Category Archives: Poetry

Shadow

by Charles Rafferty

Darkness that is me,
recognizable
only in profile, you
 
try on surfaces
and all of them fit — even
other people,
 
even the creek
as it rushes
to get away. You need
 
only light
to leap into being:
a cigarette match,
 
the bare bulb
of an interrogation room.
Even a camera
 
flash confirms you.
They all contrive
the same
 
darkness, the same
mystery
we cast and carry
 
like a suitcase
we can't put down
or even open
 
to tell what we have
taken with us —
without effort
 
or choice —
into the night
that swallows us.

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Summer 1985

by Charles Rafferty

That was the season I wrote everything in Lucida, instead of Times New Roman. There were no planets in the sky whenever I thought to look for them, and I kept in my wallet a picture of the girl I thought I'd marry behind a picture of the girl I was with. By July, the caterpillars had eaten every tree in town, but they releafed in August, and it was strange to see that shade of new green edging the backyard thunderstorms. I looked through a bell of cheap chardonnay and saw the world distorted, exactly as it was. At some point, I chipped my tooth on a peach pit but didn't have the money to fix it. It's at home on me now — like the scar from my smallpox vaccination, or the sweater I kept by accident after a host had loaned it to me when he learned that I was cold. 

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On the Edge

by Ed Meek

            Lizzie must have known it was high enough before she jumped from the 7th floor of her apartment in Paris. Experts claim a psychotic break from reality occurs suddenly sometimes, even in middle age. Lizzie was about to turn 55, happily married, we thought, with a cushy government job and two successful daughters, both beautiful and smart like her, and her husband Pierre, a winner of the Legion
d’honneur.
            If you’re psychotic, you can’t tell what’s real and what is not, like reality TV, or plastic surgery, or who our enemy really is. You may enter the realm of doubt, darkness and depression—dash out to the balcony and leap, though leaping takes a kind of courage, a sort of faith or lack thereof. You see yourself at a dead end—no way out but down.
            Yet Lizzie loved life! Sure, she loved to drive fast, yet chose not to turn off the road over a cliff near her gite in Corsica. Instead she threw herself off the balcony as Pierre lay in bed, leaving us to puzzle it out, put it into words, make sense of it, to pull us back from the edge.

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Who to Blame

by Ed Meek

When I fractured my knee I became one
of the lame. You see us on the streets,
moving slow as peat, faces grimacing
in pain. I can’t explain exactly how
it feels to be a useless fuck, dependent
on the State or someone you love—it sucks
all right. Although it’s good to know it will
eventually end, unlike the plight of those
disabled for life—feet blown off by
terrorists or rocked by IEDs in
Iraq or friendly fire in Afghanistan,
or maybe a misguided drone. Sometimes
you have to wonder who the enemy really is.
I wonder who to blame as I limp my way home.

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Mere Honor

by Salgado Maranhão.
Translated by Alexis Levitin.

losing my shine, I turned sober.
dry, alone with myself, left-over.
 
a bull, whose flesh is turned to bone.
a fruit whose rind is now its stone.
 
from light to lucidity—already stripped bare
I’ve got my steps but not the way.
 
I no longer need, I no longer care
I’m filled with the nothing of days.

Other work by Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin:

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The Poet and Things

by Salgado Maranhão.
Translated by Alexis Levitin.

things want to flash through
the poem
with its crust of entanglements,

things want to dwell in
the poem
becoming toys.

it rains on the fibers
of some secret essence
and the poem tears apart
                                                         the poet
and his structure.

Other work by Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin:

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Instruments of the Home

by Salgado Maranhão.
Translated by Alexis Levitin.

the window of the apartment spies
on the home
expressing a language of within
printed on a horizon of beyond
allying itself with the grumbling of the furniture
dismantled, motionless.
in the room
                            objects
                                          pair up
in a wordless pact
singing their silence
mocking us mortals.

Other work by Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin:

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high and low

by Donald Kuspit

for every high
                  there's a low,
and below
             more suffering,
the highs lower,
                        the lows higher,
in between the mirth
                            of the mystery,
high and low blending
                             in the blur,
unfathomable memories
                             in its mist,
i stranded
              at its dead center,
the unmoved mover
                         of my misery.

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A May Poem

by Sarah Kennedy

Under a roof of rhododendron, in
nearly-summer, and the soft rain sounded
on the leaves, slight fever of storm above
the oaks, but down against the ground it was
all shiver and cool earth, damp legs and yes
again, it was close your eyes and sleep some
in the filigreed green, branches arching
dirtward and the dirt clinging, the body

wanting that bed and its long memory
(of the petals rotting into its lap
of the sweet little deaths of animals)
even as it wants to awaken now,
fingers seeking earrings, a button, loosed,
rising again just as the sun comes clean.

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