Magritte in Rain

strange to see the rain come down quickly
as matte glazes on pottery
just the estranged creaking of various insects coating the night
the summer is never ominous this way
maybe last night when the sky turned red
furious with something, possibly against its own clouds
and the wind flew by like a ghost of caffeine
bringing the red along with it into new orange
similarly for jack with a jukebox that plays rain
jack the little boy who watches the colors as he chooses a song
to a night of burning magazines for kindling and charring tomatoes
and the rain that later kills the torch

his sister marguerite wrote an ode on venetian blinds
and became an environmentalist indoors
praising a man who could have named her
claiming his falling hats a syndrome
and never really needing his umbrellas
funny to see the rain end suddenly and leave the grass in limbo
the falling chords gone as if someone dismantled
the curtains in Versailles, touched upon a postmodern
dump and put up shades like fog
to lampshades likened to cirrus wisps
and aluminum siding the rings at the cores of the forest

oddly no eggs have hatched in the rain
they don’t work like daylily buds during the downpour
the baby is not so frequently impressed
by the ceiling fan swiveling like a hallucinating eye
driven to dandelion doldrums: there is too much yellow here
and they all get up to watch the hay bales mash to oatmeal
to trample the nasturtiums, to frolic

Julia F.

He sings atop her doorstep every night
leaving flowers,
lamenting infidelities.
His songs have a certain classical flair
and for a reason she can’t quite explain,
rationalize for herself or
justify to others,
she hasn’t called the police.

On the good nights, she is Lesbia.
The fault is his,
he apologizes, reproaches himself, his history, Heineken.

Occasionally, she is Chloe
innocent and timid
within her walls.

He calls her Delia, Delilah, Lydia.
(She has never cut his hair, though her own falls often to the ground,
snippets of feathers, bits of bird wings and split ends.
He collected a piece once. Since then she’s cut her hair by the window.)

Only once, he called her Cynthia.
She stood at the window and screamed.
(She is Cynthia no longer.)

(She tells herself this:
she was never Cynthia,
never deceptive, never dubious.
She did not lie.)

She is Cynthia no longer.

He quotes poetry upwards,
like the smoke rings he would blow if he knew how,
one through the other twisting and curled in a fuzzy cloud of smoke.
(A reminder of his presence.)
“Tecum vivere amem”
“My mistress’s eyes are something like the sun”

His grasp of translation is shaky at best.

She supposes she feels like Juliet.
Upon further reflection she remembers that
Juliet let Romeo in.

Her neighbors wonder about the bouquets
hanging from her doorknob every night,
sometimes on the mailbox or in the screen.
West Side Story-like,
his music goes unmentioned.

The incessant verse
comforts her, a haze of syllables half heard through
hazy sleep.
A lilting lullaby of sorts.

Alisa B.

Taxi

We’d had the idea for a while—Spence and I have had our share of wet evenings spent standing on street corners, waiting for an empty cab, our arms waving in the air, seats found on random fire hydrants…. As inner-city dwellers, we’d never even leased a car, let alone owned one. This by itself did not bother us—the extended walks from stores to restaurants and back home again were generally very enjoyable, and our lack of vehicle liberated us in ways that let us gloat over our wheel-driven counterparts shooting bumpily down Dean Street and St. John’s Place past the rows of brownstones covered in ivy. On our way from the N-R train to the barber’s, we often took a detour through the Promenade (past the Hot Bagels and competing barber shop), picking out pigeons that resembled our friends and teachers and admiring the glistening sun-specked water around the Manhattan skyline. These things we could not do from the comfort of our own car.
Nevertheless, as we waited for inordinate lengths of time for car services and taxis, the thought had crossed our minds many times—what would we do if we had a car? And as we watched one pass, the idea came unexpectedly: not just any car—specifically a taxi. Oh, to delight in zipping past pedestrians with waving arms, chortling and waving back as we drove past, ignoring their pleas…. These things were only mentioned quietly once in the back seat of yellow cabs, amidst laughter.

But how can you resist your imminent fate when it’s spouting its gray fumes in your face? We were walking down Sixth Avenue this May, past the Tasty D-lite and the Joffrey School of Ballet, to the Balducci’s across from the clock tower, when a yellow cab pulled alongside the row of parked cars. The driver, a Middle Eastern man wearing a gold chain, stepped inside the door to Balducci’s, unaware of the keys he had dropped by the curb. We picked them up and hesitated a moment, then bolted for the taxi, which sat waiting for us, calmly double-parked. I jumped into the passenger seat as Spence fumbled with the several keys on the ring. With a rumble, the engine came to life, and we sped off down the block, screeching our tires and running a red light.

We passed by several blocks’ worth of storefronts and Coconuts video rental places before either of us said a word, too stunned by what we’d done to even attempt enunciation. “Oh, my God, “ I finally said. “Oh, my God.”

Spence turned on the AC, breathlessly laughing as he let the nape of his neck fall against the leather head rest. “I can’t believe I just did that!” he said, rubbing his face with one hand. “Jesus Christ. Jesus, Jesus Christ. Do you realize that we just stole a taxi? We just stole a friggin’ taxi! What are we gonna do now that we’ve got this thing? Give it back? ‘Oh, sorry, is this yours? My mistake…’. ” He laughed incredulously.

Britton T.

The pit of the fruit
Like rain
Damp wet soaking dripping
Rippling when it hits the skin
Oh Kerouac
Oh Jack
It is always about rain

Josh W.

With Love from Astatine

To Cesium,
I can’t pinpoint this lack of desire in me,
this rebuttal of affection and attachment.
I’ve become good at detachment.
This honey glow overwhelms me (and in the hollowed canals
of my body, filled with coagulated and oxygenated blood,
viscous like Venetian canals, running through fairyland
ports and wedding-cake arches),
this honey glow flows and the sweet stench of love
overwhelms these miniscule, empty spaces.

It’s the instability of being bonded,
such a fluctuation of feelings,
counteracting the other.
So easily let go of, for better,
(and sometimes for worse)
on lamp-lit week nights,
street nights,
when you want to walk to a partner
but reject everyone.
I walked to you one night but at the bottom of your building
I already felt burdened, like a pregnant woman, walking
against a scorching wind, with one too many children.
I could not control you.
Dejected, those are the midnights you return home and
reject what my mother called bonding.

