January 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Sugar-White Beaches
Such a never-ending winter, these months
of snow and ice and gloom. We’ve lost
long hours again today, pushing back
last night’s leaden blanket of wet white,
mounding piles shoulder-high, towering
till they avalanche as if to mock our labors.
The wind whips our cheekbones red
and wet and raw, my wife and I,
our shovels lufting slush, lungs puffing
huffs and grunts . . . when, within a waking dream,
she says, That sugar-white beach
in Isla Mujeres, remember? I nod,
a touch of warmth, a blush, floods over me,
a smile. Side-by-side we replay these memories,
wordlessly, relishing not just the mind’s rescue
but something bone-deep having bubbled up
like steaming waters from the earth’s core.
And I remember, as a kid, that same sensation,
a resurrection out of the depths of near hopelessness,
our schoolyard in late March beginning to thaw.
One brown patch of lawn opened where snows had receded,
and we gathered there all recess, huddled in awe.
The Bubbles
Jet-lagged, we snugged the covers over our ears
to muffle las campanas de la catedral, tolling.
Stepped into the midday sun, blinded by how far
the day had progressed without us. Hungry
enough to settle for a vendor’s cart menu,
plastic tables and worn umbrellas, across from the plaza
where someone had switched on
fountains of spray hissing skyward and falling,
sizzling on the hot streets like rain.
Not a fountain, really, but jets
or nozzles embedded in the cobbles and brickwork,
firing at random for the simple screams
of barefoot niňos dashing to soak
their camisetas y pantelones for the joy of what
dazzle might rise on a Sunday afternoon.
And did I mention the children blowing bubbles?
Not blowing them, really, but throwing them
from homemade coat-hanger wands dipped
in pails of sudsy dish soap. Huge soap balloons
taking shape as the children twirled and laughed.
Families cheering the bubbles as each rose toward the sun,
undulating liquid rainbows. Kaleidoscopic rainbows!
As my wife and I held hands across the table,
glad to be in love amidst the bustle,
this world’s wondrous and baffling extravagance,
thousands of miles from home.
Three Cathedrals
Our strategy for this day: don’t waste it
roaming the cobbles in the aimless manner
we’d diddled away the hours yesterday —
my customary druthers when accustoming myself
to a foreign locale. I like to simply set out walking,
let each new intersection dictate which way to go.
But this day at breakfast, a sunlit street-side café,
you opened the guidebook and made plans. We’d locate
the burial site of the young peasant, a revolutionary. The one
who gave his life — or so the story alleges —
not for his flag, but for the welfare of his wife and children.
You passed the map across the table, without speaking,
and pointed to our destination, tapping gently with one finger
on the exact coordinates of your chosen goal.
All morning we searched street names, asking directions,
straining to comprehend a few words of a language
not our own, charging this way and that,
until past noon we stopped for a glass of wine,
conceding we were lost. Something between us,
lost. I couldn’t guess what it was. Except that our son
and daughters were grown and gone. And when we rose
to go again, we had nowhere particular in mind, meandering
across the plaza, stepping recklessly through traffic,
lured by cathedral doors thrown wide.
In the darkness inside, I studied the carved-wood altar.
Someone might have mistaken my mumbling as a prayer.
You lit a votive and set it reverently beside dozens
of strangers’ wishes flaming. Three cathedrals
we explored that afternoon — their spires rising on the skyline,
easy to find. This day I now recall in its vaulted ceilings.
And a sadness in you, hushed at depths I’d scarcely divined.
You, slipping pesos into the slotted donation box. You,
igniting brightness. I’d give my life for you
and the children, I thought. You, your face aglow
amidst a thousand flickering shadows.
I’d never loved you more.
We’d Planned
to pull the blinds,
uncork champagne,
jitterbug naked
— your mother and I —
inside the empty nest.
You slammed the hatch
on your Subaru, its bursting load
of fantasies and mysteries boxed,
pillowcases stuffed
with plush bears.
Smiled, waved, honked,
and sped away. Our last,
at last
college-bound.
We stood at the window
— your mother and I —
and breathed silence.
She simmered a Mexican stew
later that afternoon, which
side-by-side across from your place
at the table, we sipped
spoon by spoon.
