What I wouldn’t give
for another morning like that one:
I brought you Kona coffee and sunny-side-up eggs,
pausing momentarily at the bedroom door,
teak tray perched on my fingertips, to watch
you float on the rippling blue comforter,
a still life, swimming a statuesque side-stroke.
The birds in the branches outside
our bedroom window capered about in the yellow-breasted
sunlight.
The maple tree, wrapped in wet brown bark,
sprouted buds
bejeweled by last night’s fog—
the same little beads which slid down
your naked skin in the shower,
dawn after presumptive dawn.
I sip my coffee alone now, in the first anodyne rays
of the mourning hours, measuring my life
in birdsong–plaintive and palliative.
– Greg Maddigan…
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after a line of Stallings
What started as hers has now become his,
stolen from burnished sands of the past like
all the lost poems wrapped around corpses,
forgotten in fragments he mimics in these
stuttering verses where white spaces show breaks.
What started as “hers” has now become “his”
slipped in innocently (or not) by a scribe’s miss,
the original line unsung in a tomb, black
with other lost poems wrapped around corpses.
The cuts on her skin speak of iron’s sharp kiss
like vellum now scarred by metal and ink.
What started as hers has now become his
excuse for impeding all progress.
He’s combing through history’s waves in the wrack
to find her lost poems wrapped around corpses
as if only her words could undo all this
as if one translation could bring her life back.…
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i. You find her in the summertime. She is down near the Gulf beyond the highway billboards that offer penitence to women with healthy wombs. She looks like a poppy field with ripped overalls and thin, Georgia hair and you imagine she will taste like the same cigarettes her mother died on. This is a place you’ll only find behind dancing eyelids, fasting on sleep and long-term memory.
ii. You find her later in the showers of early fall, when the harvest moon carries her over the Mason Dixon line. In a dream, you tattoo a promise you both made across your wrists and you decide you will live there. It is not the first or the last crossed-out promise you both will make together. You tell her you love her the same way Gulf waters love their tropical storms.…
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Do you remember the days when men loved other men like sons,
or the days when women gave birth in the oceans of California?
The sea children and their tea notes schooling fish songs—
they kept a bath of grapes for paint in elegant professions.
Merlin painted near the sea.
I can’t tell what men love other men like these days,
or if women still give birth in oceans of California.
I can taste this sea in blood teas and floods,
and the grapes come in smaller packages.
They’ve never met a Merlin.
The fog horse and his paladin,
who ran out of crusades,
forgets the sea is paid for.
The insects flay me for suits.
– James Vu…
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In my backyard—at night there is a mirror—
the American river
I walked to the outcropping
where they once tried to build a bridge
Remember how I taught you to throw stones here?
The angle of your elbow
to skip the smooth rock… 1, 2, 3, 4
The ripples of each skip’s epicenter
The sky is a fusion
between the living and the dead, as the sunset
was fifteen minutes ago
Coyotes howl like a heart skipping
stones among ghosts
I feel the years of a rock worn smooth
against my fingers delicately kissing the
flesh I used to trace over your body, watching
the shadow’s outline each ripple in the unmade bed
The stone falls from my waist
I don’t care to catch it
Clank echoes as the rock abides to the law
This new stone I grab isn’t smooth at all, the edges
remind my fingers of broken glass, of
after the end of a fairytale
and is swallowed by my palm
The rawness is a challenge to skip amidst the clamor
of trees in the delta breeze, my only audience
I submarine my hand beneath the elbow
chock my shoulder
Leaves rustle in anticipation
The sky dies after I cut
the tension, flinging the stone
into mirror
broken glass cascades
down the bathroom vanity
It falls into the tops of my feet
Where I can no longer see myself
I hear all the leaves fall in applause
– Daniel Callahan…
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I am four / and the generator giving us heat has been ruined / by a quiet susurrus / of snow / my mother leaves for help / my father’s whereabouts unknown / I venture out into the white / into the white darkness / barefoot and determined / after five minutes my toes go leather / my eyes harden and scan blankness for life / I’m almost to the neighbor’s house when a deer and her fawn / leap from the drowsing maples / to my right / I stop unsure of the danger / they stop / curiosity overriding fear / I reach out / their two bodies steaming / one cloud of life and / when our eyes meet / I feel something / close to truth / or the first edenic moments / before the fall / then in the space of exhalation / all that remains is the drifting / of snow / pin-pricked with hoofprints / a mother perplexed / and reaching
– Josh Daniel…
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We are ripped from the ground, raindrops skittering like
rhinestones from our wingtips into the ever-expanding air.
And I am leaving you with nothing that cannot be squeezed
into the collapsible frame of the mind, that does not need
to be checked into the hold. Below, a scrawl of arteries
growls with cars and drivers underlining another week,
their tiny red and white lights holding hands way beyond
the reasonable human field of view, the pounding
of their thousand heartbeats shunting blood around
every obstacle. Sometimes it exhausts me just to
watch us all, to wonder how we are carrying on, how
the Earth is not gaining weight despite our restlessness,
is still nothing more nor less than the day it was born,
wrinkled and red-faced, screaming for its life in the
arms of a god who can still pick it out instantly,
however crowded the heavens may have become.…
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