Featured Poet: Joel Craig

STREET DAD



Let me try to lay out what I think I understand

about my life. I took a sip
of wine and plunged.

The new plague has worked so quickly we’ve returned

nearly to equilibrium.

What’s behind me has been built out of nothing

into a whole row of apartments
full of exotic people.

You can presume relative safety. I’m a quiet person.

I don’t make a lot of noise
in public.

The most I can ever do is establish what appears to be

a relatively safe level
for myself, for my own body and mind.

A flash of amusement, realizing the invitation

to pounce could be taken
more than one way.

I have two cats who live outside hunting gophers and mice.

There’s a bit more to climb
until we level out.

She was thin, shy and tended to be exacting and impatient,

but I was a good, caring father.

He had the heart and clearness of mind

to be a therapist. We could afford
little in the way of school.

Emptying his pockets we came across

a policy for trying out
new groups of people.

A safe level for particular bodies, nervous systems

and private individuals with questions.

They may be a bit uncomfortable about what

they think I’m doing
but they’ve no reason to stop me.

I used to have a dog called Bruno

but when he died I didn’t
have the heart to replace him.

I learned what it was to be really poor, what it does

to the human spirit.

Fundamental things still apply—

a greenness that makes Ireland
look grey encircling a perfect crescent bay.

A place in which only self-deluded, naïve people hope

for things to get better. Las Vegas
and the end of western history.

Above all is the ghost of sunk capital. Terrible assets

that won’t be born. Telling a cop
to fuck off.

It’s a strange feeling to look up the hill, across the grass, and see

those buildings staring down
where there used to be nothing but sky and trees.

She never really said anything I could count on, and I didn’t want to

waste any more time or energy than I had to
on people who play games.

So to you, yes. Yes for telling the truth. To your intuitive fingers

and all the rest of you, what are you
trying to say?

She’ll be coming to be with me for a while. I’m meeting her plane

tomorrow morning.

She’s wonderfully gentle. Down the stairs into the living room, the fire

is still throwing off occasional sparks.

Lit fingertips move thoughtfully

up over the top of my shoulder
and pause behind my ear.

Do cities decay differently in the New World?

There’s a faint touch of tease here—biological
warfare sort of stuff. Recreation crisis.

Keep silent in deference to the possibly

imminent end of the human race.

Seem comfortably at ease with private images.

Of course there are different ways to terrorize
from the sky.

If he’s the kind that gets easily irritated,

I’ll likely find out now.

Evolution rapidly manufactures new species or subspecies

out of their domesticates.

I didn’t know I was suffering from an illness

known as depression. For the first time
in my life, I thought I was seeing the world.

I sat for a moment, staring at my knees as I tried

to put broad, wide images
into small, tidy words.

THIN RED LINE



After giving birth, she says, she dismissed the universe

and told it that it was
on its own.

Without my presence there will be no magic in your life.

Pretty intense, but okay.

Sometimes when you go through a miserable thing

you become allergic to everyone.

The nurturing mother reaches for her child’s hand,

feeling with pleasure the texture of the skin
and the solid bones of the fingers.

She takes the grossest materials and blows them

into shimmering bubbles.

So we rejoice in the salvage. The afternoon and evening clouds

through the window at a specific moment.

As long as you stay off the piano keys.

And the me who thought I knew who I was woke up

by the oyster bar.

He has no conscience because he has no need

of humility in his life. Somewhere, out there
in the shifting sands of Death Valley
is a nothing to repeat always—

Composed harmonies can be claustrophobic at first.

My recollection of the endless summer
is almost unbearable.

Tension between perception of reality and growing up

mesmerized me and my friends.

With the mirage of unattainable futures in the distance

it became urgent to wring as much
freedom from the night as possible.

Just a few minutes ago, I was looking out the living room window

and two dogs were playing
on the boulevard.

Actually I had a wonderful time. The only horse I bet on

was a winner despite narrow odds.

And it’s just so fun to speculate, to play a role

in making a nature scene.

When the rival withdrew from the field

their faces showed confusion
or something like embarrassment.

Taking pleasure to strut around with a gun in your belt.

And it’s just so fun to speculate—

In the kitchen, a soup was simmering on the stove.

On the tile counter were green lettuces and bright-
red tomatoes heaped into piles alongside loaves of bread.