Lowell Jaeger
Lowell Jaeger (Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019) is founding editor of Many Voices Press, author of seven collections of poems, recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council, and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse.
January 2018 | poetry
Sometime Too Natural Shapes
Four vultures sit in silent conference
It’s been observed they will not land
To pick clean
A carcass whose blood was let
In the shape of a spiral.
We should follow their example,
Being scavengers.
Constellations of Necessity
As children
We mapped the stars with peerless confidence
Charting elephants, turtles
And long-tailed snarling dragons
I’ve found, living in the city
I can do this with the lit squares of dim office spaces
Though the animals I conjure
Are altogether less inspired
But There are Dragons in this City
I may even be a part of someone else’s
I keep the lights turned bright for them
In hopes I’ll be its eye
Omri Kadim
Omri Kadim was born in London and has since lived in Paris, Tel Aviv, Athens, Vienna and New York. He writes both poetry and dramatic works, with several plays having been produced in New York and a recent short film he co-wrote having been accepted into the Cannes Short Film Corner 2016. His poems follow Pound’s dictum, “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the sole morality of writing’ and thus are often Spartan in their composition.
October 2017 | poetry
The Last Time I Talked to My Mom
She’d flown to Florida just to die, not that slow-
motion movie crammed with insights and coming-
to-terms, me on the edge of the plains hearing how
one brother and his wife went bedside, sang their
newest version of psalm twenty-three, another one
praying sweet Jesus how can I compete with that,
so you can see why she flew away.
She’d hired a cab to the hospital, told them, it being
the South, she was fixing to die, told me these doctors
they’re whispering cancer as if I can’t read the seven
signs, and they want to try chemo, as if that’s going
to happen, and anyway it was good to hear but I’m
going now and she just let the phone drop, so I
listened to her breathe for a while.
They called soon enough, saying it was a stroke –
that stubborn old lady, dying as she pleased.
Sometimes, She Says
It was my kid asking me and more than once,
so after she was killed, I decided just to quit,
though it was hard, having smoked for years,
and I loved it, I did, maybe out on the porch
a fall afternoon, someone burning leaves two
streets over, a high hint in the cool air, early
moon above the hills, or after sex sometimes,
like in the movies, where you’re the heroine
if not in this story, then another, wondering
how it might go, this whatever seems to be
happening here – cigarette moments to
ornament a tree with a little history, but
my daughter asks again and there’s a crash
that makes her brain swell into a thunderhead
soaking up ocean till it rains itself away, so I
tell myself, just stop, each time you choose
not to is a kind of prayer, and keeping that
it’s like lighting candles in a church, so
maybe it counts – only, sometimes on a street
a match will flare as another’s smoke whispers
of distant laughter, and yes envy and still the
anger over everything that’s lost, and is it lust
or deadly greed infiltrating my breath – this
banished pleasure, this near occasion of sin?
George Perreault
George Perreault is from Reno, Nevada, and his most recent collection, Bodark County, features poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado. He has received awards from the Nevada Arts Council and the Washington Poets Association and has served as a visiting writer in New Mexico, Montana, and Utah. His poems have been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and selected for fourteen anthologies and dozens of magazines.
October 2017 | poetry
mea·sure 135
mind on the line, ear to the note’s
approach, the hand must needs be
steady, body too―eye blind,
to all but time’s inscribing
mea·sure 557
one slip of the tongue, the world’s awry,
away over the hill she went,
the words said, and the damage done,
the cry too slight, too lame, too late
7/seven 43
someone somewhere’s talking
call them, tell them to come,
one day, when no-one’s home
say, the walls will listen
well enough
to what there is, or was
or will be still, to tell
7/seven 49
to be seen here
from where the poem is
the pale way, to the sense
that something is
that some place, in sight, might
be lying in wait
to be spelt out
nine 53
the sound of your feet then
there in the street
that time night-time
step on step on the stone
it has not stopped
since
the lone way home goes on
the same feet sounding
stone by stone
Ray Malone
Ray Malone is currently living and working as an artist, writer and translator in Berlin. He has published in so-called small magazines in the U.K. in the 60s, and occasionally since. In recent years he has dedicated himself to working with minimal forms.
