Curing InfertilityWe should go to the bedroom.
You and your wife
should lie on the bed.
I will close the door
and play classical music.
Lights out.
You mustn't touch each other
and you mustn't move.
I want you both to stare
at an imaginary dot
on the other side of the ceiling.
Look up. Look through it.Meanwhile in another room,
I will wear canvas pants
with only a string holding them up.
I will touch my toes ten times.
I will slowly do stretches,
breathing and thinking
about my childhood:
riding bikes, eating dinner.
I will remember a song
that I sang in a school play.
I will know all of the words.I want you both to be thinking
about food. You should
try to imagine every single
year of your life,
what you ate that year,
what it tasted like.
I want you to think
about the major food groups.
Imagine vegetables.
Imagine Neanderthals eating
the marrow of lion bones.
Think about
how lion marrow tastes.
Start imagining recipes that
use lion marrow, a lion tooth broth,
frozen marrow on a stick.When I come back
I will turn off the music
and turn on the lights.
I will ask you to hold hands
with each otherand get very close.
I will say, "Remember being a kid?"
In unison you will say, "I too was young."
I will say, "Remember eating?"
You will say "I grew from nothing."
I will say, "Eating is like giving birth."
You will say, "I too was born."I will touch you both on the feet.
You'll get up and we'll walk outside.
It will be a humid day in early May.Outside I'll say, "I've loved you two
for a long time and I've been
waiting my whole life to say this..."You will be surprised but
you will say, "We have waited too."
And I'll say, "Not anymore."copyright 2003 Peter Davis
printfriendly38th Meditation: Five Random Confessions
I First Confession, 1956
If I were a song singing,
better-believe-it
Pentecostal,
my prayers would have wings.
In my hands black beads
would blaze white as the sun.I'd be so slippery
with the oils of salvation
sin would slide off me
like water off a duck's back.
But I'm an ordinary believer.
Sin clings to me like a sandbur
on a prairie dog's back.I want to be a chalice,
a place where red sparks
pour into a mystery.
I want to be a place where praise
is washed in the embrace of words.
I want to be like Mary and the moon -
to reflect light not my own.I want to lift my arms in exaltation
and shout wonderful Amens each time
the priests and nuns, hands open in prayer,
tell how the bones of the saints
inspire them with little tunes
and small doves that collect them.But I'm a wind whistling
through salvation's window.
I'm life caught picking its toes.
I'm a wick for the blue fire.
I'm what always happens
when the soul's smile
is no proof of innocence.II Second Confession, 1965
It's the uneasy dreams
the scare me,
those that tighten
both breath and sinews
back to things
born of wind and sea.The mind wakes
to a single bruise,
the meaning sticks
and stones,
broken bones,
words that spread like fire.It's the silence
that moves me most.
Who knows what's aroused
when the mind is caught
off guard, suspended
in its strange desiresto run nude
through the sacristy,
the theater of the skull,
the polite smile
eavesdropping on its own
logical explanations?III Third Confession, 1975
I've guilt enough
for this whole side of town!
I'm transparent as a window.
Sometimes my only friend
is the dead moon rising.Lately I've tried to become
addicted to huge piles of grace
and lumps of heavenly hope,
but the wonderful magic
of all my real obsessions
shouts louder than any angel
sent to corral me.
I wish I could pity
the little instincts
that enclose me. Shameseems a fit garment
for a man like me.
But every time I try to feel it,
I find some bright thing
blooming in the darknessIV Fourth Confession, 1985
I'm a thing caught between
time and eternity.
I'm half Buddha, half Bo Peep.
I take the shape of the unwellto keep from being noticed.
I was the boy who lost his kite
on a young and perfect day.
My greatest sin is being clumsy.I'm colorless as music
and sometimes just as complex.
Lately I've taken on the orange
pain of arthritis.
It's a flat little woe,
not unlike certain of my prayers.
I've been an observer here all my life.
Nuns are drawn to meand sometimes the thirsty.
