.:ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE:. Poetry

I’m the ache of harlot’s morning
I’m the rake of ninety years
His red light in the river-distance
Her famous echo clenched in mountains:
Find me in the fate of horses
in the bawling cradle-rumpus
in the ashes of the bandit
thief of all her diamonds.

Tell the caudillo I was with him
in the harebell lake of childhood
at the back of men and women
dancing on the journey out:
All our songs were peacocks, engines
all our bodies fast, spasmodic
all our crutches rocking-horses:
jaguars plundered our shackles.

A glass locomotive
scorpion-baron of lucid desire
brought our sisters and brothers
from places upcountry:
Sweet-smelling devils
competing in scandal
buried in uniforms
measured in miles
occult, decisive
sick with rebirth.

(Mother Catastrophe
rode on a spinning wheel:
said she was always
asked to these things.)

Mine is the mess on Holy Mountain
mine is the cataract of the Buddha
mine is the wedding in prison:
In ajna the pain of a piñata
blindness without relief.

In the lockup sweating rhinestones
gold teeth go swell with silver groin
and nearly sprained a tongue
calling me superman, truant centipede
a charm against the slop pail
& the friable spine.
Calling me friend, offering sanctuary
this knave emeritus

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The Chiromancer by Pat Tompkins

I tell you what
you want to hear.
Most palms say little,
callused or cold.

I explore your face
before I study what
lies in the lines:
head, heart, life, fate.

I read your maps:
eyes, skin, hair, clothes,
indiscreet as cell phones.
What is absent talks, too.

I polish the rough,
a manicurist.
My task: deciphering
the digital code.

I speak with planets
and translate ambitions.
Most want the usual:
wealth, reassurance, hope.

What matters is not what
I think but what you do:
Pay for answers and clues
I am here to provide.

Let me see that scar.
A radical wound,
pierced through, crudely healed.
Show me your other hand.

October by Nina Alvarez

The brandied thin shell of October,
Blintzes and crepes, menus, biased windows
Showers staining tea and bright drops
Silhouette of sun, snapping heels
Over the steel-studded roofs of this street
In some absent search for an aperitif
and olive branch
Baying like a wolf at the city moon
inside a similar body, closed systems
and wild sturdy semblance of suffering
and all the Spanish drag queens, abysmal love,
terse, argumentative, numb, belligerent,
born to unfold their blankets for sleep.

I had resistance, the painful bride,
Hunched under a soulless canopy
Forging intelligence in turbid bed conversations
Treating myself to a coup d'état
What is this bored familiar trimming-
Pointing, leaning over, or idling
C’est moi, I say more, flying
On heels, and toes, pointed and contracted,
These feet, canons, functions, and geosystems
Blinking to the system’s love, the heart breath fondue
Flung from the vain homo-chicks of the slums
Arcane and scalded sluts and sisters of windows
The bound bandana slung and smelling of liquor.

Thin to the touch, bar players, melting girls
The talk of the terrible game of rent-to-pay
Of ample bosom, pretty not pussy, miscellaneous touching
The body’s thoughtless style
Think of the sturm-und-drang, German Requiem
howled from a bass, and college debts
over the bath mats, by door jams, hiding eyes
apparent in dreams, what is owed to the hard fathers,
who inherit our births and our deaths, and collect
the fullness of our lives in a stained box
and cannot bear to creep, though they must keep it hidden.
In the delicate lace their wives chose for their daughter’s wedding
I am walking, shifting, freezing, forgetting.

They appear too thin for night, too fat for day.
In the Kissinger and the Klossoski and the Klempt
The bitten tight leaves, and the unbuttoned young
Starting to turn in on themselves, to curl and crisp.
They go to the outsides of themselves again, at the end
Heavy, flying up to their little edges, solidly sad
And yet fecund, yearning for something.

Heaviness is not inability to travel.
It is an exaltation, a self-conscious yet
Slow turn against the turning inward,
And in the dark of South Street,
Bodies abridged and bundled by this uncertainty.
Here is a blood stain, a blond hair
And here the wind is a way home.

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Bathing the White Stone by Elizabeth Barrette

Miska longed for a child
but had none of her own.
So she took a white stone
to the creek and bathed it,
singing a sweet lullaby.
Then she took the stone
back home, wrapped it
in swaddling cloths, and
laid it in the cradle.
When the moon turned,
Miska grew great with child.
That winter, she bore a boy
with smooth white skin
and hair black as onyx.
Piotr grew tall and strong,
but rarely spoke or laughed.
The village girls tried to get
his attention, but to no avail.
Piotr preferred the forest,
and solitude, and the quiet
little stream under the trees.
In time, he moved away
to University where
he became a great sculptor.
It was said that he saw
things in the stone that
no one else had seen –
but that was not true.
His mother Miska had
seen the same –
forms and faces –
and so it was no surprise to her
when Piotr brought home
a solemn model who confided
to her mother-in-law that she
could not bear a child.
Miska simply smiled, and
told her not to worry –
and after the wedding,
took her daughter-in-law
down to the stream
to bathe a white stone.

