Poem of the Week: Believing is a Sad and Twisted Art, Jim Pascual Agustin

Mother coming home with a basket

stinking with severed heads and crying in her sleep.

Father cracking the galvanized iron sheet

shaped into his skull like a second

layer of scalp. Brothers and sisters

peeling their cold masks like plastic

wrappers from grocery meat.

Churning half-children from the soft-

hard bone, I join them in offering

all our separate pain to the god of sadness,

the god of the lost, dying families

whose solitude is a refrigerator.

We all grow tired of making

our sad art as we cringe and crawl

farther from each other,

blaming the lonely god we’ve created,

crushing it beneath our soles.

Poem of the Week: Abused, Kharis Lund

She feels darkness

Extraneous doubts and cold blue lips

He is darkness

Dank motel rooms and rough calloused hands

Poem of the Week: Shipping News, Rick Hartwell

Magisterial cliffs overhang,

Diminishing the importance of

Sedate junks plying the Yangtze.

Clattering bamboo, signals at night,

Morse code messages from the ancients,

While tomorrow weighs heavy in the hold.

Poem of the Week: Dear Sombody: by Shirley Kuo

Just face the truth,
darling:
I am running out of
infinities to promise
on, and you are
running out of
love to give to me.

Poem of the Week: Toucan, Joan Colby

Woodcut of a toucan

To ward off disaster. Thick

Primitive clapper of a bill

Brilliant as a piñata

Tilting with small treasures.

Outsize beak

Impales this bird.

Comic totem

Disproportionate outline:

How the specific

Will waylay the heart.

Flocking to the jungle’s source

Like squalls of colored paper,

Jubilant freaks

Of the mind’s tropic.

Enormous mouthpiece

Clotted with the ultimate advice

If only it could

Wrench from the wood and speak.

Poem of the Week: Metropolitan Tide, Tim Tipton

The strange fragrance of modern buildings

Hot street lights dazzle larger than most stars

Purple silent moon looms over jungle traffic

Sounds of strong edges of people and urban clamor

To be in beautiful soft neighborhoods at night

The city in my hand

The night will leave at dawn but the feeling won’t

Casual pain of anxious thought of longing to be

Out there with you in the dark.

Poem of the Week: Chatting, Danny Earl Simmons

Some days,

I grind against
breaking open the email
and jotting down,

Hey, how are you?

with a casual whistle
and a halo,

crossing my fingers
you will read
between the line.

Poem of the Week: An Archaeology of Cooking, Sally Zakariya

Peeling potatoes is the same in any kitchen
I stand at the sink
scraping earthy skins
off the waxy flesh

It was like that in the townhouses on the Hill
with their thin layers
of paint over years
of cooking stains

like that in R Street’s tiny closet kitchen
just bigger than a breadbox
but big enough for my
first turkey

like that too in the old place on North Edison
where the glass in the cabinet
doors shattered when Mother
slammed them shut

Of course she hated cooking—who could blame her?
a bleak narrow space
with one stool and
one stingy window

wide enough for us kids to squeeze through
when we forgot our keys
too circumscribed to let
the life she wanted in

In the new house, now mine, she asked for more— 
at least a double window 
at the sink so she could watch
the squirrels as she peeled

Poem of the Week: Sand, Joseph Farley

one

grain

of

sand

among

infinite

granules



one

grain

of

sand

longing

for

a

single

drop

to

transform

into

an

oasis

Poem of the Week: Sunday Music, David Chorlton

In his blue trim shirt

with silver buttons

and a buckle shining

at his waist

the guitar player tilts

back his hat

and begins to strum

behind his friend

who sways with an accordion

along the aisle between

the tables in the Mexican

restaurant early Sunday

evening when the tips

are sparse as mercy

from the sun

and the cooling system

offers sanctuary

from a summer that won’t end.

They play requests

and always add

a little in a minor key

that comes from far away.

There’s a polka

and a ballad and

an undocumented solo

and although the place

is almost empty

the music stays on

while the lights above

the tables are switched off

and sound becomes

a compass in the dark

pointing south.

Poem of the Week: Splitting Wood, Tony Burnett

I’m not supposed to do this.

The muscles tighten

around the restructured spine.

Hand eye coordination reclaimed.

Sinewy arms regain control.

The maul finds the mark.

The muscles tighten.

“Let the tool do the work.”

my father’s ghost, admonishing.

Gravity on iron

Sharpened edge

seeking rift inside the grain.

“Let the tool do the work.”

Guided by muscles, atrophied

a laggard recovery. Titanium,

modern pharmacology, a year lost

to opium visitations,

mattresses, somnambulism.

Guided by muscles,

Crisp air fills lungs, replacing

the rancid humidity of sickness.

Sunlight excites pale skin

as maul’s edge penetrates oak.

Alive, again. Vital, again.

I am supposed to do this.

One cord, One day. One life.

Poem of the Week: Separation, Ariana D. Den Bleyker

I am wrecked: you have always been
like a schooner in the distance.
I no longer dream of conquest,
my heart an anchor. Where the air
is thin, I breathe for you. I watch
you hold a bag of frozen peas
to your swollen eyes. The way
you drift awkwardly towards me,
like snow, your color might as well
dance, tiptoe on the strings tying us
to the moon. Ships become memory.
Yet you float away. When I first met
you, I knew I would not miss you. And I don't.
And, if you said I was lucky,
I would slap you. But, if you refused
to speak to me, I would kiss you,
readily return to you, let you write
your name, file it, chisel it, clamp it
onto my heart with a pair of pliers.
I misuse the word separation, as though
it were an answer to your struggles,
not questions. Nothing remains
of the captured spark. I remember
you making banana splits at the kitchen
counter. We stared at each other,
imagining less complicated things.
Separation: that which is an intervening
space, a means of division. The bananas
slice carefully into halves and so you
split too, separating us from the many
flavors and textures competing
for our attention. I watch the end
of your suffering begin with your first
unaltered breath, a small song
of annihilation in a world I hold so dear.