I went through a few moments of seeing my worst faults.

Ceiling high bookcases thrust into the room.

There was a central room, surrounded by a veranda

sloping downwards, outwards on all sides.

Of course it’s not unthinkable that I’ve held several hands and waited

to cry and never cried but wanted to
but was filled with too much anxiety.

You’re not obvious for saying it’s dark & intolerable

outside. It’s a soggy grey fucker

giving dignity and purpose to small rebellions—

the monotonous hot-rod and beach
riots and motherly perspective.

CALIFORNIA POEM




What is needed is a recognizable molecule that carries the unstable

promise to the brain. A good-humored Buddha
area of the self.

I’ve tried and tried but it keeps slipping away. We stopped

at a spot overlooking the bay
at the same time both observing and performing.

After the patrolman followed us we joked about dodging a bullet,

the first stirrings of pleasant feelings evident
without introspective urges.

Afterward, sleeping was tricky but it worked out okay.

I said thank you but I have to go
on with the rest of my life.

It’s simple, I think. I open my mouth to say just that, but everyone

says something along these lines,
seeing places and things with their eyes closed.

A clear vision of big cities as actors in their own right.

When I close my eyes the first stirrings of
pleasant feelings become evident.

I rise and lead the way through the kitchen and dining room

and down the hallway to the bedroom
feeling solidly connected to the physical world.

A good humored Buddha area of the self. I spend the night

on a pad in their bedroom, for once
tired by the music, the air clean and cool.

The piano plays on, undeterred, and in my place on the floor

I imagine my preferred self-image
awakening to clinical sunshine.

It’s yet another distraction. How fast do you hold to yourself,

saying tiresome truths over and over again
to the tired people who rush into your life.

Have you ever been to Death Valley? I’ve wanted to see it for years

but haven’t yet had the chance.
There are personalities you never forget.

We packed the car with sandwiches and the makings of a good salad.

The idea appealed to everyone.
For the first time I missed the road.

At the entrance a small sign nailed to a telephone pole announced,

fresh oysters for sale, as if I’d built
an imaginary destination in my mind.

What will operate against a swift frame is a certain coolness in the work.

When we walked into the living room
my chest tightened, though I knew what to expect.

So far it wasn’t at all like my fantasy. The kitchen was comfortably large,

with a linoleum floor so old its original pattern
was lost in a general brown-ness.

He led me down the hall and out the back door. We walked along

a narrow dirt path, past clumps of early narcissus,
under buckeye and pine trees.

One scene in particular stays with me. The hero has wandered

into a valley where he sees, all around him
plants thrusting up by the tens of thousands.

For most of my life, whenever I was being introduced to a roomful

of people I didn’t know, the tiny muscles on either side
of my mouth would go into a twitching spasm

if I tried to maintain a smile. Noise erupted around the table.

Names of people and places I didn’t recognize
were flying everywhere. Outside was the green world.

© 2007 Joel Craig

Featured Poet: Lina ramona Vitkauskas

Lina ramona Vitkauskas is the author of the chapbooks THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press, 2007), Failed Star Spawns/Planet Star (dancing girl press, 2006), and Shooting Dead Films With Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004). Her poetry and fiction have been included in many anthologies and publications including The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), Van Gogh's Ear (Paris), Rampike (University of Windsor), The Prague Literary Review, The Chicago Review, Paper Tiger (Australia), Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, 3 AM Magazine, Bridges (The Lithuanian-American Journal), In Posse Review Multi-Ethnic Anthology (Ilya Kaminsky, editor), The Mississippi Review, The Wisconsin Review, Lituanus (Lithuanian Quarterly Journal), and Del Sol Review (featured writer). Upcoming publications: Another Chicago Magazine, Aufgabe.

IN AN ALONE



each moment is a tragedy
Rosa has never yet
dwelled in, tabular
and peppered as cryptographs
a lowered unfurled bun,
snarled lashes, unturned
simpers, hands of fingerless
radioactive passion. at a commercial,
she stumbles on dark
grounds, marries a traitor,
dies with great emphasis.
Rosa may never know the
paroxysm stereotype
of her name, the stigma
of being a cutter, ooloo, mistress.