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Isles of Dream by Marly Youmans

And it has been so long since I lowered this pen
In ink the shade of sky... The rain is splattering
On mallow and sea oats and on the vanishing trick
Of mist and ocean waves. A thousand dragonflies
Jag past, hurrying on to some great sheltering tree
That shines in the storm-light, all gems and isinglass.
In clouds that are also ink—not a peaceful white
But blood expressed from lapis lazuli—one door
Of sky remains beside a few white steppingstones
And looks as sweet as spring forget-me-nots in grass.
I wonder, if I knock, will someone let me in?

THE GHOST CRAB’S WOMAN

The paper lantern of moon is lit,
And the clouds are in attendance.
They are reflected shimmerings
On the wet sand beside the sea.

So much for setting.
The ghost crabs
Go skittering along the shore,
Fall abruptly sideways in holes.
They are white like the August moon
And as flimsy, their dead torsos
And legs tossing in the sea foam.
One is greater than the others,
With lustrous claws in the moonshine;
They might be fine mother-of-pearl,
Formed in a nacreous shell of dream.
See there, the ghost crab is dragging
A little woman by one arm—
Her eyes are an unblinking black,
Her hair spun from obsidian
By dwarves whose names she’d never guess.
Now she is dragged by those rare strands
Into the ghost crab’s secret hole,
Where slowly he undresses her
And gives her all his twiddling love
Till what’s left is a bone that gleams
Like a grinning sickle of moon.

A hundred gulls
Sit and stand on one leg or two
Around the old man in the chair—

A handsome fellow,
With downy gray hair fluffed by breeze,
With his hooked and aquiline nose.

“You’re popular,”
I say; he nods. The black eyes shine,
But he’ll never tell his secrets.

THE MOON ON THE STRAND

At dusk a boy and girl took sand and made
Images of turtle, star, and dragon.
And when the gibbous moon rose from the sea,
It was observed to be a surprising pink
That matched the color of adjacent clouds.
Sand animals awoke in the moonshine,
And turtle and dragon ate up the star.
Its arms hung down like petals from their jaws.
The sister leaped onto the dragon’s back,
Her younger brother on the turtle’s shell;
They flew toward the pink blossom of the moon.

Their mother had gone for a dawdling walk
And did not know, for just then she had passed
The last marker and found the endless sands.
The older brother slumped inside the house,
His face blue-lit, playing with his machines.
Their father lay asleep upon the grass
And now was dreaming that his darling wife
Wore nothing but a wreath of moonflowers.
(In metaphysical ways, this was true.)
The grandfather was dead and could not help.

Only the grandmother was left to see
The children swoop up to the clouds of stars.
Grandmothers are more clever than you think.
She clambered to the sky and brought them home,
Riding dragonback behind the sister,
And then she went to the infinite sands
To fetch her absent daughter by the hand,
Without asking what she had seen or dreamed
To make her eyes the color of the sea,
Her ears like twin shells murmuring the sea,
Her mouth as cold and dumb as depths of sea.

“What are these for?” Z repeats,
A little angrily. She is
A girl as hard and sharp and hooked
As a thing made for catching fish,
Although she never brims her pail.
I look at all the years of words
And see just flotsam and jetsam—
I burn every page and scrap,
A holocaust of living dream,
Every poem of my youth.
I am a woman, twenty-one.
The smoke and ash go up for hours.

“What are they for?” Z asks with scorn.
This time I say they’re for the soul
That longs to hold the earth and sky
With all its mounting clouds and birds,
The yaupon foxes and raccoons
And ghost crabs scuttling into holes,
Enormous smears of moonshine, bright
Against the endlessness of sand.
I say, “The soul’s a seine for fish
Like running rainbows, ice, and fire—
On mountains underneath the sea,
I have caught magic in my net.”

Everything is washed.
When sea and sky return from mist,
The shrimp trawlers have been erased.
A cock-eyed rainbow

Blesses the wheeling birds
As half-wild cats come to the porch
And children to the sand and waves.
The dragonflies

Copter from hidden groves,
Their million mazy paths of flight
Inscribing mystery on mild
Emptied clouds

And all the floating heaven.

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Kimono Monochrome at Midnight by Linda Ann Strang

Her heart is a nightgown fastened loosely.
The throb of a nightjar slips a hand

of sound all the way down to her belly,
where an incubus is the cold ring in her navel—

the stud piece of the Arctic.
Night cries want to unpick her seams,

carry her away to where her moon man
parks his chariot—carved from a single pearl—

too close to the curb of the atmosphere,
liberate from the chain and stem stitch

full-blooded nightingales for the Emperor—
in each larynx the diamond ink of starlight.

But tighten the belt of her dreams,
and waive all west of the moon

and princess possibilities that never were.
Her ears become caverns of ice candles:

a thousand sirens shrink to the failed flare
of a match. There’ll be no third degree burns

on Cupid’s torso tonight. Midnight slips
in through the ticking of its own keyhole,