Archives

Amlanjyoti Goswami
Fresh fire

Far from the fire
I stand still and watch
My city burn

I speak for no one
Just the one now gone
Who spoke four languages

Listened to many
Dreamt in two.
Whose kitchen flavours

Brought winds
From faraway.
But that does not wish rage away

Or understand it.
Born of no soil, I am only wind.
Water that knows no stone.

The blood once more
Runs on the street
The familiar shops

Morning, now closed
Like the old days.
And night breathes a strange wounded silence.

The dark red spilling out
The hospital room
The street and gutter.

The horrors of childhood
Return like a broken dream
Unfinished business of waking up before dawn

And wondering what the day will bring
New stories of those missing, those gone
And what their next plans might be.

Margaret Koger
The Yard Light

I am not spying exactly.
The old farmhouse, night,
faded paint, light like
an encore of firefly
commas in leaves, their
staccato promise of profit.

I slouch across grass
steal into the orchard
dusk surrounding
as if I’m in your arms.
How once I gazed
boldly into our window
to see the blue chair
we bought together
to see you sitting there.

I look down at my boots.
Our lives have moved on.
The big red apple cookie jar
(a wedding present) is
empty, the children gone.

Whatever it was we had, the
quiver of arrows, the bow …
hyper things; a stream of
aquamarine phrases
a necklace, the lift of a chin
lost. I touch the windowpane
cold glass, shards hungry
to shatter. The yard light
wrinkles my skin.
I live in another world.

Cheryl Pearson
Anatomy Class

The wrapped slab was cold, the labs were cold.
We were rubber-gloved and booted, playing
at professionals, all tremors under the gowns.
There were rumours the dental students
wouldn’t get cadavers, only heads, severed
and plated like Saint John the Baptist’s.
They only needed gums and teeth. We
were nurses, radiographers, spared the shock
of the obviously dead who had only lately
stopped requiring eye tests and vitamins.
On our desks in freezing gauze, the torsos:
human, yes, but manageable. Already cut
along the front, more pantry than body,
amply stocked with replicated parts—
plastic liver, rubber heart the size of my fist—
each tethered to its spot with rope. I thought
they looked like astronauts, umbilical in air;
I made a note. I’d wanted to study literature;
the Career Advisor had warned me off. A waste
if you don’t want to teach. Think about nursing,
something vocational. Student loans don’t pay
themselves. Lately I’d been writing in my rooms
at night, poems I dug out and dusted off
like bits of buckle or willow-ware. I hadn’t trusted
my body for months. I bruised like bad fruit,
fell often. No wonder if this was my engine.
It was nightmarish. Mince and cheese and béchamel
left to congeal. All the iron on earth, I wrote, was born
on a star. Including the iron in my blood.
That was the science I wanted. Where I was
supernova inside. And it wasn’t fatal to live.

J. J. Steinfeld
A Perfect Moon, At the Very Least

You mean the choice this time
is between leniency and forgiveness
that’s hardly fair or enough
and who’s offering the goods
they could be counterfeit
then what would I do
not enough, another existential near miss
like missing a lottery win by one wilful digit
(isn’t that a kick in the cycles of life)
or even worse, like nearly falling in love
on a salvageable night with a perfect moon
(the last time there was a perfect moon
I heard from a metaphysician of perfect moons
was when several of the unloved fell in love)
wait, I seem to recall the previous time
I was offered a hush-hush deal in the night
it was between redemption and exoneration
and I’m nowhere closer to sense or escape
than before, so whoever you are,
I await my next choice and hope to hell
it includes a few lousy bucks
or a perfect moon, at the very least.

Christina Thatcher
Convincing a Horse to Cross the Tohickon Bridge

He knows stepping off the edge
of a cliff is unnatural, that hooves do not belong

             on iron. He knows catching glimpses of river beneath
             our bellies is abnormal. He knows he is not meant

to move from this place to that place. He knows he should listen
to the earth, take the safest route. He knows the bridge

             is green but not the right kind of green. He knows he shouldn’t
             have a rider, even, shouldn’t have to bite metal. He knows

                          he is not meant to be here, standing at the brink
                          of this bridge, but what should he do? What can he do, now?