I hold on tighter to what I have,
to what is harder to hold onto.
I’ve become good at attachment.
This magnetism and energy is like a negative pull in the way of romance.
This reaction to theft is unstable, the unfilled orbitals
wait around for partnership, rotate around my center.
You do well to linger around the edges where I cannot reach
you or grasp you with a tight hand.
To keep your electrophilic attention, I would
have to crack my knuckles and clench them until they bled. I would
have to hold onto you with all my might and
with energy I do not have to share.
Days in grassy parks would be ideal with you,
on worn-out wooden benches with key sharp inscriptions,
carved At & Cs, surrounded by lovers
who do want each other and can, despite their
incompatibility and ignoble, metallic tendencies.
We lack each other’s extras and could become what a
perfectionist would call perfect, or even noble.
The gaseous, intangible union, like floating on clouds or
the use of old-fashioned telephones, is only romantic.
My favorite color is blue, like you.
For I am colorless and astatos.

I’ve spoken of sunny days in parks,
of streetlamp fights on dark nights,
Let me speak of rainy afternoons.
Together we would sleep, cook hot soup,
and bake warm bread.
We would repaint, and perhaps repent (for our sins, for
our poor judgment of character, for the miscount of the
bill), and your blue, azure shine would spread throughout
the house and splatter the walls.
Though in the end, it would be my hand shaking, not yours.
Your hand would be steady and you would be certain of your
loss: with me you would release.
Forever I would keep that part of you.

You are too easy to hold onto.
You are too bondable.
You fulfill every wish and every envy in my eyes.

Like a star I keep on bonding with unmatchable elements,
elements who burden me. I am the woman you see alone
on the street (bags full of groceries, teetering across the white
pedestrian walkway) and they burden me with their affections.
They hand me too many problems and too many responsibilities.

I will take your one love.
Your one electron.
We can be one together, and one like Radon, not one among
others, but bonded till death do us part.

Sophie P.

Ecluit Plains

Click clack…again click clack,
and beaten back
between the beaten black
gaps of the railway tracks.

Rising to the rising sun
I lash my shoes to my feet,
then walk across to the boxcar doors,
leaning out with both hands
clasped to the wood sides of the sliding doors.

Out far across the brown grass plains,
the mountains climb up against the horizon,
old and worn, tired gray
collapsing at the base of the vaulted blue sky.

The wind slides across me,
pulling at my hair
as I lean off the train.

I sigh, turning back into the boxcar.
My train rolls on through the dry plains,
searching for a station
further along these rusted tracks.

Teo Q.

What I’m Thinking

Goodbye cutie pie, hope to see you some time.
It’s been fun but I’m called away to foreign shores.
To taste the temptations of Babylon and smile at African princesses and
make catcalls at the artists of Moscow in winter and
play games with countesses who miss the good old parties where
the nights lasted days and the days felt like dreams.
I will have dreams of you, and dreams not of you, and you will fade into an obscure place
at the back of my skull.
Turkish delight. Twilight on a black ocean.
An evening party in a tall room bathed in swoony red.
That is where I will go. Where I must go.

Sensation. Black is the feeling of baby’s feet at twilight.
Solace in black. Darkness a wrapping like velvet.
Never does a devil call out.
Never does a god interfere.
Black is the touch of the taste of the tip of the snowdrift.
Soft snow lying sideways on platinum. Interesting Evenings.
Woozy.
Asleep in the ebony light
before the ivory dawn, I am
unraveled like the very sheets of this bed.

Swoony red is moony red.
I’ve got the blues and you’re the news I don’t want to hear.
Just to prove the rule “no news is good news” you exist.
Stubborn is the color of red that I walk through
to touch the gowns of countesses. Caverns
of hours go by, flying—
a meadowlark outside, just past the curtains, swishing through the chill air.
A meadowlark against the windowpane flutters
and drowns in red light that
creeps out from the room of the party.
Looping its wings, it finally rests.
And brightness bursts from nowhere. Into the airless room. Red.

I’ve felt better. But I will often feel worse.
Party over, the crashing of silverware echoes.
The halls are full of sleeping bodies and hands on breasts
and hearts given away, hearts taken back, hair in puddles around muddled faces.
Confusion reigns in morning. In daylight.
Low-key, I stumble out the door
and take the subway home, into your arms.

Marc J.

Introspection

What
does
my armpit
smell
like?

An
Armpit…

What
does
my other armpit
smell
like?

Chicken Pot Pie?
Guttered salami?
Cut anchovies sorrow served with
Yawning oregano, Parmesan soot and
Hors d’oeuvred grouchy caviar?

An Armpit?!

How deliciously tasteless.

Jacob E.

“I saw Jesus this morning. He lives on Hudson Street. He was standing on one of those plastic crates they keep fruit in, in delis. He had a loudspeaker and he was telling everyone to wake up and have a good morning. I gave him a dollar. It seemed like good advice.”

Gin was one of those people who had clearly been born into the wrong generation. She would have been fine in the Twenties, okay in the Sixties, maybe even the Seventies, but something about being born in the Eighties disagreed with her. It seemed to affect her whole life. She wrote everything on a typewriter, she owned a working record player, and she was secretly in love with Marilyn Monroe.

“You know it wasn’t really Jesus, don’t you?”

“It doesn’t really make a difference.”

“You two in the back, get to work!” an almost automated voice, carefully skirting the use of any names, barked from the front of the room. Apparently they were in class. This was news to Gin.

“I’m already finished,” she announced. The packet filled with vague instructions and obvious questions marked LAB was completely devoid of answers.

“Bring it up here; let’s have a look at it.”

Gin cringed a little. She hated when teachers insisted on referring to themselves in the plural.

“Gin, you haven’t even started! Why did you say you were finished?”

“Because I did it. Just put together my past few assignments and you’ll see I’ve already answered these questions.”

“Gin, stop complaining and get to work.”

Gin walked away, still arguing in her head, wondering when it was that it stopped being cute to have imaginary friends and became schizophrenia. When she got back to her seat, she quickly packed her bag, nodded a goodbye, and walked out of the room, completely ignoring the protests coming from Mrs. Avery.

Gin was the kind of person who would never be able to function in normal society. Luckily, there wasn’t much of that left. To her, the world seemed to be composed of thousands of artificial environments that forced you to interact with people you would never seek out on your own. School, work, family, camp, and the supermarket were all superb examples of these miniature civilizations. Not a single one of her friends could picture her in a nine-to-five job. Nor could they picture her in a white trash job like bagging groceries at K-Mart. She didn’t have the discipline, not to mention the money, to do anything artistic. It didn’t seem to matter much to her, though. She was going to die at age thirty-two. A psychic had told her all about it when she was twelve. Gin hadn’t had the money on her to help the psychic pull any strings, so she was fairly resigned to her sudden death. It made things simpler anyway.

It was hard to say if Gin actually believed some of the things she declared vehemently as true or if she was just fishing for a reaction. Neither would be surprising. She came in almost every week claiming she’d seen a religious figure at some point during her morning. Today it was Jesus. Last week she had told everyone she’d seen the Buddha on the subway.

Gin was convinced she was crazy. It was probably the only thing keeping her sane. Every once and a while she would realize she wasn’t really crazy and become exceedingly worried.

