Matt Ryan
Halloween Night Begins At The Tree
Inside his heart, a third knee grows,
which she sits on, wearing her
infomercial costume and uses
her abracadabra eyes to sell him
a trove of pyrite. She knows
he doesn’t have the ability
to interpret the cigarette smoke
coming from the cauldron
of her mouth. Magicians
understand psychology,
as does the fortune teller
who reads the cobwebs
on her palms and smokes
a cigarette of her own to say
one shouldn’t do terrible things
and blame it on fate, as if God
hands out magic wands to make
razor blades disappear into
apple-shaped bosoms that are
offered to lonely men for a treat
Gregory Sherl.
I’ve Loved You So Long
I regret sleeping through days with the most sun.
My cheeks full of winter. I lose thoughts in the morning
the most. We’ve already built the faces we’ll wear
till we don’t need faces anymore.
I’ve built the face of my lover. It’s your face
but a little older, and we still hold hands.
You can see fireflies even in the light, even when
you can see your hands. Come hide in the fort I built
out of
bent straws. It’ll taste nothing like regret.
Larry D. Thomas
Kent House, 1969
(painting by Jamie Wyeth)
In a useless
gesture of defiance,
it juts from a treeless slope
of jagged-edged boulders
ending ostensibly at the sea.
The boulders are prominent
with browns and shadows.
Of buff-colored clapboards,
it languishes under the pitch
of a roof almost steep enough
to stave off the weight
of a blank sky
so sure in time to prevail
it’s already taken up
its stark, rectangular residence
in the porch and sky blue door.
Mimi Vaquer.
On Aging
You start to feel a little bit like you
Were washed on hot and
Stuck in a dryer tossed in circles
Beating the sides like washing a shoe,
But not making all the noise –
Your reds are dusty pinks and
All your whites are grey.
You could have a drink or start
New nasty habits like adultery
Or staring into full length mirrors—
Maybe pull out an old cigarette
Stashed away from when you quit at 35,
That cutoff date for frivolities.
Some may hike a mountain or
Sign up for Eastern body disciplines
With Tammys and Kims,
Or even change their features in
Shopping mall chairs, dragging home
Fancy bags of product that
Will never be used.
But I like the ones best in
Housedress slouch who know
Their faces fell before they knew
They were too old for lip gloss.
Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue
What a Thing to See
What a thing to see – dead leaves come back to life.
They tumble in an orange, red, and yellow blizzard.
On the ground, they regroup
and rush into the street.
First this way then that,
leaping like a corps de ballet.
Pirouetting on one stem,
they spin – double, even triple plies.
Hold your rake,
wait to mulch.
Give slow thanks for the dead come back to life.
I’d heard rumors of it –
this preacher or that –
but never believed it
till I saw it with my own eyes.
The street – their stage,
And I, dazzled by their wind-powered twists and turns,
stand in awe..
Who knows, but that one day
all this bustle, this human life
will grind to a sure halt.
Every computer go blank;
abandoned cars, slowly hollowing out,
the insides of tall buildings gone black as obsidian,
no human eyes to squint at La Gioconda
in an empty Louvre.
But there would be the leaves,
dancing, wild, crazy leaves.
Michael T. Young
The Butterfly in the Gutter
My infant son grasps his pacifier,
brings it to his mouth, pulls it away.
Impulsively he repeats the motion,
growing frustrated
because he hasn't learned to let go,
to put the pacifier in his mouth
and leave it there.
Do we ever get good at this, the letting go?
Think of the many nostalgic hauntings,
past lovers shaking their purses
full of perfect imaginary coins
of what it use to be like, let's say, with Tina,
my first kiss in the alley behind my aunt's house
or moving to New York without a job
or a place to live, just hopping on a bus
on a July morning in 1990,
trusting everything I believed in then
to make a way and actually finding it,
so now it's recalled as a cherished golden age,
which, at the time, promised nothing more
than the light that falls here in the park
among the flowers, grass and dirt
where a monarch butterfly takes off
to settle instead in the gutter
and run its feelers over something,
studying to discover it's worth.
Mother Sitting on Her Parents' Graves
This is a journey we make every year.
We go to the stones - to those carved markers
that list the loved names of our kin.
swarming, memories filled with the lives
that wait for our visits beneath the stones.
and uncles. Was it yesterday we picnicked
in our backyard as if we could all live forever?
stones in the family plot. The man buried there
died when she was a girl of seven. She grieves
to the old pump organ that sat in his parlor
on Forty-Third Street from 1896 to 1923.
and turn her home into a boarding house
to keep food on the table, clothes on their backs.
It is always the same. She sits alone musing
about things too sacred to put into words.
closed. She will be dreaming of a calico kitten
given to celebrate her survival of an appendectomy.
There's a photograph of the four of them in her purse.
She hasn't taken it out to look at in years.