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The Order of the Forest
My first clumsy step in the dark alerted
broods, dens, clans, nests. Their snarls
resembled broken dinner plates, shards from vases. So close
to a smile, I’m always put at ease with gleaming.
Animals complain, I didn’t bring anything sharp. They hold me down
and sniff me for metal, I feel whiskers and breath
on my body. They examine my claws, blunt. Pull back my lips
with their paws, but don’t bother to steal
my teeth: those dull aspirin tablets. They fit me with a starter jaw:
mosaic teeth from a mason jar.
They must have found a crate of marbles. Eyes green
or yellow. I can’t discern: are some marbles black,
or are eye sockets empty? It is impossible
to identify variants of black against the navy backdrop of sky.
Their eyes must be their own light source. I brag: my human eyesight
allows me to read books. Nobody is impressed.
They snatch my glasses and immediately crack them
into usable shards. The forest blurs.
Trees wear animals like jewelry. A live creature is the most attractive ornament.
They perpetually stitch themselves a new hide. Even the smallest furs
can be patched together. A sturdier skeleton allows
them to brandish a wider jaw. Nobody has a taste
for wearing human,
so I’m safe.
Barbed, pink ribbon tongues wag
throughout the woods. Only mine is tooth-pricked.
An animal with enormous ears whispers
into mine that I have arrhythmia. My heart
is the most delicate ornament
I’ve ever worn.
Valerie Loveland (website) is the author of Reanimated, Somehow (Scrambler Books, 2009). Her poems have been featured in the Dzanc Books anthology Best of the Web 2008 and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
Parakeet
It’s the shit commute,
the hour-long drag from the Cubans I live with
to the blacks I work with.
The slog of cars—passing
dollar stores and bakeries and gas stations and
old women selling Dasani from a neck-strapped cooler;
back-packed children mocking the stalled and the flat,
laughing at the slouched bodies, shielding their eyes,
in the bus stop of the abandoned.
These old men on scooters putt between cars.
It’s just another week stocking shelves at the grocery,
but in two little years, the monthly checks kick in;
then the sweet sound of salary passed under the table.
On any given block here,
I can buy weed, a bag of mangoes, a woman.
At the red light, half-way to work,
I see her attempt at crossing six lanes of traffic.
She’s got twelve seconds before the crosswalk signal
will demand she stop.
But she’s late today and the left strap of the electric
green blouse
hangs down around her bicep.
The skin, blue-blacked by decades of sun, ends
at a pair of faded orange flats.
There’s no time to walk here like a lady,
like she practiced for days before crossing the stage
that commencement year in Trinidad.
In Miami, she’s running late to her own shit job,
a staggered parakeet,
a swirl of tropicalia in this drive-thru ghetto.
When the arrow goes green and the guy behind me honks,
she startle-taps the hood of my car.
Moves on ahead.
At work,
I’ll notice she’s left behind faint fingerprints of sweat and dust,
of the many many days of this journey to here,
the fat from last night’s fried fish.
Leave me the deep smudge memory of who she is now,
of who I once was—
before I tamped it down hard.
Rafael Miguel Montes is a Cuban-American poet and Cultural Studies professor working and writing in Miami. His work tends to explore the two worlds that he seems to consistently inhabit—Little Havana and Academia. The ultimate irony is that although his family was exiled from Cuba and brought to the United States, he now teaches English as a Second Language and American Literature to students who have also been exiled or made refugee from turbulent countries. His poetry has been published in a number of journals in the United States, the Caribbean and the UK. He has most recently appeared in The Caribbean Writer, CONCLAVE: A Journal of Character, Prole (UK), and The New York Quarterly.
