THREAD
Khizra Aslam

While you cut and sew and weave my gown,
your fingers do nimbly crease my gown.

I thread a garland of reeds for you;
my tears will no more leak on my gown.

You paint my cloak in autumn colours:
red, orange and yellow, streak my gown.

You knit long strands: my black hair in plaits;
uncoil sleek snakes; night is bleak; my gown!

When you dance around your wheel, khizar,
does it creak within? Go, seek my gown.

WILLOW NOTE
Khizra Aslam 

Soft unspoken words; you wrote in my night;
light willow breeze brings its note in my night.

You quietly flit and whistle a tune,
and tiptoe in my room; ghost in my night.

You fan my passions, then calm with your hands;
what ethereal presence floats in my night!

Come see the colour of my wound is green;
I wait for your balm; fresh coat in my night.

Did you cut your flute from a willow tree?
Look leaves weep with willow note in my night.

Why, wear your black willow rosary, khizar,
tell your beads aloud, full-throat in my night.

A VALENTINE GHAZAL FOR ROSE
Gene Doty 

cosmically less than a speck--asteroid Eros;
still we retrieve images of distant Eros

Venus swings too far inward: Mars can not woo her
beyond the parabola of the arrow shot by Eros

how your eyes descend, near to my surface,
a promised landing guided to Eros

the thunder lizards raised their snouts sniffing
air engorged and darkened by a cousin of Eros

space opera arias elaborate the drama out there
where gravity's grooves move the shadows of Eros

held on earth, gino, hear the silence born
in the panting aftermath of tumbling Eros

THE GAME
Giovanni Malito

A cough cracks the earnest silence
and your eyes betray you.

I see them look up, a flicker
of query in their shrinking pupils.

Your lips quiver but only slightly
for no sound is audible to me.

This time I clear my throat

and its guttural report could be
a sentence in some other language.

Once again you look up but only
until you see me and your eyes abscond.

It is a stalemate, only 64 moves to go
then we both win or we both lose

but we can guiltlessly clear the board.

THE SHIFT IN MAGIC
Giovanni Malito

See how quickly flesh
finds comfort next to flesh.

See how quickly blood
stirs when the chests heave.

See how readily the give
is replaced with take, but

do we see who sighs first, or
can we hear who shifts first

once our breath has returned
and the magic has worn off?

IN THE EYES OF MY CHILDREN
Marjorie Buettner 

Mid-summer and the moon is full.  The night, a dark, sweet liquid, pours out to coat my senses.  By the moon's light, in the middle of the road, we see scores of migrating turtles tuned to an ancient memory of eggs and the heat of a full moon on a sandy beach.  My children carry them off to the other side as if they were gifts laid at the feet of an unseen god.  We stand by the lake which, in this moon light, looks like a bed of satin, black and shimmering, and always shining, forever shining in the eyes of my children.

sky of shooting stars
how the night gives back to us
its own fragile light
and in spite of time I know
that we will live forever

DIARY OF FOUR LARGE SUITCASES
Betty Kaplan 

My daughter and I went on a trip. We started on The Queen Elizabeth 2 and therefore needed formal as well as casual clothing. So we ended up with four large suitcases The concern was how to deal with the suitcases as we traveled.

In London on Petticoat Lane we found porcelain dolls which we could not resist. So now it was 4 large suitcases and 3 large boxes of dolls. At the London train station, the porter took us to the VIP room for first class travel and then put the dolls, the suitcases, and us on a cart and drove us to the train to Cornwall. Great!  But when we got to Plymouth, we were told ONE minute to get off. WOW! And we made it. Pat (our hostess) met us with a very small car. She was startled when she saw the luggage.

We stayed at a haunted pub and the suitcases had to be carried up stairs. The girl in charge said "no problem. I am a farmer's daughter" Traveling back, again we found a porter who put us on the train. From Paddington, we took a cab to Heathrow.

awakened from a dream
I see on my bedroom dresser
a smiling doll
do you suppose she knew it too
the ghost of The Weary Friar Pub?