I tell them there are times when
applause can be subtle
as an axe.I saw an avocado angel from outer
space once. He was standing
in the old meadow entertaining
himself with prayers of bad humor.When I told him I had no idea
who or what I was, he informed me
that where he came from things were
that they might have joy.V Fifth Confession, 1995
I have come to rebuke
the breast of the reeds,
the dancing cranes
gathering spice from the garden,
the stuff that smolders
inside me like a blindness.My guilt ticks itself silly.
In this condition
no one is young for long.
The sweaty seams of temptation
trickle to the back of my name
until the bones sag.And I come to this place
more a maniac than a man.
I feel eternity chewing away
at my atoms, laughing
at my ice mediocrity,
my bland compassions.How will my sins behave
without me? I'm full of pits
from the forbidden fruit -
spent the whole year fondling them
as though they were
the surest things about me.And now I must give them up
like family secrets.
Set them like little ships
to waltz out on the silver sea -
and return to my life
chaste, renewed and empty.copyright 2003 Fredrick Zydek
printfriendlyTwenty-Eight Days of Madness
Day 7: February 27, 19811.
Imagine you wake up one morning inside out.
Imagine you think no one can see you
unless you talk first.
Intrigued by the benefits of invisibility
you could remain silent for the rest of your life.
But you drive to work like any ordinary day.
Except someone else is behind the wheel
while you look out the back seat window
eyes without a face
ears listening to the space above
where the neck could be
your breath as disembodied from your lungs
as the wind.If you spoke to someone
they would see you inside out
like a carcass of meat hanging
with all its organs exposed.
As if someone pulled off your skin
like a sweater or hose all turned out
with the seams showing.
Not a pretty sight by any means
so you say nothing.2.
Imagine today, you don't go to the classroom
where you work as a one-to-one aide
for a profoundly retarded child
which in plain English means:
He is an 11-year-old boy
who can't speak and still wears diapers
and can't feed himself
so at lunchtime you ease small
pieces of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
his mother sends from home
into a mouth that cannot swallow
so the pieces stick in the hole of his cleft palate
and ooze out his nose mixed with drool.You must record each drop of drool
with the counter on your wrist
and chart the exact number daily
watching the black line of the graph rise and rise
no matter how often you stroke his throat softly
like the chin of a cat cooing:
"Swallow, Jason, please swallow."And when he has temper tantrums
he hits his fists again and again
against his face so hard he leaves
blue imprint of knuckle on each cheek
unless you restrain him which is quite hard
because you are 4 foot 10 inches tall
and he comes to your forehead.
Strong little bastard he grabs so tight
at your cunt and boobs hou see stars and angels.3.
Imagine today instead, you go to the staff room
where newly elected "Ronald" bullshits
over the P.A. intercom his voice in the foreground
muffling the voices of the teachers
gossiping about their students
as if they were the static on the radio and not "Reagon."On the large rectangular table in the center of the room
is a freshly baked pineapple cake
In your mouth its tartness dissolves slowly like aspirin.The aide for the deaf children's classroomV comes in frantically waving her hands
because the substitute teacher has one arm
and cannot sign.
Like you she has no way to communicate
with the children she is supposed to teach,
to heal, supposed to mold
into a less offensive norm called "human."4.
Imagine you leave the staff room
and still haven't spoken.
You walk to the gym. Like the kids
P.E. is your favorite period of the day
but no one is in there now.
You run around and around the black line
that defines the outside perimeter of the floor.
Running faster and faster until the gray-green walls
dissolve into the laughter of children playing at recess.In the students' lunchroom
two sixth graders are popping corn
to be sold later in corrugated paper bags.
Pop, pop, pop you move your fingers in rhythm
imitating the dancing kernels in sign language
still unable to speak
But the children see you.
They know you are inside out--even without your words.5.
Imagine you walk the halls
enter each classroom and say something
something important
something that has to be said to the teachers--
reinforcement for a good job done daily.
