2016

 

 

 

SEPTEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

RK Biswas, David Callin, Colin Crewdson, Seth Crook, Jane Frank, Bill Griffin,

Seth Jani, Joan Johnston, Jonaki Ray, Paul Smith, J. R. Solonche, Tim Suermondt,

 Julia Webb, Sarah White.

 

 

 

 

 

 

RK BISWAS

 

Failed Poet Curating Poems, And Lackey

  

She’s been doing this for years now. Has

quite a following. All hopefuls. Young. Old. All

queuing up with gifts within innocuous looking

paper, printed on one side, at her door.

 

It is not supposed to be a clumsy activity. It ought

to have the grace of ballerinas, and normally does. But

she does it with arthritic limbs. The stuff she picks

are the easiest to hold. Her criterion rests on sleight

of hand. She shuffles and reshuffles the culled

poems like a compulsive gambler or a Solitaire addict.

 

The lines of a poem fan out; a nice phrase pops

its head up to be admired. A fat simile squeezes

in. Metaphors split apart. In no time the poem looks

like a plate of upturned caterpillars and centipedes,

wafer dry creepy-crawlies. Thin hairy legs

wildly gesticulating to be set right again.

 

Then she has tea.

Sitting cross legged. Her pen fluttering

like an ostrich plume. The pinkie of her cup

wielding hand fanned out. She could be

a Buddha or a gypsy queen depending

on the occasion. She gestures and I am beside

 

her, ready to do my job. Pick a piece. Obedient

parrot me, I offer up my choice. She sucks

in her breath and starts to unravel it. She believes

it is important to expose the exact point where the soul

of the poem sleeps its beauty sleep. She must

discover the location of her reasons for a yay

or nay. She waves a finger like a wand

with the confidence of one whose choice alone can

bring back a finished poem from the dead.

 

 

RK Biswas lives and writes on Earth. Her poetry and fiction have been widely published. Her two published books are Culling Mynahs and Crows (Lifi Publications, India) and Breasts and Other Afflictions of Women (Authorspress, India). Her third book Immoderate Men is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger Books. She blogs at http://biswasrk.wordpress.com . More about her at  https://about.me/RKBiswas.

 

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DAVID CALLIN

 

Ì

 

Iona's famous light
is failing me. I miss
the propositions of holiness,
the insinuations
of the peace that was never on land or sea
that I had been expecting.
The sky, aglow with a soft
post-diluvian blue,
harbours no lightning.

There are nuns on the jetty.
We look up and study them
with the same mild keen interest
with which, a little earlier,
we had watched the gannets rising
effortfully, on straining wings,
to fall into the sea
with a bright inaudible splash,
sometimes emerging with a fish.

The available maps are sketchy.
We try and fail to retrace
Columba's steps across the machair.
What we thought were paths, made
by the patient feet of pilgrims,
are just sheep tracks. Perhaps
the road that goes to the golf course was right,
but bog cotton and orchids
and visions of Jura console us.

There are corncrakes in the meadow,
quoting Aristophanes.
Krek krek.
My friends can hear them. We stop
and listen until I think
that I can hear them too.
Why Aristophanes?
Why not something more uplifting?
Krek krek.

Even on the road
of the illustrious dead,
where Macbeth exerts his tragic charm
quite unknowingly,
the world intrudes too much,
but in Michael Chapel
serious thought is possible,
whether or not you think
that prayer is valid.

My lost girl, mouldering
in an English graveyard
or, in another version,
working her way strenuously
through the timeless duration
of Purgatory, joins us there,
as large as life and fresh,
but this is a few days later,
in a dream.

On the morning we leave - amber alert,
SSW, 40 knots,
the ferry lurching in the Sound -
a convocation of clouds
has stepped out of their cells,
robed in grey, and politely
invites us to consider
that sunlight
is purely incidental.

 

 

David Callin lives, if not quite at the back of the beyond, certainly within hailing distance of it, on the Isle of Man, in what he likes to call the Deep South of the Kingdom of the Isles. He is married with a wife and two children, all of whom would rather you didn't mention the poetry. He doesn't mind. He has had poems published in quite a large number of magazines, most recently in Prole.

 

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COLIN CREWDSON

Meeting a hermit in Palestine

 

The reality of God behind this reality

of form, that is what I seek.

We’ve always tried: that’s why seekers

become hermits. I find the Truth here, but

only in whispers, hints from the trees,

in the aroma of herbs in the heat, in the solidity

of rock and in the ripples of water.

