Joe Churchwell

The Aforelife After Death

Winds chilled from the first fresh season of flowery green soft summer

rain;

leaves;

sky.

 

I’m going away from here, and still can’t say.

 

I’ll arrive there, though,

where it is,

this I can tell.

 

There I was before

birth

I sensed that, and will go there,

I once thought

 

but know

now.

 

Reflection

Hauled up in a dirty motel room,

performing brain surgery on myself again.

In a room without mirrors–

in a room constructed of mirrors.

 

Thank You God for letting me exist

for a short time as

one of the sane.

Thank You for letting me see what this is like.

Thank You for letting me stare at Your horrifying blue sky

without terror,

and Your hideous world without pain.

While I am hopelessly lost

in love.

Joan Colby

Eating Our Words

They ought to float
Away like cigarette smoke
To contaminate someone else’s curtains.
But they don’t.
They hover over our heads
Like filthy haloes.
Everything we think
Comes under their cloud.

How can we disperse them?
They suffuse our clothes
Like tobacco odors. Turn our fingers
The color of dying chrysanthemums.

We shout them even louder
To speed them away
Out of our mouths.
But they fly back
Insistently as silver planes
Disgorging their terrible cargo
Just when we are feeling happy
And carefree as civilians.

They know their rightful place
Spreading into our lungs like cancer
Infiltrating every future conversation,
Causing our hearts to fail.

If we try to write them off
The paper chars and smokes
Before we can seal the envelope
And mail them back
To the land we emigrated from.

 

Joan Colby is an award-winning author with over 900 poems published in journals including Poetry, Atlanta Review, GSU Review, Portland Review, Rockhurst Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Karamu, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, Mid-American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, The Hollins Critic, Minnesota Review, Western Humanities Review, College English, Another Chicago Magazine and others.

Jenn Blair

Sulk

Clouds hang low in the heat, heavy bellied animals.

Perspiring Boy Scouts plant small crisp flags squarely

beside every mailbox in Cedar Creek, vans slowly

trailing with fresh reserves. When they are done,

they shed their clothes—piles of khaki snake skins,

then jump into to the pool to splash and bob,

screaming Marco and Polo at their lung-tops.

I watch them from the adjacent baby pool, as

my daughter pours water from one measuring cup

to another. She frowns and pours a little water

on her stomach and toes, before reaching again

for a blue bucket to fill—precise in her rituals,

so much so it often pains her. My efforts

to help only vex her more. Nothing left but to

glance at my thighs underwater, which I do

casually, distractedly as if the white behemoths with

their wide groves of stretch mark were something

which roamed along the ocean floor in another age.

My mind runs then re-runs over a recent slight.

I conjure it up again, all the real and imagined

indignities, so lost in pride I don’t know how long

my daughter has been leaning against me now, pouring

water on my knees, the right then the left and right.

  

Left

I have heard when angels finally arrive

the tongue turns shorn stone. The air is

struck dumb, and stripped trees are helpless

to do a thing but toss and maybe dance.

 

Some come here for a few days then leave

with bright shells fastened to the insides of

plastic pails. They drive tired burnt bodies

inland satisfied they have seen something of

Immensity. But some of us are wintering,

still pacing the coastline, walking far off

enough from you now wearing such a bulky

coat it doesn’t matter whether it is a man

or woman who carries sorrow in their hands

pushed deep in their pockets—it doesn’t matter—

one’s age or station, when there’s so much

old weather rattling round the head.

 

I am staying. I am staying.

I have not yet had a word.

 

Before

The train in my heart gathers

speed for the mountains,

it takes one last pause between

shattered rock and mottled leaf.

The passengers inside sigh,

wanting to crush the ground—

to see what wine and word spring

up from the rich mulch-parchment.

I could tell them to take cheer.

But I know too well how light

like this can set one weeping,

turn one fool, make one sigh

for all the lovers whose limbs

still lie unknotted—caught

deep down in the dark grain

of unfathomable waters.

 

Chlorine

The populist had a dream the swimming pool

was filling up, more and more families arriving

in their mini-vans friends of friends getting out

with towels and goggles. The populist watched

Grannies with their skirted suits ply the shallow

end with Styrofoam rings, gently fanning the water.

The populist grimaced as babies with improper

swim diapers floated, un-innocent lilies in the arms

of their baseball hated gossiping mothers. When a little

girl dropped half her orange popsicle in the water,

a small colored iceberg trailing its dye, he screamed

The scream died in his throat before sound emerged.

The populist was not really a populist. He should

have known it. The way he polished his shoes. Cut his

grapefruit segments aft to fore and fore to aft.

The way he lamented (for days) that referencing

The Stones of Venice would have been so apropos,

bringing up an intersection that may have been

quite possibly very illuminating. When a boy

with a livid green something pulsating in and out

of his left nostril ran to do a cannonball into

the deep end, the populist woke up sweating

then looked around his empty room,

grateful and ashamed. Then he showered.

Instead of driving, he took the number eight

bus to work, planning to brush against

an especially brutish looking elbow for penance.

 

 

Jenn Blair has been published in Copper Nickel, Kestrel, the Tulane Review, New South Review, Rattle, Blood Orange Review, and Santa Fe Review among others.

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