Gin had the mind of someone with a terminal illness. She realized that life was short and school was bullshit. She knew that if she were going to see any of the world she would have to start now. She rarely studied for anything; she was perfectly smart, but she just let her grades go to hell. Why did it matter? She didn’t really want to go to college.

Gin worked at Starbucks. This was kind of a problem, considering she was boycotting it. But she didn’t let it stop her; she attended Reverend Billy’s various protests despite the fact that the much hated caramel coffee giant was paying her salary.

“God, I hate places like Starbucks.”

“So do you think they have some sort of alliance with Pottery Barn or what?”

“No, they’re more like ABC with coffee instead of carpets. I wouldn’t be caught dead in there in any case.”

“Neither would I,” Gin would reply and, after confused but generally disapproving glances from her independent-coffeehouse-advocating friends, would add, “Well, not on my off-hours anyway.” Gin really didn’t see the problem with taking money from what her friends seemed to think was the devil. It wasn’t like she bought anything there. She wasn’t supporting them or anything, and if she quit, someone else would just take her place and the company would charge on, leaving poor Gin out of work. Besides, she thought it was ironic that she used most of the money she got from them to protest them. Ethics had a way of making her feel sick.

“Hey, Gin!” It was October. She was the only one who visited Gin while she was working.

October had a tough time living with her name. Life’s hard when people start laughing after you introduce yourself. For some reason spring and summer months made acceptable names, April, May, June, August, but fall and winter ones didn’t. Understandably, October was no longer speaking with her parents.

“Here, I brought you coffee.”

“Thanks, Toby,” said Gin, smiling at a slightly mystified customer. She took the first sip reluctantly, half-expecting French vanilla or some other flavored atrocity. Gin had known Toby for years, but she still couldn’t help being mildly distrustful of someone named after a month. It had been pointed out to her several times that people didn’t exactly place the utmost confidence in her because she was named after a drink, but Gin failed to see the relevance.

“Oh, I got something else for you, too,” said October. “It’s a surprise, so close your eyes and I’ll put it in your mouth.”

Gin shot her an “are you crazy” look but dutifully closed her eyes and extended her hand over the counter. There was no way in hell she was going to let Toby just drop something in her mouth. She rolled the hard cube she received around in her palm for a second before actually trying it.

“It’s one of those French caramels you like. I brought it back from Paris.”
“Thanks. How was that, by the way?”

“Um, Gin, I think you have some customers.”

Gin turned to see that the line for coffee was quickly turning into a lynch mob.
“All right, I’ll call you later. Thanks, Toby.”

Gin sat on the subway, thinking about what she often did even though it was totally unlike her. She was thinking about what was going to happen to her. It was something that had recently started to worry her a little. She knew her friends were bothered by similar thoughts. They would joke about it sometimes, but under the laughs there was always a weird sort of nervous desperation. Gin was never a part of these conversations. She had built up an image around the fact that she didn’t know and didn’t care about her “future,” and now that her originality was dwindling away with her coming madness she felt it was all she had left.

She had always assumed she would go to college, maybe graduate school, and then go off to make a living doing whatever she wanted. Now she realized that she might not even graduate. It wasn’t for lack of intelligence. She had simply realized that studying and working and scrambling simply to acquire money she would never have the time or will to spend didn’t agree with her. Suddenly Mexico seemed very appealing. She didn’t have a single marketable talent, but she did have other talents, and despite what elitists might think of her, she was extremely smart. So what would the point be in finishing her education? So she could write the names of fancy schools she had attended on job applications? Besides, people were always telling her that practice made perfect and experience was valuable, so where was she going to get more of that? Stuck in a small room copying someone else’s words into a notebook she would never look back on, from the chalkboard she could hardly see, or out in the world? Gin was completely torn between doing what she had once assumed she would do, which was what everyone else expected of her, and doing what she wanted, even though it didn’t make sense to most of the people she knew and didn’t even totally make sense to her. She let her head fall back on the grimy window behind her seat.

Cara S.

The Concept of Parsley

Walking through the cabbage patch, I saw
you

green
mane of branching jade,
curving,
captivating
halos emanating emerald.

Wrap me in your
leafy limbs,
dew-lubricated
arms,
bushy,
broad and
masculine.

Warm me in your
tender tendrils,
caress me
as you do
the salmon and boiled potatoes,
lying in their laps.

Do you know
how I long for your
peculiar parsleyan pet,
your bitter bite of my cheeks,
your savory crunch as you
slip into my mouth
and down my throat?

O my beloved,
O my beautiful,
O my succulent,
seductive
sex-object,
be suddenly seduced!

Lemon roses,
carrot carnations,
turnip creations,
potatoes,
leeks,
beets,
not any other root
will ever be your substitute.
Civilized cilantro
could never possess your flare.

Walking towards you,
I think of your plate possibilities,
longing to pluck you out of the plain ground.
Leaning over,
I stop,
mid-breath,
as your verdant lips part in speech:

Hey baby

You whistle,
extending a long,
lime,
Lucifer-like
protrusion of leaf,
and pinch me
on the bottom.

Lifting my hand,
I smack you on your filthy face,
which I now notice is crawling
with miniscule bugs,
mating.

Soula H.

The Art of Fixing a Shadow

It begins with me in the bathtub
I am soaking
I’m developing
I’m being fixed
And when I get out I dry smooth,
Like a piece of wet fiber paper.

Next, I am in a darkened lecture hall,
Looking at a slide on a gray screen,
Wishing I were somewhere else.

When Talbot began,
He could not xerox a leaf, a seashell, a leg,
It was silhouettes on paper,
Black lace turned white,
Places the sun could not reach;
And, overwhelmingly evanescent, it vanished after a few hours.
But that was soon fixed.

Then Daguerre was changing full streets to empty,
People rushed by so fast, the camera could not capture them.

And thus the hustle-bustle was removed,
Leaving ghost towns on silvery sheets.

When I was small, I couldn’t hold it
I couldn’t hold it to the wall.
There was no tape, glue or string. No soap. No visible magic formula.
It always followed.

During my young years,
I realized my shadow was elusive and intangible.

During my young years,
I discovered I could never be completely alone,
No ghost towns for me.

During these young years,
I discovered I could never be in two places at once
And know it.

All I could think about was how Peter Pan
Wanted his so desperately.
I would have given him mine.

“Girl, why are you crying?”

As I sit in this university lecture,
“The History of Photography”
And a professor explains the absence of waves on a Nineteenth Century Lake,
I pull a snapshot from my pocket,
Sister and I, squinted and shaded, lightly smiling,
And realize
My shadow is frozen on this scrap of paper.

Hallie C.

Slippery ellipse
mysterious antennae
twitch in smooth dampness.