 

Praying, he kneels in the cave,

his home in the cliff by the pool.

 

He meets Ari.

Ari struts, clattering

down to the pool with his group of tourists,

along the slippery path

by the stream, clutching his Uzi,

confidence denying

any search for doubt.

He greets him, one with his weapon,

the other his washing,

the formal words of Biblical Hebrew,

squeezed from study,

or, Mao-like, discharged

from a gun barrel.

 

The air is still, cool,

holding trickles and clinks of water,

and thoughts stilled by prayer.

 

 

Colin Crewdson is an osteopath working in Devon, UK, having spent a varied career in other European and Middle-eastern countries. He has had poems accepted in Ink Sweat & Tears, The High Window, Amaryllis, The Open Mouse and The Journal

 

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SETH CROOK

 

Dryad

 

This forest is the only church I have.
Nothing numinous is elsewhere.
Beyond these branches
I feel no shudder to the tap root.
Only simple fear.

 

Not here.

 

Look around, it is the twist of trees,
roots exposed,
everything slow dancing with the shadows.
Most of all it is the smell,
of death and life in one;
as though fall and rise are just two directions,
rot only a paradise for mushrooms.
There is nothing above the world, or below,
I know. But something huddled holy by the side.

 

 

Doc Watson (1923-2012)

Perhaps when we cry for
those we don’t know,
we are crying for someone
we did. Or it may just be
crying for us all. Or perhaps
it is like tossing a coin -
we must cry for someone
and the Doc won. I don’t know.
Perhaps I should.
I don’t want to know.
The obituary picture shows
his hands gripped on the guitar,
eyes merely there,
the never changing hairstyle,
the image so many saw,
except him. I shouldn’t mention
his blindness at all.
Why does it matter?
He was a great musician, not
a great blind musician -
so patronising. But the tears
must have something
to do with that. My reasons for
crying at the sight of his face
are as unknown to me as
the sight of his own face was
to him. Only felt, close.
 

 

Seth Crook rarely leaves The Isle of Mull. His poems travel for him and have appeared this year in such places Northwords Now, Causeway, The Journal, Poetry Scotland, The Lighthouse, Antiphon and Raum. He is currently editor of the photography+photo section of the e-zine Fat Damsel. “Dryad” first published in Three Drops from a Cauldron, June 2015.

 

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JANE FRANK

 

The Planes

 

Driving to the coffee shop

for another flat white

I decide one morning

the sadness should stop.

Applying eyeliner has become 

increasingly difficult.

Yes, bits of my heart

are scattered through airports

and on Scottish beaches

and winding Spanish streets

but today a flat white 

and a chat with school mothers

about dog breeds,

the new deputy head

and whether it’s preferable to buy 

pizza dough or make your own

must be enough to bring joy.

That and the jokes of getting home 

to a messy house, to an unswept 

courtyard dappled with sun 

and the garden I’ve neglected. 

There’s a warmer sky today

I can open up to 

and I drive quickly past the laneways

where the sadness lurks.

There will always be diary dates

and shoes that match lipstick shades

and chicken to simmer in a new kind of sauce and

the planes that fly overhead.

 

 

Lacuna

 

Wanting and wishing spin in gold

until clouds come

but I try not to ask days to speed up

or slow down.

There must be an art to finding kindness

in the depth of a winter sky –

that’s where the beautiful words fall from –

so I’ll keep practising.

Like your face,

I can’t see the birds in the trees

but I know they’re there

like the ants swirling at my feet

in patterns beyond understanding.

 

 

Jane Frank is a poet and academic from Brisbane, Australia. She is the author of Milky Way of Words published by Ginninderra Press in 2016. Her poems have recently appeared in Sonic Boom, Northwords Now, Poet’s Republic, Gold Dust Magazine and Bluepepper, and are forthcoming in Cordite Review and Takahe.

 

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BILL GRIFFIN

 

Planck and Avogadro Meet for Tea at Blenheim Palace

 

Amedeo Avogadro takes the bus

from Oxford, disembarks

one stop early as he always does and walks

the weedy verge, remarks blue tits

          flitting in the lime trees, thirty-seven

grams in their particolored

plumage;at Blenheim East Gate

he admires the Duke’s coat of arms,

its gold leaf unblemished, he imagines,

          since Marlborough first entered here

and in his head he calculates

its surface area, dragons, eagles,

lions rampant, three atoms thick,

atomic weight 197: he knows

          how many atoms but also

to the hundredth shilling

how much the Duke was charged.

