January 2003 | back-issues, poetry
[b]so much less than sensual[/b]
this is a picture
or more of
a window into a
roadside bar, where
trucks parked on gravel
surround
a place I know
too well to be tranquil,
a place for solemn meditation,
mediation between my things.
although subtle thoughts get
broken apart by the occasional
loud mouth stepping up,
what he sees as his life’s work,
is a seldom at bat,
and there is peace here
more often than at home alone.
inquiring for a menu with my beer,
the cute as a baby-doll girl that came
for my order
wondered later why I had barely
touched my steak sandwich,
a patty, unfrozen and
fried in a skillet, so much
less than sensual, laid out equally
such a waste of a cow’s life,
and I say, “It’s okay.
I didn’t come here to eat.”
she replies, “I understand.”
but then how could she
know of so many things
waitress
barkeep
Nostrodamus.
[b]our lives[/b]
for my life I could not decide
why you played your hand
in such drastic measures.
corner sac,
dime bag,
half ounce, half pound
your fist down the
clothes chute, your luggage;
though you could too little
take the important things.
it could be you burned too bright
as bright as the sun
and burnt right out,
burnt right out of here.
though we could scarcely go on
so I won’t put this off on the
innocent,
yourself a mocking bird
myself a deer.
me, I could never fly
but you could too little
help but take flight
how the blood must have
beat under your skin
so that when you were forced
to face life too straight, and
you zoomed after your
desperate needs, and face first
but from behind
with too little time to contemplate
matters that could throw you
so in the end you threw me away.
or possibly I tried to love you
too much, now quite clean, my heart
just couldn’t live in there
inside of you.
though too late we see now
our hearts
need not have cost us
our lives.
[b]Flood Plain[/b]
Water fell down on us,
rain and runoff, with such
utmost precision I would
think it had surely been
this way before. Somehow
melted off, evaporated
and then rained down
with the rehearsed patience
of one drop at a time,
choreographed like a giant
nonstop ballet but
now everything rehashed
has found its way
through your door.
Had I only known
the mess of cleanup,
all it entailed,
I maybe would have arched
into this swan dive down
down deep and pulled
hard until the pressure
per square inch imploded my head
and washed from my body
my blood joined the flood,
rode the surf and
then was bucketed through
fireman’s chain and dumped
back onto solid ground,
where someday,
we might re-convene.
The rain took your
things away, washed
your photographs and
memories, pushed
them onto land’s sea
your happiness sailed off
along with me,
to find others who would
uncaring, shovel them with
the mud past the barriers
of those sand bag walls.
I can still see you standing there
on that shingled roof, and soaking
your tiny cold bare feet
that unforgiving water on your
brow made now of stone.
And right around the corner
we find my little mud hut and
that thatch roof in the
flood plain built even lower in
elevation, somewhere down in
your soul. If my cigarette breath
means a forest fire burning
then the tears you cry are my flood.
by Keith Webb (c) 2003
[b]Author’s Note:[/b]
Keith Webb is a graduate of West Virginia University with degrees in Journalism, Public Relations, and Creative Writing with emphasis on poetry and short story.
Keith placed in The West Virginia Writers Network Spring Competition in the category of Emerging Writers with a story, “Snakes in Heaven” and the Waitman/Barbe Creative Writing contest with a story, “The Chances We Take.” Keith finds inspiration in his job with the Federal Emergency Management Agency doing disaster relief.
November 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
waiting
for something in the
insincere october sunlight
but nothing comes
and i begin to feel
like pollock
walls and weights and
the blood of ghosts until
the only option is to drown
until the churches are
all on fire
and my children starving
[i]my children starving[/i]
i will teach them to
eat the flesh of god before
i let it come to that
November 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
[b]poem which, when held at the proper angle, becomes a portrait of michael gira[/b]
the sky suddenly deep with
the weight
of approaching autumn
the poems like small miracles
or minor saints
like ordinary men shot dead
on quiet streets
in front of their wives and children
and i want to tell you that
the violent acts of strangers don’t matter
but you turn away
i want you to believe
that love is some sort of salvation
but i can never say it with
a straight face
look at gandhi
look at lennon
think about what it means
when a newborn baby is found
in a knotted plastic bag on
a philadelphia sidewalk
think about the sun
pure white light traveling
through all of that empty space
just to show you how dark
your future will be
November 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?”
