Art and shiny things…
Like a stone switched with a jewel,
in another world I’m thrown into the sky.
The day ends with my voice
still sleeping upside down in my body.
I need an x-ray to remember my life.
I sit in my car until whatever it is
returns to me, until going home stops
feeling like a crash scene.
-Jeffrey Morgan, The Journal
The stage is blank now. Ribbons swirling, smoke
illuminated from beneath by red
lamps focused on the emptiness, oak boards
laid down into a pattern which affords
a place to leap and land: the colored thread
of narrative in dance has disappeared.
Those arms, like crane wings catching air, once sheared
the curtained wind as if to fly, their lines
as straight as quills, or intricate cleft braids
whose interwoven motion still cascades
like water falling through the wreathed designs
we only dreamed could be performed.
W.F. Lantry
Mordechai Ronen returns to Auschwitz
(after a photograph in The Times, 27 Jan, 2015)
Frei is not in the picture.
Even Arbeit, above him,
loses meaning when edged
with snow, or his memory.
Instead, the words
The Past is Present
circle his neck,
and the outstretched hand
that asks a question
could also be holding up
-Marjorie Lotfi Gill
Somewhere out there, an operator plugged in
the wire of your voice to the switchboard
of Arkansas where I am
happy to accept the charges—an act so antique
I think of Sputnik beeping
overhead, lovers petting in Buicks
and glowing with the green of radium dials.
But what you’ve called to say is lost
in the line’s wreckage of crackle and static.
read more at Condofire
It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees
arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies
of the laden apricot tree without wanting
symbols – which of course are manifold – symbols
of so much else? What’s amiss with simply the huddle
and glut of bees, with those fuzzed globes
by the hundred and the clipped out sky
beyond them and the leaves that are black
if you angle the sun directly behind them,
being themselves, for themselves?
I want to tear a page from the book of alliterations.
To get lost in an orange grove where blossoms
abound but bear no fruit. Here, they are losing
their language, but remember enough
to know what’s been forgotten. Still the women speak it
to dishtowels and bathwater. Sweep bits of it off the floors
and call it dust. There is never anywhere that isn’t here.
I’ve learned that more times than I can count before now.
Before now became then. Before then
became us. Before us ever was. I’m told
there was a tree
You were in the world and. More
slowly now I am
so fasted now so. Long
it’s been without
you, if you ever read this
you were what. I was dreaming of
this welt, to know
it before. It comes like love
I loved your
empty spaces,
Kimberly Grey
When her sister moved across the border
there was no border, not even a line
like the one they’d drawn in chalk
down the centre of their bedroom,
dividing walls and window, the light
parsed out between them
like a parent’s love. Only the door,
its point of entry and exit, was shared.
read more
Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Cura Mag
What was it he needed to read? There was a book on one
of the shelves. He only remembered the cover was green.
88 keys, 11 octaves. After daily exercises,
the lid came down on a felt runner of green.
The first year is paper, the eighth bronze, the twelfth
silk or linen; the sixteenth, a candlestick silvery-green.
What trees grew in front of our first house? One
shed only flame-colored leaves, the other green.
One arrow struck the girl, the other struck the god. He pursued her,
even as her feet grew roots, her arms leafed over with green.
Near the water, there used to be a house of quarantine. On a short
stretch of road, broken shells in the gravel amid tufts of green.
Should your mind quietly open that side door and leave, what
will you remember of us, of our days greener than green?
-Luisa A Igloria, Via Negativa
I could not predict the fullness
of the day. How it was enough
to stand alone without help
in the green yard at dawn.
How two geese would spin out
of the ochre sun opening my spine,
curling my head up to the sky
in an arc I took for granted.
And the lilac bush by the red
brick wall flooding the air
with its purple weight of beauty?
How it made my body swoon,
brought my arms to reach for it
without even thinking.
-Susan Glassmeyer
Coffee and Irony 