 |
|
|
JAMES RIVER POETRY REVIEW: ISSUE I, VOLUME I
-PAGE 2-
Hazel Spire
“Pantoum for Van Gogh”
A cypress twists toward the crescent moon,
Thick brushstrokes eddying around their forms.
The vase of sunflowers is signed, Vincent;
His pipe lies on his yellow bedroom chair.
Brushstrokes dancing free around their forms,
Two Frenchmen walk along a winding lane.
Pipe and tobacco rest on the yellow chair
While absinthe drinkers talk in night cafes.
Two men keep walking down the country lane;
A cousin's peach tree blushes pink in Arles.
While absinthe drinkers talk in night cafes,
Firework stars blaze white at Saint-Remy.
The peach tree blooms forever pink in Arles;
They say he sold one painting in his life.
Stars whirl, blazing white, at Saint-Remy;
Did turpentine or absinthe twist his mind?
They say he sold one painting his whole life;
A cypress twists toward the yellow moon.
Did turpentine or absinthe craze his mind?
He simply signed the sun-filled vase, Vincent.
Allan Peterson
“Descent”
We entered the Metro to a trumpet with a mute
down under Washington
An entry to the underworld A man and his dog
We tossed a dollar like a sop
and passed down leaving noons behind sex
that morning at the Inn
announcements answered by small silver airplanes
What is more common
the earth opening suddenly or the skull
found with no mandible
or the animals captured in dyed yarns
It was dark and cool
and hundreds of downcast awaited the ferry
and its spinning eye
There were cavernous sounds and detonations
like pine cones at home
hitting mower blades The dark shapes the maps
the letters to soldiers
all scandalous models of the attributes of chance
Allan Peterson
“How”
How often the boards do not fit together,
how they have been patched, how painted,
how frequently they peel
and the patches often not of the same material,
so a screw must be added or new glue
now separated from the cold ,
how nicks are unfinished, wood showing,
how splinters, how the corner of the table is missing
entirely, how the porch settled and the doors
squeaked since and don't close properly,
how caulk, how porcelain, how the pattern
once clipped into hexagons has gaps,
how often we might be described that way-
a house leaning slightly, ever more dependent
on loosening parts on a hill in New England,
lead white above an unrepairable ocean.
Richard Fein
“Blueprint”
That bridge
of concrete, of steel
arching
and seemingly
unbroken;
yet truly
its strength
is in its separations.
For to build such a structure
as a singular entity
would condemn the project
to the stress of the seasons' cycles
creating,
first a fracture, then a fissure,
then a yawning chasm.
There must be a
discontinuity
that lets the wind whistle
through the teeth of the metallic mesh
that binds the segments.
With summer comes the high tide of expansion,
but the interstices
accommodate
such growth;
with winter presses the cold contraction,
but the mesh holds
as the segments retreat from each other.
The bridge spans all cycles,
always enduring,
always a yielding unity.
Arlene Ang
“Explaining Death”
On the day of my father's funeral
I stood in front of pews filled
with strangers who had come
to see him off. I explained
with the insistence of a needle
on cue-burnt record about his love
for life and how blackly
he was going to be missed.
My four-year-old tugged my skirt twice
about why Grampa refused to come out
of the box, whether it was a new game.
I explained about heaven,
how people went away and never came back.
My daughter just frowned -
we both knew Grampa packed
two-months ahead of any trip.
My mother demanded for the twelfth time
to know whose funeral it was.
When I explained about her husband
and forty-seven years of marriage,
I avoided mentioning her affair
with Alzheimer and my father's tears
when she had refused to hold
his hand in the emergency ward.
That night, after I tucked
both old and young in bed,
my father's spaniel lapped up
the space beside me, thirsty
for contact and warmth.
Caged in our own silences,
we huddled close at the dark
end of the sofa where there was
no room for explanations.
Arlene Ang
“Polymorphous Perverse”
contact
is a locust cloud
she said
raids suddenly
with airborne pleasure
mouth rolled back
to devour every cell
I thought
I'd warn you first
undeterred
he undressed without
touching skin
flickered his lashes
down her back
trailed fingers
through her hair
contoured her curve
of nape with his breath
until she fell back
a barren
exhausted field
you didn't have
to tell me he said
I know
Arlene Ang
“Long Black Night”
segment 1:
Dark snake,
lounging on
charcoaled
clouds,
devoured
white moon
in half.
segment 2:
Mouth
dropped
the moon
to lunge for
my gray head
behind the
grilled window.
segment 3:
Moon
falling
was impaled
on tv antennae.
