Small Town

My childhood self

still walks the streets of the village

where I loved to visit

a grandmother, dead long ago.

Her aged friends

are still vivid in my mind.

One had a parrot that nipped my nose

and a goldfish pond

where the brilliant fish

eluded my childish grasp.

Another came to tea

and was given elderberry wine

because “the doctor ordered it.”

A glowering distant cousin 

with a crippled foot who came to visit

preferred to sleep on a feather bed,

so in the heat of summer

I dragged the dusty thing from the attic,

grumbling and resentful of that gloomy relative.

A box of demi-tasse cups

was given me by one of those women.

“Don’t wait too long to marry,”

was her advice.  -- ”I did.”

I sensed the sorrow of her life.

Unmarried women of uncertain age

seemed prevalent.

Why did they never wed?

Did the young men leave

for livelier towns?

Or did their beaux

go off to war and die?

Their locked trunks in the attic

were seldom opened,

holding treasures (I supposed)

for which they had no room

in the straitened circumstances

to which they had come.

Now aging as well,

I return to find

old houses remain,

still beautiful and cared for,

and the county courthouse

with the Civil War cannonball

still lodged in its pillar

looks solid and unchanged.

But busy stores

that then sold thread

and shoes and ice cream

now stand empty and forlorn,

and the ghosts of my childhood friends

walk the silent streets.

© Peggy Latham, 2012

County Courthouse; photo by Tony Russell

Ancient Conversations

The river of our tongues has dried to cracked earth.  

Too long since wear, crawfish pronunciations,

and bullfrog syllables are shells and lumps of sand now.

Ē kapuna, make wai ‘ia au.

I am thirsty for the metaphors of our grandmothers,

their every breath a prayer for peace and unchecked giving,

and receiving was as easy as a nap with a pole in my hand on a warm day.

I crave the torrents from times when women were gardens

and there was only one table to put a vase on.

Yet in place of flowers, homework, and electronic debris,

bountiful food prepared with god in mind was served

to strangers passing through the channel.

© Sarah Bordeau-Rigterink, 2012

Hawaiians eating poi, c. 1896
Photo by Strohmeyer & Wyman
From Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress

Give Me Something to Write

Give me something to write.

Inside me I hold a book,

Filled with page, after page, after never-ending page of hungry space.

My pages long for tales of the countless hours we’ve spent running through the night,

Of the oceans of color we’ve consumed painting the world with our souls.

There are words

That dripped from your lip like dew drops on a desert flower.

My pages thirst for them,

Were made for them,

Want  them to come home.

Send them home.

Your very walk inspires metaphors,

Metaphors with the power to make rational thought question its own existence.

Send your words and your metaphors home.

My pages will cradle them – like the moonlight,

Show them the freedom they were born to possess.

Run with me.

Let’s find our way out of this strange skin we wear,

So that we can unhide our holy.

Release the ember inside us that wants to burn like a bonfire unbridled.

This holy bonfire that burns truer than anything else that has ever burned,

This, too, would I write on my pages,

If you would let me.

My pages want only to remember:

Stories of us;

And of how we got here;

Stories of how we bent ruthlessly the rigid lines of this world’s senseless sheet music.

On those nights we ran, the paint still wet under our fingernails,

We pursued an irony we had only heard existed,

Tried to outrun a past we were destined to miss like a lost limb,

Our steps, accidental brush strokes on an ever-shifting canvas.

My pages want to remember the days,

The days when we knew what we wanted

Yet didn’t know what we knew.

We recognized beauty in all its forms.

And simplicity came naturally.

They were yours, and mine, and ours.

Send them home.

Inside me I hold a book.

So give me something to write.

