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Issue 27 Poetry: Select a Poem from the Menu

Our 27th issue includes 30 poems selected and solicited by our poetry editor, Steve Kowit, including four poems by Morton Marcus commemorating the life of this important poet, who passed away in fall 2009. Editor Robert Judge Woerheide has also selected three poems from Benjamin Arnold's new chapbook, Fractals of Past (LeRue Press).

Please select a poem from the menu on the left.

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Lavese Las Manos by Claire Hsu Accomando

Lávese las manos, says the sign.
By all means, wash the hands
that fill burritos and enchiladas.
Sheath in Latex the hands that release
the newborn from the womb.
Sanitize the hand that holds the baby's
tiny finger. Nurture the little meatball
fist, that some day may stop a ball
flying at an insane speed.
Perfume the palms that caress.
Insure the robust paws of the boxer,
as well as the agile hand of the pianist.
Steady the fingers that hold the scalpel,
or the cutting tool of the bomb diffuser.
Stop the index poised on the trigger.
Scrub splattered blood under the fingernails.
Disinfect the hands that screw electric probes
to the genitals of enemy combatants, while
Pontius Pilate asks for a basin of scented water
and a fluffy, designer towel.
Lávese las manos, the sign says.

Biographical information: Claire Hsu Accomondo was born in Switzerland from a French mother and a Chinese father. She spent her childhood in France and came to the United States after World War II. Her poetry has appeared in the Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, The San Diego Poetry Annual and she has contributed articles to Women in World History, The Christian Science Monitor, American History Magazine, Ararat, Artweek and other publications. Her memoir Love and Rutabaga, was published by St. Martin's Press.

Decimas to God by Guadalupe Amor (translated by Megan Webster)

XL1
More than ever I want you,
and it's when you are most distant
that in vain, I torment myself,
because I believe in nothing.
Solitude is all I possess:
opaque, empty, infinite.
Not even my shadow visits me.
She went to look for you,
but as she didn't find you,
she can't bring herself to face me.

XL111
I have nothing of you,
Not your shadow, not your echo;
only an invisible hollow
of anguish inside me.
At times, I feel that is
where your presence is,
because this strange insistence
to not reveal yourself
makes me think that only
your absence exists.

XLV
Occult, absent, vacant,
hermetic, unalterable,
asphyxiating, invulnerable,
absorbent, strange and cold,
is how I see you, God.
When alone and anguished
I drive myself crazy trying
to attain my plenitude,
to break loose from this slavery
to which I am condemned.

XLVII
What is it you're trying to prove
with your silence, your absence?
Where is your clemency
if I implore, and you don't descend?
What do you think of me?
If you think I'm just dirt
I sink further into despair,
and then, I am to blame.
Inexplicable, eternal God,
how mysterious your world!

XLIX
You will make mud of my flesh,
seed of my heart;
with my blood, you'll give
new life to every thing.
But tell me, what use
will you have for my anguish?
Where will you place
my abyss of solitude ... ?
Imagine the never-ending
row of pits you'll have to dig!

Biographical information: Guadalupe Amor (1920–2000), also known as "Pita" Amor, lived in Mexico City, and was one of the most beautiful women of her time. Her wide circle of friends included Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, and Diego Rivera. Although she published several books of prose, she is mostly remembered for her poetry, especially Décimas a Dios (Editorial Fournier, S.A., 1953).

Megan Webster is a multiple transplant of Welsh origin. Her poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, Sunshine / Noir, Poiesis: a journal of the arts & communication, and many other publications. Her third chapbook, Bipolar Express, was inspired by experiences with sufferers of bipolar disorder, and received a San Diego Book Award. Contact her at mweb5089@aol.com.

Old Country by Stanisław Borokowski (translated by Chris Michalski)

night creeps beneath the shutters
into the silent apartment. back in the old
country, grandma says, it filled the eyes and
nostrils like sand and the infants screamed
bloody murder until the men lied down
with them and sang in their worn out
voices of the perfect world on the other
side of the darkness.

Biographical information: Stanisław Borokowski's texts have been featured in numerous journals and anthologies and his first book of poems was released in 2007. His blog Briefe an Michail Gorbatschow (Letters to Mikhail Gorbachev) enjoys a cult following among German-language readers.

Chris Michalski's poems and translations have appeared in such publications as AGNI Online, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Zoland Poetry. His English versions of Stanisław Borokowski's work can be found in the latest issues of Two Lines, eXchanges and The Quarterly Conversation.

