reflection: spare crop / fleet mind
In my map of things you are confounded with
grey-green clouds
pressing against
bright ground,
like Shiva’s foot.
Creating – uncreating
spring.
Though properly your colours belong
to summer of golden
gulf-beach sand and
blazing,
hephaestian-hematite sweat
against the cuffs and
collar of
field, cotton white and
August sky or shallow
water running over
stones.
This poem has disappeared from this website. A reading of it may be found below:
To find more work by Jill K. Sayre, click HERE.
To listen to a reading of Jill’s poem “Chicken Paprikash” from IPM 2013 click HERE.
Autumn Leaves by Jill K. Sayre is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
This poem has disappeared from this website. To hear a reading by the author, click on the player below:
Copyright 19 January 2014 Lee Elsesser – All rights reserved
To hear Lee Elsesser’s reading of his poem “Distant Signal” from IPM 2012, click HERE.
To hear To hear Lee Elsesser’s reading of his poem “Quantam Leap” from IPM 2012, click HERE.
This poem has disappeared from this website!
Find this poem along with fiction by Chris Fillebrown at his website, Frame of Reference Listen to readings of Chris Fillebrown’s poetry on this website HERE.
Eva is like a crane
Regal, erect, a flag leaning into the wind
Wrapped warm in snow feathers
Eager eyes chasing gold sparks on waves
Charting flight paths in a ceramic sky, dodging the clouds
Seeking patterns in swirls and lines
Seeking pattern’s swirls and lines, she finds the beauty in a print.
Her fingers etch delicate bones, the one-legged stance of a crane
on the clay skin of a ceramic tile, the moment before the crane swoops into flight, aiming at clouds.
She won’t stop, until, exhausted, she droops, a flag without a wind.
Behind closed lids, her eyes chase the bird plunging from the sky, spotting something gold, far beneath the waves.
The couch has become an island, with pebble pill beaches and jagged pillow peaks, mountains of feathers.
As cells split and Poison Root blooms, Eva, wrapped in a snow white sweater,
watches the pattern of chemicals swirling, coursing down the PICC line.
Her bird eyes stop the nurse. She smiles, tries to wave, imagining her hand not limp and pale, but cutting air high above, remembering, beyond the spires of La Sagrada Familia, swinging free, dropping bits of heaven and earth, flocks of construction cranes.
Regal still, leaning back, resting her bald head in a panda-eared hat, she is worn, weary, but unflagging.
She reads words on hospital charts and watches the swirl in a ceramic teacup, imagining how it would feel to fly beyond the clouds.
When she tells me the cancer’s everywhere, my eyes cloud.
Eva wraps me tightly in her wings. I feel each white feather.
We’re in the backyard, a clear day with a silver wind
She shows me the garden planted by loving friends; neat rows, paths and lines.
In the window, a curtain of one thousand origami cranes.
“How can I thank them for all of this? It’s too much, there’s no way…” Her voice is echoing waves.
Later: “My doctor’s from China. Ah, their wood block prints: the carving, precision, the detail in a wave!
Dr. Chen’s like that – makes me think about things, like a mountain peak breaking through a cloud.
On her wrist she has a tattoo, a symbol of luck, longevity – a red-headed crane.
I like that. I like them all here. Interesting people, so kind, supportive…” her voice flutters, feathers.
“Shame you have to be sick to be here. It’s different in China. So many people! They wait in lines that stretch for miles! The anger, desperation! A man stabbed a doctor, and the queues still twist and wind…”
In the garden, a fading day with a silver wind.
“I know you,” she says, and the words are gold sparks, floating on dark waves.
I think about rows and paths, patterns etched, and radical swirls, out of control. I think about our lines –
How some things – no matter how clear, hoped for, inevitable – blur; raindrops lost in a cloud.
A crane, graceful and strong, is shot as it stands one-legged in a marsh, hot blood on snow feathers,
and the print is ruined, the line flattens, the prayer flags fray, the pattern explodes.
As the world spirals and waves roil to rail at clouds
An arrow slices the wind and strikes deep, nested up to the feathers
Her bird eyes are already in flight. I follow their line. I see gold sparks of sun, as my head cranes ever upward.
..
copyright 2013 Adina Richman, all rights reserved
To hear more poems by Adina Richman, click HERE.
Swoops in slow motion
over the lake, standing,
unmoving, on the grassy shore.
Bikers, runners and walkers
all sweep by a mere six feet away,
but he doesn’t see them.
They’re not edible.
I stand and watch,
quiet as the great blue heron.
He finds no fish but I find time.
the work posted here is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported. Read more about Ginnie Siena Bivona and her writing HERE.
The car is a menace tonight
steering me to the edge
Bony hands my skinny companions
take me to solid ground run me to the kitchen
for a fat red cabbage
to shred against the pain of forgetting
for no matter how many times
I try replaying your death I lose it
your face and eyes staring above the hospital bed
beyond a sea of relatives’ faces
Of course it wasn’t sudden
but hadn’t you always recovered from worse?
Typhus anorexia a stroke three days in a coma
The surgeons scraped blood from your brain
and said you’d never be the same
Indeed your vision and hearing progressively failed
together with ambulatory motion,
as family members helpless but habituated
wished you a Hollywood ending
better luck better health
God didn’t you deserve them
after the concentration camp
four children five daily flights of stairs?
Pinch me harder this scene is in a play
written by a sadist
She lay sheet up to her neck
breathing hard no rehearsal this
and the gauze with water on her lips no relief
Still she didn’t convince me
Were I Moses in spite of God’s bidding
I’d say no it’s unfair I cannot accept this
No death for me nor can I believe yours despite the evidence
your face stonewashed cleansed of sorrows
draped in the bed’s whiteness
ogival memory receding vertiginously
Copyright 2013 Liliane Richman, all rights reserved
To find more poems by Liliane Richman, click HERE.
Keeping vigil at the window
while my wife sleeps, my dogs, my child.
Night, keep your bargain.
The thin tree thins even more. It knows the sun is never coming back. The sea is a far-off sigh. A car travels slowly north, bewildered, as if there is no west, no east. A sleeping baby strapped in the car seat. The drunk pisses in the shadows which piss back at him the story of his life. I hear them tapping out the tune. Across the street, an invisible woman smokes at the window with the light out. She’s there, then gone. Almost there, and gone. Cold prayers slip unnoticed from the red tip of her cigarette. Tenuous lives suspended in the book of time, digging up the bones of love, is this what you call hope, is this how you find peace?
Too late, it’s done.
The moon already broken, already signaling the breach.
Tomorrow I’ll wake up and somebody will be dead.
Somebody will be born.
copyright 2013 Octavio Solis
to find more poetry by Octavio Solis, click HERE.
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 