THIS TRIPLE WORLD


1.
my mirage
not ready
to be red
your voice
a seed or
land mine.
in a muzzle
of girls, I
am your tutor,
X-ray the
canary,
gentleman,
and wristwatch.

2.
I pour you the Rhine,
you Suisse my throat.
Resuscitate the
afternoon. We had
this habeas form,
these mechanics.

3.
Maya, the dream,
I and you walk
and a few hairs
like Mrabet invite
this sand, this passion-
flower dissection. In
a crabshell you despond
and I vest my biology
upon it. There,
only three worlds
for my home.





ANDY GRIFFITH'S REVENGE



isn't it you,
that guarded man
in navy standing
by the fish, blackberries
smeared upon doors
warning the hazel doves
of corruption in the tank

hatbox her, the men
recede the garnet wombs
new woman flesh
her Apollo mound
is a boy in space

fumbling with his
pinesap whistle carved
into a gellatin kirtle
of false eyelashes and rage.





DEMOGRAPHIC



In granite
everything stills
as we are plantiffs,
plantains, and misfits

with our nylon gardens
steeped in pine,
your mouth a dream
and needles of barren
misrepresentaion,



slumber this floor
foresting for stems of
English pocketwatches
in your eyes of paraffin

and what I reach
I cannot undo
this next communication
a collage you must construct.




DULCIMER


A catatonic Finn
with strings,
& a cigar box
trinket laid on a
stable boy's straw
bed, lapsed.

My hands still
thin tones of
varnish and frozen
flax, my killed beak
mangled breath.

A hollow chord
across Fjords,
cannot see my
blue brother
in the bramble,
my Oppenheimer
atoms a vaginal bomb

in miles of spoilers.
A capella this one
whom creates my violence!
I love these wars,

pontoon bridges
of masculinity,
death in the ledger
under my Slovenian notes.

© Copyright 2007 Lina ramona Vitkauskas

Featured Poet: Tim Yu

Tim Yu is the winner of the Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Award for his collection Journey to the West, which appears as part of the Winter 2006 issue of Barrow Street. He has also published poems in 2nd Avenue Poetry, SHAMPOO, and Interlope; his criticism has appeared in Chicago Review, Meanjin, and The Poetry Project Newsletter; and he blogs at tympan (http://www.tympan.blogspot.com/). He grew up in the Chicago area and now lives in Chicago and in Toronto, where he teaches at the University of Toronto.





San Francisco



Here what happens
is a downspout loop, a
relevance fluster,

some 105 zones
of union: buy
a cretin for your

rumble room.
On the TV with no
thickness, each eye

a different blond. You
think you’re please
and thank you,

cleft palate,
cracking lip.




Tipping Point



Yeah how ye
little hills

gird wave grass
off of out

a dark end swing up
sets the brakes

of matrimony


Let’s say you were a substitute, loosed by gravel, wood cut. You’d do something like the sound on the back of a hand or dollar.

Be that.

Missing links makes you thinks. Or sausage and egg for breakfast, pooling with the tilting table, in a pleasant town with no used-car lot.


It’s as if po
easy over air

makes pants hang
dry on line

Dub race a
rude repose

or geld each
bridge, each

rain-out band


Then you’re a wall of pidgin, being sure to tongue each hole.

Pay up.

What’s under your hat can’t be had but rises staggered, sickle high: own salt. It’s possible this is your station.

I’ve discovered a way around the soft voice that finds itself in my throat.


In pied state you
must walk fact

big ape tears
slip sliding up

You don’t list
miss or mate

but do by pend
what holds each went


Face it: you shouldn’t wear those. Each ear and waist is a tipping point, apostolic or aloof.

Arthur’s mac and cheese creeps westward.

He’s like a pylon, ground or strike.





The Magnificent Mile



Some ether fell
down on my
hardwood floor

pockmarking the chessboard
on which the pizza was baking

Drop into the city
anytime you feel like
sweetness, a sugar-cone

likeness in the mail-
slot in the door





Skunky Hour



Hey ladies—I’m scared
of the common cold.
Select man at
the gate, press to continue.
It’s like cat power
sometimes, being all
alone in the middle.
I’m the dean of
clean. Go hermit
on that stripey ass.
When no one’s here
I’m quiet like a dog.