Sweet Hereafter by Stanisław Borokowski (translated by Chris Michalski)

though i know
it'd be a violation
of the inscrutable
rules that administer
our uncertain relation,
the recommencement
of which may not
take place until a
week from tuesday
at the earliest ...
though i'm aware
you're probably still
wavering somewhere
between the awkward
extremes of
mild disgust and
vague fascination ...
though there are
places where our
mutual indifference
might be nursed
tenderly enough
to almost
acquire the aftertaste
of something like
inevitability and
even seem fateful
if we were but to
give it time ...
though i know all this
i nevertheless
wanted to ask
if by any chance you had
nothing to do
on thursday evening
if you might
be willing to walk
with me
into
the
sweet
hereafter

Biographical information: Stanisław Borokowski's texts have been featured in numerous journals and anthologies and his first book of poems was released in 2007. His blog Briefe an Michail Gorbatschow (Letters to Mikhail Gorbachev) enjoys a cult following among German-language readers.

Chris Michalski's poems and translations have appeared in such publications as AGNI Online, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Zoland Poetry. His English versions of Stanisław Borokowski's work can be found in the latest issues of Two Lines, eXchanges and The Quarterly Conversation.

Leaning against my car after changing the oil,
I hold my black hands out and stare into them
as if they were the faces of my children looking
at the winter moon and thinking of the snow
that will erase everything before they wake.

In the garage, my wife comes behind me
and slides her hands beneath my soiled shirt.
Pressing her face between my shoulder blades,
she mumbles something, and soon we are laughing,
wrestling like children among piles of old rags,

towels that unravel endlessly, torn sheets,
work shirts from twenty years ago when I stood
in the door of a machine shop, grease-blackened,
and Kansas lay before me blazing with new snow,
a future of flat land, white skies, and sunlight.

After making love, we lie on the abandoned
mattress and stare at our pale winter bodies
sprawling in the half-light. She touches her belly,
the scar of our last child, and the black prints
of my hands along her hips and thighs.

Biographical information: B.H. Fairchild has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His fourth book of poems, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, appeared in 2003 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress. Usher, his sixth book of poems, was published in 2009.

Gesang ist Dasein.

A small thing done well, the steel bit paring
the cut end of the collar, lifting delicate
blue spirals of iron slowly out of lamplight

into darkness until they broke and fell
into a pool of oil and water below.
A small thing done well, my father said

so often that I tired of hearing it and lost
myself in the shop's north end, an underworld
of welders who wore black masks and stared

through smoked glass where all was midnight
except the purest spark, the blue-white arc
of the clamp and rod. Hammers made dull tunes

hacking slag, and acetylene flames cast shadows
of men against the tin roof like great birds
trapped in diminishing circles of light.

Each day was like another. I stood beside him
and watched the lathe spin on, coils of iron
climbing into dusk, the file's drone, the rasp,

and finally the honing cloth with its small song
of things done well that I would carry into sleep
and dreams of men with wings of fire and steel.

Biographical information: B.H. Fairchild has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His fourth book of poems, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, appeared in 2003 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress. Usher, his sixth book of poems, was published in 2009.

Fragments from the Hospital by Elisabeth Farrell

Behind the curtain
the old woman coughs, retches,
speaks into the intercom,
her voice high-pitched and ancient.
"Is that Hekate?" I ask a stranger staring down at me.

At night the IV drips
noiselessly into my vein.
I enter a funhouse where I am molested.
I crawl through a falling-down town,
shielding my head from the debris.

When I wake I am fed
applesauce from a baby food jar.
I hear the old woman behind the curtain
talking to her dog on the telephone:
"Good morning, Mama's girl."

Someone leads me to the shower room,
helps me disrobe. I am sewn up, bandaged.
Through the gauze I see
the lines of stitching, I see
I've survived again.

Biographical information: Elisabeth Farrell's poems have appeared in the Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Oak Bend Review, Free Lunch, The Aroostook Review, The Healing Muse, and Color Wheel. She received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she was a Jane Kenyon Scholar.

Who are
these
runners?

What do they
run to—
or from?

Do they bolt
from spouses
or muggers?

Do they flee
from old age
or new troubles?

Do they hurry
from dogs
or to lovers?

Do they run
against clocks
or others?

What are
their
motives?

Are they
addicted to
pain?

Will suffering
heighten
their senses?

Can sweating
purify
their minds?

Does bouncing
uplift
their souls?

Is all that
hard breathing
healthy?

Is there
a Truth
of running?

If so,
would they
ever tell us?

Do runners
even know
why they run?

Aren't they
just
showing off?

How can we
know the runner
from the race?

Will any of you
run with them
to find out?

read fiction by same author

Biographical information: Clyde Fixmer was born in New Mexico and grew up in Oklahoma. He has taught Creative Writing in several universities, including Southern Illinois and San Diego State University. He also worked for four years in the Michigan Poets in the Schools program. His next full-length book, Chaos Theories, will be published this spring.

