MOTHER’S CAKE
Mother bakes with flour

PRIMER
Imagine a life

WE STOOD OUT
I supposed I could feel

JOCKO, HE WAS BONES LAID OUT
Abandoned by his mother

MORTAL QUESTIONS
There’s no more that I understand

PHOTOGRAPH OF MY UNCLE
The picture is so old

WILD ROSE
I can almost hear the words

I THOUGHT MY ANCESTORS WERE SWIMMING
I thought my ancestors were swimming

NOVEMBER
The day seeps in, Venus

THE CROWS
In the utter depths of my madness

WASH RAGS
White Wash Rags

WHEN I WOKE
when i woke i was a house, lying flat and unfolded

BOUNCE
when things fall out of balance

Marcelijus Martinaitis

Translated from the Lithuanian

by Laima Sruoginis

TOOLS' WORDS' PEOPLE'S CONFUSION IN THE KUKUTYNE
As Raseiniai burned

AND EARTH WENT UP TO HEAVEN
Where will you buy fire for your ax?

KUKUTIS' WORDS
Why doesn't anyone walk over there?

Douglas Spangle

Two poems from Suite:

Lost Things

PERSEPHONE LOST
The city lives on all lost things,

OREGON STEEL FANTASIA
"Three minutes late!" and his boss is breathing fire

Albert Huffstickler

FIRST LIGHT
This morning up at four

MY MOTHER WATCHED WRESTLING
My mother watched wrestling till she was eighty-four

hammering
everyone is crying on the bus

mayday
the crow

HOMEWORK
We ask, "Where's Central America?"

Nazi Sub, Chicago
Inside the captured Nazi submarine

Laima Sruoginis

Lorenze di Credi
Portrait of A Woman, Florentine 1459/60-1537

 Norman H. Russell

THE ASTROPHYSICIST
all around him the trees were speaking

ANOTHER WAY TO TRAVEL
if i cant travel

LECTURE ON COMMUNICATION
hush i said be still!

ALIENS ALL
headfirst he flies like a bird

THE STRANGE ONE
that one walks in the forest

2 poems by Erik Muller

MOTHER'S CAKE

Mother bakes with flour
bleached of color and smell.
She buys sweet butter,
fresh eggs and sugar sparkling
like the roofs of our model
alpine village. That’s where

Mother wants us to live
beside the circle of the train track,
to go to her warm kitchen for cake,
her slices thick wedges of light.

Eating, we exclaim, Good!
Sweet! The child running 
to the plate on the counter
cannot wait. What does the child 
taste if not the good and the sweet,
the capful of vanilla?

Eggs break. Pouring sugar glints.
The train goes round the track.
For years the good and the sweet
dissolve on the tongue to a paste.

We chew until our teeth ache.
We wish we had more stomach
for all the cake to settle on
during the long afternoon
blizzards of mother love.

Confluence (Walking Bird Press, 1992)

Contents

PRIMER

Imagine a life
when tragic circumstances
become the norm --
molestation, beating, homelessness.
They wouldn’t be tragic anymore.

Imagine the single parent
on the loneliest vigil of the year
reading to small children
from a picture book
with big cardboard covers
and lots of animals pouncing and hiding.

We are more honest now.
Now early on our children
sense confusion.

The single parent turns the page.
The children stare at the book.
Once again someone is lost in the forest.
Shadows there are deep
but not troubling:
they kneel before one candleflame,
each child is found.

While here in the glare
of a 75 watt bulb
the mother turns the page,
her cold hand trembling.