Fruity projectile
lurches through clinging drips
grimacing sanguinely.

To a water bug
Paused near the tub’s drain
A child donates strawberries.

Christina Porter

Her Kitchen

“I hate her.”

“You’re just saying that because he’s your son. He’s growing up, you know. He can’t be Tinito forever.”

“She’s taking my place.”

“No one can ever take a mother’s place.”

She was yelling, in the tone she always used when talking to or about her son. She began twisting her wedding ring in that nervous way of hers.

“We weren’t that young when we were engaged,” she said to her husband, eyes plastered to the floor.

“He’s 28, Amelia. When we got married, you were 24.”

“I was much more grown up.”

“You were a child.”

She left the room, angry with him for being right. But in Cuba that’s how all the girls did it, marry young, babies the next year. But they weren’t in Cuba anymore and he was still a baby, her baby. Wasn’t it just last year that he broke his arm at Little League practice? Hadn’t it only been a few months since he started school? And surely it was just yesterday when his first tooth came in. The phone rang once, twice. She answered.

“Hello?”

“Mama, is it still ok if I come over tomorrow night?”

“Tinito, of course. You’re always welc–”

“Would you mind if Jill came?”

Amelia cringed at the thought, but then quickly returned to her happy, poised, motherly voice.

“Of course! I’ll make a flan. Americans do eat flan, right?”

“She’ll taste it. Ok, I have to run. Besitos.”

“Besitos.”

Hanging up the phone, she stormed back to her husband.

“She doesn’t even eat flan! She’s probably never even seen a flan!”

“Amelia, you have to settle. Would our Tinito marry someone awful? No!”
She went to the kitchen, tearing all the cookbooks from the shelves. She was going to make something filling, something Cuban. Her whole body hurt from the idea of Jill. She wasn’t there the day Tinito was born; she didn’t bring him to swimming classes every day for ten years! Tinito belonged to her—not Jill, not anybody but her.

She began taking ingredients from the cupboards. Cooking was always somewhat of a therapy for her. Grabbing large bowls, small bowls, she began stirring and mixing, boiling and tasting. She thought of her kitchen in Cuba, two rocking chairs facing the balcony, mosaic tiles all across the floor, and that perfect palm tree breeze, coming in and sweeping up all the ingredients of the air together to make one delicious smell. She saw Tinito on the counter, fingers dipped into cake batter, feet swinging dirty and shoeless. Then she thought of Jill, blond hair and green eyes, tall and thin just like in her picture. She saw her pick up her little Tinito and carry him out of the Cuban kitchen memory.

Amelia snapped back into reality: wood floors, high stool facing the back door, all the windows and doors shut tight to keep out the bitter cold. Her cooking was beginning to fill the kitchen with steam and smell. She saw the photograph of her and her husband on their wedding day hanging proudly on the wall. Suddenly she forgot about Jill, about her jealousy and frustration. Her neck was beginning to sweat from the heat of the stove, and she could close her eyes and feel the mosaics under her feet. She saw Tinito in her mind, happy and healthy. She wrapped her arms around herself. In her kitchen it always felt like Cuba.

Elena S.

Ellen’s Mother

Ellen’s mother,
who wore the dress with the upside-down Chinese calligraphy
which I wanted to comment on
but didn’t,
who cried with my mother at graduation,
and whose tear-stained face turned up
at the bottom of a stack of photographs
as she waved at the procession of children
marching down the aisle,
who complained about her daughter’s tendency to over pack
and said my mother was lucky to have such a
practical child,
who took us to the Christmas performance of The Nutcracker,
buying us souvenirs we didn’t really need
and expensive candy during intermission,
who went down in the elevator with a handicapped colleague
and has not been seen since,
whose daughter is crying.

Kate R.

Exact Replica

I searched darkened Paris streets at
midnight
and old verse
to find an image of you, that ever-morphing shape
Obsessively,
I capture the curve of a back bone
or the roll of your eye
at my intimidated love for you
But for once I could replicate that entity
I compare you to madonnas
and princesses
when maybe you’re the feeling of scratchy nylon on bare skin
To try and pierce you,
that callous from strumming guitar strings too recklessly,
might snap me back into a visceral
reaction
Why do I use cracked, yellowing words
to try and describe a pentagon dream?
Let me suck the blood from my
tender paper cuts,
rub aluminum foil between my fleshy fingers,
try and parallel you with household
royalty
before I lay my head to your welcoming
shoulder,
which reluctantly I realize you’ve
withdrawn

Harris S.

Miso

I am rich. I am strong.
I am

Miso.

Miso says recoiling
layers of broth into an urchin
shape.

A desperate piece of green stares
at me as it is pulled
into liquid tentacles. I am not Miso!
I am Chive, free from the rules
of soup!

Miso laughs,
rippling her countless layers
of vibrant green, beige,
and lifeless white
as she envelops
small greens.

Chive disappears,
consumed by
a hidden mouth.

Do you want that? Pale woman
emerald dress-waitress asks.

I stare into the small
urchin disintegrating
at the bottom of
my bowl of water.

Graham G.

The Fresh Green Breasts

In eighth grade I decided that I wanted to go out with Jenny Ross. Jenny was not the most gorgeous girl in the grade, but she was definitely cute. She wore her long brown curly hair half up, half down. Jenny was skinny and a good soccer player and I wanted to make her my girlfriend.

We knew each other through our parents. My mom was her parents’ lawyer. Sometimes she would come over and swim with me in our pool. We would play Marco Polo, and when I was “it,” I would catch her by her tan wet shoulders and pull her down into the water. When we came up again, Jenny would flip her curls into my face, and I could smell her berry creamy shampoo through the scent of chlorine.

I asked her out after school on a Friday afternoon. We were swinging on the scaffolding of the nearby bank when I popped the question.

“Do you want to go out with me?”

Jenny smiled brightly. “Yeah, sure.”

“Cool.” I looked at her gratefully. Then I scanned the length of her body. She had very smooth tan skin. Her legs and arms were slender, but defined. Her breasts were small. She was nothing I couldn’t handle.

Going out with Jenny was fun, but at times embarrassing. The week after I asked her out, we rode home on our bikes. I had just learned a few new tricks the previous summer so I began to show off. My hands were off my bike for at least a minute as we zoomed down Cedar Street. I made sure Jenny rode behind me so she had a perfect view of my next trick. I raised my hands in the air and clasped them behind my back. Just as I looked back at Jenny to see her reaction to my impressive stunt, I swerved into a pea-green Chevy. The car stopped immediately. My bike and I, however, rolled over the car’s hood, onto the street, and into the sidewalk.

“Are you okay?!” Jenny asked, deeply concerned.

My elbows were scraped. My knee was numb. My forehead was bleeding.

