PERSPECTIVE

Catherine Barnett

VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON

Out on the beach we hardly noticed the shells –

we wanted sea glass, one piece for every day of the year

because we can’t do what we did last year,

we can’t have another birthday party with only other people’s children

now so many have gone and gotten older,

taller, almost taller than my sister, and scared of her –

they’re a funhouse mirror she’s looking into—

We know time’s passing

because the ferries still shuttle back and forth.

One morning we saw what looked like an island

being pulled right across the Sound,

and sailing up so far ahead it seemed impossible

it could be fastened to anything,

the small tugboat.

And the fat wet pyre of stripped trees laid horizontally

on the glassy morning water moves so slowly

it’s as if it won’t get anywhere but where it already is.

Every day the tide comes right up to the porch.

My sister watches it come in, go out, and once we found

a seal washed up on shore.

I remember it had no head and I think I know why –

those tugboats with their long tow lines

like a knife in water. We didn’t speak about the seal

and I half forgot because I have the luxury of forgetting.

For my sister, one day is really no worse than any other,

longing stretched so tight it’s a wire dragged through water.

Curtis Bauer

ARS POETICA

Like one of those fourth grade math problems,

like a tunnel being dug from both sides of the mountain,

my numbered days approach me as I approach them.

For years Trakle thought a man stood behind him

with a knife when he wrote, but it was a shadow of the needle

filling the quiet space near his flurrying pen. I’m beginning to think

it’s a bottle and instead of Trakle sitting at his desk

it’s me standing in the courtyard of a deserted apartment building

in Mexico, in place of something sharp, there’s an open window

four stories up. The bottles fall, whistle past my ears

and shatter at my feet. The window hovers above me

with an endless supply waiting again for me to look away.

Theresa Burns

THE PLAY

The lawn would be hacked up

like hamburger meat when we finished.

We were seven, nine, and eleven.

He was sixteen and so cool

we called him The Rock—

he shimmered at us

from an island of cool.

He’d give us the play in his open hand,

his finger running along the lines

where he wanted us to run. It stopped

when he wanted us to stop, where

he felt he could get us the ball.

The hand smelled like metal, the fingers

long as a mathematician’s.

We knew nothing about the game

but what my brother taught us

those few Saturdays before girls,

before college: To go out

maybe five fast strides,

and at the right moment, at the place

he’d shown us in his hand,

to turn to him; that is, fake,

then keep on running in the other direction,

while our man fell in dirt trying to follow.

Then to catch the floating bullet

from him whole, cradle it in our arms,

which we almost never did,

receive, that is.

Sue Carnahan

PORTRAIT

He could he worked so physically hard

Eat fried pork chops poached eggs for breakfast

He did he had a high tolerance drink beer

Starting at noon

Continue all day all roads tubular

Cans blink as roadside reflectors

It could it led to assumed to have developed into

Later in the afternoon of his life him always

Chewing something

His liver stomach like a leaky sac

He was once I have seen

His large hands stained hard held open like lifeboats

Under kittens littered in the laundry room but we didn’t could not never

Kept any of them he was a not getting younger never happy man

Stone walls wells boat trailers kept him paddling afloat

Built a U-shaped house amid

Rising above green pistachio trees

Growing so forth in rows they leafed

Their points painfully out

Julia Cole

OBLIQUELY

I am home from the market,

at the sink

cutting an angled inch

from the stem of each tulip.

You are watching me,

so glad to see me it scares me.

If I died you might buy tulips

and prepare them this way

to keep me fresh in your mind.

I learned this from someone

and you learned it from me:

to make flowers last an extra day,

to pretend they’re still attached

at the juicy root.

This is civilization:

us passing on how to live nicely.

We learn by watching

and then teach by doing.

Here you are drinking in

what I know.

You bend your flower head

and kiss my neck, my stem.

Jim Elledge

VALISE

for Toni Oliviero

The sun rises through a skim of clouds
the way a Goth boy raises
a martini glass off a sticky bar top
to his mouth. The sun sets the way that same

Goth boy, his brow sweat-spangled,
draws the martini glass from his lips and sits
it back on the sticky bar, black lipstick
parentheses on its rim.