Strix Nebulosa
dancing in the updraft, alleluia spectralem gloriosus dominus
you will not hear it coming, the whoosh of wingspan could be anything
wind, tasers, tinnitus
a phantom call from the creditors
Oh hail Mary full of ghosts give us the blessing before the burn
area spreads full spectrum bruise red purple blue black brown yellow
look into its eyes, see whirlpools in the Styx
slick with sludge, fertilizer runoff
see your eyes in a bad webcam photo
see yourself drowning
as with most noctuam species, male owls are usually smaller
than females
Minerva wants what she wants
a nice temple, vineyard, legions of honour
tall evergreens for her owls
humana lustratio
Poet, science writer and interdisciplinary adventurer, Mari-Lou Rowley (website) has come between a mother bear and her cub, encountered a timber wolf when alone in the woods, found 36 four-leaf clovers, and has published several collections of poetry, including the just-published Undus Mundus (Anvil Press). She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, near the river—and wild-life thoroughfare.
You, Cardinal
Crimson startled the snow—
powder shook from his feet.
Between sunflower seeds
his raccoon eyes
gave no thought
to benefactors
so I buried my face
in the editorial section
like a hunting blind,
hoping he’d linger.
Above the paper’s
pinking shears edge
I’d spy him,
handsome as a captain,
his pyramidal tuft
like a helmet’s crest—
and I had gotten used to him
and he, perhaps to me,
when glancing over
a column by George Will
he was gone.
The void surprised me.
What did I expect—
that he would stay?
The mind wants hope
and you, cardinal,
though your feathers
be dipped in blood,
know little of the sadness
new absences bring.
C. E. Chaffin (website) lives in Mendocino, California, with his wife and dog. He has two books to his credit, the latest being Unexpected Light. He has been a featured poet in over twenty magazines and an editor for many others.
Aperture
by Karen George
Behind glass I watch the sky glutted with grackles
circling above an open field. A cluster breaks
from the mass and lands in bare branches
of a nearby hickory. One bird squawks and flaps
as another impinges on his perch. Seconds after settling
into tense suspense they swoop in one wave and plunge
black beaks in rain-sogged earth.
Though I lift my zoom lens again and again, I never
catch their synchronized rise or descent. Cannot fathom
how the connected current of fed bellies must feel
to lift off, wings wide, and rejoin the fold lipping
the bowl of sky. Do their jet bodies tremble as mine?
I cannot leave the glass door or lower the camera,
remembering how I tried in vain to capture breaching
whales in Alaskan waters on our last trip together.
“Just look,” you said. Your face, empty of hair
and chemo-pale, drank in the fluid black in livid
sea, and I knew what I was frantic to frame.
Karen George, author of Into the Heartland (Finishing Line Press, 2011), has work recently published in Memoir, Still, ninepatch: A Creative Journal for Women and Gender Studies, 94 Creations, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, The Single Hound, Ontologica, and Blood Lotus. She has been awarded grants from The Kentucky Foundation for Women and The Kentucky Arts Council. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, and has taught fiction writing at The University of Cincinnati.
Low Rent Urban Housing
i almost step
on two eastern box turtles
gold and black shells hiding
in clumps of spent violets
unharmed inside their hard
low-roofed houses
heads and feet pulled in
safe from the mower blades
that i pushed right over them
Margaret S. Mullins splits her time between rural Maryland and downtown Baltimore. She is a Pushcart nominee and the editor of Manorborn 2009: The Water Issue (Abecedarian Press). Her chapbook, Family Constellation, was published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press.
F/light
(Click image to view a larger version.)
Dorothee Lang is into roads, stories, places, crossings, and all the things they lead and connect to. She lives in Germany, blogs at life as a journey, and her new book is Worlds Apart.
How cats find homes
We pounced off the fence to convene
our weekly meeting of the Northern California
Cats Against Homelessness or NCCAH.
We keep up with vacancies in the area,
try to place our kind into the right homes.
A spot was available on Idaho Street where
Bonnie lived until she was put down by the Vet,
Dr. Steve at the end. We knew Bonnie’s woman—she
adopted Orphan Annie off the porch steps years ago
in Michigan when Annie was hungry and homeless.
Okay, we knew Bonnie’s woman wasn’t perfect,
let Annie get knocked up, left her and her kittens
behind for the West Coast, but in decent placements.
Listen, we’re working on a shortage here,
that’s just the way it is in California,
so we have to make allowances.