You make the sign
of the hole in the heart
and mine echoes, hollow,
a rung bell, an oboe,
a saxophone moaning
with longing and loss

I make the sign
of water sinking slowly
into thirsty earth
glistening with shadows
and you set your foot gingerly
at the edge of my mud

This is one of those
understories
the kind told in riddles
and slivers of old bone
in some quiet room
off the main road

What we know
only our hands can tell,
fingering these days
like looms threaded
with petals from wherever
the round earth blooms

Speak to me in mysteries
I will listen to you in song

Biographical information: Diane Gage writes poetry and makes art in San Diego, California, where she lives on a canyon with two cats and a boomerang son. Poems have appeared recently in Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes (C&R Press), Letters to the World (Red Hen Press), Qarrtsiluni, and Memoir(and), among others. This poem originally appeared in Thanal Online.

I walked for miles in the catacombs
of the American dream.
In my pocket, the keys to the invisible door.

My shame following me like a dog,
though I wore many coats to avoid being noticed.
Tried to stay always one step ahead.

It was the old shoes gave me away.
How I picked up the pace at the sound of shadows.
My own breath dissolving in front of my eyes.

Many others were dancing alone in dark rooms,
smiling through each of their nine lives.
If I could fly I would see how absurd all of it must look.

That in the end it's all about borders.
Bright lights strung in a line across the valley,
cold stars rubbed over open wounds.

The butterfly flutter of sheets on the wire,
washed obsessively white; only the comfort
of a threadbare night for a pauper's blanket.

Biographical information: Perigee does not have any biographical information for this poet.

My father listens while I describe the dream
I had last week, the one where my mother,
His wife, was alive, sitting at my bedside,

Pulling up the blankets over my shoulders,
Telling me, Close your eyes, go back to sleep.
But I refused even to blink for fear

She'd leave the dream and me, and I would have nothing
To tell him. The way he looked at me, his eyes—
That's how I tried to capture her, as if

Not blinking could somehow bring her back.
And still he has to ask, knowing I woke up
Sobbing, How did she look? What else did she say?

Biographical information: Eric Johnson teaches English in San Diego, California. He holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, The Greensboro Review, the anthology Never Before: Poems about First Experiences, and other journals. His chapbook The Exquisite River & Other Poems, in which this poem appears, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2006.

I used to visit a boy in Bakersfield, hitchhike
to the San Diego terminal and ride the bus for hours
through the sun-blasted San Fernando Valley
just to sit on his fold-down bed in a trailer
parked in the side yard of his parents' house,
drinking Southern Comfort from a plastic cup.
His brother was a sessions man for Taj Mahal,
and he played guitar, too, picked at it like a scab.
Once his mother knocked on the tin door
to ask us in for dinner. She watched me
from the sides of her eyes while I ate.
When I offered to wash the dishes she told me
she wouldn't stand her son being taken
advantage of. I said I had no intention
of taking anything and set the last dish
carefully in the rack. He was a bit slow,
like he'd been hit hard on the back of the head,
but nothing dramatic. We didn't talk much anyway,
just drank and smoked and fucked and slept
through the ferocious heat. I found a photograph
he took of me getting back on the bus or maybe
stepping off into his arms. I'm wearing jeans
with studs punched along the cuffs,
a t-shirt with stars on the sleeves, a pair
of stolen bowling shoes and a purse I made
while I was in the loony bin, wobbly X's
embroidered on burlap with gaudy orange yarn.
I don't remember how we met. When I look
at this picture I think I might not even
remember this boy if he hadn't taken it
and given it to me, written his name under mine
on the back. I stopped seeing him
after that thing with his mother. I didn't know
I didn't know anything yet. I liked him.
That's what I remember. That,
and the I-don't-know-what degree heat
that rubbed up against the trailer's metal sides,
steamed in through the cracks between the door
and porthole windows, pressed down on us
from the ceiling and seeped through the floor,
crushing us into the damp sheets. How we endured it,
sweat streaming down our naked bodies, the air
sucked from our lungs as we slept. Taj Mahal says
If you ain't scared, you ain't right. Back then
I was scared most of the time. But I acted
tough, like I knew every street.
What I liked about him was that he wasn't acting.
Even his sweat tasted sweet.

Biographical information: Dorianne Laux is the author of several much admired collections of poetry including What We Carry, Awake, Smoke, and Facts About the Moon. These two poems are from Superman: The Chapbook published in 2008 by Red Dragonfly Press. She lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is on the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.

