Featured Poems
Lucinda Watson
I feel lust when It should be dust
I feel lust when I should feel like dust,
too much testosterone according to my
Geriatrician. I can’t help myself.
Fireman make my mouth water.
I put on rubber gloves,
a mask, a lab coat, and go to Brice’s house for
a drink last Friday
(we’ve been slow dancing electronically).
Like all women I want to talk
before sex and be a little drunk and be
kissed with intention to
paralyze but only for seven minutes or I get
Jittery.
I just decide I am ready to tell him because
now I am bored with this dance after 50 years,
too many partners to remember identifying marks
or howls.
Listen, I say, here’s what I want.
I look at him in his old Patagonia, ripped at the hem and spotted,
hair half brown half gray stuffed under a Patriots cap,
face unshaven, nylon turtleneck blued into gray, open mouth
revealing years of ground out rage and he’s thinking,
What the hell now? So I
say I want to have dinner with someone every night.
I want a body in the bed next to me that doesn’t move or make sounds.
I want someone to have my back.
I want you to figure out what we are going to do about dinner.
I want the smell of soap and skin and silk and the feel of hips and maybe
a gun in the house,
a stick shift car and a big dog, Trivial Pursuit 80’s version,
I want you to figure out what I want and then give it to me when I want it not when you do and I want chocolate pie.
And then he says I don’t want to have dinner every night
The Stone Creek Motel
You always think you’re going home and then you find yourself
at the only roadside motel that takes dogs on a Sunday
night in Missoula having stopped at the liquor store to buy a
bottle of wine and some Pringles.
Out the window of room 208 you can see the inconsistent
glint of interstate 90 heading east and you understand
why you always wanted to be a trucker.
In a minute you are in your truck cab hustling down that Highway,
your fur ball dangling from the rear view mirror wearing tight jeans and
someone’s T-shirt headed for that lineman in Wichita County slamming
the gearshift up and down and checking your Colt 45 under your seat at rest stops.
Or you could take the job listed on the board in the lobby of the
Stone Creek Motel -
“Deer Cleaner” “Twelve bucks for the Bucks!” “Seasonal Work”
Get yourself a rubber apron and a sharp knife and go to town.
You always want other people’s jobs.
The night goes on and you feel comforted by your new
friends, Marge and Tiny, her Great Dane, as you settle
down in the lobby in the brand spanking new chairs,
setting up your Pizza Hut box and six pack of wine alongside
Marge and Tiny with their feast of Wendy’s double burgers,
fries and washed down with Zapple.
Marge asks where you are from and for a moment you have
no answer but she forgets to wait and tells you about her
granddaughter in Des Moines and what she’s bringing her.
Marge is nice enough.
She is wearing the last pair of pink
polyester pants on earth. At some time
there was a daisy chain down the side of each pant leg but
some have fallen off into the vastness of Marge’s yesterday’s.
You could be anywhere.
You could step into Marge’s life in a second.
Take Tiny out and shovel shit for days.
Marge knows what she’s going to do tomorrow
and you have no idea.
Kevin Pilkington
Completely Dry
The day after she moved out
I went for a walk and stopped
next to the only tree growing
in front of the tenements across
from mine. It’s about four stories high
but not yet a novel. Birds fly up
and down its trunk like Coltrane’s
fingers on his sax. I appreciate it
being there and listen to the songs
it plays since I could always carry
a lot of guilt but never a tune.
Even in the shower if I try to sing
I sound like a crowded sidewalk
in a rainstorm.
I don’t want to go back to my
apartment yet. If I keep the windows
open anyone can hear how empty
it sounds. It doesn’t even have an old
dog curled into a tire sleeping under
the table that I can wake and roll
outside instead of making him walk.
Or a goldfish staring at me from his bowl
wondering how I can get through
life completely dry.
Now I wanted the tree to play one
of those old standards by Mercer
or Van Husen, something soft with
a melody that sounds like a bandage.
It started playing an original I had
never heard before with nothing more
than a few wings and a branch or two.
It was a tune even I could hum.
And that’s when I began sobbing, not
caring how many cars passed
or who saw me. I just stood there
looking down, staring at nothing.
Sarah Law
Kitchen
I peel back belief like the rings of an onion, brush covert tears with the back of one hand while clasping my knife in the other. The creeds and the councils are so many layers to prise and slide away: they drop like crescent moons into a bucket. The new living surface is soft to the touch. I unwind it nevertheless, slip under the wrappings of language to something dearer still. I will cherish whatever is there – a white nub of nothing, an atom, a pearl – knowing it is good news, trusting it is gift.
Hilary Davies
Figeac la belle
I remember a marketplace
O Figeac la belle
The bustle and laughter and summer cries
The little, shimmering well.
I remember a marketplace
Where we walked arm in arm
Where branches danced and the river danced
And lovers were free from harm.
I remember a marketplace
And how we stopped stock still
Over the breeze came music
From a sudden, haunting hill.
Over the breeze came music
Five men sat in a row,
Jackets of green and fiddles,
And gold flashed from their bow.
Gold flashed from their teeth and eyes
And black from their sleek hair
Up and away from them flew their sound
Into the golden air.