In each room the children are laughing and laughing
They are stars and angels.Imagine in the nurse's office where a teacher has taken you
you lie in a dark room on a hard bed.
Everyone is trying to help.
you know now it was a mistake to have spoken at all.
Inside out with all your seams showing so ugly and red.And imagine the teachers' concern
carves into you as if searching for the perfect cut of meat
A taste to dissolve their confusion
upon finding a new child among them
who dared to speak in a language
they could not reduce to the ABC's
They try so desperately to teach everyone!
Even the voiceless among them:
The deaf, the dumb, the diseased
and the mad!wr. January 13, 1989
published from the manuscript, "As If A Word"copyright 2003 Patricia J. McDonald
printfriendlyadult swim
this blue morning the small school alights
in the machination of its long branded lanes
and it is lavish in its whitewater and inconstant
and easing in its effortless cutting it is
cleansed and this is the intent of the medium
but the water does not neutralize their signatures
as these are film that is discarded in the arches
and the swells and in the pendulum swings
their pruned fingers print on the tiles a lean
propelling reach from containment and from origin
they are a long mute time from gills and content
in nipples and coarse hairs and in the pointed
incisors anchored in the open grope of their mouthing
they have come to be fiends so long without predators
alone there and some together there in the coil
of the lane markers their cap skin tight to their skulls
copyright 2003 Michael Krebs
printfriendlyinstruments we have lost sleep in
in the thrumming tick in the yolk snug in
the fecund marrow beds some cannot
say it but claim civilization scores folks so
they peep in at the fissures and report
in numbers some truth can be
found in murderers and molesters and held
to some measure but it cannot stay
as we cannot be distinguished by these
instruments we have lost sleep in
gathering the eggs and in the bravery
of eating them some cannot discern
this very act is an accomplishment
and they rage against our dear scale
from the pools and our common
moment of first ether taste
and first lung breath and that we come
from these things in the water and it is a mess
us being so minded and all that is
copyright 2003 Michael Krebs
printfriendlyThree Country Songs
1.
She claimed she came from Coeur d'Alene
but she really came from Kellog.
She said her daddy went insane.
but in fact he got the hell out.
She swore she never would marry,
would become a Vegas chanteuse;
but she married her high school Harry:
he's a roofer, she's a coiffeuse.2.
Jack Bridwell's in love with Elizabeth Sloan.
Under summer's pared and parboiled moons
His lavender Harley comes sizzling, sneezing,
Snoring down 14.The taillight climbs the night fire-colored,As I stand gazing,
Then goes out like a cagarette swallowed.
And soon the hills swallow the whole complaint.
I turn from the window, less than content.Hours later, sleep courted and lost,
I hear the Harley singing him home. . .
His ears full of wind and Elizaneth's praise,
His eyes full of night and Elizabeth's eyes. . .
He smells the corn, the clay, the river,
And drinks the delight of the dark country driver.3.
Grass clung to the reel of the mower,
and cream to the dasher in the churn,
and I clung as close to my lover
as the honey clung to the comb.copyright 2003 Ed Minus
printfriendlyEnergy Drinks
Red Bull, Rock Star, Double Shot, Amp
(I saw a man killed by a flying body part):how I wish they had made them
when I was in the army (a legsmoldering in its boot) and stood watch
over a sleeping platoon...except that I sat,my back against a banyan tree,
observing nothing (his eyes lightly shut,hair on fire) but the backs of my eyelids--
not that there was anything muchI could have done but (had he dreamed
the one-time dream of dying?) scream"Incoming!" and at least seen him
come awake before....I would havegladly accepted the extra burden
of an Alice pack full of them,not to be lying here tonight: an addict
with eyes that refuse to close.copyright 2003 Pete Lee
printfriendlyNostalgia
The wind blows in fuzzy xeroxes
of everything good that ever happened to you.