Elephant & Castle [19]



Your raygun name
is a sour berry,

a hanger-on.
That backwater

pint wouldn’t cut
a finch. Is it tough

enough for action
is what I’m asking.

Every barber-can
Smith & Jerry

thinks he’s got us
up a mudchute.

Soak it, chalk
it up to crossing

castles at the gooey
end of the street.



© 2007 Tim Yu

Featured Poet: Jackie K. White

Jackie K. White has published poetry and translations in such journals as ACM,
Blackwater Review, Folio, Quarter after Eight, So to Speak, Spoon River, and 
Third Coast. She has been a fellow at Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Arts,
and the Mary Anderson. She is an editor for the literary annual, RHINO and an
associate professor at Lewis University. Her PhD in Creative Writing is from the 
University of Illinois at Chicago where she also completed concentrations
Latino/Latin American and Women’s Studies.  Two of Jackie's chapbooks will be
published in 2007, "Bestiary Charming" by Anabiosis Press and "Petal Tearing and
Variations" by Finishing Line Press.

Blues for a Hard Fall

1

Give me a miner’s hat
I’m going down
Give me a miner’s hat
I’m going down

What does it matter that
the sun is brass, leaves flecked with fowl—
dusk blears canary to a gray-white swell.

Under my song’s a braying hound
together in the well
at the bottom of this shaft
one of us will drown.

2

Night heaves and my marrow darkens;
vagus nerve-throbs send the neck blood
pulsing toward a shoe to drop, or sharpen
each last leaf, each paged prayer turns to thud.

Give me a farmer’s hoe
I’m hacking through
Give me a reaper’s scythe
I’m hacking through

Fields dried up cut down are paved,
one steps into falls gets up, is shod on loss;
each day’s colder gray blanks no clean slate,
anger nettles me with prickly frost.

3

Give me a sailor’s slicker
I’m tossed at sea
Give me a whaler’s spear
I’m crossed at sea

what does it matter that
the sky is red – it’s swarmed with geese,
and dawn breaks to shale I have to stack.

Under the moan of a beached baleen
alone in this expanse
fog-blurred field-wide well-deep
we split, hit ground and sink.

first published in Near South (Volume 5: Winter, 2005)

Under the Laws of Motion

it is like this:

the cusp of evening, a man
shows up at the door and
instinct draws the hand
forward, and you open, I
opened it. The door that
opens closes. A world

happens inside a room
when the body that entered
meets the hand that opened,
the hand moves along
the body, the body of
space between them closes.

It is the nature of bodies to
keep moving, doors open
and close as the earth goes
on spinning and you can’t
keep the moon out of
poems. Inside the room,

a lamp glows. You begin
asking, what is the moon for?
You know you can
turn off the lamp. Inside
every house doors lead
to other rooms; inside one

a man and a woman keep
an old story between them:
somebody leaving. Outside,
equal opposite motions: leaf
rustle, foot scuff, another
hand to the threshold, a body

first published in 9th Annual Juried Reading Chapbook (The Poetry Center of Chicago, 2003)

Fernando, To Fernando

Tell me the heteronym of your worst self
and I’ll let you decipher my handwritten diary.
Today, one said, I like engines much less,
but we know that’s a lie – it’s always a you
or I unliked, and it’s all over the diary
scraps gathered from the floor of a messy
but respectable tavern, homely, adjacent
to the train station. You never dared to
get on the train long scrutinized, schedules
studied, as if you were genuine
about going someday somewhere to be a new.
How unremarkable, the failure to change
the face you look out of, the fixed
others pinned in word-photos, the wheel-
longing your stare chugs along, along with
everything, says the diary, “tremulous” and “banal” –
the inert exhaustion of wanting to want
nowhere to go. You go back to your rented
room, window to the tracks and write
nothing – blank confetti later to litter
the hardwood under strangers’ feet and
suitcases on end. The head of one self
spins with the disquiet of a departing train
the other pretends to have boarded.

From Eurynome in Exile 

The First Wandering: July, ‘98                                    

“we have to make a negotiation with the places we leave behind, the places we return to”

                                                (Andre Aciman, False Papers)

(6-12)

The next mornings I crept out of
my sister’s cabin holding the rest of them
in sleep on a Medicine Bow mountain,

took a path to a cluttered clearing, a broken trunk,
and notebook on knees, pursued my old routine,
beginning one of many stories. 

