Some of the best poems you'll read - Perigee

"For Billy Boy"
by James Curtis Dunlap
From the land of many dead Mexicans
did the Cowboy King arrive.
To the crumbled gates of Babylon
with a lone star in his eye.
Atop his head an ivory hat,
an eagle feather in its band.
Stuck his finger in the dirt
and said, "There's oil in them thar sand!"
He waved his hat to the crowd
and claimed he had made them free.
While stealthy buzzards circled above
and missiles rained from the sea.
And all the black hats shake in their boots
because there's a new sheriff in town.
And all the men sent of to die
give a special salute
for their corporate clown.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Butterface"
by Jason Lee Huskey
She crosses the street with stilettos
staccato on the wet asphalt, her special
undergarments digging creases into her thighs
premature to her genetic endowment. She stands at the
six-and-nine intersect, adjusting her ta-tas for pa-pas
and thirty-dollar blowjobs. Some johns pass her up
as they pull away, thinking she's painted up like
a cop hunting down cheating husbands and dying
fools with no time for the formal, legal prostitution
called romance; but she's no vice snatch. She's painted
that way because God practiced a first-draft abstract
on her canvas, and it got published anyway.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Home Opener"
by Jason Lee Huskey
The silver bra hangs on the old oak's branch
like a misplaced ornament from a porn star's
Christmas tree; the picket fence smiles gap-toothed
at our gaping awe, knowing something we do not.
The sounds of slapping erupt, the beat of their passionate
war, their sound to signal the hundred air raids of foul
language and reminders of prenuptial arrangements.
The Hendersons are known to make a scene;
heck, they even pass out a flyer to new homeowners
about them, but nothing can prepare a person for it.
Bob McCreedy's family just came home from Wednesday night
mass, and they send the kids inside awhile; Old Miss Doris,
the Venus fly-perve, finishes tipping the paperboy, when a high-heeled
hooker boot skids up her sidewalk; and I'm out walking my dog on the
edge of my neighbor's first-prize lawn, when they take to the street,
half-naked and cussing like I've never heard them curse before.
Tonight, one man in the whole of our world
refuses to stop and watch them fight and fornicate
in the middle of the street. Barry Annasomasia and his
Peterbilt 385 have just completed a run from Richmond
and want to be home in time for the first pitch.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

I love love
but find people
distracting.
"Libra Man"
by John Irvine
My socks are
geometrically arranged
in colour gradients,
washing on the line
is pegged out in order
of garment type
in descending size
left to right.
Sex is vital
marriage isn't
and committment is
for other people.
I straighten
other folk's pictures
and become irritated
when they can't see
my point of view.
I'm only diplomatic
because I abhor
confrontation,
and I have an opinion
on everything.
My mind is tidy
pigeon-holed
ordered
sorted
biased
predilected
pre-decided
and indecisive.
But I'm pleasant enough
fair to the eye

