The furnace is a mindfulness bell
and I am an unworthy but earnest monk.
That quiet click on January’s coldest night
returns me to the core, returns me
to gratitude for warm air about my body,
warm tile beneath my bare feet.
The simple knowledge of food in the cupboard,
fire in the furnace, the rent paid
through the month of July.
If few people love me, that is okay,
and if they seldom show their affection, fine.
I have the click of the thermostat
and the rush of heat through the vents
to bring me back to the circle
of breathing, thinking, remembering,
This art of always returning.
– Robert L. Penick…
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I held one once.
Weighed nothing,
my uncle says
of hummingbirds
whose hollow bones
float & splinter like dead
wood —Nana, her top-hand
skin fresh like powdered
butterfly wings, always paused
for hummingbirds.
She’d stand at the kitchen sink
underskin wrist-thin
like toilet paper or tissue wrap,
watch blurry-winged birds
wind-dancers, thrumming
for something sweet.
Unfeathered but bird-boned,
she too prized
delicacy, longed to kiss water;
like light to touch
without touching
move
with no regard
for gravity.
– L.R. Traverse…
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The old man and his old dog walk slowly,
their summer shadows stretched out long
ahead of them.
Behind them, the sun fights to remain in the sky
even though it has lost this contest
for billions of years and will soon,
in a green flash, surrender to the night,
only to rise up in the morning,
born again.
For the old man, it is a short walk
at the end of a long day and he will,
like the sun, soon be on the other side
of the world, out of sight and in darkness.
For now, though, there will be shared food,
the evening news,
and time to rest in the chair by the window
while he watches his old dog’s flank
rise and fall with each breath.…
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Their rakes lay forgotten.
Stephen runs, red knitted cap,
red cheeks, the little girls
chasing, one wearing a brace
on her leg. They dash
through cut-glass air to tumble
in the cold flakes of brilliant color
piled thick from the woods …
too many … like trying
to rake in all the stars
and clear the night sky.
But we tried, all of us,
’til our arms ached
even into sleep. In those days
we burned great smoldering heaps,
and the air was scented
with smoke until after first snow.
Stephen is ever aloft
in this photo, one leg kicked back,
one leaping ahead,
and nothing, not one thing,
I promise myself,
has changed in all these years.
– Carol Hamilton…
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i send my assembly-line boy back:
reset his factory settings, my hands remember how he likes it
wipe his rosy cheeks, flick his pink nipples one last time
commit his little moans to memory, his blue eyes glowing with promise
take his box out of storage, a hasbro grave,
geoffrey’s gone like god & good fortune
admire his bulging cow eyes & long lean legs, achingly beautiful smoothness
straighten his white shirt, lower him into the abyss
lay packing peanuts on him (there’s a penis joke here),
make sure the plastic isn’t suffocating
i’ll miss him, i’m sure
but summer’s coming,
& doesn’t it just eat at you when a boy is too perfect?
– Michael Chang…
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and mangoes on the counter
silently ooze sweetness, anyone
arrives through the door warmly,
and sweat seals our skin together
in cheek-kisses. A nimble infant,
the bright sun hangs on us,
while, in front yards, banana spiders
spin pearly filaments, and catch
the devil’s red at the thorny edges
of themselves. In the storms of June,
the waves break from the teal sea,
like a seventh seal, and pass
ominously through the patched-
labyrinth of parks, and children
revel in it, the mud and mangroves;
But, they have seen the little perditions
of the periwinkle: To endless displace
each grain of sand, all for the waves’s
moon-cadence, and the white froth that spills
against the sand into the declensions
of another language and is wiped clean.…
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I try not to forget those days at home,
Though I would not like to live them again,
Alone with the chores and a currycomb
I used to groom Gray among the chickens
That ran out in the barnyard and mule-lot,
For telling you these details, I’m afraid,
Only makes any point I sharpen rot
Before it’s ripe or, on arrival, dead.
Reveries under the shed’s overhang
Close in on truths unbeholden to me,
Scrunched against the wall, sun sweet as sea tang,
The dew, too, dripping from the tin a spree
I cannot sing except to say it’s so.
Childhood, the goose-pimples, moments of bliss
I sense from decades back, gains my long row
I keep on hoeing while I reminisce.
It all comes to not knowing who I am.…
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