AFTER ALL THESE CENTURIES
Larry Kimmel 

Look at them!  All these signs.  A palm in the red light telling you not to cross the street.  An encircled bicycle with a line struck across it to say, no bicycles.  Same for a truck.  A stylized man, a stylized woman, to designate the gender of the restrooms.  A crossed-out match; a crossed-out P; to indicate no smoking, no parking.  And then there's a plate with fork and knife to tell a restaurant by.  A camera to say, here is a view.  Well, you get the idea.  So what I'd like to know, after century upon century spent in the development of an alphabet (not to mention standardized spelling, which is a dirty trick in my book, Shakespeare didn't have to contend with it), what I'd like to know is this:  After all those centuries spent in the development of an alphabet, are we going back to hieroglyphics, pic by pic?

along for the ride
this lovely May morning
reading every sign
and ad in sight -
the curse of literacy

How is it that a road becomes etched into our minds as acid draws upon an artist’s copper plate, building upon itself in detail after detail until its familiarity clings to us as water to the body?

There was nothing at all remarkable about this road; it led through a rural neighborhood where people I had never met lived their lives it seemed only during the day, as their only evidence at those late hours in which I cruised like a submarine would be the occasional glimmer of a dim kitchen light. At times a streetlight would find the sleek skin and chrome of a new car, or a skinny tree which had been planted in the center of someone’s yard, trashcans neatly arranged and ready for the morning pickup run.

But this is the thinnest of veneers, for it is only when we are poised for transcendence that the woodland gods of the night will emerge from inside the evanescent landscape and present their world to us intact in their firm hands.

Each night and all that summer after the factory noise lay miles behind me on the graveyard shift, I would walk alone on the long road home. The stillness and each fine detail of shadow and scent was exquisite and I never tired of this walk which invited me into its realm whenever I chose to be attentive.

At first I walked briskly, shy of becoming known to another life that lived beside me in the night.

About half way home there was a barn that had been built many years before on a small hilltop surrounded by field. Its secret life lay hidden during the day when its wide doors were opened and daylight was allowed to penetrate its interior.

When the moon was full on these walks, the sloping field behind the barn would flow in a calm ocean of tremulous light. At times the moon’s great celestial weight appeared to rest there in the sky on invisible scaffolds made only of sound latticed into the most gossamer of structures by crickets’ voices venting out of the cool wet grass.

On nights such as these when I lingered to participate, the darkness would rise inside me like a slowly ebbing tide, filling me up with the silt of its motion, replacing me in a gentle erasure.

On one particular night, I paused to watch the moon weave its light over the field and the barn. Each line and scar on the weathered boards etched in by shadows now became veins and arteries; the texture of its clapboards, strange sinews of muscle. In the black void of its one window, an essence pulled at a chord inside me that I could not name though I had ached for a very long time to recognize.

It was a transfiguration that I wanted, though before the self could be launched away as a heavy ship achieves its true buoyancy, it would need to be freed of the many lines that were still attached to it in layer upon layer of thought. Indeed my ship was burdensome, ungainly, and ill-fitted for sleek passage. What it envied was a thin, liquid impermanence that could move among the shadows of the night’s dream unhampered by my gravity that could only claw at the door to be let in.

I stood there waiting for the awkward galleon to slide down its ways and begin the transformation, but it never did. For only on that one night did all the mysterious entities conspire to frame a window through which I had no eyes to look. This I mistook then as a blindness in the soul, and as I watched the mist and the moon invite the field and barn into its willing circle, it occurred to me in a flash of insight that the ache of remaining merely at the edges and never to be grasped in the "gods’ firm hands" had grown out of a deep melancholy I’d wrestled with since adolescence, and probably even earlier in childhood.

And now it was as visible as if it were made of flesh as I was, disarming me by its immutable presence out of which the sentient skeleton of an entire life had been slowly constructed.

"Let’s be clear. This was not, this is not a longing for death. No, nothing could be further from the truth," I told myself as I stood there alone on the hill. This was its ironic gift to me for having failed in the end at what was doomed from the start, a feverish hunger to know the "things in themselves" and the profound erasure that dwelled somewhere in the space behind Rilke’s shifting curtain, a hunger to move through the world like water, to go deeper, even down into the gaps between quarks, if that was where being and essence began.

