April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Not Me
Who could have imagined
I’d be sitting here
on my numb ass
in this stuffy, gray, meeting room
hunched over
a big shiny boardroom table
discussing the customer response
to our security of supply
business continuity plan and rollout
instead of on the latest research vessel
out of Woods Hole collecting
phytoplankton and zooplankton,
jellyfish larva and sea urchin eggs,
like I was planning and hoping to do
way back in the beginning?
Who? Not me certainly. Not me.
Silly, naive girl
She rejected him, plain and simple as that,
when he moved in on her,
slid up against her
in the back seat of the car.
She nudged him away, firmly,
and moved in the opposite direction,
putting some space between them.
On this impulsive first blind date of hers
she had no intention, no inclination, no desire,
to engage in any romance whatsoever,
she had all the romance she could handle with me,
her real boyfriend at the time.
I suppose she was simply curious
about other guys and wanted to have some fun
at a ball game or the movies. Silly, naive girl.
There’s not a guy on the planet
who wouldn’t give anything
to get his hands on her.
Some fun at a game or the movies – HA!
I always tell you that
I watch you closely
from across the playground,
helping Brooke up the jungle gym
then back down again,
your black top and soft beige slacks
still brimming with beauty,
simmering with sensuality
even after all these years –
and you don’t even know!
I tell you of course, I cannot help myself.
But you are too modest to hear,
too modest to acknowledge my adulation,
reminding me, “Oh, you always tell me that.”
Yes, yes, I do. I do always tell you that,
can you blame me? Just look at you!
You are quite simply
the most beautiful woman I have ever seen
and I am now, as ever, ecstatic
that you are still mine.
But I cannot help wondering if suddenly
I were no longer around
telling you of your beauty, your sweetness,
your limitless sensuality,
and how important you are to me
and what a superlative woman you are,
would you miss hearing it? I wonder.
Would you miss me at all?
Michael Estabrook is a baby boomer who began getting his poetry published in the late 1980s. Over the years he has published 15 poetry chapbooks, his most recent entitled “When the Muse Speaks.” Other interests include art, music, theatre, opera, and his wife who just happens to be the most beautiful woman he has ever known.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
our grave hearts crave in the dead night
old arms of night have taken our city abreast
our nameless faceless city
sweating/stinking
a broken-down mosaic
red rotting brick/dilapidated alleys
sheltering dark looms
drain pipes drip hot
fire-escapes uproot themselves
from failing architecture
music falls onto the street from open windows
a morose violin wheezes out
adolescent/untrained notes
lungs of animals
and men and women
expand and collapse
singing/speaking/crying/loving/hating
in this city/all cities
this throbbing/beating/machine-heart
in the infantile hours of morning
black money is changing hands
our grave hearts crave in the dead night
i wish i knew like the old trees
another first story of time
our morning street is warm
with the golden coming
from blood and a beating heart
life as it runs off the feet of men
and women singing
swelling undertones
harmonious high keys
distant sirens
lost in leaves
men like the grey trunks
overgrown, tired with hating
old men pedal past
flashing golden smiles
dry lipped
dancing
in dim daybreak sun
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Michael Morical
Landscape
Between waterfalls
a poem written in moss
grows on stone.
Ferns sprout
from words intertwined,
twisted shaggy,
hard to define
in the mist sustaining them.
Under The Icy Ash
She walks her bike past
the dry spot where I sit.
We’re shaped the same,
man and woman,
lumpy and woolen.
She doubles back
and stops a few steps away.
Her breath unfurls as it fades
cloud after cloud out to the lake.
I open my mouth without a word.
We shade our eyes and squint
at the glare on the snow.
Michael Morical is a freelance editor in Taipei. His poems have appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Pedestal Magazine, The Hardy Review and other journals. Sharing Solitaire is his first chapbook.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Alan Britt
Humans in white shorts
are vulnerable
yet strangely aggressive.
What with their bare-legged dexterity,
if you’re a bug
there’s nowhere to hide.
The hand is mightier
than a horse’s tail,
or hind claw
hacking a basset hound’s floppy ear.
Humans plan social events
requiring white shorts.
They enjoy Cricket, yachting expeditions,
Wimbledon and every shopping mall
with an artificial waterfall,
to name four.
Throw in a few corpses
attending family reunions
with summer softball games
and you have
quite a mess
on your hands.
I’m telling you,
if you laid all those
white shorts
end to end,
you could encircle
the earth forever!
Alan Britt’s recent books are Greatest Hits (2010), Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Chicago/Athens/Dublin: 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Martin Freebase
And writing poems about man’s fall
Puts her chips all on black
The redundancy of negativity
Seeps through the pores of her skin
Her first beach house
She wanted high upon a hill
To look over the turbulence
A physical reminder
Of existence
Saying hello to the ladies
As they pass by
Baskets full of turpitude
Her hopes have stopped being mine
A long time ago
I marvel as she fathoms
Multiple realities
Built by your Betty Crocker cookbook
At opposite ends of the cord
Lacing your feelings with an opportunistic spine
And wrap you in leather
We have both seen the wicked street ballet
Only I stood for the ovation
Martin Leonard Freebase lives in Dubuque, Iowa with his wife, daughter, and a black and white cat named “Daisy.” Martin’s work is solidly based on the concept of poetry as a social construction. Through our interactions with others, we create and recreate meanings that allow us to make sense out of a chaotic world full of contradictions. Martin considers the art of writing poetry as one small way of collapsing the confusion of experience into more meaningful patterns of social thought.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Peter LaBerge
I was that four-year-
old boy smiling, thumb
aimed at the sky like I was
molding the atmosphere’s clouds
with Minnie Mouse
and my eyelashes, tangled as ever,
winked at each other.
Dimples singed into cheeks
like the atmosphere-clay
after I’d jammed my innocent
thumbprint into it.
And I can’t hold back a laugh.
Blood like fiery yarn
spun into rivers
up and down my coarse
veins until it has nowhere
to trickle except for under those
tacky, plastic Venetian love boats
at Disney World—it’s a small world
after all.
Peter LaBerge is currently a sixteen-year-old high school student. His writing is featured or forthcoming in: Indigo Rising Magazine; The Camel Saloon; Down in the Dirt Magazine; Children, Churches, and Daddies Magazine; and more. He is also a photographer, with photography featured or forthcoming in: This Great Society; and Children, Churches, and Daddies Magazine. His flash fiction piece, ‘The Ansonia Girl’, was featured in the January 2010 issue of Burning Word. He is the founder and chief editor of The Adroit Journal.
