Two Girls

Eighteen-sixty eighteen sixty-four,
six hundred ten thousand men
gaseous gray, blackened body parts
like chopped wood in Virginia sunshine.
Or nineteen-fourteen nineteen-eighteen,
trench rats, thousands, big as badgers,
rip chines from horse and human flesh.
IED’s, cluster bombs, punji sticks,
primed to shred feet, thighs, spine, sack,
yesterday, when we were countless.
Conscience says Count them up and be good,
suck on me like red candy stick
in casual lookaway moments.
Protected by neighbors, two girls
villagers know to be deficient
doll themselves up as bombs
for market day’s chickens and yams,
and like a world-body neural surge,
their protectors fly into fatty parts. 

 

By: W.S. Di Piero

I HATE

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,
not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,
keeps rasping in me, not in its old guise as nostalgia,
sweet crazed call of blackbird in spring;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone;
nor either that other tangle of recall: regret
for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,
petrified root too deeply hooked to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh
of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,
with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,
not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,
sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;
more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,
sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,

echo of love we had, have, for world, our world,
on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,
mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,
cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,
and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:
sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,
of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy. 

 

By: C.K. Williams

FEAR OF HAPPINESS

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:
As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator
I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,
Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,
Though someone always said I’d be all right—
Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad
(The nothing rising underfoot). Then later
The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,
Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,
The merest thought of airplanes. You can call
It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;
But it isn’t the unfathomable fall
That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,
It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap. 

 

By: A.E. Stallings

FISHING

The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her—
She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—
Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
Life and death weighed in the shining scales,
The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

By: A.E. Stallings

COLD CLEAR NORWEGIAN SEA

the water was clear so clear.
the water was as clear as water that is clear.
as clear as water that to be clear appears.
just as if.
just like water you’d like to hug, pile high,
or mail off as a letter.
as clear as the Pythagorean Theorem.
the first Law of Thermodynamics.
which you wish also applied to water.
as very clear as it is blue, green, fluid, statically dynamic.
as clear as the right side of the universe.
so clear that you seem to be watching it (water) through a pane
of clear to almost clear water.
like as if.
clear as a fish of clear water.
clear as the effect of unreal terror on reality.
clear the way it’s clear that fish are edible
locomotion and ships
inedible journeys.
mostly.
not as clear as H2O.
clear, as if the water (it) doesn’t multiply
with itself.
so clear, it’s as if water weren’t transcendence
but in fact substance.
so clear that the comparative value Jellyfish appears unclear.
and actually even
much clearer than
as if. 

 

By: Ron Winkler