September 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
one poem
in a quiet room
beneath an indifferent sky
the empty fields that define
the season of loss
these are only words
diane
and you are only a stranger i
pretend to know
it’s the lack of sound
that frightens me
the wind maybe
or a distant siren
or the kitten curled up and purring gently
on the edge of the desk
my son’s toys
without his tiny perfect hands
to move them
and it’s been four days now since
the planes stopped flying
since my fingers felt the need
to crawl across
a blank sheet of paper
and do you notice that the
clocks haven’t stopped?
do you believe
in selfless acts?
not anymore
we have moved beyond the
age of famous poets
diane
and into the era
of glorified killers
my wife wants love
and all i give her
is despair
the neighbors scream at
their children
the children run
blindly into traffic
even these small deaths are
important
when they are all we have
to call our own
September 2002 | back-issues, poetry
[b]To Greenpoint[/b]
July insects buzz the sidewalk.
It’s twenty minutes of rectangular and bleak to anywhere.
See the cracks,
the lines crisscrossing
the telephone poles, the concrete
and your hand,
this street disappears into empties —
beer cans and sky.
You’re walking through airless shadows.
Your shoes don’t make a sound.
And we have no idea where we’re going.
[b]Empty Bed[/b]
The muscles of my tongue cup him.
Broken backed chairs lean forward expectantly
and the rug curls in anticipation.
No one can close their eyes but him.
Then moonlight does what moonlight does,
but faster.
Shadows speed across his face
like a hand struggling with Braille.
I struggle for something not so solid.
Preparations, retreats —
strategies are traced on the sheets
covering his thighs.
Only when he’s sleeping can I think.
Such things can be done
with a shadow.
[b]The Anatomy of Distance[/b]
Picture an oil painting,
In the Medical Academy, by a Dutch master in 1741.
The walls are in shadow, appear to be black.
Our walls are blue.
I. The Doctors:
In the auditorium,
in our room,
spectators surround the body.
One touches it and looks at us.
He doesn’t mean to touch the body
in a way that has any kindness in it,
As your fingers attempt to sign nothing
with their grasp,
but his hands are as gentle
as the soft astonished faces of the men staring at us
as we stare at them.
II. The Body:
The body does not appear
to be sleeping but dead.
Not just the pallor but the lack of eyelashes.
The upper lip curls in ecstasy or disdain.
Although the kidneys vena cava intestines
splay into our faces,
the body
is the only one
who escapes in this picture.
The one
truly alone and hidden.
III. Us.
You and I are hidden
from each other
by the body,
the deeper we thrust
our cutting, fondling instruments
the farther we float away like unmoored boats.
Until we lie next to one another
on the same bed
in different rooms
the same color as the inside of an eyelid
or eggshell,
the same color blue.
[b]Hysterical Blindness[/b]
My life is pain.
I could be a hypochondriac.
There’s some kind of multiple choice here,
but I lost the pencil and forgot to mark the page.
I’m not quite sure — I wake up sick
in the morning, nauseated by all the light.
My feet leaving the mattress
for the floor gives me shooting pains
somewhere.
I’d have to ask my doctor,
but she stopped returning my calls last month.
She said it was getting too intense
between us,
all that blood and exchange of bodily fluids.
She had a thing for latex.
I think that shows a fear of intimacy.
We only kissed twice the whole time
we were together.
Anyway, it’s over now.
She won’t even renew my prescription
for codeine.
And I’m left with this migraine
and an unnatural swelling behind my left ear.
My skin, it tingles
sometimes, along my fingertips.
I’m sure it’s the precursor
to some sort of paralysis.
And the light, ah,
the light!
It scalds my eyes.
Makes them tear constantly.
This can’t be normal.
Tell me, this can’t be
normal.
by Christine Hamm (c)2002
([email]Bronzelizard [at] cs [dot] com[/email])
[b]Author’s Notes[/b]
Christine Hamm is the literary editor for a new magazine, Wide Angle. She has an MFA in creative writing, and will be teaching a poetry-writing workshop thorough the Women’s Studio Center this fall.
Christine has poetry published in Shampoo Poetry,
can we have our ball back, Poetry Midwest, Stirring, and recently had work selected to be in Tricia Warden’s new
on-line site.
September 2002 | back-issues, poetry
[b]Allegory of X[/b]
Being chased toward
a cliff in the night
that divides land
from the absence of land
with no warning save
the gravel that tumbles
away from itself.