 

Max Planck has taken two hours finishing

his strong coffee at The King’s Head

          scribbling equations on the coaster

unaware of Americans remarking at the fineness

of the scones and now he strides

across the great arch bridge

with Blenheim pediment beckoning

          beyond the greensward; some

would say he's looking only at his feet

but the whirling cosmos knows to jump

out of his way if it doesn't care

to be delineated, quanta, quasar

          counted and connected

as he crosses up the promenade.

 

Avogadro from the West Terrace

spots him and waves, another sip

of Lapsang Souchong with milk,

          the plate of crust-trimmed

sandwiches, egg mayonaisse with cress,

untouched and waiting for his friend;

Planck skips the Visitors' Cafe

and grabs a Coke from the machine

 

          while we stroll through the parterre

and up the water terraces, already having shared

a long meander with the River Glyme

where I kissed you underneath

that gnarled black oak, and now

          we sit beside great men

within the grasping shadow of Baroque,

its fundament that mutters immortality – do Planck

and Avogadro even listen?

While their arguments inflame

          not a little heartburn in the Creator

we nibble at our scones and watch

a rose bloom, new Graham Thomas,

bud to butter cream to ash-limned

withering, budding moments

          of experience between us

born, then perishing, then newborn again.

 

 

The Girl in the Velour Jumpsuit

 

I don’t know why my Freshman roommate invited me

to come with him to her dorm room, even more a mystery

 

how he invited himself, she a Sophomore dating

a quarterback or was it the president of Sigma Alpha

 

Epsilon, maybe both, he a seventeen-year old

five foot four Lebanese-American genius; just maybe

 

she was a philosophy major as well, maybe they both

had the hots for Spinoza, no telling for by now the inanities

 

of our converstation have compounded the entropy of the

cosmos. But this I do remember: the shimmer of lavender

 

velour, the sine and cosine of her body, the sudden lurch

into adulthood at the realization that in this wide open world

 

of opportunities and wonders there are some things

that will never be mine to touch, not unlike my friend Sandy

 

when he visited the Acropolis and kneeled

to dislodge a piece of gravel wedged in his sole – the guard

 

rushed at him shouting in his menacing Greek accent

“Forbidden! Forbidden!” until Sandy dropped

 

the valuable relic of antiquity. All of this to explain

how I have arrived without a lurch (well, maybe

 

just the occasional), arrived into happiness at this latest stage

of our life together, its conversations, its shared relics

 

and treasure, our negotiated philosophy invoking that old Greek

Plato, and why I’m able to smile as we arrive at the restaurant,

 

my hand lightly at your waist, that antique velour sweater,

and lavender, my dear, lavender most definitely your color.

 

 

Bill Griffin is a family physician in rural North Carolina.  His poems have appeared in many regional and national journals including Tar River Poetry, Pembroke, NC Literary Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Sample his blog and chapbook set in GSMNP, Snake Den Ridge, A Bestiary (March Street Press 2008), illustrations by Linda French Griffin, at https://GriffinPoetry.com

 

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SETH JANI

 

For My Grandmother, Age 13

 

I see her now in old photographs
Slender as the picnicking light
Over Western Pennsylvania.
She is standing next to her own mother.
The future still distant,
Its glimmering mirage undeciphered.
In her arms the family dog
Stares and idles.
She holds him closely against her body,
Like a son.
 

 

Engine Trouble

 

Over the grass
The glissando of bees
Is bright like mercury,
Like the first sign of snow
Breaking through the leaves.
Where the car rests
In its mackerel-colored sleep

Is the precise place for honey.
They fill its notches
With patient drones,

With thick pollen
And glue.
The engine, dead as
A rock or mirror,
Buzzes into flame.

 

 

Seth Jani currently resides in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress (www.sevencirclepress.com). His own work has been published widely in such places as The Coe Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, VAYAVYA, Gingerbread House, Gravel and Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry. More about him and his work can be found at www.sethjani.com.

 

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JOAN JOHNSTON

 

I Borrowed One Day in the Life of a Boy from Tibet

 

and when the due date came round

I took him back and renewed him.

I renewed him every Saturday

for weeks, carried him home

the same short way I’d come

—Benton Road, Thropton Terrace, The Spinney—

until one Saturday the librarian said

he’d been reserved and I had to return him.

Someone else, a child I didn’t know,

was waiting to find out all about

a boy my age who herded yaks,

ate tsampa and lived on the Roof of the World.

My nomadic friend in a colourful hat

belonged, I learned, to everyone.

