April 2017 | poetry
Since you left,
this apartment got smaller.
Like you packed away
the space you existed in,
and carried it off with you.
A whole world by your side,
in a purse.
What you left
are echoes of questions
drifting in a fog,
hoping you’ll return to rescue them.
Just like me.
I don’t feel like a mother bird,
after her baby has flown.
I feel like the nest.
Abandoned, up on a branch,
watching birds flying by,
knowing that none of them are coming here.
None of them are mine, any more.
Dazzler
Dazzler is a British-American poet living in Arizona and Washington State. Having survived corporate and Academic lives, he now spends his days dedicated to poetry, family, and black labs.
April 2017 | poetry
After Margot Canaday’s The Straight State
1
At Ellis Island
they found the immigrant’s body
indeterminate.
Protuberant breasts;
also a small, atrophied penis,
testicle undescended.
“Now,” the interrogators asked, “back home,
“did you sleep in the room with your brothers
or the room with your sisters?”
I always slept alone.
2
The interrogators stamped the folder:
UNDESIRABLE.
They sent for the father,
who made the crossing.
Meanwhile, this determination was
reached: “He is male.”
They shaved the head,
gave the immigrant
ratty trousers, cinched with string.
The father arrived
and did not recognize
her, stranded before him
awaiting either official
entry or deportation.
“If you took him home,”
they asked the old man,
“how would you treat him?”
As I always have.
3
They
undid the string
and let the ratty trousers fall.
They showed the man the small,
atrophied penis, the undescended
testicle. And asked him to explain.
(Their mouths glowed like incinerators.)
It is true,
she becomes a man for a day or two
each month, when the moon is full.
They asked, “How could you tell?”
At those times, there is always deep sorrow in her eyes.
Justin Vicari
April 2017 | poetry
Dissolving through the throngs on LoDo streets.
Beer soaked smiles and purple clothed melee.
Bars brimming full with possibility.
First Rockies home game only minutes away.
The golden bubbly flowing from the taps.
Anticipation in the on deck circle.
Optimism cheering from the stands.
At the plate the hopes of all the people.
And on the mound our cynicism fades.
The windup for the season has begun.
Is our fate to be despair or victory?
We’re tied for first but yet to score a run.
Each day is opening day- we start anew.
Our destiny depends on what we do.
Mike Coste