[b]Internet[/b]
Gleaming water-skimmers race,
stop, start, collide and multiply,
converge–instant constellations–and disperse
over a widening puddle.
[b]A River[/b]
The current takes
lull and rapids
into a circle
with no tangent
at stream or sea.
Soil from the banks
is gathered,
sold in pouches
for its powers,
among them
shaping waters
and, in spring,
reversing their course.
[b]Further Shores[/b]
The sea that roars
gently in a shell
also crashes in a cup
held to the ear,
among other vessels
whose tides have only
to be taken up;
their further shores, named.
[b]Grand Canyon[/b]
For epochs, water
has cut with clear knife
and worn with slow polishing
layered depths of rock
while, for epochs, rock
has dammed the floods deeper,
dissolving into hosts of currents
that, slowing, leave
sediments of future stone
or, flowing by, build
stalactites in caves downstream.
[b]One Flesh[/b]
How could we prove
more
than the sum of our parts?
We’re already two backs,
four ankles, twelve saliva glands,
forty digits.
And more.
We are already eight tear ducts,
countless illusions.
by J. D. Smith (c)2002
([email]smitros34 [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
[b]Author’s Note:[/b]
J. D. Smith’s publications include the collection The Hypothetical Landscape (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series) and the edited anthology Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn Gould (John Gordon Burke). J. D.’s poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards in 2000 and 2001, and his prose has appeared in American Book Review, Connecticut Review, and Literal Latte.
September 2002 | back-issues, poetry
[b]Angle of Repose[/b]
In the red light of highway protocol
All traffic stalled
A burnished wreck for sunset
Time to pause, as the book says, time to reflect.
Words come so easy till we know their source
And find it wanting-
In need of sympathy or recompense
Say, a fat check
For the fat man stricken in the road
Now out of body, now at the plastic faux pearl gates
Never having seen the equally fat toad
That sits in loam and gravel
Under the guardrail.
Sits. And waits.
Waits for the green light
Of understanding-nothing-being
The toad’s just a toad
And the fat man is dead.
[b]The Story[/b]
Mixed in some celestial silver bowl
the dark meat of our psychic turkeys
and the bowels of our cow souls
doled out cold in dollops dropped
about the land and sea and no one
knows, not even He, which plops
will rot, which plops will grow.
Or so it was explained to me
however many years ago, this recipe
for immortality, a la Voodoo Nanny
while I rocked on her bony knee
pondering the wrinkles of her breasts,
her Virginia Slims, the way she blew
the smoke over her shoulder, out of
harm’s way, took a sip of coffee and
always wiped her lips before she spoke
again, repeating the story just for me
Dark meat . . . silver bowl . . .
[b]Fifteen Minutes[/b]
until it’s time to leave for work.
I need to shower and shave
but won’t do either, though today’s the day
the boss makes her appearance and I’ll feel forced
to tell her “I know my face looks rough
right now, but in a week it won’t.
I’m growing my beard out for a while.”
She’ll understand. Last week she understood
my hesitation with the piss-test
surprised as I was
to be asked to drive the company van
to the clinic come 10:30 a.m.
So I took a couple of minutes
and rang up an orange juice, if she didn’t mind
and was off. Just about a half hour
to Bellingham Occupational Health wherein
I sat at least two and a half hours, reading
about the exploits of our CIA-
darling gone awry, Osama Bin Laden
my bladder swelling, ready to explode.
by Christian Peet (c)2002
([email]ranchproductions [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
[b]Author’s Notes:[/b]
Christian Peet is a Bennington graduate, winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a semester away from a Goddard MFA. Thus he has worked as a dishwasher/prepcook, carpenter’s apprentice, sheetmetal fabricator, hired hand on a goat farm, maintenance man, landscaper, and convenience store clerk. His screenplay for the short film Jack & Cat was just produced by 257 Films, and recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Dazzling Mica, Spent Angel, Eclectica, and The Adirondack Review. Christian lives in northwest Washington.
September 2002 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
sitting on the front porch
I listen to the nuclear family
across the street meltdown
it’s Chernobyl, Rolling Hills Dr.