I never really understood why the Beatles
broke up, the whole
Yoko Ono thing seemed an excuse
for something deeper.
Sure, she was an irritation
with her helium screech, her skimpy
leatherette skirts, those tinted ovoid glasses
eclipsing half her face.
But come on, Hey Jude
was putting caviar on the table, not to mention
those glittering lines of cocaine. Beatle music
was paying for moats dug out with a fleet
of backhoes circling the stadium-sized perimeters
of four manicured estates. Why Don't We
Do It In the Road was backing up traffic
around the amphitheaters of the industrial world.
Yoko's avant-garde art projects and op-art
outfits were nothing against the shiploads of lucre
I'm Fixing a Hole and Here Comes the Sun
were bringing in.
So why did they do it?
They had wives, kids, ex-wives, mortgages,
thoroughbreds and waist-coated butlers, lithe
young assistants power lunching with publicists
in Paris, Rome. And they must have loved
one another almost as much as John
loved Yoko, brothers from the ghetto,
their shaggy heads touching
above the grand piano, their voices
straining toward perfect harmony.
Maybe they arrived
at a place where nothing
seemed real. A field
bigger than love or greed or jealousy.
An open space
where nothing is enough.

Biographical information: Dorianne Laux is the author of several much admired collections of poetry including What We Carry, Awake, Smoke, and Facts About the Moon. These two poems are from Superman: The Chapbook published in 2008 by Red Dragonfly Press. She lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is on the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.

Drained by our supply-side workweeks
we invested ourselves in Saturday night
at the club where strobe-lit pretzels
pulsed and posed their satin jackets
and sequin stretch tops, polyester
shimmering under the mirror ball,
bellbottoms hiding our muscular ankles
as we twirled and spun and throbbed
to the four-on-the-floor beat
in search of our inner travoltas.

Biographical information: Joanne Lowery's poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Eclipse, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, roger, and Poetry East. Her chapbook Call Me Misfit won the 2009 Frank Cat Poetry Prize. She lives in Michigan.

Keith bashes clashes smashes side to side
his bass and snare, pedals madly,
shimmers and shushes the cymbals
with caveman energy and cartwheeling sticks
mindful of the next nanosecond
of his generation.

He was born quick-handed and foot-tapping.
He threw firecrackers and beat women.
He is thirty-two and will never die.

He's everywhere all over the drum kit.
And then he exits the purple spotlight.
Moonie ricochets from our sphere.
He's out there, somewhere far out there,
synchronizing a billion stars
so we can hear them twinkle.

Biographical information: Joanne Lowery's poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Eclipse, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, roger, and Poetry East. Her chapbook Call Me Misfit won the 2009 Frank Cat Poetry Prize. She lives in Michigan

Even when the baton misses—
its rubber knob bouncing astray—
Main Street's crowds applaud
her satin v-pleated mini skirt
and ostrich cap, the epaulettes
and tasseled boots of a foppish soldier
as the big drum boom-booms
and rows of brass synchronize
her high-stepping knees.
On the next try a chrome star spins
above the crowd, then drops
into her hand: their sigh,
a Revlon smile, the tuba's cheer.

Biographical information: Joanne Lowery's poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Eclipse, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, roger, and Poetry East. Her chapbook Call Me Misfit won the 2009 Frank Cat Poetry Prize. She lives in Michigan.

i. blood

I never liked onions—the one time
I cut them it's for you, and straight
off the knife goes for the bone.
It's as if I've struck gold, oil,
a nerve. My hand
fills with such heart-felt color.
I can no longer read the future
on this palm, but here
is a valentine that won't quit, ink
to write a thousand poems
no one will read,
or a letter that comes back
No Such Resident.

ii. smoke

I remember everything: the precise
outlook of the stars, at a nearby
table, a smoking cigarette, ticking
watch. (I lie about the cigarette,
the watch, but not the smoking,
ticking.) Love, when I looked
in your eyes I glimpsed
plundered cities, heard cries.
But that was then. These days
I tell my students never say
"I remember".
You're writing the poem, aren't you?
Of course you remember.

iii. chocolate

Footprints
end at the wall—otherwise
the room is in perfect order.
Who cleaned up after himself removing
all signs of struggle? There's a mystery
at the heart of this poem I don't understand.
What? Did you take me for the victim?
I am the detective seeking a clue, the line missing
or stolen: Line That Would Explain Everything.
But there is only this title hinting at
darkness or sweetness, ways
to lose one's way or just
be lost.

Biographical information: In 2009 Suzanne Lummis was one of 45 writers selected by the NEA to appear at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the second largest literary festival in the world, which this year celebrated Los Angeles as its "guest of honor". She has poems in the current or forthcoming New Ohio Review and Alehouse.

The Bear Who Lives in Me by Morton Marcus

A bear lives inside me. He wears me like a coat.

   I have to endure his belching fish breath and constant
swiping at food on anyone's plate, and he has to put up with my silly grin and small talk at parties and at home.

   I want to lower my eyes and mumble "hello" as I pass people on the street. He wants to shout and urinate in public and shake his fist against the night.

   There's no way to get rid of him. He's spread throughout my body, and when he wakes and stretches in the morning, I think he'll break through my fingertips and toes.