Confluence (Walking Bird Press, 1992)

Contents

2 poems by Jay Thiemeyer

WE STOOD OUT

I supposed I could feel
My soul at that hour
Outside the Rescue Mission,
Cramped warehouse of us, dregs,
We’d been informed, in detail, just
The night before, while we waited for a meal.
Dregs and hindrances. We stood out
Of the oppressive staleness and steam
Of the shelter, where the burnt out
Scamps and rogues, deranged, decayed,
The dying among us went to die.
Abruptly, the dying among us would die.
In spite of what you might hear,
The shelter does not adjust
One to a new life.
It acquaints the unwary
With a foretaste of their death,
The smell of it, the bleating
Sound of it, the seemingly endless
Night of it, the noise.
Leaving each morning,
Crowding the sidewalk,
We went to be away awhile,
For protection from the past perhaps,
Or just the night before,
The moaning of burning souls in mind,
The mercy of the gods.

Contents

JOCKO, HE WAS BONES LAID OUT

Abandoned by his mother
who died, then discarded
by his father who discovered
his grief came larger & larger
than the two of them: 
It wouldn’t be so difficult
to imagine Jocko
trekking lamely, anonymously,
the glistening night streets
playing out in winter
& crystalline rain, the panes
of glass from places
he was not permitted, to reflect
was not to be desired anyway,
what he wanted, he forgot....
Your story, Jocko, malingering still
in quiet doorways where
you could be alone, left
alone before dawn,
the traffic low like a meadow
with the rest nesting there. Finally,
you were laid to rest, Jocko,
alone, glistening bones.

Contents

2 poems by Nan Hunt

MORTAL QUESTIONS

There’s no more that I understand
    having seen death than before --
    only that the ribs become
    a locked cage, steady embers
    smothered within, the lungs
    slack bags forever.
 
I kissed your forehead
    and my lips met marble.
 
Who is it then who rises
    and waits when I wake
    in darkness to a long, low resonance?
The house, settling its grief
    its need for your wrench and hammer
    moans -- Where are you?
 
What is the shape that drifts
    between moon shaft and night shade
    to the reflection in a pewter-dull
    mirror, a distortion like glass melting
    a movement there?
 
A stranger, a new presence
    jaws back at me -- So, you
    thought you were safe?

Contents

PHOTOGRAPH OF MY UNCLE

The picture is so old
    its tones have browned
    as dark as the history
    he survived -- death march
    from Bataan, four year’s rot
    in the jungle.
 
The only picture left
    is this of his youth
    which disappeared in Asia.
 
The slope of his bare shoulder
    rises into that of
    the mare’s white neck.
 
His hand lightly cups
    the unbridled jaw
    finger tips spread
    as if measuring the massive
    bone frame like a joist
    undergirding the long sweep
    from brow to nostril.
 
Light reflects from her face
    repeating the triangular glow
    on the young man’s shoulders
    and on his graceful head
    with parted lips, that leans
    toward the horse.
 
Her ears twitch in a response
    blurred by a slow-shuttered eye.
I love to think what is being said.

Contents

Brett Axel

from DISASTER RELIEF POEMS

If all bullies did was bully
school might be tolerable.
But the bullies are loved,
treated as if they were heroes
for their strengths,
for their skills,
for their victories upon victories.
And the weird little geeks
that get kicked and pushed
are required to walk past
a trophy case
full of erections
glorifying oppressors
until one weird geek
sacrifices everything
to take a baseball bat
to a trophy case,
or an assault rifle
to a cafeteria,
or on a larger scale,
boards an airplane
and brings down
a pair of trophies
as big as the world.

Portland Alliance

Contents

Kenneth Pobo

VIRGIL VISITING

On a cool July
morning, I take
Virgil to my garden.
We sit beside
 
a zagreb coreopsis,
50 yellow doors
letting us into a 
palace. My flowers
 
seem unimpressed
by our visit -- why
should we
impress them?
 
Rome fell
and still they bloom.
 
As for America,
I see the coreopsis
and wait.

Contents

3 poems by John Minczeski

WILD ROSE
   after Sonny Rollins
   for Serafin Minczewski
 
I can almost hear the words
in the snow and weeping that comes
from a warm place though I’ve long
given up saying where that is
and in something as cold 
as Minnesota tonight
there is a door
in this music that lets in no drafts,
that says there are 99 steps
on the stairway to heaven
and 99 years to climb them,
inhaling the smoke of our ancestors
the fields of Seraphim,
a wild rose like dusk
that indirect color after love
among the sun’s dynasties,
another thing born without wings.