In the hour’s stillness I could hear each
creaking tree that years from now will fall,
and the wind grew into hissing or shirring 

wheels across interstate 80 rose up to me
(no matter where, I hear
highways and night trains and the “what will you do) 

then something else moaned, nearer,
a voice in the branch that tomorrow
will fall beside me as I put down   

The second evening:
We piled fifteen in the Chevy suburban,
                                                drove to the summit
to watch the sun-set
               on the range beyond Elk Mountain.
                                             And back,
after the fire-side stories
outside the dark cabin,
 my sister says, you could be safe
with your words here,
               but my younger brother walks me
                                                   to the end of the road.

There he tells me the military
scrolling maneuver of his desert
war days eight years ago.
It’s called hearting the area--

How to capture an unknown place,
one by one the soldiers are
sent out, in opposite arcs from
an imagined center.

If they meet silence, the next two
spool out, one by one, and the first
set advances, and if no one is shot,
they close the heart at its end point. 

We stood together in the middle
of the gravel road, silent for minutes,
then he says, “since you’re the smart one,
tell me, what’s this line from--

‘this is the path thou hath yet not taken,’
says, “That’s all I kept thinking when
I stood there waiting, holding my ground
for another private or enemy coming--

“And I keep hearing it in places like this--
see that full moon? You think it’s pretty,
but we’re exposed.”  As we turn back
he insists, “there’s gotta be a poem in this.” 

(13-31)

Long after my return to prairie,
squeezed again into Midwest suburbia,
it comes back to me:  how to capture the land’s

                      

snow-peaks slope into hills lush falling
pines away into Nebraska flat tawny
Iowa valleys green Illinois cornfields and soy,

and despite the simplicity I want a year for,
his words and foreign words and the diverging
roads of family tell me
           there won’t be any cabin in the woods:

In this space of time
           the mind’s wide
as this country, & 

the questions spool out one by

one answers are
     animal-like, bird-skittish, head
raised at every noise—

& where do they come from, 

the lines that haunt us—
do they say,
move out
stand still
or, arc the way
home.       Is the sound
         wind      
wheels, or      
enemy

© 2007 Jackie White

Featured Poet: Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger spent half of her life in Chicago and environs before defecting to the Cuyahoga Valley, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron and NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including ACM, American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Harpur Palate, The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill, and her first book, Prairie Fever, is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books (Spring 2007). She is an Associate Editor of the literary magazine RHINO. Her favorite tree is the Sugar Maple. She is currently at work on a second book of poetry.

THE TWINS

I see it: no more dusk

to your days. Months ago we

stood on a porch loaded with

empty terracotta pots.

Matchbooks, snowbound

floribunda, empty rice sacks.

It occurs to me that everything

is still there without us,

creaking with temperature

swings and rainstorms. Smoke

from the three women next door,

locked out and waiting.

There were landscapes

in acrylic. Chimes from clocks

we couldn’t find. Plum tomatoes

in quart baskets. I watched

them shiver into pools

on the countertop, as if you

had rolled them in your hands

for hours. Light was gold

and inching closer, taxis

banked cheek to cheek on

the highway below. Evenings

like this I wanted kept

on ice or tucked beneath

a layer of silk. I didn’t have silk, 

only wool and nylon. There was

nothing left of the night,

only train cars and breath.

They could dust me for prints

and find just fingertip salt and rust.

You were a halo of consonants

in the dull ebb of my pulse. 

I could have hung my jacket up.

You could have told me how

they found us and took us

to our opposite corners, separate

lawns, rooms where we both slept on

twin beds, star quilts, lost in the scent

of cotton batting and blackjack gum.

ROYAL BLUE

We were two strands of thread 

snagged on a wooden barn door.

You were odd granite shrapnel

in my safety goggles. One wet

sheep standing on the driveway.

A bad stomachache after apples

and capers. If I painted the wall

ecru, you walked into it bloody

handed. Those days were less

Flemish and more Portuguese,

at least in the beginning. What

Old Master would’ve measured

from my elbow to the toaster?