have a well-modulated voice.
I make a fine omelette
and can hold a tune.
I write pretty poetry
drink a lot
and have an over-eating
under-exercising problem,
but that's OK
I take prescription drugs
for that.
I smile when I'm angry
and cry alone.
Yes
mainly I cry
alone.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Night Wanderers"
by Christopher Karl Konrad
"We walked all the way from Pinjarra
to Mandurah once and slept
along on the way." the boy said.
Staggered might have been a more apt verb to use
blind, paralytic, off his face—
'walked' was a forgiving euphemism.
He belongs to Generation Y,
population unrecognisable, non-citizens
inhabitants of the spaces between the hours
unheeded unseen un-izens
wending their way
no particular destination;
rudderless ships in a hollow night.
"We walked back to the house," he said,
"but couldn't find a key to get in
so we slept on a trampoline."
In other words flaked out, fucked, crashed
lifestyle of the Vandals.
Citizens, at least, have a state
but where do these homeless hombres belong?
Denizens of the dusk
un-izens of the small hours.
Space fillers, bitumen for bedding
teenager bush shrub mia mias.
Mild mannered malingerers of the inebriated
and uninebriated kind
desperately marking time
'til they find rest
in some welcoming womb bed
a place to call home.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Illusion"
by Maria Lupinacci
Maya, bare-bellied and toe-stepping
across the sand, her fingers wearing ten rings
like fireflies against the dark.
Men, she says, are mutated imps captured
during the Fall. Their tails raised
in discord, their mouths big and wanting
to swallow you; to have you live
within the fissures of their pocked skin only
to later excrete you as waste.
And women, they are snakes. Not the biblical
snakes ferried from hell: Eve's overused
symbolism of tempting fate, but snakes
in their natural sense: deftly quiet until
the mouse is in reach.
When asked of children, she shivers
before she speaks: Not all angels appear
in human shapes.
She waves them, those rings
on her fingers,
as if they were prizes to be proud of,
or gifts bestowed onto her by the deities
she adores. Maya motions you:
Walk away,
walk away.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Late Summer Afternoon in Southern Kentucky"
by Chris Michalski
in the backyard hang two yellow towels
on a rusting wire, harassed then
abandoned by the wind. in the corner
of the garden the geraniums are fading
or have faded, their wilted heads
reflecting the soft obstinacy of all living
matter. this is where you are—where
the colorlessness of the afternoon makes
the heat that much more unbearable.
where waiting inspires a lustful
reverie you're almost unable to resist . . .
later on you see the twilight reach its
pained climax on the aluminum foil—
laced windows on the other side of the street.
a stray dog goes on with his business
in the alley, in his ignorance enormous
and self-possessed. suddenly there's hardly
any light left at all. the remains of the
day's monotony settle on the burnt lawns
and neglected flower beds. like everyone
else i give up hoping for a sign or
visitation, peace or a little relief, swallow a
half quart of whiskey on the front porch
gulp after painful gulp.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"End of Season"
by Chris Michalski
the tattered reception tents and bamboo umbrellas are pushed
by the wind into the listless sea. a few abandoned boats rock
in dock like electric cradles. along the blurry stretch of beach front
the high-rises aren't lit up anymore, have lost their sterile appeal.
bats flee the search light's groping beam. a skateboarder spits
through a chain-linked fence onto the blackening beach.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"The Old Quarry"
by Caroline Misner
They have made a mockery of this,
building these boardwalks of old weathered planks
so that our soles may never touch
the shiftless silt that once resided here.
The splinters protest our approach,
they heave and groan beneath each footfall;
they seem to call—
don't step here, step instead upon
the hammered stone, the ground,
the dust that crackles underfoot; climb
these boulders that erode their layers
like the skin of the snakes that
lay hidden here.
The walls are not the canyons I recall,
nor the ravines that meandered
between these humps of stone,
dwarfing the foliage that split
the abandoned granite blocks;
they now inhabit these ancient bones,
so proud of themselves, though
they have accomplished nothing.
The grandeur of this place has been sanded down,
a colossus dulled and drab,
even in midsummer when all the hues
spiraled in shadowed kaleidoscope
when I lay down upon this ragged slab
like a human sacrifice
and turned my face up toward the sun.
Even the trees that crest the rim where the sky
and quarry meet, have brandished their age,
bristling above this ragged crater,
now filled with moss and swaying reeds.
Blooms of amber, white and fuchsia splay
like mist below the rust tipped stalks,
casting whispers in the air—
water has turned the ground to marsh,
the boardwalk a sheath of wood,

neither a martyr nor a saint.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Totem"
by Jeff M Phelps
There are dragonflies about me,
Snatching insects in swirling dust.
I'm grateful; the flies are bad out here.
One swoops a bug off my arm
But I flail at him—
I didn't expect him so close,
And he is strange.
He and his wingman flit in a hot breeze, hunting.
Fearless he lands for a moment on my pack;
Who considers whom?
I slide into my armor and check my weapon.
The wind is picking up.
The dragonflies disappear.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Fragments"
by Jeff M Phelps
Quicksilver thoughts go slipping from my head—
The journey from mind to page is far
Too long for their fleeting spirit to endure.
Brilliance beyond capacity?
Just a poor attention span.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Man and Dog"
by Amanda Reynolds
The homeless man
who sits at the exit of I-75 and Archer
now has a dog.
At least, I think he's homeless,
and the rest of the story
is debatable.
Did he steal it?
Who'd give a homeless man a dog?
What dog would be so dim
as to choose this guy?
In Pittsburgh, one homeless man
made fifty thousand last year.
He played a trumpet and Christmas
was especially rewarding.
For months I've hated him,
the man that is.
Air conditioning blasting
and check engine light on
I waited at a red light one day.
His sign said Please Help.
I tried to look like I wasn't watching.
He threw a soda bottle ten feet
into the grass.
Hedonism:
a shiny car that goes faster
than it needs to,
fresh fruit, television.
Or: clean clothes, a roof,
expensive dog food in a can.
So, at midnight
I'm at the grocery store buying
rubber squeakers, chicken and rice pellets,
pig ears, flea cream in a plastic tube.
And I'll have to wait until morning
to see him look at a shopping bag
filled with offerings