 

 

Writer on a Rock

to my granddaughter

 

And this is one of me, alone on a rock.

I couldn’t get off for six whole hours! Imagine

me then, old enough to know better, old enough

to know in my bones that turning my back on a

Let’s-Just-Do-It-And-See-What-Happens

was even by that age a non-starter. (Oh yes, that hat

was very fashionable in those days. Really.)

 

It wasn’t my idea. I just volunteered. My life

was never in danger, no, and before you ask

—I certainly didn’t do it for the money,

yes, my bladder was a problem

and yes, of course it rained.

 

The attraction was the unknowable. The fact

I couldn’t predict what I’d write, or not

—that, for me, was the whole point.

I simply wanted to find out.

It was a sort of mini-adventure. With a pen.

 

Here’s the notebook. I’d like you to have it.

(Be careful—that’s the original guano).

You’ll notice there are some empty pages

—I ran out of time, couldn’t believe it!—

so it’s open-ended and you can continue

if you want to. And if you ever decide

to read what’s in it you’ll find

 

...who knows? me as I was, one day in June

—your first summer—years ago. I may be gone

but the rock’s still there, and whatever I wrote

is for you to discover, maybe add to. My old words

are yours now. Here, please take them.

You never know, they might make a poem.

 

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JONAKI RAY

Home

 

Bengali বাড়ি, Greek σπίτι, German Zuhause, Hindi घर, Swahili nyumbani, Telugu హోమ్, Zulu ekhaya

 

Astringent smelling

Eucalyptus leaves line the custardy

patch that refuses to permute

into a lawn. Neem¹, Mango (two of them), Guava

trees and stones from the neighborhood kids’ attempts

to pluck these fruits ripen

the borders of childhood.

           

            For here or to go—a new phrase in Mid-western

            twang—every sentence ending in a query that

            expands the jaw. Wading through deceptive

            piles of slush that crinkle,

            leaving the cheap boots: $9.99

            (on sale for Thanksgiving) clammy and toes lubricated.

 

Why didja do this to us—a woman with “nappy” hair and Jamun² skin

thrusts her face near mine. In vain, the defence:

India. Mid-East. Oil crisis. The other wars…

Go home, you Arab! Y’all don’t belong here!

           

            Pigeons nest in match-box buildings

            Roads cram with fruit and veggie vendors

            gleaming cars block the road potholing

            the status of suburbia. The Bougainvillea purples

            the haze and the 50C fever in the air. The Madhobilota³

            shields from the neighbor’s eye that judges.

 

Loneliness mantles the shelves of mind until

its practice eases into homecoming.

 

 

1 Neem:Tree in the mahogany family

2 Jamun: Tropical tree that has fruits that are purplish-black

3 Madhobilota: Flowering creeper

 

 

Barcino

for Antonio Gaudi

 

The scales of the dragon gleam bronze

against the four arms of the cross. The ivory

Mary and Joseph gaze down at the lines snaking

into the doorway designed using sacks of sand and geometry.

Peacock colors ray on to the forest of columns inside the nave

silencing the clamor of thoughts and jangle of worries.

The beetle knocker, the sinuous benches, the skull windows look out

to the walls of Plaça de Sant Felip Neri pockmarked

with cannonballs bits that echo the cries

of children running out from the school.

In a narrow alley cobblestones slip

with the memory of the forced deportation

of the last remaining Jews.

Minutes away, a duplicate path

commemorates the thirteen-year-old co-patron saint, Eulalia

tortured in ways numbering her age.

The crescent near the mulberry trees at the Fossar de les Moreres

reflects the umber-red of the bricks covering the buried

while tourists pose next to Picasso mannequins.

Pagans. Romans. Goths. Vikings. Muslims.

Jews. Christians. Catalans. Castilians.

Life ends like a cryptogram with everything summing to the same end.

Perhaps that is why when you died, all they found in your pockets

was a handful of currants and peanuts, and a crumpled book.

 

 

Jonaki Ray studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and then returned to India and her first love, writing.  Her work has been published in Silver Birch Press, Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, Pyrta Journal, The Four Quarters Magazine, and Kitaab, among others. 

 

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PAUL SMITH

 

Clasp and Loop

 

She has a gold necklace

With a clasp and a loop

The clasp goes around the loop

And embraces it

I must help her

Put it on

From behind

My fingers are clumsy

They struggle with

Its delicacy

Its imbalance

Whatever it is

That makes her think

I can do it better

But I get it wrong

Her fingers appraise

Its correctness

Its fluidity around her neck

The gold chain is twisted

She says

It is wrong

I do it over

It is still wrong

From behind her

I know she smiles

She places the loop where

The clasp was

And has me do it over

I repeat the procedure

Not knowing how this will make

Any difference

Her fingers run up and down the chain

To ascertain the necklace’s uniformity

She spins around

With that smile

My fingers

Thickset and fumbling

Reach down and grasp her hand

Tight as a clevis

 

 

Paul Smith writes fiction and poetry.  He lives near Chicago with his wife Flavia.  He likes taking the bus, walking by the canal, Milwaukee Avenue, Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one.

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Crossing

 

Stopped at the railway

crossing, I cut the motor.

It's the morning freight,

and I know I will be here

awhile, although I've never

counted the cars and do not

do so now as they file past me

behind that twinkling star-like

light. They duplicate themselves

as a worm does, adding segment

to segment, each one identically

sized, identically colored, identically

shaped, clones with different

numbers only. I watch them

appear from the bend of trees,

I watch them pass the gates,

I watch them disappear into

the bend of trees, I close

my eyes, I listen to them roll

over my thoughts, I listen to them

roll over my life, I listen to them

roll over my soul, until the man

behind me taps his horn.

"Give me a chance, friend," I say

into the mirror, "Give me a moment

to collect myself, for this train

has rolled over me and my ego.

And then shall I start up my engine.

And then shall I cross over and go

on. I didn't see it was the end.

Mister, give me a moment to be born."

 

 

J.R. Solonche has been publishing in magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s. He is author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), the chapbook Hearts Content (Five Oaks Press) and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in New York's Hudson Valley with his wife, the poet Joan I. Siegel, and nine cats, at least three of whom are poets.

 

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TIM SUERMONDT

 

A Cautious Optimism

 

A fearless optimism would be better,

but we do have to take what we can.

 

The fault lines between the large H

and the small h of history are eroding

 

every minute, falling chips often

feeling like a spray of shrapnel.

 

Yet today the sky was clear, the night

placid with a few stars, the air smelling

 

a little aromatic and couples on benches

silhouetted in the branches and leaves of trees,

 

gratitude humming Beethoven who insisted

“if you know my music, you know happiness.”

 

 

I Like Sparrows But I’m Putting My Foot Down

 

A one-year prohibition on sparrows in poems

makes sense and says justice,

 

especially those who always flyover

endless fields of yellow brilliance

 

and pick out the rooftops of charming cities

to nest and ride out the winter.

 

They do smack a bit of paradise, a perfect

excuse to bow our heads in awe,

 

but lately a bow is not on my agenda

and the dying are making too much noise

 

for wonder to carry the cloudy days.

I wish the dodoes were still with us, I wish

 

poets would put them in their poems,

I wish for so many things that will never be.

 

A cadre of sparrows just flew by—the bastards!

 

 

A Last Act Of Wisdom

 

My father packed a small suitcase,

said “I’m going” and vanished in the air,

 

leaving behind his coat—its pockets

filled with candies—on the bed.

 

He always knew how to be

quietly spectacular. He always knew

 

how to do what he thought was right.

 

 

Tim Suermondt is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Trying To Help The Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007), Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books, 2010) and Election Night And The Five Satins (Glass Lyre Press, 20i6)—along with three chapbooks. He has poems published in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, december Magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, The Southeast Review, Poetry East, and Stand Magazine, among others. He is a book reviewer for Cervena Barva Press and a poetry reviewer for Bellevue Literary Review. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

 

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JULIA WEBB

 

Sisters (part i)

 

i.

This sister is the bones of the outfit,

she is the stuff that keeps the body up,

she is dem bones, dem bones,

she is calcified connective tissue,

she is femur, tibia, ulna, ribs.

 

ii.

This sister is the perfect scrunch

of English Rose,

all delicate petal curl, subtle pinks,

she opens her smile up to the sun.

This sister is a fuzzy stamen

with a dust of pollen,

she is the heady waft of perfume

begging you to bring your face down to her,

to bring your face right down.

 

iii.

She is the one with the hair just-so,

the handkerchief skirt hems, the well-cut clothes,

and on birthdays she gets the family all together –

we line up for photos that never looked posed,

and how she laughs at being vegetarian

but each Christmas allowing herself a little meat.

 

She is the one with the dainty features, the cutesy nose

the one they look for when you enter the room,

and the way they hang on her words makes you nauseous

but you can’t say it, because she was the one

who watched out for you behind the shops and in the playground.

