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TO
MY FATHER
by Jed Myers
You
stood there across the golden oval
living room rug. I clutched the marble
coffee table, stood and wobbled,
until I could let go and travel
hope’s distance to your broad hands,
your smile. I still stand
in the world of your welcome, a man
not too alone, in a bone-dust land
crowded with aloneness. You stood
your ground as I swore on the Asian blood
on your American hands. You understood
your stubbornness was a kind of food
for my narrow bones. You stood on the edge
of ruin, wearing the truth like a badge
pinned through a rib’s marrow. You said
you’d make it back, and then you did.
You stood at your father’s grave, a stone
tight in your hand, your face like bone
in the light of the winter afternoon.
You couldn’t leave him alone.
I want to stand with you in a place
we’ve never been—on a precipice
over an Italian lake, a stretch
of the Danube’s banks in Budapest,
in the alley ten paces west
of your long-gone storefront office—
wherever the light is best
for us to know, for us this is
the edge of things, where for once
future and past collapse in one tense,
our shadows come loose, and all our secrets
spiral skyward out of our chests.
We stand there, and our bones are blessed.
Jed
Myers lives in Seattle. His poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in Golden Handcuffs
Review, Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Fugue,
and elsewhere. As an undergraduate he was editor
for Tufts Literary Magazine, and was
recently guest co-editor for Chrysanthemum.
Trained in psychiatry, he has a therapy practice
and teaches at the University of Washington.
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ALLIUM
CEPA, THE HUMBLE
ONION
by Perie
Longo
Though I order a thin book of
poetry from a service
online, I receive a massive
recipe book about onions.
Not cracking the cover I march to
the computer
for return. An eternity of clicks
later, I’m advised
to phone. “I don’t
cook,” I complain. “I
want
my poetry book!” A
pleasant-voiced woman leads
me
to the free mailing label. Three
days later I receive
the same book. I return to the
Web site,
retrace steps, tell the new
operator,
“I want nothing to do with onions.
They make me cry.”
“Please hold,” she says. Minutes later
she tells me I can’t return
it twice. “Your poetry
must be in the wrong bin. Just
keep what you have.”
Miffed at first, it hits me there’s
a message here,
some words for stewing. Slowly, I
begin to read
that onions date back to Sumeria,
2500 BC,
there are more kinds than Eskimos
have words
for snow, a food with no fat or
carbs, packed
with vitamin C and protein,
believed to cure everything.
Ancient Egyptians even stuffed
them into cavities
of the dead to shock them into
breath again.
If only I’d known I would
have cooked my husband
caramelized onion and leek soup
in his last months.
Only yesterday I could have cured
a friend’s broken heart
with molded salad of Vidalias,
cucumbers, and Gorgonzola.
Reading on, I find myself hiking
with scientists
in the rugged hills of Turkmenia
in search of a rare,
wild onion, only to discover it
vanished,
yet another loss to save the
world. The book concludes
with Web sites I can contact for
seeds to grow my own.
But if I followed through, I
might receive
a book of poems and then where
would we be,
I ask you, wiping my eyes,
humbled to the core.
Perie
Longo is Poet Laureate
Emerita (April 2007-2009) of
Santa Barbara, California. Her
poetry books are Milking The
Earth, The Privacy Of Wind,
and With Nothing Behind But
Sky: a journey through grief.
Her work has appeared in
journals and anthologies
including Atlanta Review,
Connecticut Review, Eclipse,
Nimrod, Paterson Literary Review,
Prairie Schooner, Quercus Review,
Rattle, Solo, and in
Breathe: 101 Contemporary
Odes. Also a longtime
California-Poets-in-the-Schools
poet-teacher, she has led the
Santa Barbara Writers Conference
poetry workshop for many years,
as well as her own three-day
summer workshop. This poem was
first published in the
Wisconsin Review
(Winter, 2008).
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PULSE
by Rachel de
Baere
Amidst clacking
skateboards,
guitar twang,
and raucous telephone tunes,
there’s no silence in my
house.