After the gears in my temporal clock began to grind forward again, I looked at the lone window whose Cyclops eye now dryly offered only a harsh and ordinary silence both within and without. I realized I had a home to go to and a young boy whose sleeping face needed one more gaze to complete the timeless cycle of his day, and a wife to whom I could not confess the sin I had just torn out of my head on Hansonville Road.

Wielding his sword
he flayed the old god
wide open
and then hid his eyes
from the blaze of its stars

Fall 1997, Summer 2001

SUMMER SOLSTICE
Marjorie Buettner 

the night is empty
of everything but these thoughts
flooding over like hard rain
washing me down stream
to pool so close to your door
this house that hosts only wind

I have breathed the wind
taking it into myself
when nothing but this would fit
I have tasted rain
when it is my time to grow
will you pick me--this wild rose

only the rose knows
what to give and take away
on a summer solstice night
and stars remember
how many wishes were cast
to release an empty heart

SIJO

throughout the night voices
babble in adjacent rooms

emergency vehicles scream
up and down the streets of Rio

out the hotel window
the Christ statue glows softly

Elizabeth Howard

ARCTIC AIR
Gino Peregrini 

Forty-five to fifty years ago, one of my chores was to see the cattle had water. In bitter cold weather the ponds and stock tanks froze; I took an axe and chopped holes in the ice for them to drink from. In hot weather, I pumped water from the well into a stock tank for the cattle. Often the pump had to be primed. A one-pound coffee can (Folger?s or Maxwell House) was kept by the pump; I dipped water from the tank and poured it into the pump. When I first began to pump, the mechanism, being dry, screeched. A crowd of thirsty cattle is not especially polite, not even herefords with good breeding.

~!~

On the stage of the western sky
I see a bright new player.
This light outshines all older stars
in heavenly competition.
Orbiting from this marquee
above mere mortals - space station.

Day dawns gray, dark clouds drip rain;
the bushes blend into the sky.
It's hard to lift above this fog
ignoring all the puddles.
I know above this weather
a yellow sun still shines.

Kirsty Karkow 

THE COMING OF ANTS II
Edward Baranosky 

Among the veteran archaeologists, a story is passed around about a team of diggers that disappeared from a pre-Columbian site when there were driver ants in the vicinity after heavy rains. Only a few artifacts and scattered bones were found.

On the hardened faces,
Cracked by forgotten floods
Stone sun-wheels
Still expose discordances
In the passage of ages.

Evidence remains
On the edge of ruins
For missing time,
For an archaeology of grief
In a faint trace of voices.

It was the same
During the last cataclysm
At Pompeii,
Huddling against the marble
And the cool, familiar smell.

Statues with stained feet
Stand in our naked
Anonymous prints,
While divining proceedings
Interpret the planet's pulse.

When the first black wave
 of ants surge across the clearing
Consuming shadows -
Vipers, lizards, scorpions scurried
Away into silence.

VI AJE
John Bennett

Lock saw train room
dip sink true lag
o sleeve drip trail
key spins flash once
then dark

~!~

watching leaves fall
i consider
for the rest of my life
this little plan
poem by poem

all these years
in one house, one job
one town and in me-
too many changes to fathom
as i sweep away autumn leaves

in autumn sun
i sit on a bench
reading poems-
she is reading something too
the curls in her hair

Thomas P. Clausen

TANKA FOR JR
Gerard John Conforti

long is the silence
which haunts this room of mine
the unspoken voices
of walls, floors, and ceilings
which confine on this winter night

I do not know
how to bid farewell
in this aching heart of mine
I long for your voice
which has a silence of two of us

you've done so much for me
and how can I forget
your generous heart
which is loving like flowers
grown and blossoming this early morning

I have not heard your voice
which is an emptiness to me
if I could make up
all the pain I've caused you
I'd root up all the dandelions

I pace the empty rooms
of my beating heart
which hears only
the voices outside this room
the hammering voices of youth

there are many roads
leading through the forest
I don't know which to take
it's been that way for years
and the silence sings in the sparrow

POEMS ON THE NAMING OF PLACES
(After Wordsworth)
paul t conneally 

I
EMMA'S DELL

April morning
a small stream running
with a young man's speed
the sound of winter's water
through budding groves

city sunrise
she weaves between
still traffic
police sirens echo
building to building

walking
through the confusion
a leafless ash-tree

sitting
in the coffee-shop
dirt under her nails

alive to everything
songbirds vying with
a waterfall

neon signs
flick on and off
sidewalk daisies
swapping stories
with a policeman

a single cottage
on the distant mountain
bright green hawthorn
talking to shepherds
on this wild nook

August 2001

~!~

Hands
on the wheel
waving
no- one
in the distance

Pouring
another bowl
of cereal
has my future wife crossed
the street out of sight?

