The old hickory dropped
Nut-brown seeds that we’d smash
Our fingers trying to crack – the filled dirt innards
Became our pretend dinner before
Dad bandaged up the bloodied tips.
Now it’s dead and dead cold from
Standing in the Florida heat with no
Blanket or break from its production.
The fallen branches were chainsawed to
Smoker bits at Christmas or Labor Day.
We never thanked it with water or words
For the shade and meals and memory-wounds.
Mushrooms have invaded our yard
Except the patched dirt that’s been
Driven on for far too long. Nothing lives there.
Nothing lives long enough for our children’s children anymore.
We dig and build atop and strip the soil before it’s passed on.
The flowers he gives his wife – when a newborn is
Borne by her alone for twenty odd years – wilt and crumble within a week.…
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I crouch in leaves and needles
under pines and water oak. I crashed my way
to this place through the saw-vines and mimosa
avoiding poison ivy and backyards. Vibration
escalation, terror of arrival, noise and
bulk and overwhelming
joy, blur and roar and clack and whistle
fast and loud and large
receding sudden.
Fading, gone.
The noise of startled birds
returns, and the sound of my own breath.
After long enough, I rise,
lift my weight on steady hands and feet.
No rails for me no predetermined route
marked out on maps. No tickets
and no whistle. Crunch of footsteps
chosen, breath. The scratch of nails
on trunks of trees and long-discarded
glass and rusted metal.
Times crashes into me at the crossing
but I will just bend like the river.…
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they tell me I cannot donate, stamping
the word
……………..REJECTED in red across my
wrist like a branding iron, but less superficial.
I had felt an obligation to sign up, because
I was a universal donor—a term which,
I recognized, was quite ego-inflating;
……………..perhaps, I mused, I could play savior,
and be needed, and be one of many.
I thought there might be something poetic in
seeing the blood move from one shriveled
bag to another,
……………..skin like plastic and vice versa,
or at least, I figured it’d make me a better poet,
to say my heart had beat outside of me;
yet, in the reflection of fluorescent
……………..lights on the linoleum floors I saw
……………..……………..my resolve begin to crumble.…
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When I told you how I’d
love to take a picture of you—
I was talking about you as
you were then, in motion,
eyes alight,
hair framed in a halo
of the dying sunlight,
looking, looking, looking—
at something far away,
something through the glass
and the engines, the asphalt
and the crawling things—
something far from
this wretched place,
something far from me.
I wished to capture you as
you were then, in a moment that
we would never return to.
But the memory, I suppose,
is permanent enough.
A slow-developed shot,
already murky,
like vintage film.
Someone else will have you
that way again, and it won’t be me—
But at least I can hold on to this.
I will have you
in my mind, if nowhere else,
just as you were and
will never be again.…
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The wreck is a weird
symphony: the exploded
air bags rumpled as
a just-empty bed, the way
the metal bends like her
jacket that day at Brinton
Timber, the buttery smear
of the engine smashed up
to the skeleton.
There were two
dents for her knees, a cracked
plastic brassiere, and gaps
where the fine curves
of the doors won’t spoon,
and a delicate timbre when
the control knobs tumbled
from the console.
The paint
curls as paper from the book,
one window tossed to ice
cubes, one streaked like hawk
feathers, and the shattered
truss sets the hull down,
like a woman being beaten
who clings to the ground.
– Jared Pearce
Author’s Note: “What sounded” was a poem that came from my going to a wrecked car in order to retrieve any further property from it; we had been hit head-on.…
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“…only the names of places had dignity.”
– Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
No farms recede from Ives Dairy Road,
Just row after row of June Cleaver homes—
No apples blossom on Orchard Lane—
Acres of trees? Not one remains.
No trout swim near River Street,
Just pavement pounded by weary feet—
Moo-moo-moving are herds of cars,
Gassing their way down boulevards—
Our supermarket is Evergreen Park
Where traffic lights dispel the dark—
We call our shopping mall The Open Field—
Not even the names of places are real…
– Robert Piazza…
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The scent of leather, shoe wax
and the cobbler’s aftershave,
pears, broken
crates of ricotta cheese, rinds of parmesan stacked
haphazard on barrels of yellow beans,
fagioli, hard as beads,
crushed beet
leaves, broccoli florets, snap
peas. The scent of basil stops
at the back of the storage room, where grandfather
sits, propped up in suspenders and shirtsleeves, head
tipped forward, shoulders hunched, his work
consumed by their broadness. A ray of light
slices the top of his head, green apple in one still hand,
coring knife in the other, the peel
falling into the milk crate. By his blackened shoe
a grey mouse rubs its furry back
into the stitches, nibbles a hunk of cheese.
– Paula Brancato
Note: “Her Grandfather” is a revised version of a poem originally published by Mudfish in 2008.…
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