Gullible’s travels

Out in the middle of the garlic fields
Boutiques had sprung up filled with
Things nobody could afford to buy
I swear there was never a harbor
Here when I was a child

The hotels were empty and the streets
None of the clocks could agree on
Just what time it was or why
The moonshine flowed free
And I was in trouble

Funicular trains ran all night long but
They made you seasick so walking
We found a shortcut over the hills
Too many times we came upon
Invisible cities in the dark

Down in the valley the people carried
Water to the trees in cupped hands
We tried to make a home there
The abalones we planted
Never seemed to thrive

– Robert Haycock

Col legno

the little junco, and all its graynesses,
pink beak almost like flesh we protect
between what prompts an opening.

come in, the catbirds, pallies!
stroyers of dignified gait- how welcome is
the blue you sometimes give off under
branch ceiling, as i pause about the lake.

i have no occupation. by what method
am i halted except these dainty leaves
coming from the blood root in legion-
or, by the score, old hickories, one of
them hiding a wee wren imitating
a cellist who uses the wood, rather
than the hair of the bow, to achieve
her harmonics.

bree

Generosity

Spring’s watercolor renewal:
wood buds, floods green
over winter’s pencil palimpsest
which is fading, fading, fading,
gone

The old king is here
again

– Lady

Status Report 249

Got a two-track brain train
a-run-a-way going

One track weighs whoa,
are we ever weak, breakable

Second says so?
broke before, can fix again

– Smith

I am quiet
in library silence
surrounded by magazines
— Paleo, Real Simple
Quilter’s Newsletter…

the come around
the least sound
the zipper of his laptop case
the clonk of her high heels
across the tile floor

the sacred shhh
the music of air
rebounding off the walls
and the ceiling, singing
inbreath, out

– Marc Mannheimer

A dream of gentle warmth
has entered the cushions
of my soul a barefoot woman
traveling across a wooden
ocean holding a basket of
bread and tender kisses
singing in the sweetness
of her arms and headed
for the saddened market
of my spring time heart.

– Vidrick

Status Report 244

New day sun rises unseen
above slate grey sky thick in clouds
stained with past promise
framing new beginning of old game
of survive, thrive, strive.

There is flower.
There is worm.
There is new hour
already wearing yesterday’s squirm.

– Smith

Ruminations on a Golden Eye

1.
A ring-eyed golden stare
looking into a knothole
forty feet up an ancient
black oak.

Great horned owl
eyes her prey moments
before life ends.

2.
Orion’s spur cradles us
like a young child
yellow dwarf
neither large nor bright
Our Sun, welcoming
and small
glowing speck
in a greater mystery.

3.
Lens peering closer
narrowly focused
on a moment of turning.
Sperm meets egg
jellied life,
fluid, changing.

4.
What are you?
Dug from an ancient ruin.
Carefully selected for the
long voyage.
Alien life, asleep in the sand
What do you see
now that you are awakened?

– Christina M. Brooks

A Page From This Day

I ask the towhead boy
fishing below the Rock Creek waterfall,
the deep pool, Have you caught anything?
Naw, an hour ago, people were swimming here.
Up the creek, a deputy dawg pulls off
a dozen pistol rounds, crack, crack, crack.
The cane pole boy hooks a big sunfish
and holds it up to me, grinning, a solar kite
filling the sky.

Later that day, I watch old man Jerry
drag himself into Ciccone’s bar,
wash rag arm, scuffle shoe.
He hangs his stoke cane and climbs his stool.
Roberta has already poured his beer,
caught in the June afternoon yellowfin light
streaming though the open door.

Jerry slumps over his beer.
Under his hat, he is swimming buck naked
in a spring fed river with a woman
who splashes away, laughing, otter quick.

– Maj Ragain

“THE CLOUDS WERE WHITE AND
NARROW AS BONES.” …………Murakami

Cities of bones.
Spring catching fire at the ends
Of every tree branch. The brightest
Green. The sky littered with stars.

We do not know how to walk here.
We have no idea. Our bodies
Lean forward and suddenly
We are falling through the days,
Week after week of them.
The sun spinning across the sky.

Meet me in Chapultepec.
Meet me in the Parthenon.
Meet me in Reykjavik.
Meet me in Cleveland
At the Terminal Tower.
Meet me when I finally shut
My big mouth and nova into
A startling poem that already
Knows only how to speak the truth.

– D.R. Wagner

looked up to a monochrome bird onna wire
armslength away making animated human talk
without words
head jerking
eye poking @ me
yes
spring

~ lang

Finding the Butterfly
For my mother

That October, the maple tree stood in front of our house
tall, singing fire and gold, purple and scarlet
another season coming

In your absence, the leaves fell

They said my father took you a picture of the tree
To remind you of home
In between his visits
To see you in your isolation

In your absence, the tree was bare

My hands were empty
Until I held your letters

In the spring I would find the butterfly,
Capture it in a jar
And bring it to your room
And you would see the echo of
the wind.

And once you saw it
It would be time to let it go.

– Heather Ann Schmidt

MORNING SONG

Having apparently escaped
coq au vin
the neighbor’s rooster
crows the morning

opening the day
like a window which
had been closed
against the cold night

– MJ Arcangelini