“Yeah it’s nothing. What’s a little scratch here and there?”

“You’re bleeding, like all over!” She bent down to touch my forehead and her hair tickled my face.

“Let’s go to my house and clean you up.”

I walked lamely with my bike by my side as she rode slowly in front of me to lead the way.

When we arrived at her house, Jenny told me to sit on the toilet seat. She cleaned my wounds with Dial soap and covered me with anti-bacterial Band-Aids.

“All done!” she announced, sticking on the last Band-Aid.

“Actually, as I recall, I think you need to kiss me to make me all better.”

It was a cute line. She had to at least give me a peck. I deserved a little action after this humiliating afternoon.

“Well, if that’s what it takes…” Jenny kissed my cheek.

I pulled her down onto my lap and kissed her soft pink lips. We moved to her room and made out for an hour and seventeen minutes. Then I went home for dinner.

Soon the year came to an end. Jenny and I went to pizza, swam, continued kissing, and we did not go bike riding. On the last day of school we promised we would stay together over the summer and write. Jenny went to horseback-riding camp and wrote to me every week. I went to theater camp and wrote to Jenny when I received her letters. There were a few pretty girls at Camp of the Arts, but I knew my delicious Jenny would be waiting for me when I got home. So I just daydreamed of her berry creamy curly hair, her slender arms and legs, and kept myself busy acting.

School started September 9th. I put a little gel in my hair and pulled my new blue shirt over my head. As I walked into homeroom I looked around for Jenny. But instead of 8th-grade Jenny, I found 9th-grade Jenny: taller, with longer curls, and breasts that I once knew as clementines, now grapefruits. I was so embarrassed that she had grown so much. I still had no facial hair, and now I was shorter than my girlfriend. It was so embarrassing. I couldn’t handle it. While Jenny’s new breasts looked nice, I guess, in her tight green dress, I had no idea what to do with them. So I decided to break up with her.

After school I pulled her friend Casey aside and told her to tell Jenny that I didn’t want to go out with her anymore.

“Why don’t you tell her yourself?” Casey asked in a bitchy voice.

“You’re more articulate.”

Casey told Jenny the news and called me back that night.

“She’s pretty upset.”

“Really? Well, I’ll still be her friend. I mean we’re sort of family friends anyway.”

“Well it doesn’t sound like she wants to be your friend right now. It sounds more like she wants to kill you.”

I hung up the phone and went to bed trying to assure myself that I had done both of us a favor. I was pretty sure that some other guy would know what to do with those things.

In hopes of forgetting the whole thing, I closed my eyes. That night I dreamed of giant green breasts. Chasing me.

Emily W.

Ninotchka, or Greta Garbo’s first words

the initial
enthralling chords
and lion’s thick roar,
light thrown starkly
over audience’s face-crenellations,

and something ridiculous and theatrical in it all—
the hollow of the air perhaps,
the exact and heightened sense of breaths
hitting tongue in fast small beats

and then the face,
singularly smooth curve
of brow, swell of lips defined
in black and white

(to be purely scientific—
the eyes normally use imperceptibly
quick internal twists and stretches to travel
around silver circles of screen edge
in unknown repetitions.

Hanging languidly on
we now notice
the slide around the rim
of one particular eyelid.)

all mouths open in screen-traversing
unity, and we fall
into the dark clarity between her lips
and are soon forced out again

by the press of accent,
the misplaced stress on syllables,
by the jagged Russian name
we cannot grasp.

Maggie W.

Remains

Brush-stroke me beautiful, sculpture me wise
Clay-brown my clavicle, glass-blown my eyes

Noble horses of marble with their heads held high,
their necks thick and strong in a tensed, rearing curve,
stand guard in museums
remnants of the proud hands that built these beasts
boldly. They are smooth,
eyes wide and nostrils soundless
as deep tombs in the night.

Golden my swan’s neck, opal my wrist
Lapis my toenails, my lips chisel-kissed

An army of cats
glitter behind glass. They were burnished
vain, somnolent felines of the wandering desert,
necks elongated as if they are peering still,
Osiris-eyed,
into the sandstorm that clouds the distance.

Ankle of Egypt, bosom of Greece
Of feasts in the West and tombs from the East

The sand stretched on.
On the water-gorged banks of the Nile,
emerald grins curved crookedly.

It is the still pool of an azure beetle
embalmed in stone,
in the embrace of your sun-warmed neck.

The urn of the hip and the jewel of my eye
Slim leafing of silver, pine sap running dry

If you listen, shelling waves, to the marble floor echoing
(left wing Roman-Grecoing
new exhibit Art-Decoing)
you can hear the sound of moccasins:
thrum low padding on long gone grass.
Beaded color red and yellow
mates with the death of doe-eyed faun:
thrum low padding on hunted foes.

The masks of strong features are chiseled in stone
The soft giving flesh smoothed out on the bone

I see the faces
of many kings
beheaded and sightless.
A clawed Octavian forelock
mocks the youthful mortality
in that unmoving stare.

Elbowed Grecian matron, captured without flow,
The angles of her frown where all her smiles would go

Before I had no arms I would braid my hair.
I was proud that it was the black of my father’s eyes,
that it would never coil in green reptilian turmoil above my brow.
Now I have no hair to braid; you cannot braid stone.
It is as if I am the subject of revenge and not art,
trapped limbless with my breasts carved milk-white and bare.

Fine thin brush of angel’s hair
Sweep-thick tip of brush-will-dare

The pretty ladies sit in a gallery of oils
encircled by polished frames, their fingers and waists
breakable, their cheeks blushing in respectable pastels
as if their pastoral pleasures happened only yesterday
at tea time. A picnic in the park
in the summer, before the fall.
They pose. They protect themselves in a mimicry of silk.
They rest their hands against their waists
palms down
and smile as if they have no care.

Similarly, the nude women sprawl out
round-hipped on couches
with still life,
breasts kissing the grapes they hold that suggest something
more. They are sexual, naked as the day
they were reborn.

And then, oh luscious then,
we reject our topiary and embrace our roots, defy serenity. Say
God, life and I are crazy and our models
become our own innards
the workings of what is outside prismed
by what is within. We sling bright acrylics
in the face
of death.

The artist paused, poised in statuesque thought
To understand death in the life he has wrought.

A museum is a tomb.
Exhibits are graveyards.
Throughout the sprawling silence you may look
not touch:

Here lies Rodin. He believed his bronze would save him.
Only dark-muscled memories remain.

Here lies Picasso. His savior, the brush. His eyes have rotted
but what they knew remains.

Here lie the people native to the dark earth. Their faces,
with trapped, horrified stares, are long gone. Their masks grin, and remain.
Here lies the sunny Greece of a thousand years passed.
There they worked in solid stone.
The sculptures are time pitted, pocked and unwhole, and only they remain.

