January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
We used to be small, with many a great care
taking cover from comrades, waiting to give chase
Seeking the monsters of our youth
attics, closets, beds, basements
– better we find them, than they us
Rain’s worms and snow’s angels,
the business of those quarters
Feared only were the fatherly scold
the playground rebuke and the motherly palm
in a time when the doubts of giants trickled down to our crowns
like raindrops upon ants
Now we roam as giants
much too tall to gaze upon the insects
whom we frolicked with once upon a time
and our tears have matured
They will plunge toward our heirs, threaten to drown them
unless they learn quickly to amend
and mirror the tread of their keepers
From ours we fled
Two wheel commute carrying us far from our jobs
of holding no agenda, but instead faceless grudges –
then unnamed
fated to revisit in adult slumber and
despite all,
keep us from remembering what we then could not see…
were still less complicated times
Patrick Battle has been previously published in the Garland Court Review (2010) and from 2007 to 2008. He worked as a columnist and staff writer for Northern Star, Northern Illinois University’s daily print publication with a circulation of 15,000 and is currently pursuing an Associate’s degree in Journalism at Harold Washington College in Chicago, IL.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
O capricious heart
Make me the miracle
That in choir of love’s opus knells deeply
Sharp as piercing awe
Like eyes perched in windows of a face
Gleaming with the hymn of sharing candles
Kindled in a liturgical flicker of the other
—Remi’el Ki
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Winterscape: Crow vs Snow
Like billions of dark butterflies
Beating their wings
Against nightmares, rather
Like myriads of
Spirited coal-flakes
Spread from the sky
Of another world
A heavy black snow
Falls, falling, fallen
Down towards the horizon
Of my mind, where a little crow
White as a lost patch
Of autumn fog
Is trying hard to flap, flying
From bough to bough
Zeugmatic America: A Parallel Poem
Every time you stage a play or an election in your own yard
You cannot wait to shake hands with your audiences and their wealth
No matter whether it is the passage of a new bill or an old dilemma
You excel particularly at manipulating public will and private property
With your weeping eyes and hands
You keep waging war and peace far beyond your boundaries
While you kill non-Americans and their hope together
To turn all others and othernesses into biblical dust
More often than not, you selfish intentions prove
Much more destructive than your smart bombs
You invisible fighter jets strike far farther
Than your visible arms of peace effort
You are simply too great for a small criticism
Too super-powerful for a weak opposition
Too democratic for a totalitarian competition
And too single-minded for a double standard
Changming Yuan, author of Chansons of a Chinaman and 4-time Pushcart nominee, grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to North America. Currently Yuan teaches in Vancouver and has had poetry appearing in over 400 literary publications worldwide, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poems Online, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse and RHINO.
