by Sixfold
those near to death like to a lover.
I am walking the wood paneled halls
of your small and immaculately kept home.
I am rearranging the furniture.
I am unstraightening pictures.
Especially the one of you on your wedding day,
The one where you look so beautiful,
The windblown curls of yellow hair,
Your bright blue eyes,
a smile like abandon,
Like luck.
I know you’ve moved to a center,
somewhere they can take care of you.
I know the walls must be bare, the cupboards empty,
the beds in storage.
Tell me, what have the days been like?
Do they let you wake early to walk the beach?
Does the pale blue light that tips in
through the bedroom window remind you of me?
Do they let you sleep
with the window propped?
Does the coolness of the morning air almost
stop your heart?
In my mind, I take down your picture, press fingers
sticky with Jiff to the glass over your lips.
I hold it against me,
hold onto you.
You’ll have to wipe the smudges from the glass over the photograph.
You’ll have to rehang it on this imaginary wall.
Once you were a tern or a loon,
Perhaps a frigate bird.
Something that returns to the water.
I rode on your back, all motion and wind,
and the sea was in us.
Salt water was in our veins.
You are not coming back
to tell me
we are kindred.
I’ve seen the gray mist of your eyes,
the curve of your body, like bent feathers,
like a drowned gull washed up on the beach.
This is why I never come.
I can’t bear to watch
the stillness overtake you.
Fox holes
Are there no atheists in fox holes? Perhaps you don’t get into a fox hole unless you have something to believe in, but in my experience, most of the people in fox holes are in the process of giving up their gods.
The world will continue without me, will continue to turn without us, my love, though the thought makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.
I would like to believe that only you and I exist. I have believed such a thing. I believe both at once . . . in the world, and also in nothing beyond what I can taste.
I am the juice that runs down your fingers, I am the sweat that pours from you, the extravagant feeling of fingers parting your hair, an extra set of hands to let the world slide through.
Let us rejoice in each other, let us give thanks. Let us suffer in each other. Let us be tortured and meaningless and pass out of the world having mattered to no one, having no immortality beyond our mingled dirt.
Robert Mammano
the way the ground shakes
or the holes in the walls
where you would be able to see the guts of the house
if the house had guts.
it makes good sense that our limitations are so
tight around our cute little necks
and our ambitions are knick-knacks
collected on end tables
sit for years and are eventually
thrown outdoors to get turned over
ashes to ashes junk to middens.
daylight from citrus oil
lampshimmer tomorrow,
the crunchy foot prints on the flash frozen grass
the architecture of the water structures that come
out of your sigh.
I’ll watch till there is nothing to see,
let my fingers linger in your hair—
shivering whispers sew the buttons on the morning
the intrigue has been woven and fastened like this
for as long as the deep sky went blue
and blue to true and just, just
out of reach, your skin, so soft just under—
how do our weak wonders rest
their troubled feet and great heavy heads?
the steady lonesomeness lovely
almost passing as longing.
the fever climbs about cloud cover high
and stolen away
a bit longer you must.
look at all them letters
all the damned things flitting about,
blustering and flummoxed
colliding and colluding!
just outside this window
on all the awnings
squatting and cosmic—
I want to talk about what holds me.
I want to talk about gravity,
the newspaper from two days ago
filled with rain stuffing the gutter.
we continue to be surprised by violins,
yell across the avenue
as if we were in a crowd.
we’re just pieces.
there is nothing but life
happening between us,
but the sky
the atmosphere
and beyond our weather,
the whole mess.
consciousness is such a delicate accident.
stars don’t cross .
two lines
expressed in tons
of wood, gold, and concrete
for twenty centuries.