If oxen crowded the interstate

we were in no way responsible

or even aware. I was not your

wife, not even close. Alpacas

always left me shivering like

a tuberculosis stick, or elevator

skipping a floor. A cartoon man

naked in a barrel can never be

unrolled. I ironed handkerchiefs

for quick cash. I let them weld

me behind some mesh. It’s mean

the way we flush right out, like

milk, and then we begin all over.

Once, we both lived underwater.

MILFOIL & AFTERTHOUGHT

There were four rooms. There were eight. You were in corners and under
furniture, near my knees, reflections of your back in stainless steel.
Suspenders, Florsheims and avocado linen. There was limestone halfway
up, and I knew I’d crash into it if I could move fast. You thought it
was a cold place. The light bulbs?  It was all like helium to me at
that point. I said someone should be taking pictures, the way we were
sprawled on the hardwood or propped up on rattan sofas. One time in the
airport we were both small and spun together in a leather chair chained
to the ceiling. You touched my leg.  Nobody was taking pictures, but
that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or that we weren’t in Frankenmuth
five years later, at connecting tables but kept separate. A shed behind
the school, or that storm sewer at the dunes, past the grasses, left of
concession, the sand that felt like clay, like slip, how blond you had
become, I hardly recognized.  If you were here in this room you’d
remind me of the guitar, the train platform, the silver Cutlass
containing me and continuing on past it all. You said we’d go back. I
was always a good runner.  You said: the smoothest skin ever.  We’d
seen the skyline from two dozen taxis, our own legs on the bridge, from
the grass, from the grass again, in the grass on my front lawn, lit by
the cheap plastic solar lamps, from deep past the buoys of Lake
Michigan and into the waterways connecting.  We knew where we had come
from, had that in common.  In college I looked out the laundry room
window and saw you between leaves, in a corduroy jacket.  We’re here,
you said. There were blue sheets I used instead of curtains.  Later I’d
be in a hundred rooms with tin ceilings and slim wine glasses, or
rectangular tables and cinderblocks and papers.  In the subway window
I’d look nothing but tired.  I would try everything from milk to cactus
in hope of turning you to milk and cactus and dark rafters and back
again, so when I closed my eyes it was heat and every other color we
described.  The nights kept us like ants under plastic.  I kept you in
places that were cool and uncovered.  You touched my face like it was
years ago and just starting. I was busy fending off letters and
drinking green tea and lying in a cool bath.  By noon, everything was
back where it had been. We’re here and we’re living, you said. 

FOXGLOVES AT 3 PM

Ballooned on the back porch

like a bullfrog in springtime.

All full of it. The whole world

going down on its neighbor

and then sliding up bus steps

fragrant with Dial, snapping

wintergreen gum. Sunglasses,

duffel bag, nobody knows

how damp your body is.

Rooms the buttercup gold

they use for schools, seen

on desks, hushed in cotton.

What’s not a hustle? No

need for silk when you’ve 

got grease. At the opening 

reception, nobody checked

the broom closet for nudes.

There were hours pressing 

faces under the paintings,

a glass of whole milk split

between us before stained

glass grottoes. Grandparents

dressed you in lederhosen

every autumn. I was lost

as a child and felt my way

into a neighboring borough.

Why were we the only two

left at the end of the song?

It sounded like shaking, coal

dust, bells, a sitar and tabla

set loose in the wet mines.

We used to meet at the back

table, like we were corporate.

You would help me with my

buttons. I walked that room

and stepped through the blinds

into midday traffic, our haze 

a secret. Each dress I snagged

on the same broken hinges.

RED SEA

An afternoon across from you

in copper light. Smuggling

a quart of milk on the city bus

to drink between potholes.

We stood at the edge of a lot

rumbling with maple leaves.

Lie down in it. Lay it down.

An hour later under sixty watt

bulbs, albacore in pepper oil.

Where did I go when your

arm slid across my shoulder?

Even my palms turned cold.

Even gabardine went sharp.

You told a story of cloves sewn

into canvas pillows. A wife

who loved blanched leeks.

A childhood of Appaloosas

that resisted training, or girls

in distant cities wearing silk.

I remembered a chandelier

I once dissected in the basement

without permission. Your face

startled in the stairway. Blood

rides water underground

like another body. Waiting on

a bar stool in Waukegan, knowing

you are in Ashtabula, no phone.

The sound of dancing drifts through.

© 2007 Mary Biddinger