   I guess he can't get rid of me either, can't toss me like a tattered overcoat into an attic corner.

   At times I think we have been joined together so I could have him from his ways, but at other times I think he's been sent to save me from mine.

   Either way, it's unnerving when I look in the mirror and start to say with a grin, "There's nothing to worry about," but observe the wedge of ferocity, embedded above my nose, pulling my features inward and burning the blood in my eyes, and I unaccountably mutter, "Beware."

Biographical information: Morton Marcus, the well known Santa Cruz poet, passed away this past fall. These four prose poems are from Pursuing the Dream Bone published by Quale Press in 2007 and are reprinted by permission. Permissions do not include transfer to any other website and does not authorize any reuse in any other medium including print. Anyone wishing to use this material for any purpose must secure permission from Mark Ong at mark@sidebysidestudios.net. Those interested in Marcus's life and work are invited to visit his website at www.mortonmarcus.com.

I Still Complain About the Government by Morton Marcus

I still complain about the government, the bad guys in big business, and the way the workers always get it in the neck. In Portland, Omaha, Duluth, my fellow workers shrugged off my remarks in a motion that tumbled down their arms and opened their hands, their callused fingers showing me that this is the way things are. I can still see the wood shavings and metal filings glimmering in the creases of their palms.

Biographical information: Morton Marcus, the well known Santa Cruz poet, passed away this past fall. These four prose poems are from Pursuing the Dream Bone published by Quale Press in 2007 and are reprinted by permission. Permissions do not include transfer to any other website and does not authorize any reuse in any other medium including print. Anyone wishing to use this material for any purpose must secure permission from Mark Ong at mark@sidebysidestudios.net. Those interested in Marcus's life and work are invited to visit his website at www.mortonmarcus.com.

The Town Where he had Never Been by Morton Marcus

The old novelist always wrote about a small town where he had never been. He populated the town with all the people he had met and all the experiences he had experienced in other towns.

To readers a hundred years later, only the town where the novelist had never been was real. The other towns were names on maps below clouds that vanished over the summer landscape.

Biographical information: Morton Marcus, the well known Santa Cruz poet, passed away this past fall. These four prose poems are from Pursuing the Dream Bone published by Quale Press in 2007 and are reprinted by permission. Permissions do not include transfer to any other website and does not authorize any reuse in any other medium including print. Anyone wishing to use this material for any purpose must secure permission from Mark Ong at mark@sidebysidestudios.net. Those interested in Marcus's life and work are invited to visit his website at www.mortonmarcus.com.

   "Wait here," says the father to the little boy, and walks into the clothing store without looking back.

   "Wait here," says the mother to the daughter, and enters the supermarket.

   The children wait, apprehensive: What if the grown-ups do not come back? But they do, and everyone goes home to dinner.

   Adults and children will repeat this scene again and again, until the children think that being a child means waiting outside their parents' lives two or three times a day for several minutes to an hour.

   This is how children learn patience and how to amuse themselves by pulling at their fingers, or picking at their clothes, or wandering away when they were told not to.

   Then one day the parents do not return, and the children are left waiting.

   They do not understand at first that their parents' repeated admonitions to wait were preparing them for the rest of their lives, which will consist of waiting and amusing themselves with their fingers and clothes, until they finally wander away.

Biographical information: Morton Marcus, the well known Santa Cruz poet, passed away this past fall. These four prose poems are from Pursuing the Dream Bone published by Quale Press in 2007 and are reprinted by permission. Permissions do not include transfer to any other website and does not authorize any reuse in any other medium including print. Anyone wishing to use this material for any purpose must secure permission from Mark Ong at mark@sidebysidestudios.net. Those interested in Marcus's life and work are invited to visit his website at www.mortonmarcus.com.

They found him in a phone booth, huddled,
frail as a fetus, shivering in the cold.
The problem, he said, was that when he began
to take off his clothes for the usual transformation,
the blue and red suit with the yellow "S"
emblazoned across the front, just wasn't there.
He couldn't believe it, he said, and kept disrobing
when he was assaulted by a transient who took the pile of clothes.
He insisted that no one tell Lois as they led him away
covered by a wool blanket, babbling incoherently
to the air in front of him, remembering how things used to be.

Biographical information: Federico Moramarco is Professor Emeritus of English at San Diego State University where he taught English and Creative Writing for many years, and is the Founding Editor of Poetry International, an annual journal published there. He is currently Artistic Director of Laterthanever Productions, a non-profit San Diego theatre company. "Clark Kent, Naked" originally appeared in the April, 1996 issue of M.E.N. Magazine and online at www.menweb.com.

Easter Poem for My Mother by Mil Norman-Risch

Now with a soft spot in her brain
the words "passed down for many years"
came out "onion,"
as when she pointed
to the table
of four generations
that would one day pass to me,
saying
"the table has been onion, four, four.."
(her fingers lifted)

and when she awoke from a six-day coma
she said,
"vinegars are set up like chemistry,"
a sentence we thought had to be a code
for something she had learned
there where her mind had drifted.