since the drifter takes his dog
somewhere else in the dark.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Pasture on Sunday"
by Amanda Reynolds
There is Zen-like peace
in the chewing of cud,
the cut-and-shuffle of teeth and endive.
Baubles of spit settle near mushrooms;
daisies garnish a vegetable dish.
My dog stops chasing crickets,
suddenly enlightened by
two oracles of indolent bovine eyes.
What passes between them
is creature fervor, mammalian ardor,
tail swish and rumbling halt.
The rest of the Angus herd
stamps platitudes into terra firma.
On Monday the sheep come.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

I. Prologue
"Black and White Nude"
by Amanda Reynolds
I'd like to paint your spine with umber,
sprinkle your back with obvious words:
tactile, nubile, nude,
label, hollow, poet,
plunder.
I'm no longer an aesthetic deadbeat. If only you smoked,
patchouli ashes falling from your fingers,
I'd taste the ground you lie on.
I wish that you were
fire-engine red.
II. Afterward
I wish I'd never asked for wine when you were only made
of water. Are my pinks too close to grigio?
My milk too sour yellow?
Your still-life is lacking all and any
verve.
No, the shadows the light threw were not enough.
You didn't feel as warm as you once looked.
Suffice to say, you'd never
have interested me, except
in black and white.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Bus, 4 a.m."
by Amanda Reynolds
Just about now, when you forget to care
whether it's early or late,
the most unusual riders appear.
The dozers and shoppers, the reader and preacher
are gathering
like sprouts on a day before rain.
In my notebook I scribble them down:
The amputee lost his leg in a duel 150 years ago.
He told me so.
The man with the bible—not a preacher of course,
an editor and grammarian with his latest project.
The reader? She's hiding the joint
she's rolling in the pages of Gone With the Wind.
Someone said
write what you know,
but there's no sense in this.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Exposure"
by Tracy M Rogers
And I lie here, broken, day after day,
on this desolate stage of gray marble,
blinded and warmed
by illuminations from above.
Legs apart, thighs elevated—
bare and barren—
I am open to the gaze of passing strangers.
Faintly mocking the spectacle I've become,
they file past, staring
at the tiny patch of pubic hair
offered as art and obscenity—
save a few bloodthirsty souls who,
desiring more still,
stop for a closer glimpse
of the pain-stricken eyes
and the secrets within.
The brazen and the perverse pause
for an ephemeral touch
when the guard has turned away,
fighting the urge
to slide their gluttonous hands
between porcelain thighs
and tangle callused fingers
in silken auburn curls.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Magnolia and Maxine Heading South"
by Tom Sheehan
Every time the red Corvette passed a
construction site, Magnolia tooted the horn and
waved wildly, tossing and flipping her hair in
the breeze or the draft, bouncing herself around
in the Corvette seat.
"They'll think about it all day and all night,
honey," she said to Maxine, "and they'll tell their
buddies about it over drinks tonight, sitting up
there at the bar shooting their own brand of
dreams and hopes and good wishes and shit and
shinola all rolled into one. Way they do things.
They'll have a nice night thinking 'bout what it
coulda been today we out there thumbing when
that little Firebird flew on by us like some
heav'nly star chariot, them two goddamn
angels sittin' proud up in it like they wuz
riper'n shit under a three holer. Most of them
deserve it, hunks a men all at sweating up this
world of ours, making it nicer right from the
ground up."
When Magnolia one time caught Max looking
sideways at her, she simply said, in a
straightforward voice, "I'm real, girl. Real as
they come," and she laughed again at another
inside joke, as if life was one great big show.
Once, about to pass a huge chrome-laden
Kenworth rig, baby-blue with white trim, wide
as a mortgage and hauling a long-body trailer,
her red hair flying like a special Triple A road
standard, but one without any admonitions, she
whipped her dress top down so her gorgeous
breasts beamed proudly in the sunlight. She
tooted the horn as she went slowly past the rig,
smiling at the driver almost falling out of his
side window, his face round, his arm huge.
"That'll take him from here to California and
back, hon, even if he's hauling shrimp out and