Here lie the men and women of blazing Egypt. Flames die.
The lapis of their skies, the gold of their sands, remain.

The artist of fear gives birth to unlife
In hopes to Create from primordial strife.
The greatest of men will fear where they go
Leave markings behind like footprints in snow
The sculptor in stone, the painter on white
Impart parts of themselves: themselves, but not quite—

The wish remains: greatness.
but because no man can last
the artist pours himself forth,
Chisels himself in memoriam.

We will not remain.

But pieces of us shall be unearthed, as if they were truly of our own white bone.
They shall be left behind.

We build ourselves
into our creations.
They will bear our names; they are of us; they can truly
be our own.

The faults of the artist are hubris, desire—
we cannot Create; that takes someone Higher

In all our museums
are only little pieces
of dead men.

Brush-stroke me helpless, sculpture me man
Gray rock surround me: museums of sand

We make our own art in effigy,
we live out our lives doing just this,
building up gravestones that are merely pretending,
aspiring
to be as life:
life that we lost
life as we saw it.

We hope never to decompose.

Hannah J.

I pine for you
from the pit of my ever-undulating stomach
from the rollicking seminality
of my raging bestial gut-plant
forcing itself out of its mid-brown coma-shell
and into the lining of my now
nastily twisted organs
from the grenadine excrement it leaves splattered
in nebulous patterns up my esophagus
as it reaches to throttle my uvula, soft and yielding
an internal recoiling and I
breathe deeply to overcome my
feeling of helplessness
and I expire.

I miss you, like always.

Britton T.

Garden on a Winter Night

Imagine the magic of snow on the thorns of copper roses.

Twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes ago,
I gazed out upon the small patch of land dormant behind my house.
The moon through the clouds cast a strange red-brown glow
across the ice-sugar patio.
It was as if a witching hour of snowy bronze had fallen.

There were no thorns in that snowy garden, no roses in the copper.

The silent image of frosted brass and brick is burnt in sleep-cast eyes,
an inanimate dance of crystal enchantment,
bringing spark to tired lawn chairs and table
under a dream-clouded moon.

There were copper thorns in that garden, under the rosy snow.

Encased in chambers of brick and briar,
the roses yearn for snow,
while snow caps the world around them,
under the shade of the coppery moonlight.

There was snow in the copper magic, under the thorny rose garden.

Jonah L.

Abraham and Isaac, Revisited

Four days ago at this same dinner table, Abraham and Isaac were arguing about the film they had seen the day before at the weekly meeting of the Divinely Righteous People. On the table were several light dishes at which they and a mistress were occasionally picking. The lighting was mild, and the mistress listened to the discussion as she fueled the fireplace. Near the table stood two bicycles of different sizes.

“No,” Isaac was saying, “they depicted the main character as an unimaginative, cardboard personality—he never made the wrong choice, not once.”

“And you think that’s unrealistic, considering who he was playing?” Abraham asked. The fire crackled noisily.

“Unrealistic? It was an impossibility, Dad.”

The sound of the hour changing rang out from the living room. Abraham started violently in his seat and then shut his eyes to recompose himself. Isaac turned his head minutely towards the noise. And as the bell faded out, the last few days played out in their minds again.

It was Thursday evening and a good and normal Thursday for Abraham and Isaac. It was ten minutes to six o’clock, and, having been called upon as a special request from Head Honcho (the head and master of the Divinely Righteous People), they were already driving to the Divinely Righteous People Headquarters.

“I’m here,” said Abraham. Head Honcho never showed his face, so no one knew what he looked like. When he made speeches, he used a console to select which members heard him through their headphones.

“Abraham,” said Head Honcho into Abraham’s headset, “You are quite the faithful Righteous Person, are you not?”

“I am.”

“I need you to do this for me. Kill your son.” Head Honcho was notorious for his lack of unease when wielding his power. Righteous People who turned out to be Unrighteous were exposed to inhumane amounts of pain. Abraham thought of Cain, who was protected from murder but whose ability to find happiness on Earth was crippled. That is why Abraham had no trouble or hesitancy agreeing to do his task. His mind, however, reeled in waves of shock and hid from itself.

During the last three days of his son’s life, Abraham did everything he had always wanted to do with Isaac. He bribed some people for tickets to a concert and a basketball game, rented five movies, bought Isaac new clothes, and for hours asked Isaac about the more pleasant things in his life. For those three days, never did he shed a tear or admit that anything was out of the ordinary. Today is a great day, he would think. That is why I so want to be around my son, because why deprive him of a day like today?

The weather was bad and the clouds were ugly at the end of the third day. They drove to Righteous People Headquarters. Isaac was worrying about his father. He noticed that the parking lot had been cleared out.

Suddenly Abraham said, “Where am I going to park, Isaac? Where am I going to park?” His hands had a spasm, and the car careened threateningly near a wall of the building.

“Dad!” said Isaac, “Watch it! Watch out! Dad!” The car sheared off some paint as it skimmed a parking meter. “What’s wrong with you, Dad?” Isaac said.

Abraham hit the brakes and got out of the car. The engine was still running. “We have to go now, Isaac,” said Abraham.

They walked into the building and silently up the stairs. Cameras followed their backs. They approached the great door, and Abraham knocked.

“Come in.” The room was dark. An unseen spotlight illuminated a circle of the yellow tiled floor with the black table inside it.

“Lie down on the table, Isaac,” said Abraham. Isaac waited. “Go on. Lie down on your back. Don’t make me say it again, boy.”

Isaac lay down on his back on the black table, and Abraham quickly strapped his abdomen down. Isaac tried to sit up. “What is this?”

Abraham wordlessly forced Isaac’s hands and then feet into the bonds on the table. Isaac looked at his father bemusedly, calmed by the fact that Head Honcho was present and thus nothing that was not supposed to happen would happen. But the gleaming lumberjack axe his father picked up washed his mind with horror.

“Are you there?” Head Honcho asked Abraham so that Isaac could hear.

“I am here,” whispered Abraham. He lifted the axe.

“Dad! What are you doing, Dad?” asked Isaac.

“Shut up, boy!” said Abraham. “Quiet!” But as he said this, he tottered dangerously as if losing his balance.

“Why do you keep calling me ‘boy’? I’m your son!” Isaac wept.
“Silence,” said Abraham. “You hear me?” A splotch of spit was leaking from the left side of Abraham’s mouth. He was twitching.

“Please, Dad! Please!”

Something in Abraham audibly snapped. A rage swept his features, and he then let the axe start falling. Isaac’s wet eyes were not following the axe’s path; they were locked on Abraham’s eyes. Abraham’s eyes were locked on Isaac’s neck.