“and by the way thanks for that”
half-assed over the shoulder disputes
lobbed like a split pomegranate in parting
we were in the kitchen cutting onions
and someone came in
we pretended we were at our wit’s ends
that strange region where men weep
a tangle of ropes
the path of least resistance is atrophy
sometimes decisions waiting to be made
make themselves
evaporate opportunities
and inaction knots an expiration
no
living past tense
all the moments of knowing
you wanted everything changed
line up like constellations
flickering moot way way up
and I trace these stubborn lines
‘look a seed
a bulb, a tuber’
back toward the last times I wasn’t myself
those nights
when who knows who circulated
through the little back alleys
and sloppy veins
crocheted byways
underground amateur astrology
root structures drunk moon shine
risky
I still find a stray hair
here or there
a polka dotted sock
when my underwear drawer is almost empty
and how many years since that smile glinted
you won’t remember
the handkerchief situation isn’t half as strange as it seems
because this contraption scratches
tilt your mouth
and what voice chooses
come clean for once
bones after the flesh has rotted away
a wolf big black bird with hunger
a feather a hair a plume of smoke
we’ll go on and on
wondering how 2 people in complete agreement
could argue so long
“I’m not lazy I just don’t see the point”
imagine if we picked any direction
and just went
but sometimes these directions loop<
br />
5 years in circles
there used to be formulas for these sorts of things
out of boredom
something pretty is molded
with my preachy voice
that clears out subway cars
mind the gaps
how many “well the names aren’t important”
until the names disappear and the places follow
leaving dull skeleton stories waltzing around
I’m 2 stepping this 3 step dance
“my first love was a boat”
independent thought like buoys suspended
rope worn round the wrists and ankles
like cheap juvenile jewelry
lately through this strange irrelevant term
seems all my thoughts fall about
neither here nor there
I’ve been thinking about people living in their heads
I like imagining them miniature
pulling down eyelid curtains a warm glow still behind
I wonder how they’d leave if they wanted to
I know it’s fancy but I’ll bet the ants still get in
maybe through chimney ears
and march their numbers along the skull’s walls
a few resolutions ago
Nothing is set
run around and around
New Year’s eve
we’ll drop our own ball.
I’ll try not to play the accordion.
My sweet, what?
I am almost out of space.
Oh what wonderful geese you have, ma’am
and what a sigh.
Even the mailman gets a raise
and here I am still jobless,
a big green apple.
She left last night
and they’re all praying for you
green peppers . . . green peppers.
Cross the ‘i’s and dot the ‘t’s
let them talk about despicable so-and-so’s
and we’ll throw in an orange wedge with our two cents.
Read it to me in your real voice.
Let us send messages on rays of light—
No, no, give me primitive construction any day
tic-tac fingers and swollen pulleys.
“Ain’t no rest for the wicked.”
a post-modern post-script:
Nothing is set
We moveable parts.
Run around
around
and I breathe deep.
Janet Smith
Rocket Ship
Emery Park had a pretend rocket ship.
We walked there in the afternoon, and I,
legs straight, palms flat, dropped down
the metal slide onto the cold sand.
My mother made me wear dresses;
they fluttered up like frightened birds.
I wanted to walk by myself, but I was seven.
One man in a torn jacket stood by the fountain,
hands in his pockets, eyeing the merry-go-round.
“Don’t talk to him,” my mother said.
I wouldn’t even talk to the girl my age,
who held a sucker in her mouth as she
slid down after me. That was dangerous.
Later, we walked across the street
to Crawford’s Market. I stuck my hot, dry
hand deep into the barrel of hard candy.
The store clerk glowered over her counter.
Watch your children, a sign shaped like
a pointing finger warned.
I unwrapped the candy Mother bought me
one by one, placed each on my tongue,
and moved so the wrappers in my sweater
pocket rustled. A red disk burned my mouth.
I spat it on the sidewalk. That was wrong.
We walked home past the park, and my mother
grabbed my hand.. The rocket ship
exploded with boys, yelling and hitting.
Be Good
I once was pointed to the corner
of a room where the curtains swooned.
Red-eyed, hands tight as buds, I held
the pink tissue mother gave me.
She and father agreed, I was bad.
Dust motes drifting through daylight
fell on my head.
Puzzle box unlocked and smashed,
I moved into a fragment of myself.