lettuce back. That'll take him in and out of a
hundred truck stops between here and next
year, hon. Guarantee, if you ever bump into him,
he'll be talking about us, how we passed him on
the highway, the top down and the jugs high and
proper for fitting. I guaroantee it," she added,
saying it like the guy in the Cajun cooking
commercials a few years back.
A mile down the highway they could still hear
the repeating and long moaning diesel sound of
the trucker's horn, like the whistle on an old
nightline freight train hauling down through the
southern plantations a load of longing and
missed chances around a long curve in the
roadbed and out of sight forever.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"The Sugaring"
by Tom Sheehan
My father hid his diabetes
in black shoe tops. At night
he peeled off bloody socks
where veins found short circuiting.
My mother bought white cotton
socks by the dozens, band aid
throwaways after work or Sunday
best, after his heart pumped
its way down long lean legs
deep Nicaraguan paths had known,
every baseball diamond Boston
shook under red August skies,
who-knows-what in Shanghai.
Later on it went topsy-turvy
in eyeballs' secret caves,
refracting light into bones,
porous humors going to sponge,
into space where ideas lose out.
When he sat to peel his socks
from their red-wounding rounds,
checking the salvage of the day
like a crow beside the macadam,
or thumbed a brailled king of
hearts or a diamond five
before he pegged me off the board,
I used to congratulate myself
for not saying anything to him.
He'd shuck off such words just
as he would an uncomfortable
compliment: they paid nothing,
they did nothing, they sat on the
ear like old, old promises.
Just piles of junk, he'd say,

the letter of vocabularies
and sore intentions. Even now
at cribbage or haberdashery,
seeing apod men humbled to knee,
clothesline flush with socks
as if a semaphore is working,
I remember how he crossed one
leg over the other, fingered
a sock, slowly peeled the skin
away from his angry feet,
casting off evening's surrender flag,
like an Indian,
godless,
from his coals.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Small Boats at Aveiro"
(from a painting set in Portugal by Peter Rogers, Nahant marine artist)
by Tom Sheehan
They sit at Aveiro by the river's mouth,
Their bows scattered as compass points,
Small scoops on an interminably huge sea
Rising to the ever imagined yet illumined line
Of sight where the gallant Genovese
Fell off the known world.
They are not
Deserted, though faintly cold for oarsmen
Who walk down this beach behind me,
Stomachs piqued and perched with wine,
Salted hands still warm with women, mouths
Rich of imagery and signals.
Sons are left
Who later come down this beach
To these small boats topping the Atlantic,
Gunnels but bare inches from the Father
of Oceans, coursed to the stalked anchorage
by thin ropes and a night of tidal pull.
At Aveiro I stand
Between commotion and that other, silence;
Inhaling spills of kitchens, olla podridas
Riding the ocean air with a taut ripeness,
Early bath scents, night's wet mountings
And varieties peeled and scattered to dawn,
And see boats move the way sea and earth
Move against a distant cloud.
I question hammer
And swift arc that drove pared raw poles
Of their moorings into the sea floor, picture
A mustachioed Latin god laughing at his day's
Work while waving to a lone woman on the strand;
And see her, urged from kitchen or bed, in clothing
Gray and somber, near electric in her movement
And scale of mystery, eye the god eye to eye.
Such is the mastery of eyes.

Inland, before dawn hits,
An oarsman, tossed awake, knows an old callus where
Atlantic sends his swift messages, for up through
Toss of heel and calf, through thew of thigh
And spinal matter, radiant in a man's miles of nerves,
These small boats, gathered at Aveiro,
Tell of their loneliness.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Born to Wear the Rags of War"
by Tom Sheehan
The day had gone over hill, but that still, blue light remained,
cut with a gray edge, catching corners rice paddies lean out of.
In the serious blue brilliance of battle they'd become comrades
becoming friends, just Walko and Williamson and Sheehan
sitting in the night drinking beer cooled by Imjin River waters
in August of '51 in Korea.
Three men drably clad,
but clad in the rags of war.
Stars hung pensive neon. Mountain-cool silences were being earned,
hungers absolved, a ponderous god talked to. Above silences,
the ponderous god's weighty as clouds, elusive as soot on wind,
yields promises. They used church keys to tap cans, lapped up
silence rich as missing salt, fused their backbones to good earth
in a ritual old as labor itself,
these men clad in the rags of war.
Such an August night gives itself away, tells tales, slays the rose
in reeling carnage, murders sleep, sucks moisture out of Mother Earth,
fires hardpan, sometimes does not die itself just before dawn,
makes strangers in one's selves,
those who wear the rags of war.
They had been strangers beside each other, caught in the crush
of tracered night and starred flanks, accidents of men drinking beer
cooled in the bloody waters where brothers roam forever, warriors come
to that place by fantastic voyages, carried by generations
of the persecuted or the adventurous, carried in sperm body, dropped
in the spawning, fruiting womb of America,
and born to wear the rags of war.
Walko, reincarnate of the Central European, come of land lovers
and those who scatter grain seed, bones like logs, wrists strong
as axle trees, fair and blue-eyed, prankster, ventriloquist who talked
off mountainside, rumormonger for fun, heart of the hunter,
hide of the herd, apt killer,
born to wear the rags of war.
Williamson, faceless in the night, black set on black,
only teeth like high piano keys, eyes that captured stars,
fine nose got from Rome through rape or slave bed unknown

generations back, was cornerback tough, graceful as ballet dancer
(Walko's opposite), hands that touched his rifle the way a woman's
touched, or a doll, or one's fitful child caught in fever clutch,
came sperm-tossed across the cold Atlantic, some elder Virginia—
bound bound in chains, the Congo Kid come home,
the Congo Kid, alas, alas,
born to wear the rags of war.
Sheehan, reluctant at trigger-pull, dreamer, told deep lies
with dramatic ease, entertainer who wore shining inward a sum
of ghosts forever from the cairns had fled; heard myths
and the promises in earth and words of songs he knew he never knew,
carried scars vaguely known as his own, shared his self with saint
and sinner, proved pregnable to body force,
but born to wear the rags of war
—Walko: We lost the farm. Someone stole it. My father
loved the fields, sweating. He watched grass grow by starlight,
the moon slice at new leaves. The mill's where he went for work,
in the crucible, drawing on the green vapor, right in the heat of it,
the miserable heat. My mother said he started dying the first day.
It wasn't the heat or green vapor did it, just going off to the mill,
grassless, tight in. The system took him. He wanted to help.
It took him, killed him a little each day, just smothered him.
I kill easy. Memory does it. I was born for this, to wear
these rags. The system gives, then takes away. I'll never
go piecemeal like my father.
These rags are my last home.
—Williamson: Know why I'm here? I'm from North Ca'lina,
sixteen and big and wear size fifteen shoes and my town
drafted me 'stead of a white boy. Chaplain says he git me home.
Shit! Be dead before then. Used to hunt home, had to eat
what was fun runnin' down. Brother shot my sister
and a white boy in the woods. Caught them skinnin' it up
against a tree, run home and kissed Momma goodbye,
give me his gun. Ten years, no word. Momma cries about
both them all night. Can't remember my brother's face.
Even my sister's. Can feel his gun, though, right here
in my hands, long and smooth and all honey touch. Squirrel's
left eye never too far away for that good old gun.
Them white men back home know how good I am, and send me here,
put these rags on me. Two wrongs! Send me too young