Snow
crackled
inside houses.
segment 4:
Flexible jaws
spat out
leftover torso.
Half-digested,
I fell
impaled on
black four-poster.
Michael Ladanyi
“Humming Riddles”
I cannot see, my words are tiny
imperfections of gray skin that
cover my eyes, their voices heavy
purple bruises walking empty rooms;
they search for mother's milk,
the essence in leaves that brush death
above old graves, rustle and converse
in quiet languages against cold marble.
My hands are earth, knotted and tangled
roots attempting to grasp a million
small things with fingers of blood;
they threaten one another with quick
territorial hissing, unwilling
to share the day's lessons.
You, my love, are white light sparkling
in my glass, a wet aching that comforts me;
always far and yet close, one who
listens to wants, touch, warmth,
and hunger, all at once, with no belief in
the science of death---
leaving me simple and naked, an
atmospheric pulse humming riddles
and counting syllables.
Michael Ladanyi
“Spilled Wine and Broken Bread”
I have thought to fall asleep at night
with my door ajar, as those that
open to reveal deathbeds where
family gathers, stand leaning
with eyes of plaster, waiting,
ready to pick up phones that lead to
wailing places. There is no ferryman
before the death. He cannot guide
those that have not yet come to him.
Slender ghosts whisper this from
crooked corners of midnight rooms,
their ceaseless voices murmur
of old wooden walls and childhood
whims. I have heard them, they tell
me I am not really here, tell me my
bones are only pitiful sticks,
their marrow my future eyes. My
throated syllables to them in dreams
are spilled wine and broken bread;
their persistent words drown me.
G.L. Pettigrew
“Anger”
It is slender
slips down the throat easily
then expands in the belly
like a blowfish
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
“Café”
You wait in the laundry on St. Anne Street,
where luminaries in do-rags
play gin with drag queens and gossip.
I unravel like a shawl.
In my dream I go to jail. Tommy Lee Jones shows up
to say, "It's all my fault."
Tommy Lee is standing under a sign for
THE ILLUSIVE CAFÉ.
Does this mean anything? The girls want to know.
I want to know only what any leading man can tell me
about the moon
in your freckled hands. Awake late, TV on porn,
I practice darkness, mumble:
Beware! Life is a pitfall! a fall, a fit, property of the Grim Reaper.
Death is not a deep sleeper.
Au contraire,
you hum from the 42" screen,
Tommy Lee is immortal.
I say only: This
late in life, he still looks mighty sexy for
a guy with formerly bad skin.
On screen, The actual End,
the cards laid down,
the girls made up and gone,
a CAFÉ sign.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
“History”
I hate that return path through the lot next door,
the Johnson grass, the broken toys—
an impossible jack-in-the-box, the spring inside
his flimsy body-cloth that I can never stuff back
so Pop Goes The Weasel pops him
every time, or even working my way up the quarter-mile drive—
1320 feet of phylox—
weeding. This is the story of
yesterday, which is the day that inevitably
receded into my idea of that day, which preceded or followed
that other, more perfect day, when
the path was cleared, the trash recycled, Jimson trimmed, the weeding done.
Or even a bygone day
only months ago when you were still here,
on your knees by the fresh beds, digging, glittering with sweat,
your chest hair, eyelashes, all the fur
of a lifetime spent avoiding that long talk we meant to have, wet
myself, I kneel beside you and begin the job. We work
down the drive, each of us in a hurry
to find out what happened,
each working hard on our own version of history.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
“4 Acts of Marriage”
Blackbird and woodpecker
in the oaks over the road and deer,
sudden on the Farm to Market. All night
before he left for war, the Persiads
flew down at the edge of our eyes.
Before he started home, he phoned
from the base. Later,
spinning toward the house through a mist
of summer insects, butterflies
lifted easily onto his windshield.
He believed he was swimming
through our rooms. His eyes seined
his surroundings. He lifted his hands
and I longed to bark—
watch out for the undertow, the drowning tide.
