Her Road Ahead
by Cheri Fry
They have built their nest in her fragile looking hair
and they wait
sensing her demise
as the cancer cells lay waste her body
and test the patience of the
abyss that lies waiting
so many places and events she has still to look forward to
events that she never will see
the marriage of her daughter
the birth of her grandchildren
the way the sun rises
over the backdrop of the mountains
she has held on for so long
and I long to tell her to take some comfort and rest
give up her breath
take in the light that imperceptibly shines only for her
I would ask her to challenge the pain
and give way to spirit
she will be remembered by her love
and the moments when her eyes would catch a smile
she will be remembered by my heart
and I will send her off
with a prayer.
Copyright 2005 by Cheri Fry
Reproduction is prohibited without express permission of the author.
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Chalk and Board
by Joneve McCormick
Vice makes virtue possible to know,
like white chalk on black or green,
thus there is no role I would not play -
sage, madman, robber, king -
changing skin and gait
on a Shakespearean stage;
the more identities I can have,
the more knowledgeable I can be,
act deliberately,
not re-act mechanically,
or let myself be led by Loki spirits
hovering near.
This reminds me of a play
in which a traveler lost both sight and way
but that was before I found the devil
(though it took some million years)
who kept me hopping leg to leg,
loss to gain and back,
self to self, parts missing:
the one with a stash of scalps
who told me I'd been chosen
and others hadn't.
Copyright 2005 by Joneve McCormick.
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Class Hexactinellida
by Michael Estabrook
After 2 weeks
on the beach in
the salt air and sun,
my return to work
wasn't easy.
The fluorescent lights
made my eyes water;
the pounding of computer
printers and
photocopy machines
made my head ache.
I had to close
the door, closing my world
in even smaller.
I wished I was back
in college again
listening seriously this
time to Dr. Brenowitz
preach about the pleasures
of being a marine biologist,
going to sea for weeks
collecting
phytoplankton and zooplankton
and rare specimens of the
Class Hexactinellida.
(the ocean crested and
lapped at me more now that
it was far away,
so far far away.)
Copyright 2005 by Michael Estabrook.
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Eyes of Soul
by Victoria Fann
There is something about the way he looks at me
that makes me think I've known him before.
Though he is my child, he seems to know
more about certain things than I do.
He talks about God and death, auras and meditation.
One day he tells me he misses the river where he used to live.
I ask him where, and he says Egypt.
I asked him when, and without pause,
he says the life before this one.
Another day when I'm feeling sad and tired
he looks up at me and says his aura is golden.
Then he hugs me and says now mine is too.
We've never discussed these things. He just seems to know.
Often he remarks that life isn't real; or that he sees
my father, dead 23 years now, walking next to us.
At night, sounds and visions invisible to my eyes and ears
keep him awake and make him afraid.
At dinner he tells us when all is quiet he hears a sound.
What sound? we ask. Ohm, he tells us.
Oh, we reply, stunned.
At a party, he tells a friend of ours he's full.
When the friend asks if he's full of baloney,
our son says, No, I'm full of you.
You mean I'm inside of you? our friend asks.
No, but your childhood is, he says, grinning like the Buddha.
All this from the mind of a young boy, no older than nine.
All this from a young boy labeled special and deficient and disabled.
All this from a young boy who loves life, cares deeply about people,
and thinks I'm the best mother he's ever had.
So next time you meet a boy or girl who appears delayed or
troubled or doesn't learn the way other children do,
gaze into their eyes and look deeply into their soul.
What you find may surprise you or humble you.
Because things are not what they seem.
Something beautiful is happening to our species.
It is evolving.
The children are coming and bringing with them
an awakened mind disguised as a broken one
so they can gently nudge us out of our slumber
and teach us how to be free.
Copyright 2003 by Victoria Fann.
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The Messiah Of Toadstools
by Paul Murphy
Everywhere mistranslations slow in coming, everywhere
A fenced in monologic, petrified, fossilised, heated, embalmed.
I am everywhere, I am Lucifer and Jesus, I am Nietzsche and Krishna
I am Lenin and the Tsar: for I am everywhere, a mistranslation of 'tribe'
or 'fate' or 'quest' or 'invader', a heated homonym - bark, there.
Shoehorn days, interminable string of invertebrates
beached on a dank shoreline, scuttling life
intensified to the pitch or key of yellow, red or green.
I am the Messiah of Toadstools and yet unevolved, riddlesome
shorn of respect or fear like Schopenhauer's baldness or Kant's
respect for orderliness or Nietzsche's fear of heights or women.
an egg they said was unbreakable yet broken a thousand times
dark mutterings of the Sybll intensified in my mind to a vista or flattened perspective
surrounding an egg-shaped bay with roads made of horn..
Copyright 2005 by Paul Murphy.
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Fishman's Catch
by Luke Buckham
(for Lee, after one of his paintings)
"I took the pieces you threw away
& put them together by night & day
washed by the rain, dried by the sun
a million pieces all in one."
--Howard Finster
A man walks in twilight on a winding back road
and remembers how this time of day used to make him giddy.
Now sun and moon don't work anymore.
6 pm, faint bluejays and gravy dinners are dead.
No time of day relaxes him.
Peripheral golf courses and beer-soaked patios
seethe with dead people.
His body is a yawning hole that sucks in light;
a human supernova, sex-energy and anger-energy imploded.
Alien things disturb his thudding rhythms--
mailboxes peer blind from the side of the road,
waving their numbers. Near the side of the road,
a sharp silver glints on the blue tar.
It is a shard from someone's car,
a piece of their side-view mirror.
A tamer life left behind something
from its comforts for him to look at himself in.
He picks up the glass, a long warped triangle
of living mirage. Its jagged edges
nip at his skin but he doesn't flinch.
His face in the mirror cannot laugh or blush.
Pain has gone that deep in him.
His eyes are like the scales of a fish
left out on a counter after the fish has been
gutted & cleaned, what he would thoroughly devour
left on a gleaming plate half-eaten,
or in a stranger's belly. And it makes him remember
steamed rooms in restaurants--he used to wash dishes,
the last occupation his frazzled mind could handle.
Then his scrubbing hands began to tremble all day long.
He used to look through the porcelain cracks
in his hands in musty sunlight from the one window,
the only worker in the building aware
that the sun is volcanic. One day he dropped a plate
and god, a frog, landed on the pavement outside
his little window with a faint but distinctive plop.
The wet roads called to him after a rain,
and the old song on the radio was a strong breeze
pushing him through a screen door.
The cook screamed in anger, a voice told him
to pick up the broken shards. He closed his eyes
and fell out of the building as if it were built on a cliff.
And human faces became unbearable to him--
omething in their eyes grabbed and pinched.
Clouds and airplanes from somewhere beneath time
flicked past him like film images.
Now a battered man on a battered road,
he lives in those broken pieces that he never swept up.
He can't earn money from anything but his wound.
Which teaches him that pain
is the most powerful force on earth.
And he needs to rejoin the destroying world
in order to begin healing.
Copyright 2005 by Luke Buckham .
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Letter to the Editor: Cherie Staples (skyearth1@aol.com).