The Reconstruction of Light  (New Rivers Press, 1981)

Contents

I THOUGHT MY ANCESTORS WERE SWIMMING

I thought my ancestors were swimming
 
through the same clay and sand
they ran their hands through
generation after generation.
 
It must have been my shadow;
it must have been the heating pipes
cooling in the black morning,
 
or tourists aiming cameras at cathedrals
and coliseums, the sun glancing off
chrome bumpers and mirrors of the earth;
 
I thought I could gaze into the family face,
past telephones where no one speaks,
where this sun and rain
 
soak our winter wheat clear to the bone.

Contents

NOVEMBER

1

The day seeps in, Venus
riding high at dawn, both hands
on the handlebars and gunning it, hard.
 
This black coffee, an homage to the stars
and lingering frost on windshields.
 
Happiness, where you going now,
hat pulled over your eyes?

2

Everything the trees dream
stands visible against the sky
once the snow turns them black.
 
November: the juke box of crows,
a dog barking at the wild universe;
 
I give an inch, you take a mile
in this country where we welcome
the value of distance.

3.

November, the ancient, wooden smell 
of Birkenau lingers.
Maybe it is a remnant of coal and not
 
the frozen rags of prisoners.
 
Does forgiveness have a smell?
Did the circling Angel of hope
 
leave anything besides dust
and the morning trills of jays
in dormant trees.

Contents

2 poems by Mike Karna

THE CROWS

In the utter depths of my madness,
    I watched the Crows
    Perch in the trees,
    On the hill behind my house.
 
Those were the days before my injury
    When I was yet invincible
    And I drank rivers of Vodka
    Looked into strange eyes
    And was touched by unfamiliar fingers.
At the peak of my health,
    On the juke box nights
    I stumbled through doors
    Into dirty apartments
Asked in by carnival red lips
    Coughing out raw tobacco laughs.
    I watched my hands
    Reveal piercings and tattoos
    Stagger across her white body.
On early wet sky mornings,
    I crawled off into the streets.
My body was bruised
    And my brain was laid open.
    I had become unstoppable.
And yet I listened to the Crows
 
    One day as I walked home
    I noticed One observe me.
The bird took position
    On the tailgate of my truck
 
And as I approached,
    The Crow sailed up to the ridgecap,
    And watched me
    In the rain
    From the roof of my house,
Laughing
    At my madness
    Without mercy

Contents

WASH RAGS

White Wash Rags
Slung Over The Wood Fence
Dry Now
Bleached Stiff By The Sun
Motionless
Comical
Toothless Notes Of Music
Like Dry Fish Bones
Swimming In The Wind

Contents

Patrick McKinnon

OBSERVATION HILL

at night from her balcony
linda watches the red lights
electric arrows on observation hill
tv & radio towers calling out across this city
she imagines their on off dancing
to be something in couplets like this
    goodnight homeboys
    sleepers time to sleep
 
    hello the end
    save me save me save me
 
    watch out
    here it comes
 
    over there over
    there over there
 
    get up yr real thing
    give us all a bone
 
    yr winning yr win
    ning yr winning not
& even tho her radio is off
& even tho her tv is at the dump
& even tho she uses candles for bulbs
linda still must be getting these messages
on her brain lining she knows what they mean
she knows red light is destructive to mammals
she knows shes a mammal
these pulsing waves slush upon duluth
redneck northern town
    sleep all you sleepers
    time to sleep

Contents

2 poems by Dan Raphael

WHEN I WOKE

when i woke i was a house, lying flat and unfolded;
i was the type of flower that each night retreats into its stalk,
never certain what color it will be today
or if there will be enough light to bring it all the way out.
 
