Poetry

ABoVe ALL tHINGS

He loved his whiskey, his cigar,his dog, and the river.

From his porch at twilighthe watched it flow

and imagined the fish following the current or gathering

in pools. Never did hefish anymore,

but instead simply rememberedwading the river as a boy,

casting his lure and followingwith his eyes the river’s bend and disappearance into all that green.

Gary Blankenburg

FIrSt MArrIAGe

Danville, Illinois 1946

At twilight— while our parents chat on the porch—Jean Anne and I are collecting fireflies.

We carry flickeringMason jars of lightning bugs.

She calls meto her side, takes my

ring fingerbetween her thumband forefinger,

and smearsa firefly across it where its guts—

for the moment—shine bright yellow.

She applies another to her finger as well.

Now—she says—You and Iare married—forever.

Gary Blankenburg

New AdVeNtureS oF SuPerMooN

Did you see the moon?The largest of the year!I would like to write a poem about it,about how it followed usfrom New York to Ontarioas if it knewhow long we would have to waitto look at ittogether again,how it appeared to mewithout my glassesas a great bright blob,a future-shaped holein the empty sky.But I don’t knowhow to put the moon in a poemwithout saying the same thingseveryone has already said.What if I put ina word such as “perigee”—Will its scientific precisionredeem my poem from sentimentality?Or will science only discoverthe problem is the poemdoesn’t want to be about the moon?It wants to be about how it feltto hold you naked in my armsand wonder if this was the last time,how your breath synched up with mine,how your heartbeat felt like mine,a rhythm as primalas the phases of the moon,our bodies at perigee,our blood made of the same substanceas the salty tidesthat rise and falllike breathingat the moon’s command.

The poem wants to be about waking upnext to youinto my real life at last,about the joy and the sufferingof the world.But there’s even less that’s newto say about thatthan there is about the moon.

Matthew Falk

Chip Irvine

StAck oVerFLow At LINe 1

Light fills my page.The Good Tasha Yarand the Evil Tasha Yarsit at a tablein Ten Forward.The lipstick of the Good Tasha Yarglows with a supernatural ardor.Why is air in despair?A serial killerwashes his cop’s uniformin a laundromat.I remember boarding a galleonand laughing with gleeas my cutlass slashed a fat bellyand guts came pouring out.Sherlock Holmes hides the God particleinside a snuff box.He slips the snuff boxinto a pocket of his waistcoat,strides from his flat,and disappears down a fog-haunted street.I philosophize with a sledgehammer.The elf is eight feet tall.He wields a sword in each hand,whirls through the foot soldiers,and lops off their heads.The knights know fear.The dead love the battered black vanof the Door + Way Church.

Chris Toll

deAtH IN HAMPdeN

I want to be impaled on a pink flamingo.I want to be trampled over by stiletto heelssticking out from beneathleopard print miniskirts.

I want to be smothered by velvet Elviseswhile wearing fluffy bunny slippers.I want to be pummeled with antique furniturefalling from the roofs of art galleries.I want to be smashed in the facewith Rosie the Riveter lunch boxes.

I want to have my eardrums busted by bad karaoketurned up so loud it shatters the windowsof quirky restaurants and dive bars.

I want to bash my head into a giant Christmas treemade of shiny silver hubcaps,wrap myself in Christmas lights,and jump into a bathtub full of Natty Boh,expiring in a puff of rainbow-colored smoke.

Then, I want to be buriedbeneath scores of beehive hairdosunder a fluorescent pink tombstone with a glowing neon Jesus fishflashing gaudy lightinto the smoggy sky.

Michael Monroe

JuSt ANotHer LoVe PoeM

I love you like a spent gas tank, like sickle cell anemia, like the raspy voice of a good blues singer, like the imperfections in a diamond, like the foam on the edge of breakers crashing against a rocky shoreline.

I love you like a gentle brook caressing pebbles.I love you like an avalanche, like a slow dance.I love you like crack cocaine, like a hurricane.I love you like broken iron chains lying in the dust on a prison cell floor,

like the steel beams in a skyscraper towering over the relentless city.I love you like a dinosaur fossil, hidden beneath the earth for millennia,

dug up and displayed in a museum.I love you like a child playing with his favorite toy beneath the Christmas

tree, like the cracked concrete sidewalk, like extra sharp cheddar cheese.I love you like a samurai sword slicing through your enemies with steel

precision.I love you like a fire burning unburdened, passion igniting the sky red,

orange, and yellow.I love you like the sun blazing infinity into the vacuum of space.I love you like the chill of death spreading through the crisp winter city,

desperate, inevitable, and eternal.I love you like a worker ant carrying a potato chip crumb, several times the

size of his tiny body, to feed his colony and his queen.I love you like bitter dark chocolate.I love you like a couple stopping to share a kiss as the bombs flash in the

sky above the war-torn desert.I love you like mouthwash, leaving your breath minty fresh, like fireworks

cracking explosive blossoms of color.I love you like a prisoner etching the hash-mark days into the grey wall.I love you like a car wreck, mangled metal and bodies, blood blossoming

like roses on a thorn bush.I love you like a poet waiting for the lines to come, like a monk waiting for

enlightenment.I love you like a coffee-stained greeting card, like a dying man waiting for

the end.I love you like the sunset spreading pastel colors across the horizon, like a

dog chewing on his bone in the corner of the room.I love you like a church steeple pointing at the infinite gray sky.I love you like a young bird, pushed out of a tree, learning to fly. Michael Monroe

AFter SwIMMING

Painted words on the bathhouse wall

make it clear who goes where,

but we are our mothers children,

each throwing an elfin arm

around the scent of an oiled calf.

Our bellies are filled with mouthfuls of sunrays

having laid our backs on a mattress of ocean.

I am aware at five years old,

on a public beach

I could be a boy just as easily as my brother.

Our mothers know this,

we are only pairs of sand encrusted toes,

faces dried tight

with the salt of other children’s splashes.

Seagulls perch atop a bathhouse labyrinth lit with open sky.

Greeted by wet headed toddlers-

a chorus of small voices crash against the walls

of an open shower,

begging to return to a watery playground.

I listen as they become their own waves,

their mothers speak to them

as if trying to reason with the tide,

washing the oceans froth into a trickle around the drain

until the waves have stopped,

until they are their children once again.

Two round faced two year olds

peek from the stall over,

I shape the lather on my face into a beard,

standing proud beside my brother

with the same naked chest.

Mary Elizabeth Mays