In the days after cherry blossoms,
when the air lies on J street,
thick as elementary school paste,
sometimes a Dodge Dynasty drives by us
on the bumper, torn, Make Love not....
Colleen R. Little
“Not So Long Ago”
I.
Memories have started my hair on fire
I scrape a match
across my cheek
and listen to the pain
the loneliness brings
it's lava in my ear.
I remember him small,
with tiny feet,
needing me.
Naptime on a nameless afternoon,
just him and I
curtains billowing,
fanning the flames of motherhood into his room.
Dark and sleepy, this little boy
awakening to my smile,
a snack of cut up apple,
milk in a sippy cup.
II.
In another hour he will be home,
emerging from the mouth of the bus,
the school day plastered across his lips,
pencil lead and waterpaints dipped inside his nails.
I'll be on the porch, waiting
he'll grab a coke from the fridge,
a chocolate chip cookie off the table.
He'll be back later.
He doesn't know how hot I burn,
my heart melting inside my stomach
at the way he walks back out the door.
Anne McCrady
“Imagine My Surprise”
Your voice splashes through the phone line,
a fountain of freshwater joy.
I cup your words in my hands,
lift their sweetness
to my lips,
sip your optimism,
savor the return of joy
to the man I loved
and lost in the desert
of loneliness.
Drinking in the unexpected
pleasure of your laughter,
I tip my head back
to catch every drop
of the cascade.
Anne McCrady
“Tell Me”
Of a Saturday afternoon
when the stagnant water
of our lives will give way
to the weight of joy
so unexpected
that it skips across the glint
of light too bright
to look in the eye
until it sinks
in a satisfied spiral
to rest beneath
the still surface
waiting to be found
some other day
when there is no sun
overhead to mirror the lake
and all we can hope for
as we wade through trouble
is to stumble upon happiness
like a stone.
David Filer
“Cathlamet Pastoral”
Eight o'clock, Saturday
night, under a failing
August sky. It is almost
silent in The Dock,
leaning more westward
daily on its aging wharf.
What sunset is left
beyond Tenasillahe Island
is the color of good
ale. One small sailboat
runs back toward town
on a following wind.
It cannot be silent,
though, as long as the couple
at the end of the bar
disagrees on whether
it is right to tip
a good waitress who
has brought a bad meal.
"Gratuity," he says.
"Look it up
in the dictionary."
Or the old guy
in the high school
ball cap oulls history
from his creased
face and remembers
the offer to coach
the Mules in `61
he turned down to
stay up north in Spokane.
As long as Naselle,
down river, has
trouble with its school,
this Fall some kids
going on down
to Ilwaco, some to
a private school
in Astoria. "You don't
want to make those
Finns mad."
The sound of this
small place bubbles
in beer and river talk,
like flotsam,
swirling under black
pilings, down along
the Brusco tugs
with their tow-lights
lit,
like the heron's
awkward silhouette,
headed up to Jackson
Slough. Like Rod
Stewart on the juke-
box,
like drunk
Nancy, as she refuses
a safe ride home,
and sings out into
the night: "I love
you. I love you,
anyway."
Shane Allison
“Twenty-Seventh Birthday”
Just turned 27 and I hate it.
I didn't mind being 26,
it treated me better than any man.
It stung for the first time, but the
age never sassed or gave me back talk.
I'm not the type of guy
who freaks when he thinks
of turning 30 in three years.
I know when 45
hits me like a grand piano
dropped from a six story window,
I'll really look 21.
If my ass sags, I won't become disgruntled.
I don't plan to empty a machine gun
in the lanes of Wal-Mart.
If wrinkles occur, I'll say how
do you do and welcome.
Viagra won't be necessary
because I eat all my vegetables.
I have one shake for lunch, dinner
and in between snacks.
Actually, turning 27 ain't so bad after all.
He doesn't give me any shit.
Money has not come up missing.
I haven't found lipstick on shirt collars
or phone numbers in jean pockets.
We'll be fine as long as he doesn't snore
and remembers to stay on his side of the bed.
PAGE 3
BACK TO PAGE 1
PAGE 4
Send E-Mail to: jamesriverpoetryreview@yahoo.com
Copyright © 2003 . All Rights Reserved