Archive
Incantation For My Old Friend, Landers
by Alex Cigale
Thunder, thunder, lightning, storm,
let the next three days be gone.
Northern cloud front, western sun,
while the southerlies have come.
Wind is rising at my back,
Washington Bridge traffic, trucks.
Willing weather: heal me, heel,
or all else miserable.
It has rained four forty days,
left me stewing in my daze.
Mark my word, the water’s line
will keep rising in your mind.
Beer, port, vodka, whiskey, wine,
just ’bout now would be de-vine.
Alex Cigale’s poems have recently appeared in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains and North American reviews, Drunken Boat, Hanging Loose, McSweeney’s, and Zoland Poetry. Other work can be found online at The Adirondack Review, Babel Fruit, Big Bridge, The Externalist [PDF], nthposition, The Potomac Journal, Quarter After Eight, The Salt River Review, and Synaesthetic. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry and in The Manhattan and St. Ann’s reviews. He was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine and lives in New York City.
Prayers
by David Need
From “St John’s Rose Slumber,” XVII
This porch among fallen winters
space of my hand
on your shoulder
****
a secret room behind the books
your daughter’s footsteps
on stairs to the basement
****
body becomes field
and so can answer sun, “asters”
and so wait
****
fire
no longer secret
is autumn
my father’s diagram
****
a priest lazy in a field
careless
mistakes ideas
for flowers
****
oh, rose
split
makes possible
the hidden skies
****
face, first of all, prow
filled with water
your cupped hands
****
what moves in them
but fallen winters
your shoulder ahead
****
a translation to kiss
as I am shadows
her daughter
****
and so founded
****
so you also
speak stones across the river
spark
****
a path back
inside myself
lifts dream
****
skirt lifted
her feet descend
a last ridge
****
ocean rose
blueblack in her hair
and iris
****
eyes shut lips shut
ears shut the shuttered doors
of icons
****
a candle guttered
a city became shepherd
these for you
****
majesty
****
in star folds
****
in your pocket.
David Need lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches Central and South Asian Religion and Poetry at Duke University. His poetry and essays have appeared or will appear in Talisman, Hambone, Golden Handcuffs Review, Fascicle, Minor American, Effing Journal, and on MiPoesias. He tries to maintain three loosely connected blogs: O Pure Contradiction, The Anderson Sisters, and No One’s Rose, and hosts the Arcade Taberna reading series.
The Burrowing Song
A song burrowed into a woman’s head. It got in when someone said, “Oh, that’s just dandy.” C&H, C&H, Mommy uses it to bake her cakes. She makes the greatest cookies cakes and candy — they’re dan-dan-dandy! When the woman was in her bed, she could hear it upstairs.
C&H, C&H, Mommy uses it to bake her cakes. The woman called a pest control service, the one with the man dressed like an undertaker and carrying a big heavy mallet. She asked them to kill the song. It needs to be fed, they said, don’t you have some cookies, cakes or candy? “Oh, that’s just dandy,” the woman told them, and then she wept. Her blood pressure went up, so her GP prescribed meds. The song still played, only now in a chromatic scale, like Bach gone inbred.
Finally, the woman packed up her red Keds and left the house. The song had become part of the plumbing and stayed behind. Cool, she thought, at last I’ve got the damned thing balked. Who is the coolest guy who is what am? Fast-talking slow-walking good-looking Mohair Sam.
Now she has a safe tune and always carries it with her. If she sings it silently, the safe tune can drive away a burrowing song.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Claremont, California. In another life, she majored in German Lit, where she read poetry for college credit. She was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart. Her safe song has been on the job for more than fifteen years.
Brink
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Prize-winning photographer Anne Morrison Smyth (website) grew up in Ripton, Vermont and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to Belchertown in 1999 after living in Amherst for 30 years, where she raised her four children. Anne’s love for wildernesses of all kinds informs her work with an intimate, unflinching celebration of the diverse small realities that create a larger truth.
qarrtsiluni 