© Axel Cooper, 2012

Artist Painting at Central Park
Photo by SpyON from Wikimedia Commons

Relationship

I'm sorry to stay covered up,
but that was so you
could possibly get to know me
for my other attributes,
not just my double D's.
You see it’s not that
I’m not proud
of my physical being;
just was hoping
you might find
a little cerebral stimulation
arousing,
take it to another
level--
something a bit
more conscious.
I mean let’s get serious
for a minute.
What do you want out of life,
and where do you see me in it?
Don’t wanna feel like
this is time wasted,
cause if it is
there's no reason
to even hold this conversation,
cause I need a man
who is able to express his self
yet not try and overshadow.
For though I want you to shine,
I need not be blinded by your ego.
I wish that I knew what was happening
when you looked at me
like my eyes could mirror yours,
and therefore
I could reflect
those innermost thoughts,
know you deep inside.
Cause after all,
they are the windows
to your soul.
But you curtain them
with heavy lids
or turn away,
as if to say,
“I don’t want you to know
what’s not already surfaced.”
Discover that
I too, like you,
am vulnerable sometimes,
but for every weakness
there is strength,
and maybe yours
is locked behind
that visual contact
you find so hard to make,
and that’s why,
when asked about
real emotions
you hesitate,
while my tears
make it blurry,
impossible to concentrate.
So I move on
and wipe away truths
with the back of my hand,
cause if you shed tears
and open yourself,
you think you are less
than a man.

      © Suzanne Saxon, 2012

Male-female intersex relationship
Wikimedia Commons
Serge Lachinov, 1914

Three Kingdoms

Animal

1.

Our mother,
molten animal,
shambles across
giant comet-singed ferns
and we follow.

Black milk cries
from flickering sockets
on her skinless body,
streaming down bone-ridge
and bare muscle-tissue.
Deep and pungent;
tasting of berry, spit-honey,
fecund ambrosia.

Our sap-stained mouths
fill with the pulse of new organs.
We caress each other
with unintelligible vibration,

tearing out with claws
the strands of hell-red neon
which held our epochs together,

collapsing together
our swarms of ecstatic flesh
formless as warm wax,
flowing streamlike
into quicksilver reservoirs.

2.

Living tempests! Carve epitaphs
on this ocean skin,
sharpen us crystalline
so we may rend apart
the solid ships
that drift by.

Trace our drifting nerves
with queasy venom and
fill our mouths
with orange spores
of sugar!

Blind our hexagon eyes
with a screaming white light!
Penetrate the folds inside us
as spirals of root flesh
to churn the vitreous fluid, bile, and blood
into vast slow-motion hurricanes!

Plant

1.
It took us a while to see
the electric blue veins
digesting our everyday architecture.

Wreaths, holographic,
held the sun in its thorns
to bleed silver noise into
empty quarries.

Radial stalks of cartilage
grow from the ground,
one thousand soft fingers
curling off to grasp empty air,
lost in the chaos
of molecular motion.

2.
Two trees speak to us,
raising their bark-scales
to braid quilts
of artery and chlorophyll
between us.

Nectaries leaked
burnt sugar
when their phrases held
a warmer tone,
when somber slicked
their flowers with formaldehyde.

These are the last words
in my human tongue.

By stretching fingers
across leaf-vein and root-coil,
we’ve found
a more moving vernacular.

Fungi (Mycelium)

It eats our undead dream-space
with flickers of worm-tongue;
the pores in time’s skin
are now widening.

We awake
tangled in mycelium.
Networks of dried spittle, lung-tube, and spider-cord
helixed tight around our skulls,
squeezing out fountains
of brain tissue into the wet summer air,
fusing into the spine’s raw node.

Our eyes burned out
after watching it tear into
the heavy opaquery draped over
earth’s inner star.

Now we dream awake and outside
our secret worlds
atomized by the screaming gravity
of black galaxies. 

© Luke Manning, 2012

 Root-tip mycelia of the Amanita
Photo from Wikimedia CommonsSource: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/178

Last Train of My Childhood Dream

In this tunnel

where fear is an animal

smothering me

with unbearable fur,

I feel earth tremble

as if an ocean,

trapped beneath trees and rocks,

is pounding hard

against roots,

the way my heart hammers

against its own roots of dread.

I have heard the same roar--

tornados thundering toward me

like stampeding buffalo

until terror slams me awake.

Now this darkness

opens its one bright eye.

Light that does not mean hope

drives the future 

at me fast,

your death a black train

filling the space

between me and escape.

© Jean Sampson, 2012

Locomotive in Chicago subway, circa 1919;
photo from Wikimedia Commons

Mother Moon

Shall I take up this conversation again?

A question from me

that rises to mother moon.

Yet if I cannot believe her

who can I believe?

She speaks of hope

of beauty

of change

in nightly perspective.

“Remember, I reflect,”

she says…

the conversation

doesn’t stop here

it continues

in whoever gazes

who chooses to see

to hope, to reflect…

© Linda Suddarth, 2012

The Phase 8 day of the moon; 

photo by 阿爾特斯 on Wikimedia Commons