Poetry Issue 10

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When Finishing That Excellent Vinde Loo Lamb, I Am Unaware Of The Most Subtle Taste

Jay Carson

As Heisenberg taught us,
we overlook the weight of our
own thumb in a rush for
the final perfect centimeter.

 
I am unaware of the finest filings
of rage toward the shortest slight,
that you pass off as nothing, until
as always, I meticulously strain it over and over.

 
Not so much the faintest film
of each tooth’s pure porcelain
that so precisely forks through meat,
leaving only miniscule tang,

 
But the precious drops
of bile that intravenously feed
all of me as, glacially, relentlessly,
I consume my own teeth.

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Overridden

Carol Hamilton

My grandson snipes
              through streets of Fallujah now.
He is still a boy
              but not so young as when
we videoed his delayed shivers
               to sips of Coca Cola,
his father’s favorite.
               He still wore sleeping gowns then
and trailed them as he inched his way
               carefully around the edges
of furniture, afraid yet to let go.
               His father’s father recorded “Rambo”
right over his baby face,
                surprised by the bite from the bottle,
his convulsed reaction to the unexpected.
                We could not stop the loss
of the footage to a film
                 we abhorred, nor can we
end the step by step videotaping
                 over his life before Fallujah.

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Sufficient unto the day

Rich Yurman

Some nights there’s no telling grace
from disgrace.
     - Elton Glaser

You grope
through a jar
of homemade jam
for the missed pit
that could break a tooth
when you bite down

 
Your fingers are not
long and slender enough
or sensitive enough
to find the stone
so you end up
with a sticky mess
and jellied fingerprints
on every wall and countertop

 
All because you thought
if you could
sort it out in time
you’d have a worthy treat
to serve your guests

 
You run warm water
over your hands and stare
at all you’ve touched
so much the kitchen sponge
damp and starting to rot
can never wipe it up

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Spices The Soil Reveals

Joddy Murray

Three miniature melons cracked open,
seeds pulsing where there might be brains,
people like leaves with plastic bags buying fresh fruit:
the Pasco Farmer’s Market ready to close
and set them back into the wind.

 
We do not see many curiosities – just fruit
and a few standard vegetables: onion, garlic,
corn, beans. When the cherries are in
we buy crates for preserves

 
(the season is now nearly over). The woman
who hands us our garlic heads does not look up,
and from her hands I know her fields,
the chocolate soil, the rich layers of manure,

 
the hot, dry sun. Such hands are
monumental, larger than mine, stronger.
Her voice is sweet: twenty-five cents change, hon,
haveaniceday. But her hands seem to ache
loudly. There is no comparison.
Hands as vocal as hungry children.

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The Chick

John Oliver Simon
from Nine-Elevens

The poem should slambang the present moment:
after inspiring the seventh-graders
yesterday morning Anita & I passed
a fuzzy newborn chick on 24th Street
whose wobbly neck and fragile skull craned up
as if to beg of us to be her mommy
or grant some easeful death: we offered neither,
scurrying down into the serpent of BART,
already yesterday, so soon encoded.

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Old Crimea

      by Osip Mandelstam
      Translated by Andrey Gritsman

Cold Spring. Hungry Old Crimea,
As was under Wrangel-still to blame.
The sheepdogs in the yard, patches on the tatters,
Still the same grayish, stinging smoke.
Still beautiful is dissipated distant land-
The trees with buds, swollen a little bit,
Are standing strangers, and the almonds,
Framed by the yesterday’s stupidity are wretched.
The nature does not recognize its own face.
And fearful shadows of the Ukraine, Kuban…
In their felt slippers the hungry peasants
Are guarding wicket gate not touching a ring.

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The 35,000-Year-Old Gift

Tom Holmes

To hold what an ancestor has given you
the possibility of music
in an ivory flute
holds you to reconsider air
how you believe in time
how you imagine the first drums
& shortly after
around a fire
on dump cave floors
where drummers bounce sounds
dancers jump with ashes
artists blow paint
on ceilings & walls
& your flutist draws air
& pitches tones as bright as flames
as chilling as the cave
through that flute lying now
lighter & lighter on your palms
this gift carved & smoothed
from a woolly mammoth’s tusk
holds you to consider
how joyful was your flutist
who hunted for this
in the ice-age air
for music for you

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Slack Key, Stravinsky, The Greeks

Karla Clark

The man in the red swimsuit started his chainsaw
at seven-fifteen this morning I went outside
in my cotton nightgown, in my bare feet, with the spiderweb
I caught in my hair, striding across the lawn
under the Koa tree, stepping over the roots
of the monkeypod, marching on bare feet

over asphalt and gravel, to stare at him with my wild
curls snaking in every direction-a tropical Medusa.
It seemed to work, the saw stopped as though frozen
in stone and I had the deep satisfaction that comes from
a righteous glare in the service of peace and even when
he started over again at eight-thirty, it wasn’t full bore:

 
only a hiccup, not enough to bother the reptiles,
not enough to make them rear up and hiss. Last night
began well enough. John Keawe played slack key
guitar at the Bamboo Cafe in Havi, his silver-haired
wife danced her beautiful hula, there were pupus,
pulled pig and beer for everyone in the place,

 
his grandchildren rubbed sleep from their eyes to listen
to their Papa play. After most of the tourists had gone,
we stayed on whale he played Flamenco he first learned
in Mexico in the early sixties, went on to a song about teeth
he composed long ago in the Navy. When he played
“She was just seventeen, you know what I mean,”

 
we all fluttered our arms, singing Ohhhhh. Rain
on the tin roof while we were still singing, the dark heavy clouds
rolled over the mountain, light on the sea was extinguished.
“the Rite of Spring’’ on the car radio ripped the night
off its hinges as we drove home, & with the trumpets
the other side of our culture barged into view–its armor,

 
its serrated knives. At home, asleep, hordes circled.
I couldn’t escape. So the sound of that saw
got me out of a mess. Why didn’t I think of it
sooner? Strike those legions with the pure rage in my obsidian
eye. Impose Pax Reptilians. Bad guys stacked in piles
Perseus frozen, stupid sword silenced but good.

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Temptation

Christine Kravetz

One morning, a Sunday school teacher
got the notion to fill balloons with sins—
red for anger; yellow, deceit;
green, envy—and so forth.

 
Sins floated above the children’s heads
dangling curly tails just within reach
of damp, eager hands.

 
Now drive them out! The teacher ordered.

 
This is all I know of that lesson.
Yet I imagine a moment’s
hesitation before the children complied,
popping them smartly with their bottoms.

 
And I wonder if the little ones,
alarmed by sin’s sharp retort—
mirroring the Psalm’s pronouncement,
“God is gone up with a shout”—
were thereby frightened unto Jesus.

 
After the exorcism,
empty skins must have lain
withered as dried figs in the desert.
And, while no longer a temptation,
the smell of sin may have lingered
in the warm, Sunday air.