Brendan Duffin 

listen
to the stillness of the trees
at dusk
when all things are done I will
finish my tale's last chapter

leaning on my rake
I remember those days
of wine and roses
how little seems to be left
of the garden of our dreams

one gust of wind
and the morning mist starts
to undulate -
how strange that in the end
our words seem to drift apart

an empty can
rolling down the street
struck my feet -
how did we love to go out
in stormy weather long ago

this chestnut leaf
held against bright daylight
recalls the story
of such a warm embrace
one autumn years ago

november storm
the sand on the beach
adrift and hurting
I'll never forget the smell
of your skin under your coat

Fred Flohr

SPACE OCCASIONALS
Sanford Goldstein

I see 
in the death of others
how memory
falls into a niche,
becomes alien as cloud wisp

muse of these five lines
have you only a delicate mouth?
can't you mine,
mess up a soft green surface,
dynamite a stark, dark hole?

even 
my kid's dog
silent
in its long stretch
this end-of-autumn morning

those who sat
at the MacDonald
breakfast-time
six years ago
sit here today

how the kids
at the ecumenical
ran this way, that - 
sometimes they stopped and rested
to color Yeshua blue

~!~

nest flooded -
a finger on two eggs
I tip the water out
come back mother dove, father
dove, is that too much to ask

bronze ax lies where
it fell years ago
in basil, wild thyme
broken stone walls
of Hagia Triada

an amber vial:
perfume on mother’s dresser
high, high
I want it and 
I don’t want it

Ruth Holzer

full moon
snow falling
white night
strange dreams
this winter solstice

on hold
the unwanted four lane
through the mountain village
archaeological digs
Indian graves and artifacts

Elizabeth Howard

moths gather
at a window full of night,
I watch
for the water to boil -
tea to quiet the nerves

you touch my arm
saying, "we must speak
of this later" -
a barn swallow darts
and disappears

last night
was only a thing of the moment,
she will have me know -
from the cottage doorway
how wistful the out-of-tune piano

a russet sunlight
among the goldenrods
gone silver -
picking at threads
in this tapestry of regret

empty headed,
I lean and watch the snow
fall past the window -
for a moment
a world of wonder and peace

Larry Kimmel 

The traffic light speaks
with its reds, yellow, and green -
and we obey.
Yet in this matter of love
how can we know what is safe?

How ordinary it is
to lick the honey
that dripped on my hand.
But then, at the first tasting,
thoughts of you flood over me.

Resting on a bench,
I watch people passing by.
And my favorites?
Mothers with their new-borne babes,
and old couples hand in hand.

I stop just in time,
choking on unspoken words.
Now I remember!
My daughter's revealing blouse -
years ago was her mother's.

Ah, such joys in spring,
unlike the days of my youth -
for while I've not changed,
once clothes were meant to conceal
what now they often reveal!

Four, three, two, one - zoom!
The motorcycles race off,
ten seconds and done.
Though there is a joy in speed,
I prefer slower pleasures.

Two arms and two legs -
all the ordinary parts -
eyes and hair and smile.
Why is it then, I wonder,
that I think only of you?