I imagine nighttime corridors
where a doctor stops
outside the rooms of his demented patients,
listening, listening,

as though he'd come upon
a scroll or stone
or the Coptic version
of the Greek
that holds the words
of some first witness
of the resurrection.

To see my mother's eyes
when she said "onion"
is to see
how the faithlessness
of listeners
weighs heavy
against her own known truth.

Biographical information: A 2009 Pushcart nominee, Mil Norman-Risch received New Millennium Writing's 2008 Creative Nonfiction Prize and American Poetry Journal's 2007 American Poet's Prize. Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Opium, White Pelican Review, Sojourners, Valparaiso Review, Common Ground, Tipton Poetry Journal as well as in Agha Shahid Ali's anthology Ravishing Disunities.

My Brother's Blackberry by Leigh Pollack

You are a bad brother.
When you call,
I don't recognize the number,
but I answer anyway.
I appease you:
You are a good brother.
You never beat up
my mean ex-boyfriends,
instead you advised me
to expel my relationship demons
like salt with the bath water.
When Danny Kempler
stole my FiloFax
in the fourth grade,
you told me to keep
a better handle on my stuff.
I put my arm through a window
at drama camp;
I must've been eleven.
You never called,
you never even wrote.
You let your roommate
get me plastered
on four watery cups
of warm Natty Light.
I was your braces-wearing little sister.
I puked all over your dorm,
then helped you
clean the mess.
When you got married,
I had 88 days.
I brought my sponsor as a date.
I read a poem as my toast.
Embarrassed,
you turned away.
You are a bad brother.
When you call,
I answer anyway.

Biographical information: Leigh Allison Pollack, of sunny Coconut Grove, Florida, is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at SDSU. She is an Aquarius who enjoys long moonlit walks on the beach, reciting Sylvia Plath by firelight, and finding a good deal on an especially snazzy pair of designer shoes.

Lean men,
broad shouldered men,
I see them in the newspaper
with their perfectly styled hair
and their sagging inquisitive eyes
and the gold epaulets on their uniforms
that shine even when there is no light—
they took you down, Neruda,
it didn't matter to them
that you emerged from the
birthplace of shadows—
it didn't matter to them
that imitated the moon with words
for a woman or that you screamed at the blood
on the factories of the poor—
they simply wanted you dead—
you were old, you were weak,
you saw it coming,
it was the same state police siren you heard
when they wanted you dead before—
I read how they withheld your medicine
when you were already dying,
how they confiscated your piece of land,
how they decorated the bedrooms of military men
with your exotic collection of shells,
how they burned all your books already related
to the vegetation you were about to become.
I re-read your Noble speech tonight, Neruda—
you said you always put your trust in man,
you said you believed in the prophecy of Rimbaud,
how, "in the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we
shall enter the splendid cities"—and now
the corporate men, and the police informers,
and the military have covered the splendid city again
with their piss and spit and bullets.
It doesn't matter to them.
All the fires are out of you now, Neruda—
there is no phoenix, only
in your poems, there is no
"splendid city"—only in words
we are too rotten to believe.
4 a.m. The lamp in the patio
burns all night like a wing
on a dead body that
won't stop flying.

Biographical information: Doren Robbins's work has appeared in over 100 periodicals. He has published one fiction collection, Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (Cedar Hill Press 2004). Recent poetry: Driving Face Down (winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001) and My Piece of the Puzzle (2008) are published by Eastern Washington UP. He teaches at Foothill College. This poem was originally published in The Roots and the Towers, a collection of poems by Doren Robbins published by Third Rail Press in 1980.

Red, round, ripe—
full of the sun's heat
familiar in my hand
like a newborn's head
Little pumpkin
of pleasure
dressed in
six scalloped leaves
Leaves that held
the flower
that needed
the bees or a breeze
To start
the seeds
in these
red ovaries.
Sometimes,
there is
so much sex
in my sink
I need to
turn away
and quickly brown
the bulbous onions.

Biographical information: Linda Leedy Schneider is a poetry and writing mentor and psychotherapist in private practice whose work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Linda has written five collections of poetry including Through My Window: Poetry of a Psychotherapist. An anthology, Mentor's Bouquet, is forthcoming in Spring 2010. "Tomato" previously appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review.

I stood between my parents
and held their hands
in the freezing grey weather
while rain and winds whipped
our faces and made
it difficult to speak.

I understood nothing
about what was going on.
Why did our ship stop
in the Indian Ocean
and people gathered on deck
to watch a ceremony at the rails ?

Flags flapped crazily.
I was four years old.
None of this made sense to me
on the voyage from Europe
to Australia in 1949.
Why did the ship stop ?