“All right, Abraham, you’ve proven yourself,” said Head Honcho. The axe was now half an arm’s length from Isaac, and Abraham was not stopping it. Now one foot away. “Abraham, that’ll do,” said Head Honcho. “You are truly righteous. Abraham!”

Abraham started and tried to pull back the axe, but it was half a foot from Isaac’s neck. It stopped an inch away, but Isaac had already frozen. His voice was silent, but he mouthed the words continuously: “My throat. My throat. My throat.”

Thus in the dining room of their apartment, Abraham sat at one end of the table and Isaac sat opposite. In front of them were plates of sumptuous food. They were alone in the dining room. But for Abraham chewing, they were silent. The room was scorching. Isaac was gazing at his plate. He had not said a word for four days. He could barely swallow his food. Isaac did not speak in front of Abraham again. Isaac did not, in fact, use his throat in front of Abraham again. There were no more films, no more movies or discussions. There was no more successful communication, physical or verbal. But, they both silentlyknew, that was okay; they were, after all, Righteous.

Michael B.

The Bite

Blinding light caved into the pitch dark while the laboring breath set with the light.
The night was cold.
A hand on the chest touched the terminal beat of the heart
and one could grope death as the final sigh gave out.
The gasp in the black was blanketed by howls and hot breath
and as the news circulated the deepest sleep aroused strident cries that ripened in the night.
Everyone was whispering over the corpse as it swelled and became cold.
The wind was violating,
causing the trees to jerk and moan.
All those around prowled back and forth among each other’s constrained bodies; the people were
racing in the dark.

The haunted people lived next to the dead.
And between their cries the sound was entrapped tight within the jungle.
Beside the village’s loss the jaguar sneaked and snapped through the leaves.
Compact paws stroked the dust and cast a path towards the village.
The steps dipped
and dragged as the cat’s stomach howled from lack of nourishment.
He advanced and followed the rotting and the scent of live flesh.

A mother diverted by white life bathed her baby in the darkness and the grief.
Her wet hands scraped the tender body as she licked the tears from her face.
The baby cooed
and burped over her mother’s heavy sighs.
Tough palms hushed the baby’s noise as the mother lay her hand inside the child’s mouth.
Her fingers skimmed the gums
and curved over the jagged nubs soon to be teeth.

Danielle K.

Lessons in First Love

When reflecting on my years in middle school, a time in my life marked by many dramatic changes and important events, there is one prominent experience that I can recall more vividly than the others. I remember this aspect of my adolescent years, and I feel my chest ache with pain and happiness; I am transported back to those days, and once again I feel the rolling emotions that governed my spirit at that time. In spite of all of the social upheavals and all of the drama that constitute middle school, my first love was by far the most defining part of my early teenage life because the strength of my feelings carried over into almost all the things that I did and said during that time. Classes and schoolwork alone could not rein in my energy and emotion; rather, my forces were directed in an exhaustive pursuit of adolescent love.

“Nobody can tell you that you’re too young to know how love feels. When you’re in love, you just know it,” said Sonya, wise beyond her years. By the end of seventh grade, I felt that nobody in the world could know love—for all its highs and lows—better than I. I was totally and completely in love and helpless to overcome the feeling. For two years my gaze would automatically drift his way, searching for his white hat in a sea of children, watching for the familiar corduroys and white shoes in the park. The knot that stayed fixed in my stomach at the thought of him, the pain and jealousy I felt for any girl he spoke to—these feelings became like habits to me.

It was a rainy day in the fall of 1995, the beginning of sixth grade, and I was outside school with him and his friend. Those were the days before the scaffolding protected the sidewalk from downpours, and the three of us sought cover under the alcove of the emergency door. I was waiting for my mother to pick me up to take me to Boston, and they were both waiting for their parents as well. A very small overhang sheltered us, and the three of us were playing around, pushing one another out into the rain, and then splashing and laughing. Amidst all the joyous laughter and the spray of raindrops, I looked at him and felt a sudden rush of happiness and experienced an instant feeling of contentment in being by his side, and I never wanted to leave him. I spent the four-hour car ride staring out the window at the passing trees, sliding raindrops, and flickering telephone poles, thinking about him and realizing that this was different from the other crushes I had had before.

From then on, it was as if the world existed only for him. Never before had one person’s presence had the power to sway my feelings, to change the mood of a room, or to alter the course of my day for better or for worse. A single smile from him could make my heart fly high into my head, as if the sparkle of his braces alone could elevate me to a state of transcendent happiness. My diary, begun in the autumn of seventh grade, after I had liked him for a year, ought to be dedicated to him, for he is the sole concern of the bulk of it. Every scrawl, every manic entry written at midnight after a horrible day bears his name and influence. In that diary, I documented every comment I found pithy, every glance that seemed to me at the time to be indicative of his state of mind, and I analyzed every action and every word. I even got up the nerve to ask him out on a date in sixth grade, and when I was kindly turned down, I thought that the end of my life was near and shut myself into my room, refusing to come down for dinner, my body convulsing with pathetic whimpers.

I also believed that he was the only person I could ever love. I used to dream about our future relationship, how it would last through high school and college, and how we would marry and have two girls and a boy, and they would play sports and we would take turns driving them to Little League games. In the dark of my room at night I would pretend that he had spontaneously appeared at my window to profess his love for me, and I would carry on conversations with myself as if I were talking to him. I had a small fake diamond ring, which I used to keep in a special box and pretend that he had given to me. I saved an empty box of Nerds candy that we shared once at a Christmas party, and to this day I have it in a tiny bronze chest on my dresser. I prayed, vowing that if God would grant me just this one thing, to have him love me, I would do anything: go to church, drop out of school and become a fat couch potato, devote my life to spreading God’s word—anything to gain favor in God’s eyes. I invested in a Magic 8-ball and asked it to tell me what he felt about me. I suppose that I took what Sonya told me too far—I thought that once I was in love, I was in love forever and this person was the only person for whom I would ever feel so strongly. My love became almost an obsession, but more of a custom—without him there to fawn over silently, my adolescent life seemed empty.

It took almost two years for my dreams to be realized. On Beach Day in seventh grade he finally asked me to be his girlfriend. There still is no way for me to talk about it, even on paper, without smiling to myself and giggling softly. I was waiting in line to get ice cream at the stand, and he came in, took me by the hand, and led me outside behind the walls of the small beach shanty. His eyes were fixed on his bare, tanned feet, which were twisting nervously on the hot concrete and shifting sand between his toes. He glanced at my eyes, squinted in the sun, and cocked his head to the side, as he always did, and said to me, in a voice faltering with nerves and hormones: “I know you know what I’m going to ask, but…will you be my girlfriend?” After all those years of planning the right thing to say to this request, I could think of nothing but “Yes.” I saw his green eyes brighten beneath the wrinkled lids; his chest sighed with relief, and his freckled face spread into a smile. With a flirtatious nod, we ran off the boardwalk, as if it were suddenly too hot for our feet. The day, perfectly sunny and blue, was spent playing tackle football in the sand with the boy and my friends. I was so utterly happy that day, I forgot to wear sunscreen and came home with a terrible sunburn.