They bent their heads together
And their feet tapped the floor
Their smile passed quick as a javelin
As the sound began to soar.
They struck the air together
Time and beat were one
The key and chord leapt asunder
On the rarest of patterns spun.
As their sound began to soar it went
Into another land
And all the listeners hung on the thread
Thrown by their flashing hands.
They bent their heads together
Their feet tapped the floor
Round and round streamed the melodies
Out of the angel store.
The light grew long round the shadows
As the song sprang to and fro
And the lovers danced to hear the sound
Of the players’ brimming bow.
In the marketplace at Figeac
Five fiddlers threw wide the door
Our hearts flew up into a golden tree
And sit there evermore.
Edward Clarke
The Idiom of the Psalms
I heard our eldest son
Relate an anecdote
Whose lines our youngest one
Would take and twist and quite exaggerate,
Repeating this detail, changing that phrase,
To share an effervescent tale
Whose parallel cola quite amaze
The listeners they’d regale.
The eldest set a scene
Of heavy rain, when, lo,
The youngest said he’d seen
Big thunderstorms, and conjured up clouds low
On hills that fizzed and shook, and darkness round
The earth that billowed in the noise;
The floods have lifted up their sound:
The floods lift up their voice.
Can it be that they’re charmed
Spontaneously to raise
The idiom of the Psalms?
They seem to live, like trees, at the height of praise,
These boys of mine, and when the story’s over play
On cymbals and synthesizer songs
That sound as if their singers obey
A rule they’ll break before long.
James Harpur
Angels and Harvesters
As thoughts arrive
From god knows where,
Or sun breaks through
A fraying cloud
Emboldening a patch
Of trees, or grass,
They just appeared
From nowhere
Among the harvesters
The field a world
Of cutting, gathering,
Cutting, gathering.
Their outlines sometimes
Flickering brighter,
They walked between
The bending figures
Curious
Pausing to watch,
Like ancestors
Almost remembering
The world they’d left,
Or foreigners
Amused to see
The same things done.
They moved around
Unseen by all –
Unless one glimpsed,
Perhaps, light thicken,
A glassy movement,
As air can wobble
On summer days.
And then they went
Walked into nothing
Just left the world
Without ceremony
Unless it was
The swish of scythes
The swish of scythes
Laura Bonazzoli
The Sixth of July 1984
You fall through air,
a wounded bird,
down, down to rocks and water,
a dark baptism,
you who were not born to hatred.
That strange catechism.
I remember my own learning.
Math, writing and especially social studies,
studying the social.
Social awareness,
the bitterness and confusion,
why and because.
A boy is different, a boy is himself.
Born to love his own way,
his own choice until the
ragged words tear at your clothes,
the fist holds a stone, and
you take flight.
At the George Floyd Memorial Protest, June 19, 2020, Rockland, Maine
A voice calls out
lie down in the street
when the alarm sounds
face down
hands clasped together behind your back
eight minutes forty-six seconds.
So we march in silence until
the alarm sounds
then we all lie down in the street
face down
hands clasped together behind our backs.
I’m a grown woman
but I’ve never lain down in the street before
don’t know
it feels like fear
feels like humiliation
like being a child when your father
takes off his belt and says
pull down your pants or maybe
some guy at work comes up behind you
traps you between the counter and
his chest his groin and you
squirm and plead because that’s
what a caught body does
trying to get free.
I’m a grown woman with a grown woman child
but I’ve never cried in the street before
don’t know
the tears are just the first surprise
don’t know how soon a face
face down how soon a chest heavy on the hot
asphalt burns to lift how soon a neck
stretches to hold the lips above the grit the dust
this is how soon
shoulders pulled back ache to slacken
hand holding wrist and wrist held
strain to break free
to make an arc of grace above
the shame.
A breeze off the sea ripples my shirt.
I turn my head
watch a gull
sail cool and sweet until
a voice calls out
he said
I can’t breathe
and our breath stirs the dust
he said
Mamma, Mamma
and we invoke love
he said
some water or something
and we thirst for justice
he said
please sir please please
and we pray the names of our brothers and sisters
and I watch the gull skim the air and disappear until
all I can see is
the cloudless the blue the empty of all but light
blind
bright
sky.
Ellen Goldsmith
I Am Now an Understudy
for the part
I was to play this spring
A flurry of cancellations—
classes book groups dinners Passover Seder
No entrance to rooms I would have inhabited
Instead, in my house, I move from room to room
straightening as I can’t
the mess of the virus
And what’s under study—how
to stay steady, how
to replace the term for what we’re doing—
physical not social distancing—how
to find pleasure—so much more time for baking and walking—
without eclipsing the dark source
of this new found time. How
to go deeper
into the mystery of time
taking time saving time losing time
And what about the eleventh hour?
I remember the long car rides, how
my parents laughed
when before reaching
the Holland Tunnel, I would ask
Are we there yet?
Whatever’s Offered
As I listen to Beethoven’s late quartets,
I find silence
is not the absence of sound.
Eyes closed. Time vanishes.
The emptiness at low tide,
it too will refill.
Listening, I vow
to take whatever’s offered—
a crack in the wall, the smaller piece of pie.