i didn’t want to be the street, devolving so slowly, 
constantly oppressed yet never resisting, never turning 
suddenly soft or holding on to a passing foot or tire.
 
when i woke up my body was a small herd of cows,
not coming back together until time to sleep;
i was a young tree with the blueprints for a happy city inside it,
where several species lived as equal partners 
and worked together, without commuting, self-sustaining --
 
then i knew i was still asleep, still dreaming.
i knew a large factory ship with asphalt sails was chasing me,
confident of the kill. i was a goldfish in a frozen pond, 
watching the flowers blooming above me, the butterflies and bees 
swimming in air; i knew the ice should no longer be there,
that i should be able to break the surface & smell spring
 
but i couldn’t sleep
because the traffic never stops, it’s never safe to cross the street.
the alarm clock is about to cut open the day before the sun gets here,
assuming the sun makes it through the bowl of stubborn clouds
"protecting" us from light
 
i woke and watched myself sleeping. i floated through the skyscraper 
of years, going through various hallways, knowing there must be 
a window somewhere. maybe this building is completely 
underground. maybe im in alaska and the sun wont rise for several months.
 
i dream that i go inside the body inside the body inside the body 
that goes to work. is there a tree inside? and inside that tree?
if the blueprint is exposed to light will it grow or fade. 
if its exposed to water will it run or sprout.
 
when i woke i wrote this.
now i have 12 or 14 lives before i can sleep again

Contents

BOUNCE

when things fall out of balance
like one side of the throat exposed by corrosion in the factories of
termites     whirling wooden gears compressed into metal songs
the only lubricant is light,    the only wind from last years molt
eager to escape into a heaven it has no idea the direction of:
heaven is chemical. heaven is a sociability so easy we don’t know 
what to call it, don’t recognize it as something our kind can do
and we’re not that kind
a couple dozen branches ago
when they who refused to bash in enemy skulls somehow survived and bred
further and further away from the skull smashing masses
that their own planet budded off,
    the way the moon did,
leaving an incomprehensible valley in the ocean:
call it atlantis, or shangri la, a place so isolated and high
a place so low the darkness transforms us, the heat evolves us
like diamonds     oil     kinetic fossils
nervously gesturing stars in an inch thick blanket
left for centuries at the bottom of a very deep lake
with no apparent source but rain and the senseless animals
bringing their bladders for miles to empty and restore
wringing their skins against the porous rock ledge

Contents

Three Poems by Marcelijus Martinaitis

TOOLS' WORDS' PEOPLE'S CONFUSION IN THE KUKUTYNE

As Raseiniai burned
Kukutis's little ax ran
squealing
through Stonis' pastures -
and wood shavings
flew from his pockets.

Then people broke into a run,
after the little ax,
dragging along whatever
they could carry.

And there was such confusion,
such confusion,
that people could no longer
tell themselves apart
from words or tools -
they started to harrow one another,
cut one another down with scythes,
plant one another in the ground.

They could no longer tell
themselves apart from axes
from pitchforks
women from men -
children could no longer tell themselves apart
from their grandparents.

They could recognize one another
only from notes
from seals
from the weight of grain
from numbered horses.

And there was such confusion,
such confusion,
that even now, beards together,
two Kukutises laugh -
two sharp axes.

Contents

AND EARTH WENT UP TO HEAVEN

Where will you buy fire for your ax?
What will you grind, Kukutis, this winter?
Where will you find a chain for the cow
so you could tie the earth to her?

During the war, as the bird-cherries bloomed,
a crazy woman cried in the farmyard -
There are no fields! There is no God!
There are no nails left for the hammer!

Burning towns blazed red
like the rooster's beard.
They beat a barren sheep with a rod,
because there was no more food on the table.

How can one earn a living from fire?
There won't be enough of it this winter.
The foolish woman glanced over the well's rim -
and earth went to heaven.

Fish came out of the waters
as the world's treasures burned.
For sins, for the past -
they beat a dead man in the market grounds.