Charles Flowers

WHAT BRINGS ME BACK

These last days of winter, even light teases,

coaxes me to an idle coffee outside a cafe,

where I watch college boys parade new bermudas,

their legs pale and awkward in the day’s final blush.

In high school, I wanted to impress a boy

who wore his father’s cotton shirts,

wrinkled and billowing from his thin waist.

One night, on his front lawn, we chased

tequila with beer until we sank back into new grass,

our throats open to the slick, cool burn,

tongues stung by salt, lips wet with lime --

how clean desire felt then, like the air itself.

Last week, with dreams of t-shirts and crewcuts,

I danced for hours, my body all light --

later, humming and alone in damp clothes, I drove

for miles through vacant streets,

through steam plumes and flashing amber.

My skin pale and greasy, I wondered

if they dusted my body, whose prints would they find,

what patterns? Last spring, another

boy’s love bloomed to a raw no. Reeling

in the clear June light, I wandered

Manhattan, his face everywhere -- a half-smile

between closing subway doors,

a street vendor’s blunt, olive nose -- until I collapsed

in the Met before a nude of black granite.

Beneath a skylight’s thin wash, I rocked on a bench,

weeping at the sight of her back bending

to embrace her own knees, her head lowered

as if she knew my shame, over the boy,

over this nameless grief each time another leaves,

another layer, like ash, sheathing

this body alone. What brings me back

can be thin as smoke clinging

to the arms of a dancer, or careless as the grace

of workmen, or insistent as dawn

filling early crocuses, pale lanterns above cold mud.

Ross Gay

David Groff

SAME OLD SAME OLD

How to exonerate the second fart in bed,

the bed reciting the same damn yarns,

the boring penis boring the old chapped ore,

the tits pert as toddlers now drooped like dough,

the hairs curled, fetal, beside a shot glass,

the spectacles oral sex demands, the face age clawed,

the shared first pets as dead as parents,

the embers gray enough to grasp?

– The bed’s a leaky raft. Swallow the fart,

clutch the cock at its base like a fading pen,

espouse the other, later body like a dated cut of coat,

holes rent in every solitary pocket,

the cool coals dropped like change on the street

for bums and kids to find and spend.

Paul Guest

PHYLUM

When it’s warm, when it’s summer and dogs

hang their heads from car windows

like wind socks, I wonder how

their dog-minds understand human speed,

the speed that blurs our shared world

in which everything but them and the person

arguing with the radio’s invisible voice

seems to become sci-fi shorthand

for travel, the stars streaking, stretched,

defeated. I cannot decide,

even now, mostly still and half cold,

as October becomes no longer September,

as the leaves are not hurried

from the arms of trees by their death,

if I’m consoled by the inner life

I only seem to share with the canine species,

if I should I open my mouth

to the rushing air and taste it,

and think only that this velocity is good

and had I seraphic wings,

not cellophane and string nor tendon and vein,

were I some new phylum

freed of the concerns of animals,

how far I’d rise to make brash war with God.

Kenneth Hart

CIRCLE

The insignificant page turnings,

the determined walk with angled sun

knifing through the branches, evening's

warm smell of spruce needles rising up

to your nose… they come back,

little déjà-vus, often riding the back

of some old horror or sweet bestowal—

that jealousy that wrenched you up years back,

the holy parting of her knees when she gave

herself to you, freely. Frightening, sometimes,

to find they are never fully gone, how some things

so nestle in the body, osmose and cathect

into actual organs, the life-spasm of memory

out distancing even certain stomach cells.

And memory's characters, then, taking on

a life of their own: How not stand beriddled

among the dazzle and welch of their power?

You wonder how long things take

to pale into jargon, the strata

of emotions tilled up into a single word.

Crazy how the mind prunes, without the heart's

rumplings for escape.

What meditation frees mind from mind?

The fish-trap never exorcising the fish,

the slime and your mother's thighs,

your head cresting out and that first, bright,

palpable, cold cough of air.