 

She is the one with the amicable divorce

and the books on cake decorating –

all those fiddly womanly things you have no patience for,

and she is the one who sat up all night in the crematorium

plaiting flowers into your mother’s hair.

 

iv.

This sister reads Nietzsche,

her hair is twisted into bunches like tiny horns,

she makes abstract art with fur and feathers,

she likes to collect things from gutters and pavements,

and her eyes have that sparkle you were scared of as a kid.

 

v.

This sister is the bee

and we are the nectar,

 

she is drawing us in

with her persistent buzzing,

 

her talk of the hive mind,

her tremble dance.

 

 

The Piano Lesson

 

When I asked Daddy if I could learn the piano, he said

NO because MUSIC IS THE DEVIL’S WORK. When

Daddy was away doing GOD’S WORK Mama took us

to visit the end-of-the-row neighbours. They are secret

friends because they are BAPTISTS. They have our house

back-to-front and a real live piano which sometimes I

am allowed to play. Steve taught me COCKLES AND

MUSSELS ALIVE ALIVE-O and in bed that night I sang

the song to Alice. I was just getting to the good bit about

the GHOST when Daddy banged in shouting STOP THAT

NOISE, DON’T YOU KNOW THAT DUBLIN IS FULL OF

HEATHENS AND PAPISTS? I didn’t know what a papist

was, but I asked Daddy is Molly Malone a Papist? which

made Alice snort with laughter. Daddy didn’t answer; he

just slammed out again muttering about Papists and the

devil. I hummed Cockles and Mussels under my breath

until I fell asleep, and that night I dreamt that I was Molly

Malone and my barrow looked a lot like a piano but with

limpets stuck all over it like the rocks on the beach at the

Sunday School outing.

 

 

Night Sickness

 

Her mother darns the window,

the moon leaks in

with its blue thumbprint.

 

The girl’s legs splay on the bed.

She sleeps with a head full of horses:

 

sees her father at full gallop,

his massive hooves stomping over the countryside,

sees the sun toss its golden mane.

 

Her mother has nodded off in her chair –

she drops her silver needle with a clatter

but neither of them wakes.

 

The window unravels itself,

the night leaks slowly away.

 

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SARAH WHITE

Ideas of Honor 

 

1.  I’ll never understand

how Madame Butterfly 

can say to her little boy—

          Play. Go and play.

          in the garden,

then step behind a screen

with her father’s dagger and die.

 

Why?  I ask.

To save her Honor

explains my mother

who knows the customs

of countries where an indiscreet note

or a stray handkerchief

is enough to ruin

an innocent man or woman.

 

After the strident horns

and the final curtain,

the boy, still in the garden,

meets his father and mother,

the Pinkertons. They bring him

home, name him Ken

or Stan, teach him

American letters and manners.

 

As Butterfly’s charm

grows dim in his mind,

he remembers:  One day,

she lost something serious, 

and for that reason

she had to send him

away to be an American..

 

2.  We who believe

in the Rule of Law,

the Pursuit of Happiness,               

don’t see why Eddie Carbone,

once Sicilian, now of Brooklyn,

must murder the guest

who spits and calls him “Rat”

in front of the neighbors.                       

 

We don’t know why,

at the end of A View

From the Bridge, Eddie himself,

having given a “brother”

the kiss of dishonor,

must be stabbed to death

as the womenfolk watch

in wonder and horror.

 

I had a Sicilian lover 

who said, 

when our affair was over;

 

          It was sweet, Carina, but if you

          were my wife I’d hang you

          from the tallest tree in Taormina.

 

My American husband, angry

as he was, would never

have bothered to kill me.

 

Yet for years I dreamed of my body

dangling from a twisted tree

high above the deep Ionian Sea.

 

 

The Birth of Gray 

 

You may paint

“A Starless Night”

but that’s not gray,

which, like much of life,

lies between the poles

of dark and light.

 

And, by the way, why

do so many names

for white—bialy, bianco,

 blanc—sound like black?

The answer sleeps in the heart

of a Middle English maid.

Don’t wake her.

 

Rather, make another gray

without a trace

of either black or white!

Spin the color wheel.

Stop it, say, on blue.

Spin again and stop 

at the opposite hue.

 

By miracle of spectrum,

conundrum of prism,

by luck or lust or both,

orange and blue,

or green and red create

a fine chromatic gray

when they mate..

 

 

Sarah White's most recent published collections are The Unknowing  Muse (Dos Madres, 2014) and Wars Don't Happen Anymore (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). She lives, writes, and paints in New York City.

 

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