Contents

KUKUTIS' WORDS

Why doesn't anyone walk over there?
Not one child scampers about!

-Kukutis, words are being worked over there;
they are trained to understand
what they mean.

Why don't doors creak over there?
Nobody looks through the windows?

-Kukutis, words are being made there, for you,
they are prepared,
so that you too would have something to say.

And you say they are very busy
and don't let anyone in?

- Kukutis, they guard your words there,
from your loose tongue.

Translated from the Lithuanian by Laima Sruoginis

Contents

Douglas Spangle, Two poems from Suite: Lost Things

PERSEPHONE LOST

The city lives on all lost things,
he thought,
the flower of youth devoured every day,
ravened in a rush of iotas,
dragonsbreath of
entropy.
One more transient derelict
dies tonight
to feed the steel heart
its fuel
in gushes
of automotive gruel.
Its glands, ductile gutters,
begin to water,
anticipating
another human-shaped absence,
for the city lives on lost souls;
its sustenance is the vanquishment
and all the vanished time:
time spent waiting
for tardy visitors,

time between you
and the bus you just missed;

a face so powdery pale and surprised:
staring from the backseat window
the cabochons of her eyes.

Girder,
i-beam,
brace and
rebar:
           I don't know why we are
            drawn to lost things
            but we are.

Red rose swallowed in a barbwire hedge
and thicket of the Oregon Steel Heart
whose blood is lost wax and gutterflow,
sawblades and packing wire tangle like sedge
in the place where the lost things go.

Contents

OREGON STEEL FANTASIA

"Three minutes late!" and his boss is breathing fire,
waiting for his relief,"I'm losing time! You're
always stealing my time. You're worse than a thief!"
He slams his rage into the Mercedes,
"How you gonna pay all the lost time back to me?"
Interesting question, thinks the employee
as he listens to tires squeal away in the rain,

how do we regain
all the lost things?
He considers the garbage picker
shambling down the streamy sidewalk
with his bedroll and his shopping cart.

Urban hunter-gatherer,
the pavement is his pasture
who lives on the street apart,
whose host is the tissue of the Oregon Steel Heart,
who dives like a walrus into the dumpster
looking for something lost or castoff
of use to
daub the chinks in his life
where the Oregon Steel Wind cuts through.

It's true:
the city will hum in its cold coils,
drill and suck sweet marrow from the thighbone
to play its glinting scales.
Clusters of terminal tones
come hooting from a phalanx of clyster pipes:
a million lives through its guts every day.

The scavenger has disappeared all but for
his bootsoles held together with loops of silver duct tape.
He flounders, then finally sounds and surfaces,
clutches with greasy work gloves his Grail,
a battle-scarred transistor radio.
"I can't believe,"
He gloats in transcendent glory,
"what some people throw away!"

His laugh is juicy, a plumb of the Abyss,
sparse teeth float in its black utterness
above the stubble shore of his chin.
He rubs and chafes his chapped hands,
cold and wet in the Oregon Steel Wind.

Ask old Walrus, he ought to know
where all the lost things go.

Contents

Two poems by Albert Huffstickler

FIRST LIGHT

This morning up at four
couldn't get back to sleep
made coffee, dawdled, walked
out in still-dark morning, Dian
at Pronto Convenience, then
coffee on the bench in front of
the bakery, greeting the early
morning people, something in
me saying, "Don't miss this," -
how our life and our death
intertwine, "Don't miss this," -
that beautiful edge that comes
knowing there's only so much
time left, trying to come up
with a way to say I love you
to everything at once and
falling back on words again,
words scrawled in the first
morning light on my bench in
front of the bakery, right
here at the center of the world.