The human did take care of Bonnie till the end,
and got a good reference, but Bonnie would say
nice things about anyone, don’t you know.
And there was the asthma thing that got pegged
as hairballs, the stomach thing, the cancer,
the matted hair-pulling and brushing, we thought
a short-hair would work better in this situation,
got it all set up with Snowball who was
getting rehab over in the Baylands, until we heard—
the woman’s considering a DOG!
What a nerve on that human!
Snowball wouldn’t come out from under a rockpile
by the bay for a week, we told her don’t worry,
keep your tail high, maybe go over there and try
anyway, you know, soften her up, you do have
those bedroom eyes.
Phyllis Klein has been writing poetry for many years and has published most recently in the Emerge Journal. She works as a psychotherapist and a poetry therapist and believes in creativity for its own sake and as a healing force.
Chironomus plumosus
Twelve years old and in the back yard with a badminton racket. Not batting birdies. Whacking flies. By the hundreds. Per swat. That’s how thick they run. What else are 12-year-olds to do on a hot summer day two blocks from Lake Winnebago during the lake fly bloom? At least they don’t bite, we tell each other. Don’t ride your bike with your mouth open, we kid each other. Can’t hang the wash out, our mothers complain to each other. Mosquitoish things. Arise out of the lake a couple times a summer. During the hatch, they’re thick. No, thick doesn’t do it. Clouds. Multitudinousswarminghordes. They hover over every tree, every road, every damn thing. They dim the sun. A hatch of trillions caught by Doppler radar. The whirring of millions of wings singing an electric buzz, just a touch above Middle C. At least they don’t bite, we remind each other. They feed the fish, some say. The birds are happy, others say. It’s Hitchcockian say the out-of-towners. Just life, we say (sometimes forgetting to tell them they don’t bite). You get used to it, most say: mow the lawn fast, get the mail fast, run for your car. Short-lived. Ephemeral. A week or so, tops. As adults, that is. All they do is mate, lay their eggs and die. No need for mouth parts (at least they don’t bite). Afterwards, they collect in dark drifts at lakeside, curbside, houseside. Smell a little. Make good Fertilizer. Then gone. Until the next time, at least.
From reading his poems, you might think that Steve Tomasko has some kind of insect fetish. You might not be too far off the mark. But there are worse things, of course. When not thinking about bugs, Steve wonders about the life of a slime mold, or how many hair follicle mites are in his eyebrows right now. Oh wait, that is thinking about bugs.
the egrets come to Downey
by Lorine Parks
necks curved wings slowly flapping
the snowy egrets at dusk
circle the tallest tree on the block
the egrets glide to the branches
content with the morning’s breakfast
fish speared from the wet cement river bed
and snacks pricked out of ponds on the golf courses
they perceive this suburb as safety
compared to the wild salt marsh and the foxes
now closing their wings and folding themselves
like compressing gawky coat hangers
into small white bundles of laundry
they croak and wulla and chuck goodnight
suddenly down the street comes rat-a-tat-tat
a boy with a string of fireworks saved since July
the birds rise startled indignant
but then they come circling back only a boy
re-settle their legs excepting two sentinels
erect as white candles
slowly over the sunset horizon
an immense blue ball climbs into the May sky
a wayward balloon it hangs there
menacing in its silence
these birds will not stay
to be harassed any longer twice frightened
these birds have standards they demand respect
this time when the egrets scramble
they will take their plumage
to a better perch
beauty is fleeting
coming back only as memory
leaving the tree
so briefly inhabited
an egret is not any more beautiful to another egret
than it needs to be
only humans can separate beauty
from the passing elements of sexual selection
Yosemite’s Half Dome the quantum theory
they are beautiful they will not have babies
birds cannot comprehend taking time out for zen
they might get ambushed by a boy with a pop gun
but for humans beauty must be
more than the stock market report
it rests in the longing for that
which could not be saved
from the pale blue balloon
Lorine Parks (website) lives in Southern California and has just published a book of poems, Catalina Eddy, which is about the weather in the same way that the Broadway musical Cats is about cats.
qarrtsiluni 