They get sent, with today's view
from your heart, through the trash compactor,
and when you take the garbage out,
bits of damp smelly paper blowing out,
like thunderstorms,
you catch a glimpse of something now abstracted
in the rain clouds and mulch.copyright 2003 Kylie Svenson
printfriendlyWitness
I have seen an arrow pass through the heart
Of a deer--and the deer, with scarcely a flinch,
Continue to chew the moss
That blackened the roots of an oak.
But the deer knelt down, at last,
In damp leaves, cocked his head to hear
A sound, then sagged, paling the earth
With his white throat, his loosening skin.And I have seen a carpenter,
With his palm pierced in a jig-saw, put down
The half-carved block--the wood
Sallow as flesh stripped bare--
And so as not to snap the blade, pull it
Clean through the webbing of his hand,
His eyes raised the way the murdered look
To the sky, as vague as St. Sebastian's stare.The dark pines in winter I have seen,
With branches full of snow, conceal
The kerosene drunks
Gone to sleep in the shells
Of abandoned cars, and I have seen
Those men stumble in the woods at night:
Their hearts answer one another
Like ripples after a stone, or wings,With blood that wells from everlasting wounds.
copyright 2003 Temple Cone
printfriendlyBlack Night
The arid fields of dusty silver
lie fallow for years and years that pass
in the farewell trembling hues
of the night too black and dazzling
to look real.The placid ponds of gilded lilies ripple
with the sinking shades of this suffocating
twilight, the black night's faithful employee.The corrupted fates of grandeur,
formerly sparkling, now vexed and weary,
lie scattered on the banks
which the nightly Rider of Justice haunts.copyright 2003 Vladimir Orlov
printfriendlyThe Marble Tomb to Crown Life
It was caused by nothing,
aimed at nothing
but popular outrage.
Frustration, discontent, unrest...
all these offsprings
of the disabled single party rule
are now issuing their pervasive yells
all around the new
and the same old country
caught up in complex implications
of its discarded but
thoroughly tenacious pastThe unknown present day
breaks in upon the petrifications
of what has been sanctified
by the multitudes of the ever-marching
purple, red, bloodstained, bleeding
banners now carried high
by the staunch advocates
of the good old totalitarian days.Their lofty calls
seem to fail to chime
with the somewhat less lofty
cries of those butchered
in Stalin's prison cells,
now wafted to the marchers' ears
from the cells
of their own lingering memories....
These marching former convicts
crave for Stalin whose much lamented death
let them out of the prison cells
but buried them
in the prisons of their wounded souls....Are these parading relics just the guns
Stalin triggered off
from under his marble tomb?
The marchers never question.
They are called up from the past
and are here to obey.copyright 2003 Vladimir Orlov
printfriendlyI Will Send My Message Collect
I will send them all the torn-out copies
of my last message collect,
as I stand breathing in the sight
of the frozen silver, its faulty light
fettering the river's glassy ice.
My memory, in its inveterate longing
to plunge into the sweet water of hope,
is being hurled to the gusty summit
where regiments of ghastly ghosts gather
to perpetrate their ghoulish parade.
Time rumbles down the bumpy street
of my crumbling consciousness, as
I am being run down by its heavy cart
that used to stop at my beck and call,
but now will positively not,
even if I vociferously plead with it.
Days are being sipped out of me,
with relish, by the subtle connoisseurs
of the delicious wine of time and age.
I will send them all the torn-out copies
of my last message collect.copyright 2003 Vladimir Orlov
printfriendlyTo Spring
Eggs. More eggs. Sarsaparilla root, ginseng,
black cohosh, black pearls, bloodstone, rose quartz, jade,
malachite, spires and steeples, maypole rings,
Shiva's stone lingam deflowering maids.
Vitamins C, B6, B12, and E,
Old George all baked: gingery communion,
or just pomegranates, Persephone,
not green at all. Or fortified for one
last shot. Or castrated for Artemis:
roses, genitals waving in the wind.
The sacrifices, fires, masks, all for his
seed, her hips. Simple things, so intertwined:
the basal charts, the egg whites, all these tales
of storks, prayers, EPTs, lances, cups, grails.copyright 2003 Eric Gardner
printfriendlySeed
Consider fear.
