January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Week or so after Hurricane Hazel,
Me, just out of the Navy, no job.
Mac, one year out of Walter Reed.
My dad (looking out for us) Bunch
Of trees down at Curtis Arboretum,
Township needs help cleaning up.
Couple of axes. hatchet, sharpening
stone, file and coffee thermos.
A two-man bucking saw, Mac and me
We waded into tangled branch mess
Hatchet, axes swing, bite, chips fly
Branches slap — sweat stings eyes
Sun, leaves, sawdust everywhere.
Axe blades sticky, saw teeth clogged,
Sap-stiff gloves, blistered hands
Buck-sawing oak, maple, walnut
Sycamore — some we didn’t know.
Logs piled by road for dump truck
We cashed checks, drank beer.
Papers said the storm killed
Thousands, Haiti to Toronto.
Mac died, Halloween Day 2008.
Hit by northbound car on Rte. 611
Happened fast like Hurricane Hazel.
Mac had his troubles; he was lucky
Got out of this life quick-like
Now, nobody’s on saw’s other end.
Fifty-four years done and gone.
George Fleck is a graduate of Temple University, Philadelphia Pa., and a Korean War Veteran. He has been writing poetry for fourteen years. His work has appeared in Commomweath: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Penn State Press 2005, Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and online in “Poets Against The War.”
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
#1
He walks
On the road made of nothingness
Paved with bodies of dead wishes
He walks tacitly
Invisibly
I’m pretending to be a Star
On his sky
To be the Sun and the Moon
He walks
Not looking up…
Marija Stajic is a writer and journalist who has been published by The New Yorker and many other online and print publications, and who has published three books of poetry. She has a B.A. in Linguistics from Faculty of Philosophy, University of Nis (Serbia) and an M.A. in International Journalism from American University.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Nameless Grave
Demonic fires blaze in the eye of the stone palace,
and me,
I only stand in the dark beneath the sky
that reaches its invisible hands
out towards scores of nameless graves.
For callous politicians,
they are but nameless graves
upon which no one’s tear fell.
They were silently and swiftly buried into the black soil,
without speeches and tears,
without too many imprints
on the black soil.
(They say that everyone’s life is worth attention,
and that the dark truth is that only death equally appreciates each life)
And while they treacherously, silently and swiftly
dug a new nameless grave,
only death was faithfully listening to the crickets
feverishly spluttering away in the dark
to honor the dead poet.
In the hazy grave lies the poet,
like a shadow of many dreams,
and the raindrop,
brought from the honorable mountain
by the honorable wind,
softly and timidly trembles
on the dead poet’s white face,
like an angel’s tear.
And politicians, tycoons, church pontiffs
are sitting in the golden loges now,
ghastly and faithfully acting:
the righteous, the charitable, the Believers,
crying their copper voices
out into Croatian silence,
like a copper bell,
and the dead poet
now waits for one tear
in a nameless grave.
Memories
I am standing in the street of my childhood,
and the blue April sky
rises above me,
glittering like a dreamy eye.
Down here, the wind is marching
behind my dark memories,
tiredly,
but unfaltering,
like a tiller behind his plow.
Tell me, steady wind:
How shall I escape the screams of the past?
For years you’ve been pushing me to all corners of the world,
as I was your unwanted child.
You know, wind,
that with my restless spirit, I belong more to You
than to myself.
From You, I inherited the yearning
to travel the world and seek:
the Morning in a golden cradle,
the Day in an angel’s embrace,
the Night in a bloody dress,
and midnight in black,
that preys on lust
like death preys on life.
I am standing in the street of my childhood,
next to the same window
from which I used to gaze at you, wind,
during my childhood,
and dream of the day
when I would fly on Your soft, sweet back
to a better world,
far away from poverty;
the flies captured in the spider’s web,
the miserable cries of worms
eternally crawling beneath the feet of soulless masters,
far away from the grass
and the tear-swept flowers.
I am standing next to the window
in the street of my childhood,
as if standing next to a bloody cradle,
and the memories,
my ashamed children,
cry out into this April night
with their silent screams,
reaching their invisible hands
out to me.
And I,
driven by the gales,
I am rolling across the world,
like a raindrop
looking for its grave,
in the cracks of the arid crust
of the betrayed earth.
Walter William Safar was born on August 6th 1958. He is the author of a number of a significant number of prose works and novels, including “Leaden fog”, “Chastity on sale”, “In the falmes of passion”, “The price of life”, “Above the clouds”, “The infernal circle”, “The scream”, “The negotiator”, “Queen Elizabeth II”, as well as a book of poems, titled “The angel and the demon”.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Labor Day
Labor day already.
We went back
to Brookline from Marshfield,
where we summered.
With the ocean at the bottom
of the street, two streets over.
We walked barefoot down the asphalt
and the pebbled street, and over
the rocks above the sandy beach.
Our feet toughened, calloused,
for walking all summer long unshod.
We took excursions
to the penny candy store in Brant Rock
or the horse farm (with two or three horses
in an arid field) at ocean street’s end.
Searching out blueberries and blackberries,
to gift our mother with.
Only our shirts rolled up
to carry them.
(Better not rob the
strawberry patch in
old man Allen’s yard,
for him seeing all
he would be out with his shotgun
to chase away us munchkins.