T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” — 1922
As locust of grief gathers its legs
for the pounce and traffic spins
in its clotted grave,
answer escapes by channel of fog.
I am seized by the question’s thrust–
turn toward ways you fanned a purse
and opened it on Christmas Eve.
A man with his face inking a sign
marked homelessness, dotting
your “I” with a tear of having more
than your heart required in wallet clutch,
pushed you to extend your gift.
You dropped $5 in his lap.
He smiled the way a cock must crow
waking up a sleeping farm.
Teeth became a rope of pearls,
real in their soft reward.
Passersby withdrew from slug trail poverty
and the wind raced its breath
toward frost and clung.
“Pocket change, that’s all we are
and all we have, trading pennies for a dime.”
The song of it all in photograph
rekindled decades hence in water bath
for wisdom’s tiny carrot curl.
“One clash with fate, that’s all it takes,”
you murmured quietly, as if your vocal chords
had violins in lumpy throat.
That single reach. Rendering a bible’s jacket
more than paper babble bound.
Undaunted by his drunkenness and sour cough,
a memory pushes through my hands.
*First Published in The Pedestal Magazine
November 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
It’s been two years, one month, three weeks,
four days.
Since I sat on the edge of her bed
reading “Dover Beach” aloud
for ears pressed firmly
to the final page of life.
Patches of strength
curling their corners
like bandaids over wetted skin.
And I thought I could.
Make crepes that smiled from the pan
and press her Irish linen
without the steam of tears
and tuck it out of sight.
We matched like new pairs of socks
in my underwear drawer
or widows holding hands at Sunday Mass.
I’m sure she knew I smoked
and never said a word.
But turned faux pas like broken lips
of china cups around to face the wall.
It’s been two years, one month, three weeks,
four days.
And I thought I could.
Sit on her bathroom floor alone.
Use wine to take me places I needed to go.
She had this way —
of revising defeat —
of pouring waterfalls of misery
into margarine tubs
and sending me home,
steering straight.
I still feed the daisies she left
with watered gin, and they flower
even in September’s shade.
Each book she bound with patient flesh.
Advice a gilded potpourri
sprinked like sugar
over bowls of regret.
We both agreed that bridge
was a waste of precious hours.
That poetry and shoehorns
wedged crippled toes
into the “best of times.”
It’s been two years, one month, three weeks,
four days.
And I thought I could.
*First Published in New Thought Journal
November 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
I understood your allergies to ivory,
anything close to white. Perhaps it was
a form to sign inside the morgue.
Vivid frost of lonely winters
after cancer shook the house,
left you only furniture
and pitch black night
without much velvet in its grain.
The livid shade of feckless hope,
of failure knocking at the door.
The color was that pat, that clean.
Death is the ultimate bleach.
The parking lot had memories
of times your shoes kicked a tire,
then returned to dust a shelf of china cups
that rattled in an avalanche.
“I’ll call you on the phone,” you said,
“but I can’t walk the ghostly halls.”
I understood the jail rails of steel beds
and gurneys that carry a world away —
then lie and do not bring it back.
That room with little on the walls but
voiding charts and memos to a passing nurse
who had no answers in her hand
but gentle ways to close the book
as raison d’être lost its glue.
I would have picked the dye myself.
Every lily told a tale
of love as poisoned manuscripts.
Anything in dirty chalk
was just too close to missing angels,
open graves, and pale moans.
*First Published in Epiphany