Poem of the Week: Measuring Time These Days, Nina Bennett

We communicate in song lyrics, seek
safe harbor in words of others. You sing
on my voice mail, I cut and paste
confessions into e-mail. "These days
I sit on corner stones
and count the time in quarter tones to ten"
we dole out desire in snippets.

When you sigh, roll over,
disentangle yourself from the sheets,
I swallow my words, silently
plea please don’t go, let tonight
be the night you choose me.

Poem of the Week: At the Seance, Joan Colby

Presume for a moment,
There’s an end-up place:
Heaven, Paradise, Kolob
the Celestial Planet,
Happy Hunting Grounds,
You know the drill,

Where all the dead congregate
And at the séance of the impossible
You can pick up the protoplasmic phone
And speak to your loved ones
What would you say. What apology
Would you offer, what question pose.

If the muse of history
Happened to be the medium
What could you rectify. If
Anything.

Poem of the Week: Hard Pull, Danny Earl Simmons

When it comes to turkey,
I’m more cold than wild –

too much
abandonment in abandon,
too much
left wanting when wanton.

And, I think it’s funny
that when no-rules rules
it can lock you down tight.

Who am I trying to kid?
Pass the bottle.

Poem of the Week: A Form of Healing, Rose Mary Boehm

the house
windows boarded
oxidized hinges
rotting wood
matter responds to time

behind frayed curtains
rectangular eyes
stairs sag
towards a chamber
where her secrets
are kept in bolted
lockers

across the yard
rusty swings squeak
hinged on the north-southern

a dark shadow reaches languidly
towards his outstretched hand
there’s weeping
they found
his sister swinging
from a noose

can’t leave now
the eyeless weep
groping in darkness
like he
they are
silently picking
at old scabs

Poem of the Week: Our First Apartment, Ryan Mattern

Many thanks to Ryan Mattern who was the first responder to the call for poetry. He never fails to produce wonderful work.  -L

-----------------------------------------

We dug the pyramids up
from the foundation
of a kitchenette building.

We carved our initials
into a booby-trap wooden spike
lodged in the ribs of a raider’s skeleton.

We spray painted a mustache
on Akhenaten’s upper lip.
Spent the night inside Tutankhamen’s crypt.

A pigeon perched on the fire escape
flew in through a missing brick.
We locked it in with us.

Poem of the Week: On the Porch at Eagle Pond, Rose Mary Boehm

Before I get to today's lovely poem, I'd like to ask all of you for submissions. I only have one poem left for next week and that's it. If I don't get any more work, the Poem of the Week feature will have to be postponed and possibly trashed if submissions continue to dwindle. Please submit or pass this on to your writing friends. I won't delay you from reading this piece anymore.

-----------------------------

for Jane Kenyon

The moment she grounded,
her blood felt
red, hot, and throbbing,
until it was tampered with.

Wondered what was gushing
through those long, winding, narrow tunnels.
Felt transparent.
Snaking under her skin,
bubbling through burnt flesh,
running chemical.

When the pain eased
she dared again
to draw in the scent
of the honeysuckle,
touch the hot scones,
lean back in her chair.
But she knew.

Poem of the Week: Wagon Ho!, Rick Hartwell

I find that my dawns steadily
encroach on my nights,
from six to five to four to three.
Soon now I am certain that
I will re-meet two a.m. and
greet it as the start of day, as
once I bid it the end of night.
Is it advancing age, or is there
something of the clubs and
bars I miss and which I am to
recapture – my youth ill spent
in which I must reinvest – time?

Empty driveways,
un-mowed lawns,
abandoned suburbia
or a different cause;
back to the nightclubs,
back to the bars,
stray from the right,
re-embrace the night.

Poem of the Week:One Universe Too Many, Mitch Grabois

Ed Note: I'm so sorry this wasn't up on Friday. I had a lot of things going on and forgot to schedule it. 

The alternative universe
in which you’re not a colossal disappointment,
where is it now?
It rode the Diphtheria Nebula
slid into the Oppenheimer Black Hole and hid there,
rested in perfect silence
before disappearing

A colossal disappointment ,
your ears ring with parental echoes
as do mine

My patriarch said:
I can read you like a book
and all the pages are blank

Then, as if I didn’t get it, an interpretation:
You’re a bum and you’ll always be a bum
his finger in the air as if he were reciting from the Talmud

Mira:
I let mold grow on my organic eggs
I invite quadruplet cats to lick my cheeks with their rough tongues
until the chafing mimics my Roseola
I do yoga in the rubble of the necropolis without a mat

all this to show you that
Perfection is not possible
and whatever you’re comparing yourself to
is a construct with no reality

Religions of perfection betray us
leave our lungs scarred as if ravaged by pneumonia
leave our blood infected

“God” is the arch-villain in an archaic mythology
“Jesus” is all the sex we’ve denied ourselves

On a Greek archipelago, the risen Jesus and the goddess Isis
have riotous sex
until the feta mountains crumble
and the ouzo and retsina
in their abandoned goblets
ignite