Consider this watermelon seed
that sucks from the earth
a thousand times its weight in water.
Consider: when you swallow it,
it will grow inside you.
Consider the thunder
that wakes my wife screaming
even when she only dreams it.
Consider how she prays for rain without thunder.
Consider that I am lying to you,
that you want me to lie. Consider
the things under the bed,
the things beside you in the bed.
Consider the darkness. Consider
that each letter on this page
is a darkness.
Consider why you taste them or resist them.
Consider myths of fruition,
of rain without thunder, of things in the dark.
Consider spitting this seed out, consider
where it may fall.copyright 2003 Eric Gardner
printfriendlyPlanting Tulips
The Universe is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything.*
Pulled by the coming darkness, shorter days,
we reenact old mysteries
fill bird feeders, kneel in the cold ground
of November, plant
what will in time, become flame, ruffled
apricot, a parrot-fringe
of green and yellow, as tulip bulbs settle
on their satin haunches.
Feel the tides that suck at earth, no less
than the moon's
tug on the dark hammock of ocean and wait
for the lowering of winter's
iron gate. The bulb's small latern will flicker
throughout the long night;
star, ruby, firefly, your own beating heart,
all blown from
the same star-burst, all palpable with light.*The Universe Story, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry.
copyright 2003 Sharron Singleton
printfriendlyArchaefructus sinensis
The ancester of all grains, fruits and blossoms may have been a fragile plant that lived in a Chinese lake 125 million years ago.*
When the hair-like roots
of the almost colorless, petal-less
first flower fingered deep intothe primordial muck of a pond,
our ancestors were still rudimentary
creatures skittering among rocks.This morning I, too, am simple
with color and scent, windows
open to air fragrant with viburnumand lilac, to pink and white blossoms
of crabapple, dogwood, magnolia,
to a humming of variegated greens.Think back along billowed eons,
to evolving petal and leafbract. Think back
to the drift of a thousand slow centuries,to that first mother plant, still swollen
with seed. From its need to be seen, sniffed
and tasted, called forth pupil and retina,olfactory nerve, teeth, lips and tongue,
that it might be devoured, digested, excreted,
that it might ride on the pinions of blackbirds,burrow in the secrecy of forests, leap
high on Andalusian wheatfields, find
this table, this bowl of blue china.*Science magazine.
copyright 2003 Sharron Singleton
printfriendlyAttempts at Love in Negaunee
Sun down by six. Road-salt rusted Fords bog
Into driveways, slush-packed wheel wells throttled
Snug. Tailpipes croak. Neighbors wade toward
Hibernations, slick-cement porched vaults
Mistaking opaque for peace. Snow falls all night.
Falls numb. Streets are bottlenecked about your past,
Parents' dead-end. Lamposts hang deadpan mugs,
Stasis with no penance, only the hard spray off the blade
Of the city plow, the bark of cold pavement and metal.Your dad drove dump truck steady midnights,
A thirty-four year noctambulation that stalked him home.
You never saw them hug. Never coo. Only an occasional
Cold knock, headboard on plaster, ending sober, ending
In the rattle of backdoor-clapped panes. Your mother poured you
Silver-dollar pancakes. She called you back from the window,
From your father's orange boot-prints fleeing to the bar,
A release you were barred from, a foreign euphoria:
Brick, bland neon, thick oak door, tarnished metal handle.It was your mother's body you grew into. Of age,
You opened the oak door to find the tables vacant, bottles
Of schnapps in rows blocking the mirror, the bar crowded
By a chain of smoke-coated forms slouched over noon beers,
Squinting your silhouette until the smug till's ding-jutting
Mandible turned them away, opened their wallets like the mouths
Of choking walleye. In dim communion they buried warmth
In their throats, hours swallowed in a humdrum jukebox psalm,
Lukewarm nods stagnated into haven. You were too late
To take your father home. The towel on the bartender's shoulder
Had stolen his kisses from the glasses.Snow falls all night and drifts threaten the windows.