and don't send my gun with me. I'm goin' to fix it all up,
gettin' home too. They don't think I'm coming back,
them white men. They be nervous when I get back, me and that
good old gun my brother give me,
and my rags of war.
—Sheehan: Stories are my food. I live and lust on them.
Spirits abound in the family, indelible eidolons; the O'Siodhachain
and the O'Sheehaughn carved a myth. I wear their scars in my soul,
know the music that ran over them in lifetimes, songs' words,
and strangers that are not strangers: Muse Devon abides with me,
moves in the blood and bag of my heart, whispers tonight:
Corimin is in my root cell, oh bright beauty of all
that has come upon me, chariot of cheer, carriage of Cork
where the graves are, where my visit found the root
of the root cell—Johnny Igoe at ten running ahead
of the famine that took brothers and sisters, lay father down;
sick in the hold of ghostly ship I have seen from high rock
on Cork's coast, in the hold heard the myths and music
he would spell all his life, remembering hunger and being alone
and brothers and sisters and father gone and mother
praying for him as he knelt beside her bed that hard morning
when Ireland went away to the stern. I know that terror
of hers last touching his face. Pendalcon's grace
comes on us all at the end. Johnny Igoe came alone at ten
and made his way across Columbia, got my mother who got me
and told me when I was twelve that one day Columbia
would need my hand and I must give. And tonight I say,
"Columbia, I am here with my hands
and with my rags of war."
I came home alone. And they are my brothers.
Walko is my brother. Williamson is my brother.
Muse Devon is my brother. Corimin is my brother.
Pendalcon is my brother.
God is my brother.
I am a brother to all who are dead,
we all wear the rags of war.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Learning to be Invisible"
by Linda Simone
From chickadees and crows I take my lessons:
how to approach without setting
off flurries of feathers, alarms
from tiny throats— all to be able
to snatch a closer look, study
brown and white striations
or rainbows arcing ebony wings,
note if a beak
is tan or yellow, blunt or sharp,
notice the walk or hop
watch as persistence yields
a worm or piece of straw for nest-building.
I'm learning to keep moving,
arms swinging steady and wide
This gets me quite close—
except for cardinals, red crests
always at risk.
No matter how silently I glide,
they stop their song, fly
to highest branches
and away.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Redemption 1959"
by Linda Simone
Rows of green soldiers at parade rest
lived in our kitchen drawer until called to duty—
the booty my mother took home
from trips to the A & P—one stamp for every ten cents spent.
My mission: to lick and stick battalions into quicksaver books.
These were the stuff of dreams:
Coleman lanterns, Kitchen-Aid mixers
and toys, yes, toys . . . All ours for the trading.
Filling books I learned math: how many
more for that badminton set?
When we marched to the redemption center, I
learned reality. Sorry, please choose something else . . .
Anything worth having meant many more books.
So mom would save, and I would lick
sheets of stamps monogrammed with the red S & H.
My tongue still tastes
those sweet gummed backs.
But I can't recall a single thing
those stamps provided
that redeemed us.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"The Driver's License Mug Shot"
by Randy Stark
The medications increased Papaw's absent-mindedness,
But he hated waiting worse:
Restaurants, movies, the post office,
Even the cancer was stringing him along.
When the time came to renew his driver's license
He knew that would mean more waiting.
His anxiety increased
And he took even more meds.
He read about a new licensing office opening
In a small mountain town a half hour drive north.
Eager for business, they treated him like royalty.
He joked with the young clerks like they were his grandkids.
Grass doesn't grow on a busy street.
Although he'd forgotten to change out of his bedroom slippers,
He still had eyes like a hawk,
If the hawk wore horn rimmed glasses with thick lenses.
He was in and out in 15 minutes.
That's what makes the mug shot museum quality—
Daring the camera say him nay—he'd beaten the wait.
He strode out and across the new parking lot
In his white socks and bedroom slippers.
And because he forgot the route he'd taken,
He got lost several times on his way home,
Left turn signal blinking all the way.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Jim Morrison Grows his Last Beard"
for David Hillenburg
by Adam Tavel
In college I made it two weeks before
a roommate gave me an old razor.
You look homeless, he said.
There's soap and a fresh towel
on the back of the john.
Then in '67 after the first
album I let it go.
Thirteen beers into a show
at the Whiskey I made the band
vamp in E minor
while I scraped my cheeks
against the microphone.
I only keep flashes from the stage,
the moments I refused to dance.
Before blacking out on a mat of cables
I heard a girl in the front row
scream at her boyfriend.
He's sick, she yelled,
Can't you see he's sick?
So after the extra weight,
the move to No. 17 Rue Beautreillis
I grew it thick, even when
it bristled past my top lip.
Now when I walk in the evenings
and browse the used books
I can leave my sunglasses on the dresser.
The perfect anonymity for a poet, I tell Pam,
but she nods like a tired child
after a long day at the circus,
her nose caked with China White.
That's when I take long showers
and feel the water run down
the tangled maze on my neck.
If I sing more than three notes
she's here with me in the steam
so I hum and let the melody rattle,