Wichita Kansas where life
moves like wheat in a high wind
a woman walking her dog
stops to witness the madness
as a man bursts from the house
he lugs a tattered tote bag
which he tosses into the trunk
of 1970’s vintage Americana
the broker from next door
steps outside drinking a beer
and shakes his head disgusted
we are all spectators
the man’s wife, carrying a child
runs out pleading to him
as he drives away, backfiring
September 2002 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
I stand at the door to apartment four in the “blue building”, Emporia Kansas, address unimportant. Even at 20, I have the same nervousness of a teen on a first date. I swallow hard, putting on a fa�ade of confidence, and knock soundly on the veneer covered door.
At 17, I was a dreamer. I still am. The things I dreamed then accomplished or future goals; my dreams of today, goals of tomorrow. S was girlish at 20, a Disney aficionado, on the Student Senate at the local college, grounded. She was too good of a person to be dating a hotwired senior in high school hell-bent on escaping the midwestern cultural doldrums. In ways I never left.
During Christmas break, after my first semester of my second college year, I arranged to meet with S to renew our friendship, having seen each other once since we’d broken our relationship two years prior. An encounter so tension filled, it was hard to breathe. However, when she walked into the vestibule at my fast-food pocket-change job, every nerve in my body exploded and instantaneously prodded me for not being the person I am now, then. S was a woman.
S opens the door to her apartment and throws her arms around my neck. Well aware that I made the five hour trip from school to home late last night. Leaving after my last final and room check, finally passing the last exit out of Springfield at shortly after ten o’clock at night to make our scheduled lunch date.
“What do you want to eat?” S inquires. On our first date, I’d taken her to eat Chinese, managing to find a decent restaurant in the booming metropolis of 30,000. I smile at her; silently hoping the business was still there.
Driving down 6th Street, my car showing remnants of last night’s frenzied move. For a friend I am willing to do several things, but what I attempted the night before was insane. Driving on six hours sleep, after getting trashed on tequila the preceding night. But this is different, S graduates the next day, I leave for Michigan in a week, the next time we would see each other unknown.
Seated and ordered, I scan the zodiological placemat. I am the rooster; coo coo ca choo. Habit, I should have it memorized the number of times I have eaten Chinese. Conversation is sparse, typical–the look in S’s eye that she is busily processing something.
We eat, S sans chopsticks, talking about graduation and Grad school. Staring at a couple of years left of undergrad, I am hell bent to move on. Very familiar in attitude, some things never change. By the time proper fortune cookie etiquette has been established and the bill taken care of, I am sure S had figured out what was coming next.
As we get back into the car, I asked S if she has anything else on her schedule for the day. She’s cleared it. It had been her idea to do “something crazy” when we had gone on first date. What we ended up doing was walking around Peter Pan Park amidst the others enjoying the late August weather.
“I think I know where we are going,” S says it, but doesn’t completely blow the ego-trip I have developed planning this day out. I pull back on to 6th taking it to Prairie then South winding my way around. “Here we are,” S apparently navigating now, manages to get it out before I have a chance to say anything, while parking the car on a side street adjacent to the Park.
Even for May the air is brisk and the slight overcast makes it even cooler. I grab S’s present out of the car. At least she had not spotted it! We walk along one of the well-beaten trails that lead around the pond. At the end of the trail is an alcove with a bronze statue of William Allen White, our destination.
In August, the position of the sun while it sets allows it to shine through a clearing and shimmer on the pond’s surface. A perfect vantage point of this spectacle is from White’s alcove, and where S and I had ended up sitting the first time we visited the Park. I was blabbering on, shoving my foot in my mouth over ACT scores, when I saw S shift uncomfortably. My reaction was instinct; I brushed S’s hair away from her face and leaned in…
S is sitting right under the ledge she’d been dangling her feet over when our lips first met, as I hand her Disney gift bag. S digs through it: a CD, Introduction to Meditation by Alan Watts, my chapbook, Lifesavers, crayons, and lastly a bag of marbles for when she lost hers in Grad school. Laughing, S also pulls out a computer speaker cord that had managed its way into the bag during my hasty dorm room cleaning. Three shades of red and in tears, I laugh right along with her, reminding myself to have a serious rethinking of preparation skills.
I notice her shiver before she says anything, and am ready to leave myself. This time there will be no piggyback ride, no holding hands, just walking side-by-side S’s graduation present suspended from her fingers. The moment should be bittersweet, when we had left the Park 3 years prior we were on the ascent of a new relationship, now we are looking at undeterminable gaps in being able to speak face-to-face. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I could have changed, maybe made S my dream. Would it have matter? I shake my head smiling, knowing that S and I will always exist in points of time.