On a small table or platform
resembling a see-saw
something lay wrapped
that, from a distance, below us,
looked like a loaf of bread.

The platform was raised at one end.
Whatever lay on it
slid off—was gone,
out of sight—
while the ship lay heaving
like a steel monster
impatient to move on.

My parents blessed themselves.
We stood a while longer
and moved away—out of the rain, into warmth.
I asked, "What happened ?"
My mother said, "A little boy was sick. He died."

Decades later, in Canberra,
researching my family's journey
in the national archives
I found a reference
to Jan Dul, No. 347, who "Died at Sea"
in the files of our ship, the General R.M. Blatchford.
He was aged barely two—
an only child, left behind
like a piece of jetsam
between the Old World and the New.

Biographical information: Peter Skrzynecki is an Australian poet, novelist and short story writer of Polish-Ukrainian descent who has published 9 volumes of poetry, 2 collections of short stories, 2 novels and edited 2 collections of Australian multi-cultural writing. His new novel, Boys of Summer will be published in April.

Coming Across an Old Girlfriend's Poems by Tom Speer

In the anthology her three poems each have
men in them, other men, different men, not me,
at least I think not me. I am not surprised,
remembering how when she left town for grad school
she did not glance back, did not smile or wave,
just gunned the car as if happy to escape
though I had just handed her the painting she
coveted, the painting we had together gazed at
many nights from our bed on the floor. Take it
I said to her, and she did, wordless,
turning and throwing it into the back seat.
Maybe I was secretly glad to see her go,
and now I am glad as well her poems are dull,
in that quiet, beige sort of way that finds you
forgetting the poem before you've gotten to
the end, though reticence seems to be the fashion.
At the time I thought she was plain, but the face
pictured after the lengthy biographical sketch
is striking and fierce. That hair must be dyed
blonde my God it's been thirty years and mine
is white. I read the three quiet poems again
with three different men, quiet men, I suppose,
& I see myself running after her car, waving &
yelling goodbye goodbye, as if she were listening.

Biographical information: Tom Speer is a Tucson-based poet who teaches at Pima Community College. "The Return" was previously published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. His collection My Father's Shoes: New and Selected Poems was published by Pima Press.

Rain falling on the roof:
first, it's sparse, light as the hairs on my arm;
we don't know what will happen, whether
it will halt suddenly or come crashing down,
so we wait on the porch, filled with expectation,
looking out on the desert, this dry and stubborn land.

We talk to ourselves in low voices, we whisper,
retreat into ourselves, joke and wait, hold hands.
How is it that this is so exciting? How can something
so ordinary still fill us with such pleasure? The universe
is alive, here, on this porch, and we look out
on the brilliant rainbow winter sky.

Yesterday my friend Arnie told me his colleague,
another doctor, was dying. Prostate cancer, he said.
You just have to get used to it. There is an end to everything;
even Michelangelo died. He left something behind,
but there was an end.

There is always an end. I remember this, and
I remember sitting with you on the porch waiting for rain.

Biographical information: Tom Speer is a Tucson-based poet who teaches at Pima Community College. "The Return" was previously published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. His collection My Father's Shoes: New and Selected Poems was published by Pima Press.

In Tuesday morning's class I was
standing in front, reading a poem,
"The Man He Killed," by Thomas
Hardy, 1902, when the young man
to my right spoke up.
I turned and looked at him
directly, point-blank as he spoke
and a shadow seemed to cross
his face. That's how I felt, he said,
the first time I shot and killed someone.
No bravado in his words, only
a slow sadness, a haunted look
and a reluctance, as if he had not
just returned from Iraq,
but stood there back from
the grave. He could have been
my friend in another situation,
he nodded, holding the book
in his hand, and see here
where if says they were out of work,
well that was the same. A kind
of excitement entered his voice,
wanting to share this, and the other
students sat dead still, all ears
waiting to hear more, waiting
to hear my reply,
and me trying with little success
to bring words to my mouth.

Biographical information: Tom Speer is a Tucson-based poet who teaches at Pima Community College. "The Return" was previously published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. His collection My Father's Shoes: New and Selected Poems was published by Pima Press.

one thing into another
then things spun
into thangs

sharpies and notebooks
then
aerosols and alleyways

airsoft pops
turned into
real bangs

a wannabe thug
got his name crossed out
now Luis can't even breathe

I wish we could go back
to when graf writers
weren't confused with gangs

but no
my friend didn't live
in the old school

he's now depressed
into this earth
way too soon

buy the chapbook

read prose by same author

Biographical information: Benjamin Arnold's three poems published here are "Editor's Choice" selections by Robert Judge Woerheide. All three are available in Arnold's recently published chapbook Fractals of Past (LeRue Press, 2009).