a tiny sparrow in my throat.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"The Chicken Pluckers"
by Adam Tavel
walk from Allen's Poultry factory on
Pearson Ave. a quarter mile to
the Exxon station. The first shift
starts at 5 a.m. and goes to lunch at 9.
I see the same three hairnetted women
every morning. Each buys a
box of doughnuts and carton of OJ
while they talk about their children,
recipes, the new sex quiz in Cosmo.
I stand behind them in line
adjusting my tie, switching
my coffee from hand to hand.
They never stink.
Although their aprons are speckled
with pink memories of blood
I have never caught an
untucked shirt, a stray feather on a shoelace.
Once I watched them march back
in the morning fog. From the sidewalk
they looked like nurses
on the perimeter of a firefight
hunched and praying for peace.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Monday Morning at McDonald's, Federalsburg, Maryland"
by Adam Tavel
Winston Koch wore his green cardigan
even when the heat from the fryers
made the restaurant clammy
and the windows fogged,
flanked by the December air
and dragonbreath of grease.
Between small sips of coffee
he watched the construction workers
queue like ants on a melted popsicle.
He liked their Carhartt coats
and dirty overalls, the small
blotches of week-old paint and
caulk crusted on their sweatshirts.
37 years of delivering packages
in wet socks taught him everything
there was to know about work,
what it meant to palm
small biscuits of sausage
and gooey egg between stops.
The Daily Times sat
neatly folded on his table, but
he left the crosswords blank
to admire Monique on the register,
how her hands uncrumpled small bills
like cloth napkins full of glass.
Behind her a small
army reset timers, stocked trays,
slid yellow rappers down a narrow
ramp. Winston prayed
if there were such things as ghosts
that Rose's was sitting with him
taking it all in.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Out of Focus"
by Stephen William Krewson
This morning, the man on the bus
hears the portentous news:
the telescope on the spacecraft
has a fuzzy faculty of sight.
Humankind's orbiting eye is clouded
with debilitating debris, its lenses
double images like a poorly tuned TV.
But the man, whose hand never
strays from the placid flank of his dog,
cares not for the faulty technology,
the galactic macular degeneration,
and probing with his cane hurtles
into the dark asteroid belt
that is his world.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"My Office"
by Stephen William Krewson
The files expire today.
I cull them from the cabinets
and pile them beside
the beige paper-shredder.
They stack neatly: slightly
faded invoices, bills, correspondence
(the facsimiles of irrelevance).
For seven years I've bulged
the stiffened binders with clients
who have since declined
to renew or shifted their business
elsewhere. According to most
arbiters, it is now safe to initiate
my petty revenge; to cut
confetti out of unfulfilment.
>view as PDF<
>close window

"Her Ride"
by Eileen Malone
FIRST PLACE WINNER
Pierced, tattooed and tight
in handkerchief top and low
and I mean low, slung jeans
slipping down her angst
she gets her young body up
from its squat before the stage
to perform her puce streaked rage
in patchouli, cedar poetry that
has barely been skirted before
paperless poetry, memorized
or ad libbed as it goes
her friends in the back of the room
whoop and call back in chorus
yeah, right on, fucking A
she yells, screams scarlet, rocks
back and forth, won't take it
anymore, ever again
fuck you, fuck all of you
foot stomping, bellowing
cheering, she bells, gyrates
bumps and grinds, hollers
about migrant farmworkers
war mongers, pink, bald corporate
see-eee-ohs, oh see the ee-ohs,
the ass holes, for what they are
she wants a rough sex affair
with Ferlinghetti or McClure
or someone equally old, beat
doesn't care who knows it
wants to be lustily mentored
into famous poet status
now, at the height of her beauty
so she can then leave her old, old poet
and run off with a younger
upcoming, chapbook publisher
to live in Greece or Sicily
for a summer, drink cheap wine
and write Pulitzer prize winning