David L. Kirkland    

~!~

mid-summer heat wave
everything dying except
for the weeds
this fragile bloom of love
how can it survive?

outgrowing its pot
snake plant is toppling over
from lack of soil
I scramble to keep
my own balance

last night's
talk of angels
I awaken
to the rustle of wings -
pigeons at my window

sampling
this year's strawberries
from the market
how much better they tasted -
the ones picked by moonlight

Angela Leuck 

lovers sprawled
in the cool of night
on prickly grass
moon casting shadows
a hundred leaves on skin

cricket wings
shrill rhythms in the night
remind me
hot summer days
will soon be over

sunflowers
droop heavy heads
leave puddles
of pollen around the vase
a still life in yellow

water spills
over large boulder
hummingbird
hovers near to drink
wings in a whir

a bumble bee
probes blossom
after blossom,
like the beating of my pulse,
it keeps a rhythm of its own

Claudia Logerquist 

in his backyard
paintbrush clenched
in his teeth
he paints streaks
for swallows in flight

in the summer
of his final madness
Vincent's last painting . . .
a flock of crows
above a runway of wheat

how can I dwell
on having lost you
when this little girl
so badly needs attention
to her scraped knee

the stalks of long grass
nod in the summer haze
and mixed in out of synch
are the flushed faces of children
playing hard at hide and seek

Giovanni Malito

tattered white coat
seven years ago
i left home
to make another
a bird changing nests

all the more because
i feel at home on this earth
my heart yearns for one
oak in whose shade to find rest
leaves golden in autumn

Giselle Maya 

WORKPLACE SERIES
Thelma Mariano 

another paper
wrested from the copy machine
all wrinkled and torn
I wonder who will rescue me
from the repetition of days

beyond smiles
and small talk in the hallways
a restrained silence
imagine if people dare
to say what's on their minds

a flow of paper
from in basket to out
if I close my eyes
the relentless waves
pulling me to sea

dinner parties
where the wine flows all night
between chit-chat
the stolen glances
at my watch

my worst fear
to be laid off at fifty
now here I am
planning to go
at forty-nine

in this wind
waves splash against the sea wall
ever higher
like me no longer willing
to be contained

WE'LL SLEEP
June Moreau

We'll sleep a dancing sleep
on the foamy crest
of an ocean wave
kissed and kissed again
by joyful dolphins.

We'll sleep
the sun-drift sleep
of pollen
drifting, drifting
with the drifting wind.

We'll sleep with mountain arms
around the puma
and feel
the living warmth 
of its golden fur.

We'll sleep
with swarms
and swarms of wild bees
in a cloud-forest
of orchids.

We'll sleep there
in the meadow
where speckled eggs
are hidden
in a lark's dreamy nest.

We'll sleep
in the everywhere blue
and know
the sun's everlasting path
across the sky.

SIX TANKA
Carol Purington 

My crooked fingers -
for years wearing the pearl ring
my sister
forgot to take with her
when she died

I can live with
crowded shelves, bulging drawers
in this one room
as long as I don't hold on
to everything I have ever felt

Across the lawn
the uneven steps of a child
young enough
to run at life, to run from life -
I smile at all she has to learn

The child-sized table -
we turned it boat-side up to float
across our playroom
    even then I knew that stories
    must be lived

Eavesdropping
on a song the robin
gives to his mate
this book of love letters I hold
also written to someone else

The garden darkens
into November's shadow
The last tomatoes
are lost among frosted weeds
I will not live on memories

~!~

flood of sunlight
did I awaken with you
that summer morning?
spilling leftover stars
onto the treetops where we slept.

birds of my hand
take flight to your branches
in a great rise of wings.
they carry my once quiet voice,
these thousand tiny poems.

how can I sleep?
my thoughts are lifting 
from the pillow
traveling north to your house
weaving the threads of your blanket.

Claudia Retter

Wrinkles on the skin
remind me of time's passage
year by year travelled
long distances renewing
spirit and waving goodbye.

Stray fungi grow
on the broken window frame
beside my bed
watery smell swells as if
a corpse in the river.