Benjamin Arnold has survived teaching high school English for five years. When he isn't teaching, he is writing, painting, and raising a reader. He is the founder of BEtheCAUSE, a collective of artists, musicians, and poets, which hosts open mics and poetry slams. Word Riot has published some of his poetry. Arnold's book length collection of poetry, Synaptic Traffic: Intersections of Prose and Poetry is scheduled for release in April 2010. He earned a degree in Literature and Writing Studies at Cal State San Marcos in 2003. Arnold lives in Reno, NV with his wife, Tami, and son, TK. He is a contributing editor for Perigee—and continues to investigate and write the world.

dishwasher
floor waxer
baker

stocked shelves with groceries,
only to later stuff them
into processed trees
or recycled synthetics,
packed them into cars of able-bodied,
flirtatious women and men

waited tables—became the flippant flirt

scrubbed
packed
cooked

bought into corporate codes at video stores
convinced customers, rented out movies
ordered, received, repaired, rewound, sold,
shelved, and stole them

approached by a pyramid network scheme— reconsidered

fried donuts
boiled bagels
roasted coffee

at a hole in the wall: sliced meats, cheese
served them up on sour, wheat, and rye
took smoke breaks in the storage shed,
surrounded by buckets of pickles and jalapeños
traded hoagies for herb with rasta john,
rag-head pete, and all the troubadours

stifled within walls—tried freelance labor

framed
painted
shingled

chased balloons for hot heads
from napa to healdsburg and back
tied the proper knots, hefted sand bags,
smiled at too many tourists,
drank their left over wines

scraped by with minimum
made five times that, threw it away

raked
shoveled
jackhammered

diverted traffic on 80 in the nevadan high desert
plastered polymers all over bridges,
manipulated molten oil and rock

shortest day, twelve; longest, twenty-one
didn't always need a bed—
just fixed on those white lines near the edge
of the road

buy the chapbook

read prose by same author

Biographical information: Benjamin Arnold's three poems published here are "Editor's Choice" selections by Robert Judge Woerheide. All three are available in Arnold's recently published chapbook Fractals of Past (LeRue Press, 2009).

Benjamin Arnold has survived teaching high school English for five years. When he isn't teaching, he is writing, painting, and raising a reader. He is the founder of BEtheCAUSE, a collective of artists, musicians, and poets, which hosts open mics and poetry slams. Word Riot has published some of his poetry. Arnold's book length collection of poetry, Synaptic Traffic: Intersections of Prose and Poetry is scheduled for release in April 2010. He earned a degree in Literature and Writing Studies at Cal State San Marcos in 2003. Arnold lives in Reno, NV with his wife, Tami, and son, TK. He is a contributing editor for Perigee—and continues to investigate and write the world.

Your eyes are smooth moonstones
shifting in the slatch of rising tides,
flashing signs of promises.

Crisp air stiffens the hair on my arms,
salt soak creeps into my nostrils.
Incessant waves create smoke around you.
As we kiss, I taste the end of our burnt
connection.

Midnight tequila tastes like breaking
morning rays
On the shore of Trinidad, California, we laugh

at Tony balancing on the fire circle rocks,
as he jabs: What up now?
I remember him walking into a deli, wearing
his favorite jersey,
and stop-sign-red shoes, but no pants—
demanding service.

He flirts with a stranger: Wanna take a ride?
She don't know him.
He's genuine as a Rolex
He's genuine as a Rolexin the streets of
Tijuiana.
The honest player flashes his Rolex smile:
Me gusta su sonrisa bonita.

I close my eyes to ignore you,
to forget your promises,
I close my eyes to ignore youas you walk away,
electric waves of wisdom wash over us,
and we spoke to god
and we spoke to god then rinsed our hair.

If you listen closely to those waves,
you'll understand Whitman's soul.

As our fire circle becomes just a circle,
the rocks taste the briny air of the
twilight,
and we slowly become incoherent seals
and we slowly become ishifting on the sand.

buy the chapbook

read prose by same author

Biographical information: Benjamin Arnold's three poems published here are "Editor's Choice" selections by Robert Judge Woerheide. All three are available in Arnold's recently published chapbook Fractals of Past (LeRue Press, 2009).

Benjamin Arnold has survived teaching high school English for five years. When he isn't teaching, he is writing, painting, and raising a reader. He is the founder of BEtheCAUSE, a collective of artists, musicians, and poets, which hosts open mics and poetry slams. Word Riot has published some of his poetry. Arnold's book length collection of poetry, Synaptic Traffic: Intersections of Prose and Poetry is scheduled for release in April 2010. He earned a degree in Literature and Writing Studies at Cal State San Marcos in 2003. Arnold lives in Reno, NV with his wife, Tami, and son, TK. He is a contributing editor for Perigee—and continues to investigate and write the world.

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