cryptic bilingual cantos
the poem finished, spent
she dismounts, heads for the door
enters the scream of a siren
as it passes, someone follows
wait up, hey, slow down
but there's a term paper to write
and her ride has to be home
before midnight.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Rendezvous"
by George Thurman
SECOND PLACE WINNER
A Super 8 billboard, advertising buffet
breakfast and comfortable nights
where kids sleep free, blankets the view
from our old room. Across the valley
the pastiche of autumn hills is pockmarked
with condos and private drives. I-85 flexes
south toward Atlanta. The promised exit
doesn't lead to this parking lot flaking asphalt.
It doesn't lead to this courtyard fountain
with its crumbling blue basin and weathered
cherubs pouring nothing from pitchers
filled with vacant years.
* * * *
Memories lurk in these windowless rooms:
you and me tie-dyed and sandaled. Wild flowers
from the hill fragrant our sheets . Our future
splayed in the night before us like a scattering
of coastal stars. Oh, let's meet. Let's haunt
these rooms with sweet smoke and dry wine.
Let's slip into ripped jeans and Berks.
Let's speak the language of our history.
Let's paint pet names on the billboard
and take back the sky from this shadow
where all the doors have been jimmied open,
and the fountain echoes with the splash you made.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Krakow am See"
(Krakow on the Lake)
by George Thurman
THIRD PLACE WINNER
An old man, from his bench beside mine,
misreads my smile and approaches behind
extended hand. Face thrust forward, a slight
slouch, his eyes, blue and watery.
His mouth, a river of hard consonants
and glot-stopped vowels. Familiar words
rush over me as he fingers his history,
an accordion of pictures. His dead wife
traced beneath the plastic. His son, double-tapped
with trembling digit, lives in Hamburg.
I try to speak, but my German, weak
as his patience, yields a sigh, a refolding
of his life. The breeze rattles through the lindens.
Plovers pierce the surface of Lake Krakow.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Fake Butter Flavored Fumes"
by Mike Marks
FOURTH PLACE WINNER
Fake butter flavored fumes won't make you fat,
but they kill your lungs in the Gilster-Mary Lee
Jasper, Missouri microwave popcorn factory.
And a jury has determined that
the smell will get you millions
if you were a popcorn packer who
collected wages mixing the offending goo
and halved your years compared to other civilians.
Was trading your time on earth any stranger
than dancing with that impostor flavor,
choosing it instead of your life to savor?
Now workers wear respirators to avoid the danger,
while lawyers invade this sleepy soybean town
to drink coffee at Judy's Café and hang around.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Different Lines at 4:32PM"
by Anirban Acharya
Thirty two past four is all I got,
jokes apart,
a sugar cube silence levitates my palms
cupped with warmth for tea in chinaware,
similar to breast lines, curved, tuned, taut.
Kabir you are right
speech is an endless line on my face
searching beyond the pastel strokes of smoke
to see fish bones stuck in clouds
like airlines flying farthest east in finite loops.
If we are going to talk of hanky whites
drying along with clothing lines
we may as well talk of death
for then death is naïve
it takes detours
forgets to wash its soiled linens.
I keep sinking below the couch
with conundrums made up of thinner lines
that separate light from utter dark
mildly unaware pupils
slide the seasons outside my door
and inside out.
Love is confirmed by forensics to have happened in our sleep
and in spite of a promise
to sing on and on the lines that repeat tracks of a gramophone,
the pin drops a note.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Language Arts"
by Jeffrey Alfier
With ten-thousand years of overlapped lives,
Neanderthals and more Modern humans
thrived across savannas from each other.
Most Neanderthal bones found are children—
nearly fifty-percent, they say. In one,
they found that bone in the back of the throat
that enables speech to progress farther
than the grunts we thought accompanied them
slouching down their road to oblivion,
non-enlightenment tripping on their tongues,
hunting paths and wombs leading to dead ends.
We don t know if our divergent forebears
ever merged, how they beheld each other.
We think of Cro-Magnon mothers warning
their daughters away from the broad-set eyes
that leered past liminal borders, lit red
by that brilliant accident we named fire.
We think of words stuck in throats like a drought.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"Fuji and Blossom"
by Margaret Babbott
As if I were bent north
when I am southeast.
As if I were copper
when I am pumice.
Tell me what I am,
and I will tell you what I am not.
I am neither sequoia, nor birch;
red tailed hawk nor finch;
abalone nor moon.
Not genius, not sterile, not puerile.
Nor migraine, nor stallion, nor splash.
Not a curled Polaroid of a tomboy in a crabapple
tree, body smack center, back leaning
against the arch of the trunk,
bare feet outstretched like talons,
cocky. One hand covering
her face with a five cent oriental fan,
Fuji and blossom.
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window

"There are Birds Flying in my Vagina"
by Alex Cigale
At the nursing home where I work, a woman
lies tied down to her bed with rubber restraints.
"You all look like whores!" she scolds the nurses.
Accusing them of wearing too much make up
she imagines cabals, orgies with doctors,
becomes obsessed with her bowel movements:
"They are stealing the stool from my bed pan
and using it to smear the walls!" It seems
all the stars in the sky have disappeared,
the channels on her TV remote were retuned
to station zero and funereal music pumped
like gas into the garishly painted room—
all the cruel tricks an oxygen-starved mind
plays on the old. And then Edith's last words;
"There are birds flying in my vagina."
>view as PDF<
>next poem<
>close window