R K Singh

a young woman
wears her hair in a scarf
just like her mother
she sits contentedly
with her husband and her tea

the ten-year-old
counts cats in the living room
new year's day
a man and a woman
compare corners of their lives

waiting patiently
in an empty rented house
I read histories
of a place far away
that was once known as home

when a heart breaks
it breaks open to the world
a cut flower
catches the fading light
of an autumn afternoon

Marc Thompson     

LIVING IN THE G-7
Marc Thompson                         

she said her mother
will turn forty-nine
this summer
the sound of an oboe
drifts in the afternoon

aching for food
on the evening news
someone's sister

a hot wind
crosses the parking lot
at twilight
sons and daughters
gather at the mall

sculpture garden -
a bearded man
layered in watchcaps

fetishes
call the moon to rise
in Hispaniola
the ancient gods
watch us from the night

yellow leaf
tumbles between us
   song birds departed
a crane    high up and rasping
punctuates our strained words

parsnips uprooted
separated and exposed
air nipping the skin
   I walk away
   our harvest done

alone
among pines we planted
a family ago
I savor the touch
of supple limbs

~!~

your jacket - collar points
and back pleats
high fashion
my shirt - worn cuffs
and split seams

a tenderness
of northern lights
shimmers green on blue -
the moon colours
wheat-fields

Joanna M. Weston 

We refuse all but
Monosyllabic multi-
Layered mood-loaved
Words that sweeten
Homewood worthy of
A firmament
We table insolence
Using our own
Known syllables
Claimed less than adored
We pencil each other in-
To day squares,
Level-best the consequence
Of mood stairs wavering
In situ comedias res
Open to unformed agendas
Plural as we are
Drawn down to uniform
Approach intact
To muse upon impingement
Clear as new divinity

BEFORE
Sheila  E. Murphy

Netherskens elapse in memory as points
Along the segment of a line
Recalled for practicality as substance:
Pale petal after petal to be skipped across
Then tarnished as a spoon
Left to the atmosphere
Of morning after morning light
Away from common view,
From actuarial predictions left to
The receding wings of butterfly
For just a chaliced while
Alive and loved
As beatific as thin aqua in a film of sky

BLUE SHIRT
Sheila  E. Murphy

First time worn, a fragrant cloth
Smooth-shaven face to kiss
A moment of this morning’s own
Inelegance by compare, the few
Young glints of sunlight on his hair,
Small conversation architected
In the way a bolt of silk might seem

His eyes have shadows of missed sleep,
Hands full of innocence,
This day will open on the routine
Intersection of chemistries, there will be
Shared, unshared analysis within
The context weather rides, should one
In conscience work on days
That hover on perfection?
 

Each day the body is a found thing
Planted on known mind, each day
The cyclical arrangement learns and then unlearns,
A recitation hastens consciousness,
Parts of selves join, then release,
Biography informs specific moments
With narration to go home to
Possibly in perpetuity, until not one new thing
Is learned, forecast, or pointed out
In isolation, and the fabric of a thing
Distinguishes an essence
From protection that allows
The same to seem a self

APPARENCIES
Sheila  E. Murphy

Even glossing over night, the twill comes vastly as a broom of lace across

Whittling conveyance of a spruced, interpretive massage in contrast to the wooded blue tetrameter defining lines against and lines in rows

The parallelogram of inference requires no moat

Stillness suppressed recedes into the negative tangential mauve kissed into being by naïve few cinders

Touching down bemuses stature of the rare breed left low on the horizon

Plenitude seems often soft

A wizened hue, a staunch, young plunge into headrest at the close of day

The tocked-off metronome that follows vigor in assembling of an evening meal

Response time varies even among triplets stung by fated views

Pronunciation damages the vineyards now imbued by clues

Retort after receivership of repertoire

In moments, closeness is marred by temple vest

The priest has shoesprings while amending tables of equations that define an attitude

One ceases wearing blue

One blends into midnight stowed with overwear and fibrous wood unevenly exuded

Birth implies retort of psychic offspring who will be fluffed into less realistic carnage as to offer sacrifice

Pure amendment safely washes custom

Square meters of breath collide with grief as yet unspoken, even in the gluey margins where opinion lies in state

Commencement always fortifies what would be naked to sure vision

 Nine of ten imaginary blasphemies decry the magus on a person’s mind after infancy has rescued some incessant video about to be rewound

APIERO
Dawna Rae

Apiero, we lived near the crossroads
in a hotel, mollusked and petrified
it was a leaking aquarium of life
when you went picking flowers
the fates waited by the west side
and you went hole-shouting there
to lay your fears in dirt

The caught you
and when I looked
we were fish out of water.
what you said to the worms that day, was this:

I am scared I am not wrong
I am scared that no one believes me
I am afraid that I am right about this world.