Melissa Hotchkiss

AIR A RUNWAY

Unlikely to return soon

She steps up into the plane, a small plane

An elderly man in the first row

On the left, reminds her of a grandfather

Not hers, only someone’s

Relative, the hour early

(6:20 AM)

No recollection of something recent

Her entire body, an afterthought

Or possibly a film still

Film still perfectly stressed

Returned as a fish from water

Air a runway

She sits in the assigned seat

He looks like a grandfather

In a white shirt his tone

Stands out as dark, lovely

Kasey Jueds

THE GIFT

All winter the feral cat

hid beneath the barn. Only sometimes

when I walked the rutted road,

kicking mud chunked in frozen fists,

she’d run ahead, always just on the edge

of vision. The woods stepped forward

in that thin light, branches clean

as x-ray bones, the leaves,

by that time, vanished.

The cat, too: darted past,

slipped under the barn floor’s boards. Gone.

Mornings she left birds on the back porch,

dropped just by the door, and I tried

not to look too close, buried them behind the flower bed,

the one soft place I knew. That road stayed frozen

for months, trench and hollow dredged by trucks

then stiffened into place, lines my boots traced

all the way up to the birch wood and back.

I never thought to call them gifts,

those birds. Mornings I found bonechill

air, husks of wing and blood, I tried not to look

too close, wanting October back again—

amber, amber, crimson, gold—not

the absent cat, the cold, everything

sliding past zero. The cat spread the feathers

in lavish arcs, and her eyes, as I passed the barn, glowed.

She left the birds for me. I’d spent months

staring at stripped trees, looking the wrong way

that whole time. It took so long

to find what I needed: not the reaching

branches, but the ground.

Joy Katz

A ROOM (without the woman).

Helena Rubenstein’s Ile St.-Louis apartment

(photograph by Dora Maar)

The silence of.

Planes of: receding, approaching, receding. Placid tabletop,

chairs

speaking and spoken to.

Is whatever going on—jawbone of an ass—

light going into eternity at its own rate, lines vanishing

into infinity, not moaning.

All the spokens and expressings of content

in flux—infinitude of shelves,

windows with their coy hints of wild,

books like lolling steps, stone elephants

weighting down columns of air…

If she were here

would take their magnificence from her brow

(she thinks)

would care (she thinks)

to bear her up

and the story would stop

Joy Katz

A ROOM (with the woman).

Helena Rubenstein in her Ile St.-Louis apartment

(photograph by Dora Maar)

How the statues recede;

how all bows to her; how her hand,

on a case—

how she owns

(pretends to own). The story becomes

her own. The rug

apart from the chair, alone…

How the song stops. But I must stop

and talk about the folds of her skirt.

How I notice that her skirt has—

But I must think that she has chosen this vase and wonder about the choosing of it.

She barges on. How much smaller

grows the room. How she

becomes the moral, perishable pinpoint.

How her story must be told—

—no.

Every glass half-full of tea, every mask and sword were here without her

even, in this minute

are a part of eternity.

Judy Katz

ASTRONAUTS

Night is when the big questions come.

Tucked into the top bunk

you call “Heaven,”

Rosie fast asleep on “Earth,”

you wait for those final moments

before the day’s gates close

to hurl your most pressing questions

into the dark…When did time start?

Where is everything that died?

One night you said if Dad and I had just been astronauts

we would have understood everything --

as if all the mysteries of living

would be perfectly clear

if only we could get enough distance.

Lying beside you, eyes closed, the night sky

opening within me, I felt myself floating

weightless, and I pictured the earth.

There were no trees or people or bread or cars.

It looked like that photo we’ve all seen

taken from space – the blue and green sphere

with veils of white around it. I found it wholly

unfamiliar, almost unlovable. In the dark

I felt your skinny arm next to mine.

We didn’t say another word that night,

just lay there, drifting, with our questions.

Maud Lindsay

“OLD PARTNER, OLD PAINT”

Remember when the alphabet

reliably lined up in perfect order

and words danced like the Rockets,

kicking their legs across our mind.

Don’t leave me, dear.

Don’t give in to that dirty lyme spirochete;