Not by day, not at night, when
the cat
scratches the worn post,
and the washer drains
its late-night load.
Pots clang against each other
in the Whisper Quiet
dishwasher.
My house is almost never
empty.
When it is, there’s the
buzz
of the refrigerator,
and the tock of the kitchen
clock,
the one decorated with a plastic
artichoke
at the twelve.
Inside me, there’s no
silence.
Unspoken words scream,
seep through my scalp.
No silence in dishwasher
steam,
in the dog’s stillness
when she looks at me, waiting
for me to speak.
I hear the pounding in your
chest
when you hold me,
the scratching of my hair
against my scalp as you
stroke
my head. It scares me
when I can’t hear my heart
beat against my fingertips.
Rachel
de Baere has taught at
the International Women’s
Writing Guild conferences in
Santa Cruz and at Skidmore
College in New York for the last
six years; she also serves as a
regional representative for the
IWWG. Her poems have appeared in
5 AM, CQ (California
Quarterly), Kaleidoscope,
Rattlesnake Review, Red
Wheelbarrow Literary
Magazine, and other
publications. She lives in Marin
County, in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
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COLD
READING
by
Brendan
Constantine
It’s
really cold in here now,
easily forty below something,
and half the class is asleep.
Snow dazzles in the windows,
makes a cake of each desk.
It’s really cold in here
now.
I’ve been lecturing on the
same
poem for twenty six hours
and half the class is asleep.
I want them to get it. I
start
to talk about death again
and it’s really cold in
here now.
One student has frozen solid,
her hair snapping off in the
wind
and half the class is asleep.
“See that” I say, “Lisa gets it.”
But it’s so cold in here
now
half the class are white
dunes
shifting to the sea.
This
poem, by Brendan Constantine, is
from Letters to Guns,
his new book from Ren Hen Press.
It appears here by permission of
the poet and by permission of Ren
Hen Press (© 2009 Brendan
Constantine).
Brendan
Constantine is an
electric performer of his imaginative work. His
new book is Letters To Guns (Red Hen),
other titles include Zombie Dovecote and
Crimewave. He is the creator of Industrial Poetry,
a Writer’s Block workshop, and lives in Hollywood
at Bela Lugosi’s last address. He will read
as part of a celebration of Poetry Flash
at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, 681 Venice
Blvd., Venice, on Saturday, June 20, 2009, and on
Thursday, July 23, 2009, Poetry Flash at
Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley.
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THE
POET
for
Jim Schevill
(1920-2009)
by
LUIS GARCIA
He’s a circle of words
that goes round and round
frequently
releasing a lively sound.
He’s a star maker.
He’s a moon shaker.
He’s a form of fire.
He’s a form of water.
He’s a form of earth.
He’s a form of air.
He’s a form of parts
that finally make a whole.
He’s a form of sleeping bells
that finally wake and toll.
He’s a wandering form
That finally finds a home.
He’s a form within a form.
He’s a form that’s only born
When the spirit reaches out to grasp
the blood inside the marrow of our bones.
He’s a form that dominates its landscape
like some huge antique stone.
He’s a form that sometimes seems to feel
that it’s been left there all alone.
In spite of that
he’s a form that also blossoms here,
as if it were a flower,
among its own,
among its own.
This poem was written for poet and playwright James
Schevill’s
memorial in Berkeley, California, April 2009. A
letterpress broadside was made of the poem by Jerry
Reddan, Tangram.
Born
in Berkeley, Luis
Garcia published his
first book of poems in 1963 in
Chile. Subsequent collections
were published in association
with George Hitchcock, famed
editor of Kayak, with Robert
Hawley and Oyez Press, and with
White Rabbit Press. For personal
reasons Garcia stopped publishing
in the 1980s but he returned to
writing in the early 1990s and
has published several books since
then, including Poems for
Dinner, The Gift, and
The Token.
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