Contents

MY MOTHER WATCHED WRESTLING

My mother watched wrestling till she was eighty-four -
and died..
She liked the clean-cut ones who fought fair
and drove her blood pressure up lying there on the couch cheering them on.
Who knows? She might have shortened her life.
It's a serious business fighting for the good.
She rode through the Deep South sitting in back with the Blacks
ages before it was fashionable.
I had long prepared myself to hear
that the first white woman had been lynched in the state of Alabama.
She survived a broken back at the age of eighty
and walked into the hospital to get it fixed -
but only after my sister had threatened
to have her declared mentally incompetent and hauled there in an ambulance.
She saw no virtue in the act of sex.
Sometimes I wondered how I got here at all.
She loved me like a son.
She stood all of five feet two - in three-inch heels -
and she endured,
daring anyone to tell her to the last day,
feeble and deaf, half-blind, off-balance, ego frayed by misconceptions,
that that was not how it was supposed to be.
If the wrestling had been live,
she'd have been in the ring before anyone could stop her,
fingers tangled in the villain's dark hair,
dragging him off the fallen hero.
But she could be hurt: by a cruel word, a lost animal, a straying son,
the diminishment of her capabilities
which fled one by one till she was left lying there, eyes still shining, motionless.
And then she died - but only at the last minute.
We think we get nothing from them - those ignorant parents
who guided us wrong, lied to us -
at least till we're lying there on the mat with the dark-haired villain's eyes
leering into our own and our strength gone.
It's then the vision comes of the pert little figure
seated among the Blacks at the back of the bus, chatting away,
oblivious to the fiery eyes flinging their lasers from the front.
Yes, it's then the vision comes and, with it, strength
and with one last effort, you free yourself
and, lifting that evil force above your head, you fling him from the ring
and watch as he soars above the crowd and into infinity,
then stand, shoulders straight, not listening to the applause, hearing only
a cradle-soft voice in your ear telling you you did well
as the lights fade and the darkness of the tube enfolds you and your image dies -
but only at the last minute.

Contents

Two poems by musicmaster

hammering

everyone is crying on the bus
like a popular leader has died
but there are no popular leaders
only popular songs full of thunder
passengers have tears
streaming down their cheeks
polishing laughlines
their eyes are red you
can tell they've been rubbed
but no one wipes tears audibly sobs
we're going to drown in this sadness
dreaming of people telling their dreams
watching reality spin out until
spinning out isn't such a big deal
everyone is crying on the bus
like a popular leader has died
but there are no popular leaders
and followers aren't respected
even the driver is numb with sorrow bloodshot
his solace in the wrath
his God will use on others
I stare at passing homes
in a country I don't know
I don't even know the language
sidewalks recycling lawn ornaments
like pyramids
poetry like barbwire
the sky a form of plague
it's impossible not to imagine
that in one of those houses
someone is hammering
someone else to death
when everyone is crying
like a popular leader has died
but there are no popular leaders

Contents

mayday

the crow
who has nabbed all the jewels
he can spot from the sky
who has taken marbles lighthouses
and other valuable things the lakes themselves
amusement parks kegs of beer
the crow who has
snatched real teeth and dentures and real eyes and glass eyes
and worthless things the watches
silver coins necklaces
enough of them to weave a mile long whip
is the crow who is right now
ripping off the roof of our home
hydraulic talons and snarling eyes
a beak like the trademark that's printed on our paychecks
I am mad all over I know
at animals and clerks and words
I am mad at crazy people and at people who think I am crazy
I am mad at lamps air dirt dogs and apple strudel
but I'm especially mad at the crow
who is ordering us not to worry so to worry us
because he likes the taste of adrenalin

Contents

J B Mulligan

report from the back of the front

The search for (god save us) truth
continues unabated -
we've captured the circumference
and stride the walls, shivering
in the windy night,
facing the far wall
and flipping the bird
at the enemies of progress,
who are everywhere progressing.
Before you know it,
they'll be upon us
and all will be lost.
Keep going, troops!
Your faith will sustain you
in the long hard march
around at those fools
who march around at us.
Drink from the cup -
that hole in the bottom
is only a rumor
planted by the enemy,
and if god is counting
the laps, surely he will smile
on our sacred cause.
Hup two. What for?
Sergeant, shoot that man.

Contents

Vicki Reitenauer

ABOVE SUBURBIA

The fifty-year-old maple in my parents'
Pruned backyard? Gone. Cut down. Just a hole
In the sky above suburbia. Suburbia's lived here
Longer than they and still it seems like a half-
Baked notion someone whipped up only yesterday. So

There's the wounded air,
The gap where the tree once
Stood, raw around the edges, remembered
By the birds who stop to say
Hello, settle instead
Upon their ideas of branch. The surface
Roots stand out from the yard like crazy
Cockeyed ribs, like the humped back-
Bone of a great american animal sunk
Whole into the earth. My mother's

Out there now, hatcheting in deliberately
Mighty bursts. She says
It's therapeutic. For herself, for the tree
Or for the hollowed ground,
She doesn't say.

Contents

Jim Bertolino

THE SHALLOW END

Her postcard said, "The Grand
Canyon is not
filled with our love notes."

How can the only woman who
ever loved me for my viscera
be gone? She brought a warmth,

a dryness to my basement place.
People laugh when I say her moaning
incited riots in the roaches, but there's more.

I still have the half-empty bottle of clear
mucilage we used to adhere my contact lens
to her forehead - over her third eye. It clarified

her night visions, especially visions
of me. She always found my face; sometimes
organs too. How can I go on without her?

My spirit is spreading stain. My mind
is drowning in the shallow end. Oh Loo.
Oh Loo-ga-roo.

Contents

Carla Perry

BLUEBERRIES GROWING THROUGH SNOW

this is all metaphor -
when I say snow
I am talking about the cold winter isolation
that paralyzing prairie blizzard
when your cattle all die and the wood runs out
I am talking about that blue-ice bedrock glacier
we all live in
when we despair of love

nothing grows in snow
the blueberries -they could be watermelon
it doesn't matter
I am only pretending
living in denial and hope
when I should do something normal
like go in and cook a hot breakfast

notice there are no people
in this scene with me
it is all I can do
not to freeze out here in this white silence
where I used to swing around your heart
it is all I can do
to pretend there is life in those berries
and that I will eat them

Contents

Two poems by Doyle Wesley Walls

HOMEWORK

We ask, "Where's Central America?"
Our son says, "It's in my room,"
and continues to cut his meat.
He's right: Central America is hanging
on his wall. It's his map. He worked on it
all last week in his kindergarten class.

We don't press him on particulars --
Where is Honduras? Where is El Salvador?
Where is Nicaragua? -- because
we're normal Americans, that is to say,
stupid about geography, well not
absolutely stupid, though perhaps
dangerously stupid, but stupid enough anyway
for our stupidity to make a big difference.
We are sure that Central America is
in our backyard.

We're having a fourth for dinner, President
Reagan, who's almost at the table
with us via television. Mr. Reagan
is saying that Central America should be located
in our back pocket.

We ask our son to eat more potatoes, carrots,
and bread, more body-building foods.
We ask, "Where is Central America?"
Our son repeats, "It's in my room."
Our son will be eighteen in thirteen years.

published in Pax: a Journal for Peace through Culture

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Nazi Sub, Chicago

Inside the captured Nazi submarine
at the Museum of Science and Industry,
our four-year-old son feels
pressure from the mass of people
and remembers having learned
something from us about Adolf Hitler,
having seen clips of him on a PBS documentary,
so he turns to me as I hold him
and whispers his question,
"Are we going to be killed?"
"No, son! Oh no!"

Not now anyway.
Probably not here.
Although the dead tooth at the front
of your mouth might try to enlist
its brothers and sisters
to help sound a warning,
that tooth, darkening,
has had it, is now history.

I'd like to think
the Nazi threat would flounder here
like a fish out of water,
even though I know
how the swastikas roll,
each a little leg bent at the knee,
inching their way along
in darkness, moving the spirit
of this relic toward the improbable --
a subversive surfacing in Skokie --
or wet dreaming their way
toward Lake Michigan
and then, once again, the world.