The word was out on that.)
Stopping to rest, in our travels
on the old stone steps
in front of the house
hidden behind overgrown
brush and trees.
Or on a tree branch, hanging low
in the wooded ground
bordering the yards of
vast Victorian cottages.
Walking the sea wall from
whence it started, off the beach
or from the road.
Later we gathered sea moss
for aunt Bridie to wizard-like make
her famous carrageen pudding!
we rode bikes down hilly lanes.
Went down to the marsh
we trekked through to swim in the river,
with it’s strong currents or placidity.
We tromped through shaded woods,
and sunny back yards,
(running over vain lawns),
the grass yielding like soft moss
under our feet.
yes, time let us be
what we wanted to be.
Pirates and princes, unicorns,
Joan of arc, lions in cages,
batman and robin, riders
and runners of rickshaws,
or mermaids all the day long until
the sun was sinking towards the sea,
and our hands and feet were wrinkled deep.
Morning Home
I sit with my coffee.
It is still dark outside, quiet.
My cat is sitting on the cupboard
licking his leg.
looking up, in time.
Outside silhouettes of branches
break
the sky –
into dark gaps, like
fissures on a frozen lake.
A bird sings a few short notes.
again.
and then, again.
The cat tilts his head up.
then returns to pruning.
It takes it’s time,
the light,
to permeate the day.
I look over at the
displaced
second-hand sled
I picked up in a second-hand store,
leaning against the island,
bringing home home.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Sharon Siegel
Winter, you are cold
Crisp, frigid air
Hands meet pockets
Chills sent down my spine
Winter, you are cold
Puddles on the sidewalk
Ready to freeze over
I see palm trees ahead
But I feel winter
Gusts of winds
Whirling through the air
Leaves fluttering
Through the heavy breeze
Iciness in my veins
Under grey, gloomy skies
Numbness takes over
Winter, you are cold
Put me back inside
Place me by the fire
These palm trees are not inviting
Winter, you are cold
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Dirt
My hen Kiev has it in for dirt.
She craters the backyard with soft pumice pits,
digging an acre of ashy basins;
she scatters mulch
with backward-scratching feet,
scraping bare the trunks of crotons and ginger plants;
she slurps night-crawlers from the ground
and severs roots, but not the detested
greenbriar and potato vine—
those she leaves growing from the grey hollows
like a last cackle;
she conspires with the raccoons
to broadcast compost,
spreading clumps, unintegrated, across the grass:
coffee grounds and fetid beans,
newspaper strips and onion skins,
blue lemons and pulpy litter
all resurface in places laid out for clean feet;
she polarizes debris that’s meant to meld together into rich loam
(brown-bag bits now crinkle stiffly between my flower beds,
while lonely cabbage cores dry in fence corners).
I’m thinking of buying a battalion of worms
to blend sand and trash
and return humus to my post-apocalyptic garden
but what would be the point? Kiev would just eat them.
Metal and Drab
I had my fill of metal and drab,
at a desk in a room, in a suite, in a concrete block,
with florescent lights and plastic blinds drawn
against the tropical brightness.
I trudged the concrete stairs to the second floor
each day, I heaved open a heavy door
underlined with stubs and cigarette ash,
closed my eyes and called upon torrent,
frond, and passion-fruit vine
“deliver me from this job,”
before stepping over the threshold
into the grey corridor,
into a box in the calendar.
I stacked the data in drop-down squares,
each name on a line, in a crease, in a sliding drawer;
my mind arranged its own inventory
(“gob-smacked,” “saffron,” “tiramisu”)
to crowd out the ordinal meanness.
After work, outside beside the fragrant gardenias,
I rewrote the day,
the way I keep reworking this poem
to include all that was absent and filed-away:
body, beauty, nuance, compassion,
the way sometimes in the sickening gleam
I tore the thick pith of a backyard citrus
and inhaled the bitter smell of the sun.
Crossroad
At a crossroad on a quiet day
she does a double-take through rolled-up glass,
a startled glance and slight pull-back
that only I notice;
the older man in the blue sedan
doesn’t see more than the dull crawl
of her nondescript car as it passes through the shadows
of the laurel oaks,
but I take in her black hair, pulled back and morning-tidy,
the mouth curved confusedly on her taupe face,
the dough of impending middle age
softening her forearms into ovals,
the whole effect so regular it begs a story:
Why has she looked twice at this guy?
Is it the polished olive-brown of his cheeks,
the breeziness of his t-shirt,
the careful hold of one hand on the wheel?
Does he evoke a patriarch making a toast
at a long table by a cliff by the sparkling sea,
with bowls of tomatoes and penne and ciabatta
and even the children with wine glasses half-filled?
Does the sight of him make the clinging heat
feel like a dry mediterranean afternoon
sweetened with tipsiness and garlic?
Or maybe I watch too many Italian films;
maybe he’s really her next-door neighbor
who just came from the barber with his beard newly shaved
and she almost didn’t recognize him;
maybe the reason I think I sense a quick spark of desire
piercing her window and then his
and then her subtle fluster and regrouping
is because I myself have now stopped running
and stand at the crossroad, eyes fixed
on the white hair and glossy, sunny skin
as he drives away.