Later they allowed me to set foot
where the lamps shone upon doilies
bright as lilies. Be good, they said.
The dark boughs of my woods still
thrash upon themselves.
Pockets
My mother sewed the pockets
of coats. She called it piecework.
After her shift, she slept on top
of the bedspread in her clothes
so as not to mess the covers.
Then the bed was straightened.
We went to a coffee shop called Earl’s.
The meals came with cake or rice
pudding. She wore bright lipstick,
hairdo arrowed with bobby pins,
an ironed blouse with the dime store
brooch like a medal on her chest.
Practical daylight fell upon her things—
the nylon scarf, the curlers and the pins,
the pennies saved inside a jelly jar—
but it was the beige slip that slid
like a rattlesnake off the chair
onto the floor that scared me. She said
a slip stopped boys from looking
at the outline between your legs.
Smooth and supple as flayed skin,
the beige slip told me how my mother
became the red-lipped ghost. Listen,
she’d say, here’s a coupon, a hairnet,
a pad, a needle and some thread.
The dresser and the nightstand
each adorned with scarves depicting
rosebuds, bluebirds, a shepherdess,
and a leering doe with red lips.
Where was the interior life?
So many pockets, and nothing
but bare hands to hide. I was told
to never touch the sharp scissors
she had honed. She wore dresses
with no sleeves in summer, arms freckled,
warm, and fat as rising loaves.
The change on the dresser
never added up. The nylon briefs
and bras lay cool and folded
in a narrow drawer that stuck.
She smiled at me as if her mouth
held straight pins. Here’s a hanky,
a spare key, a dime for emergencies.
Stop eating cookies or you won’t eat
your dinner. There’s no one
now to accuse or defend her,
except me—her most loyal prisoner.
It Surprises You
It could be a cold Wednesday.
Moving your feet along the ground,
shouldering through the air
is pleasure. Your heart fastens
on a house you always pass
that now needs looking at.
You love the nape of your own neck.
When you were seven and wandered
from your parents’ sight,
this was how you saw the world:
every edge hardened with reality.
That’s why you drew lines
around the pictures before you filled
them in in your coloring book.
You begged for a pet, even a fish
or a bird, because you loved the world
and needed a body to put that in.
One day you stared out your bedroom
window: roofs, stars, moon,
the crowns of trees reached for you.
You were already falling.
The days dream us and the nights
wake in
our ears. Today, sitting
at a desk or driving a car,
you wonder, what was all that childhood
longing about? When you enter
the black room of your aloneness,
nothing bad happens after all.
Nobody walks more solitary
than a child. You could ask now
for a piece of that slow waiting
that married you to your hunger.
An hour might spring on you with
a daydream hidden in its claws,
your old loneliness in its mouth.
Fireworks over Chain Lake
One July 4th I stayed at your house
on Chain Lake. We opened
two bottles of pinot noir and put
swimsuits on. Across the water,
fireworks exploded like cannons
aimed upon us. I woke at 3 AM
to rain splashing against the house.
You were asleep downstairs
in your wet swimsuit with the TV on.
When the first bursts exploded,
light fell like pollen on our heads.
We jumped up and down on the dock,
drunk and shouting. Why have we
waited so long to be found good enough?
As children we loved any tree,
any mountain, any sky.
Others appeared. They yelled for us.
We hid. We went hungry.
Gina Loring
Dementia
the women. the women. the women.
the babies. the babies. the babies.
How lucky not to remember
the mountain of missed milestones.
The spirit spark dusted over and dimmed.
How lucky to melt into yourself like that,
the entire muddy footprint path erased.
In lucid moments
few and far between
when the room comes into focus,
you remember me.
A stranger with your eyes.
You know
the straw I hold to your lips
the lullabies I sing low
the monologue prayer hymns I write in your palm:
redemption.
His
Here to see your father?
I ask how she knows.
You look just like him.
She waves her clipboard,
motions for me to follow.
It takes three nurses to administer the medication today.
He is a restless windstorm trying to break free.
Daddy, I say, sing with me.
I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield