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Taylor Graham

THE FLEET COMES IN

From the plaza the ladies walk folding
their wings, shawls, fans. Flies. Their eyes
upon the in-laws and intendeds, red and
iridescent purple, saffron, lacy black, they
fold and unfurl still scanning for sails
calling familiar names.
            And then, awaited, unexpected,
the ships arrive and every eye watches men
rise up from harbor through the flies
buzzing sidewalk -- so many colors of
wishing and remembering the thousand
eyes and hungry mouths -- they gather
watching for the single one who sailed
away forever-a-day as soiled sailors come
to claim them and start dancing,

each one reclaimed this day dances
with her own, and the others like flies
bothering the dead nobody names yet.

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PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN

Laima Sruoginis

Lorenze di Credi
Portrait of A Woman, Florentine 1459/60-1537

Although I've probably reincarnated countless times by now
here I am, immobile, in this painting -

My hands are crossed
at the wrists, elbows arthritic

caught as if hacked off
already in Shakespeare's fantasy.

Between my index finger and thumb
I rub a wedding band -

a severe symbol.
They dressed me in black

which must mean I am a widow
put a veil about my head

set me against a November sky -
prickly, glistening limbs fan out behind my back

and what seems like a mini ice-age can be glimpsed
just beyond my left shoulder.

Only today I heard the BBC announce
that in Afghanistan women are required

to wear veils at all times and must even fashion tight nets
to catch and cover the eyes -

to blind her vision, to prevent her stumble
to guide her, and to love her, always, to love her.

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Five Poems by Norman H. Russell

THE ASTROPHYSICIST

all around him the trees were speaking
and the birds insects even the snakes
and he heard nothing
for he was much too busy
building great microphones
shouting his name into them
across the blackness of space
and waiting for replies.

ANOTHER WAY TO TRAVEL

if i cant travel
don't care to drive anymore
cant afford airplane tickets
and yet wish to see my children

there is another way you know
a little more difficult
I will just stop myself
and let the world keep turning

then when they catch up to me
i will just start myself again
they will say where did you come from?
I will say nowhere i was just here.

LECTURE ON COMMUNICATION

hush i said be still!
The creatures will not speak
your language listen!

One day you may hear theirs
but not if you work
that tongue and jaws so hard

your ears are connected
to your mind listen!
Your eyes also look!

See the movements of the goose
hear the clangor of the crow
watch the beetles and ants

all speak as you
their different ways
let them speak to you!

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ALIENS ALL

headfirst he flies like a bird
toward the ground and suddenly
stops and flicks his great tail
I call him squirrel but he is not
he is an alien from a red star.

I walk the yard and all around me
strange voices aliens all bird
tree even the grass I crush
white spaceships attached to logs
the air filled with flight

and they do not notice do not see
me walk upon and beneath them
for i am the greatest alien of all
and do not know from whence i came
nor where i will go or when.

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THE STRANGE ONE

that one walks in the forest
sits on logs and stones
and talks always to himself
and if you draw near
and ask him a question
he looks and does not see you

I have seen him in the trees
squirrels following him
birds sitting above him singing

small children laugh at him
young women fear him
but old women go at night
take him food
wrap him in blankets
and comb his hair.

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STARTING TIME

Albert Huffstickler

Felicia, those flowers that you
sent after Susie killed herself -
I thought they were from her. I
got home and there they sat on the
porch and something happened in
my heart and I guess I though it
was a delayed goodbye and then I
read the card and said, "Oh," and
didn't know whether I felt better
or worse. It was a kind thing to
do and I'm not sure why I'm telling
you all these months later. Except
that what happened in my heart
was that time stopped for a moment.
And we need to recognize those
moments when time stops - for
whatever reason - because they're
very important: that's how we keep
things going: by starting time again.

Sept. 29, 2000

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