The streets narrow. They are your streets. You walk them
And prospects expire. You clip coupons, you pay rent.
You scrape ice from your car windows at dawn. You kneel
In the bile, in slow digestion next to the VFW, the St. Vinnies,
The unkept bars that keep soliciting sore miners, blizzards
In their minds. The horizon drops in jigsaw tatters. Years
Won't pan out, toil toward lucid curbs. Plows roar
Through the night, large and orange and lost. You embrace
This fallow lineage, dredge the cellar for the boots
Of your dead father. Trod circles in snow.copyright 2003 Kevin Kainulainen
printfriendlyJ. B. Phones Me at the End of Summer,
Asking Where I Find Silence in the Lehigh ValleyLet it be Sunday, pre-dawn.
Let the snow that began
Saturday afternoon
when the dark came on
keep falling, and let it be blown
soundlessly. Let it be frozen
January and the moon
new below the horizon.
Let the sky depend from iron
hinges, the land decline
from forest to formless plain,
the slowfall sift and dune
in the windscoured open.
Let the ground mole batten
on blackness in its own den,
every internal combustion engine
go cold as glaciated stone.Let the mind be Norwegian,
die-cast, the ear attune
itself to the one bird alone
abroad before the thin sun
fissions, windspan-borne
on the liquid nitrogen
morning air. Let him darken
a dropline drawn from Orion
over South mountain,
down toward the drifted lawn.
Let him turn, his float-plane
flattening overhead. Listen:
a sudden motion-plosion
under wing, brief backspin
of aftertone, then intimation
of the non- below the baseline,
then the grey-green zone
of gonecopyright 2003 Steve Myers
printfriendlyWhile the Future Is Putting Its Cards on the Table,
My Irish Side Fumbles a Handful of ChipsJust walking the Strand was like slogging through salt marsh
in a greenish dream.Sometimes the littoral would vanish altogether. Tha's no rain,
it's Holy Water,gushed the pub owner. The two of us mouthed sounds at each other
all down Fishamble.At night the flashlights of wife, son, and a hundred sleepless
administratorsbeamed me messages from a Nova Scotia outpost, across
the sodden Dublin sky.Unmistakable, washing over me at the Abbey during "Big Maggie":
a fetor of clay,as if the bilge and sludge of antediluvian Liffey were sloshing around
in French drains below.Then Thursday, pre-dawn--everyone else gone off to Inishmore
while I, half-pissed on Guinness,watched the spindrift sea unflesh itself to shingle, shell, one thin scrawl
of phosphorescenceI might have read the implication of, if only the moon held still,
or the tide had stalled.copyright 2003 Steve Myers
printfriendlyAll That I've Wasted
At home in the country this February morning
there's not much doing.There are larvae wriggling in a downstairs cupboard;
otherwise everythingstate-of-being: my wife, sleeping; coffee steeping
toward bitteron the kitchen counter, even the adverbs listless
as a Tuesdaygoing nowhere fast. Did i say I wasted a girl
this ordinaryonce? Nothing as theatrical as shattered crystal--
no psyche-slivers on the bathroom tile. She was mild. One phone call
was enoughto put her down, a chuff of breath on the other end
and gone,compliant as Ontario in Indian summer.
Her hairwas--no other way to say it--auburn. She altered
even silencelightly, as a moth brushes wingdust on a white wall.
copyright 2003 Steve Myers
printfriendlyIn Your Lager Dream,
copyright 2003 Stephen Herz
[I am sorry, but my wfm will not manage the diacritical marks in this poem, which is therefore available only in printfriendly black on white. TK]
On Looking at 2,500 Pictures of French Children Deported in the Cattle Cars from Drancy to Auschwitz
[I am sorry, but my wfm will not manage the diacritical marks in this poem, which is therefore available only in printfriendly black on white. TK]
copyright 2003 Stephen Herz
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