Naomi was holed up with Scooter and his beautiful baggie of Oxy in The Cutler Corner Motel—Room 13—when the tornado touched down and set the whole place to shaking. She had barely partaken of the powder when the walls of the motel room began to rumble like a train was passing just outside the window. Naomi gripped the threadbare comforter, wondering if a mine had collapsed or the world was ending.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” yelled Scooter, trying to pull his jeans up over his greying underwear but kept getting tangled up until he tipped into the veneer dresser, knocking his stash onto the red shag carpeting.…
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1
I came
With thousand colorful dreams And the world
drunk them all Year after year
it dropped like a rain Drop by drop by drop
And I know tomorrow
even These few black crows Will fly away
From my snowy roof
2
Gliding from the elevator gushing on the street blowing with the taxi
Crossing the highway by the rain bow Saying hello to the old house
And entering my room It’s been years since human flew here
3
You plant your feet in the ground with fingers staring at clouds
you surrender your leaves to the wind and know that death
is not an exotic event
4
Sadness
is better than darkness
I fear the silence of lanterns waiting for sunset
– Maziar Karim…
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“Mere, pere, și bretele,” went the old Romanian joke, which loses all its rhyming wordplay in English: “apples, pears, and suspenders.” This was my first exposure to the indignities of female body image, and it came not, as you might imagine, from my mother, but from my dad. A recognized world-class curmudgeon, my father never even tried to reign in his colorful expressions to shelter the budding sensibilities of his daughter and only child. He would repeat this joke with glee, ignoring my mother’s frowns; I would giggle blithely.
If you haven’t realized already, the joke refers to the physical state of a woman’s breasts through life: in her youth, firm apples standing proud on her chest; in her middle age, pears tugged by gravity earthwards; and finally, in late life, suspenders that have entirely given up their shape and the fight with gravity.…
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And like a sailor, he lifts the blinds. In the distance, no matter how far he is in that VA nursing home, he sees us out here somewhere as we glide. Your elderly father sees you and me, our hearts as one woven kite on the porch swing just as night seems to nudge the sun aside. He knows we are falling in love.
After all, all our footprints in sand and snow and cinder and everywhere we go, we go two by two by love but look at how the world blends so small. He knows. Widowers may have a way of seeing all the power in believing, as somewhere way out there is yet a heavenly mother near her child.
He may remember his younger sky, and her beautiful eyes, and likely can see them still when you laugh and when you cry.…
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It’s one kind of delirium
the state of these bed sheets
state of the union
after the fever breaks amid the folds
honey bees through the window
summoned by the sweet musk
they find moisture
in the crevices
and buzz about the tiny bud beneath the curtain
The linens bare your teeth marks
Cresent indentations like moon shadows
The fever broke
amid the shadows
behind the blinds
and the ecstatic mess
the delicious delirium of bedsheets
became
a home
– Apollo Papafrangou…
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One of the many awards that noted American poet Judith Skillman has received is from the Academy of American Poets (for Storm), while Red Town and Prisoner of the Swifts were Washington State Book Award finalists. Her poems have been included in such journals as Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and FIELD; also, her collaborative translations in various journals. She’s in Best Indie Verse of New England as well. Her latest full poetry collection is Kafka’s Shadow and you can visit her here.
How did you decide on Franz Kafka for your new poetry collection?
I read “Metamorphosis” again and was very taken with it. After a span of thirty years since the last reading, the story took on new dimensions. Then I read “The Stoker,” “The Judgment,” and “Letter to His Father,” as these have been reissued in a new edition titled The Sons (Schocken Books, Inc.,…
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In the spring, planting
commences, the roots of
verbs and gerunds
are persuaded to cloak
themselves in new
soils and stretch
into blank territory
without the sun’s
compass; the weeds
that hold as fast as skin
distracting the soft and
hairless on their route;
to thicken and thickening,
rinds and lemons,
the oranges trees
souring at the twigs
without ever flowering:…
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