Archive
Ghost Web
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
by Chris Hayes
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Audition
The enormous orb-weaver Nephila
hangs her old microphone under the eaves
Each touch of life points to her and sings
to her weaving legs like a star’s twinkle-points
Each voice steps up and croons through her diaphragm
She listens to her legs She hears the song
of something delayed its frantic wings sugar-glazed
She moves with her quick lace napkins
and composes a white note concerning a fly
by Allan Peterson
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Something Got Inside
The mouse in the drawer
shitting over dish cloths
& towels. The snake on the closet’s
lowest shelf. Spiders in the corners;
crickets. Silverfish, roaches
nesting in cabbage-rose walls.
They appear so… unlovely;
so sleepily common.
Found during our doings,
our common days.
It can seem they wait — for us,
our finding. But that is,
exactly, wrong:
they would be inside,
move through our drawers
our rooms, regardless;
they would do what
they would do. We examine
the lips of glasses,
the tines of forks, inside
our shoes. Canisters
for webs & husks & leavings.
Something inside is wrong.
Something small that is not us.
by RJ Gibson
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Daylight Saving Time
Yesterday the field stretched away from the road,
empty except for the broken stalks of last year’s crop.
Today it is filled with arrivals and departures.
For now, the light stays later, but so does the dark.
Yesterday the tree was silent; today it sings.
High in the branches, an abandoned wasp nest peels back its layers.
A car pulls up to the stoplight, corner of Randall and Big Timber Road.
On its bumper: Lithuania in NATO.
In six years, the driver has not seen another issue
worth the effort to clean his bumper and replace the sticker.
He remembers late winter lingering in that other place,
the same dry stalks, the same blur of wings;
but the farmhouse was of stone, the barn still in use.
When the light changes, the line of traffic moves forward
and the geese stir and rise, stir and rise.
This may not be the right field.
It may not be the right time.
by Susanna Lang
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This is Nebraska
To the farmer
the field is a circle,
a finely drawn
poetry of wheat.
To the clerk
the field is a courthouse,
an unfamiliar city
lacking stars.
A story is a finished
animal, a calm voice.
A courthouse is a flying
desk, a game of cabinets.
The farmer is a field of wheat,
the clerk is a hill of ants.
The animals have disappeared,
sent to watch the night sky via satellite.
by Boe Barnett
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The View From Within
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
by Tricia Anne Baar
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What is Broken
there is a crack
in the green moor edged
with white limestone
the air it breathes
out is cool it is
deep fresh and you may go
through it by tunnel in
breathing darkness to deep
basin caves which are
theaters of mime in gold-brown
rock which have mounds
fantastic built drop
by limestone drop over
aeons and when your thought
stands back thousands
of years you see
this roiling stone
dreamscape is cover for ancient
catastrophe for gargantuan
rock-fall
the bleeding and the moan now
stilled the splinters
smoothed and high
many feet high
above your head there is another
earth-crack and the sky is blue and on the moor a lark
is singing
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Grafted
Two parallel saplings grow to the side of a path :
…………………………………. on the right a flaking gray pole : to the left
scarred white bark. Three feet up they lean in
…………………………………. grapple graft in a bulbous striped cyst so
meaty it could burst with a prick a unified thing
…………………………………. the cross piece in the letter H androgynous
yet able to disentangle into two selves with one
…………………………………. difference : white continues in a direct line
above gray’s roots while gray persists unfazed
…………………………………. above white’s lower trunk. Intolerable?
Bizarre? If you dare dispute biological truth plot
…………………………………. the parabolic equation leave two Us co-
joined : one upright one upside down axes flipped
…………………………………. leaves mixed in the sap’s slippery switch.
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qarrtsiluni 