Even if my back hadn’t been red and itchy, I never would have slept anyway. The diary entry for 10 June 1997, written in red pen, reads more like a giant sign, proclaiming my victory to all and my resolve to make the new relationship perfect. I look at photographs from that day and see that I exuded total happiness; I glowed with the unique satisfaction of having one’s love reciprocated. The last two days of school were like a happy blur—all of my friends, by now well versed in my strong feelings for the boy, smiled at me with happiness, but most importantly, I had him, just as I had always dreamed.

From there, however, the diary entries grow more and more sad. I soon realized that, despite the years of yearning (or, perhaps, because of them), I could never make the relationship work as I had envisioned. He was no longer the same fickle, inconstant boy that I had loved and pined for. He could no longer unknowingly torment me by talking to other girls because I knew now that he really liked me. I still loved and cared for him, but I had no interest in having him as mine. I wanted the freedom to do what I pleased and wanted to have him to obsess over alone in my room.

A few days later I left for camp, and virtually forgot about him. I never sent or received a letter for the span of the summer, and upon the return to school I noted with pleasure that I had virtually no classes with him. A week into school, after trying my hardest to ignore the awkwardness only to find myself disgusted by his face, I knew that it was time to give up. I made the call to him on Sunday night, and, crying tears of disbelief and pity, I told him that I wanted to break up with him. He was, for the most part, silent, and so he remained for several weeks. I was relieved to have him gone, but also struck by the sadness that, after all those years, it had amounted to two phone conversations, a peck on the cheek, and a game of tackle football. The fact that the eighteen months spent loving him had more significance to me than the attaining of him saddened me. After our relationship ended, my diary entries slowed down and eventually stopped. I suppose now that the relationship was important in that it signified a break with my old habits and likes and paved the way for maturation and growth. The void left by his absence was soon filled by the demands of high school, both social and academic, and by other boys; eventually, there was no soft spot in my heart, and I felt no pang of emotion at the mention of his name.

The boy no longer attends Saint Ann’s and is no longer a boy, but rather a (very handsome) young man. For the first two years after he left, he used to come and visit occasionally, but we never were able to really bond again. I cannot say that this is because he experienced a great heartbreak—I am sure he never felt as strongly for me as I did for him—but, whatever the cause, we were never as close as we had once been. I did reconvene with him last year in the most mundane of all places: at a practice SAT testing site uptown. After the test we ate brunch and rode the subway back downtown together, laughing and talking like old friends. I asked him if he still carried a bagel for lunch around in his pocket, as was his custom in middle school, and he told me that he still did, but although bagels were still his favorite food, he sometimes preferred pizza. When we parted ways again, I smiled and, as the train went on without him, my heart, for a moment, jumped into my ears.

Rebecca O.

A Simile

On the Author’s tasting a Sweet Bit of Fruit while his Eyes were covered,
and being told afterwards, to his very great Surprise, that the Fruit
was, in fact, a LEMON

Just as a guy in blindfolds tastes a lemon
And feels each potent string fill up his mouth,
Burst singing from his nose, chant in his throat
And sing a gamut up and down his palate—
The small, sweet strips are worn away to nothing—
Ev’n so Ulysses, tossed upon the main,
Returning from the plains near Troy’s wide streets,
Saw with surprise above one foamy crest
The trees of Ithaca and his father’s roofs.
Each tiny house makes swell his manly chest,
Which yet one wave’s swell covers up from sight:
Some quite small things produce a great effect.

And just as, opening up his blinded ears
And deafened eyes, the young man is informed
His sweet delight did bear the name of LEMON—
He stares and is amazed, asks those around
If they knew his sweet fruit’s true sour secret.
Ev’n so Ulysses, blown back from sweet home,
Inquires around in incredulity:
Who knew those winds would knock me from my course,
When I expected to reach home at last?
I am amazed I could have been so wrong.

Jonathan B.

Fallen

You wax essential to me while fading,
metal monument to modernism
A fallen beacon
at the impact of your silvery bullet
Wounded,
you gasped through powdery smoke at a
cloudless sky
And with a screeching metal groan,
you descended to a concrete bed
in a billow of silky gray ashes

And so now, the dust settles and the air clears
and we are left with scorched paper,
respiration masks
and untamed anger screaming for release from
palpitating hearts
Function normally is the answer
But how to do that
in a city that has strayed from all its ways?

Somewhere near a ground of zero
a boy presses his nose to chain-
link fences
horrified by his quivering, naked city
To understand the silvery bullet, the onyx
smoke is impossible
And as the sun’s rays stray beyond the chain links
he wonders whether
there’s a divinity that shapes our ends

Harris S.

Primordial Dusts

Where once there was pure immensity came a flash of black and screams and
permutations:
And so emerged a little sun-rock, later to become
our wax-polish floor and deep well of existence—at first we saw just the dip and drop of it:
the antiquated beauty of a world’s first soft baby lips—
before spiderwebs or stones, seagrapes or sand, there was something so pure and
oxidized—
the tickle of a nitrogen breeze over the surface of a naked soil,
spread wide for all gods to see:
You may ask, what on earth?
But in fact things are quite simple, in their simplest form—
Let’s imagine the land before we grew here—us, greedy little bacteria babies,
waiting for our turn.
But first it was only sun and clay: the baking and drying of calloused pieces of
land-flesh,
Black-burnt and swollen in their final kiln—
This mixture of molecules smells like old toaster ovens; scents and songs
and sulfur hanging heavy in the mists—
Chunks of unidentified lava-dirt (we’ll call it) lie drowsy and surprisingly silent
in a limpid air—white and empty and paleolithic.
They exist only in the memories of clouds and gases; remaining unmoved as the night
laps in and out—a soundless, timeless tide
Evolution’s beach is lulled and airless, wrinkled and venerable and viscous—
You may wonder at this frozen moment:
Before hydrogens danced with hydrogens and orgied with oxygens,
and before this wet copulation manipulated our destiny—
Listening to the ebb and flow of ground flatulation; the rocks emit dry
irrigational mutters
and jellyfish burps of heat and dust
These moments splash, odorous and trembling through the minute tunnels of earth and time,
and a narcissistic and nectar-colored pulse beats, wave-like, against all the organic
compounds.
An oily, opal perforation forms a skin
on all the bony backs of grainy plains, and now—
You may ask, what on earth? But this is true beauty—
write your love poem to this—this desolate horizon, this glowing carbon bath,
this rocky grandmother.

Laurel D.