Poetry

by Sonia Greenfield

If you listen close
To the shell-shaped cookie
You can hear the ocean

And the sea’s fortune speaks:
You will never know hunger.
As if it were simply enzymatic

To digest this idea.
As simple as bread in mouth
To quiet the din

Of organs consuming organs.
The noise cries up
From my belly

Even after the food gets eaten,
Because appetite does not succumb
To matters of meat.

Take for example
The flesh loneliness
Of a room solely occupied.

This crumb and water subsistence of one.
A crash diet; the sense of shrinking;
A body starved for attention,

Until we feed and give back
And feed again in the cyclical chain
Of pleasure.

As in the lover
Who consumes my orchard,
Heavy with … Continue Reading

by Stephen Gibson

This is what men do when they can not sleep:
They sit and write poems to you through the night,
Or they wander the alleyways saying your name to the universe,
Over and over again, rehearsing your name like the answer
To a question they want to be asked.
They do this again and again so that your name becomes
Foreign in their mouths.
Repeating it so often to the storefront windows
And to the blue lightning pulsing in the clouds,
Your name becomes strange,
Use has made it
Unfamiliar. Still, they search the city
All night long thinking they will run into you
At every corner and through the black … Continue Reading

By James Kerns

Another Hemingway Sunday
Eases by on a gin and khaki breeze,
The afternoon fading to caramel
And nudging unfinished hangovers
Into fuzzy recollections.
Our shirt collars are queued to another sunset,
Another black X marked on the calendar of dreams,
Another round of blurry oaths sworn to glass reports.

Gray city, who shall call you when the siege is lifted?
Who will wave-off the masses plucking your bazaars,
Fondling your customs, slipping your secrets
Into the pockets of their travel pants?
Legions of mail-order expatriates cruise
The sleekness of your nights
Brandishing independence and living from café to curb,
Throwing languages from their lips
As bread is tossed to vagrant animals.

Favorite geographies are recounted … Continue Reading

This poem will not be
Depressing.

It won’t talk of the wasted
Energies of humanity
Pictured each day in the framed faces
Of bus windows. Continue Reading

In one dream, I open the door
after work, and walk inside.
There is my reading chair, solid
in the corner, a couch,
built-in shelves lined with books
about the Civil War, photographs,
paintings and art work by friends on the walls…
I step inside, but I don’t
turn on the light. Continue Reading

By Jason Ward Boyte

Remedy chaos
With tabernacle glue.
Martini slants
     just as sticky

The lure of stasis,
We pour out into tiny puddles
To settle and congeal,
     becoming solid in a (spineless) way

The rainbow in the puddles of oil
Behind the Church of the Nazarene.
There’s gold there for the taking.

The soldier in uniform
Laughs in line,
A reflex.

The angles of his hair
(the smooth around the ears
and neck) suggest machine.

The butch cut
Of social gas, the
Flavor of pig
Is practical
     (like coupons)

Somewhere a boy spins a wheel
Of his own making down
A … Continue Reading