Guest Poet: William Doreski

Three Poems

Lyra, Cygnus, Libra, Scorpius

Documents litter the table. Charts,
graphs, memos. Nothing important,
but the clutter lends dignity
to the meeting of our minds.
You look rumpled by intellect,

the wrinkles of your summer dress
corresponding to the powerful
convolutions of your brain. We nod
over competing data and frame
criteria to assess. The moon

basting the lawn outside rebukes
our slackened postures, our lack
of prowess. I’m too old to name
myself after the summer stars—
Lyra, Cygnus, Libra, Scorpius.

And you’re too reflective to share
my love of nighthawks cackling
through the humid dark. Extinct
in most of the state they thrive
still in Keene for some reason

ornithologists haven’t discerned.
We have to complete this proposal
if it takes all night. Lightning flares
a hundred miles north, gilding the sky
for an instant. I gather a mess

of papers and shuffle while I think.
You fix your brown gaze on me.
With a rustle of your cotton dress
a surge of will exudes to force me
to accept your proposition;

but I don’t understand its language,
which isn’t Indo-European
but something fevered by the dark
matter of the universe, which bulks
so mightily between us.

Tossing Your Room

Tossing your room for contraband,
I find underwear large enough
to decorate a rhino, glasses
thick as plywood, three huge wigs
clumsy as shag carpeting. Whose
are these? Not yours, not anyone’s,
but planted to bemuse me.

Light thickens in the window. Storms
approach with their petticoats flaring.
A siren razors the avenue
as police respond to famous crimes.
I’ve bundled these silly objects
into evidence bags. Evidence
of your improper irony,
your groping, speculative mind.

I’ve also stolen your sex toys,
whether plastic, leather, or bone,
bagged your bags of marijuana
and the vials of crack and crystal meth
you hid behind the wainscoting
in your spare bedroom where lovers
disgruntled by your humours hide.

The first sheets or rain shatter
against the side of the building.
Your room smells like the closets
where families keep their skeletons.
For years you’ve expected me
to search it, leaving your door unlocked
and shouting down the hall as you leave
for your wild nights in vodka bars.

Now I’m sorry. The wigs suggest
beheadings, the glasses muddle
rather than correct my eyesight,
and the underwear would transform me
into the saddest of transvestites
if I were fool enough to wear it
even with no one looking.

Magic Easy to Believe

Arguing at the grave of a witch
hanged in the seventeenth century
you deny that magic can heal
the ruptures in the social fabric
and the leaking oil well in the Gulf.
I want to bring back the stigma

if not the fact of black magic
to frighten our smug politicians
into cleaning up the planet.
You deny, but when you spotted
that car parked at the graveyard
with license plate reading ZOMBIES

you doubted your own denial.
A man toting a tripod with no
camera or telescope attached
may have been the zombie-master
who oversees nightly excursions
in search of edible brains.

Voodoo, you agree, is magic
easy to believe. Its followers,
if they actually attempt to live
on brains, would probably starve
in these united states. None the less
I argue that faith can resolve

the wounds the planet has suffered
if the politicians fear powers
that lobbyists can never bribe.
The witch’s gravestone bears
an hourglass and a curse to keep
the creature dead and decomposed.

You laugh because I want to claim
her powers had some currency
in her era, but the wind in the pines
speaks her language, and the lilt
of a song sparrow by the river
elegizes us as well as her.

© William Doreski 2011

William Doreski's work has appeared in various e and print journals and in several collections, most recently Waiting for the Angel (Pygmy Forest Press, 2009).

MuDJoB Guest Writes: First Anniversary

Views

Two small people carry one large thing and an argument ensues,
It ends with the big thing left on the street when one of them blows a fuse.
A patient sues his doctor and the lawyer sports new shoes,
The doctor makes excuses, saying, “I’m always the one they accuse!”
Fans at the game are anxious to see the visitors lose,
Though the leading player rolls on the ground and rubs a swelling bruise.
Mom and Dad watch a crime in progress on the local news;
A hateful man in an interview hurts with the words he spews.
Three competing suitors are hoping the beauty will choose
Against a backdrop of music and hearts of pink in varying hues.
The tenants default on their rent with excuses by ones and by twos,
And complain of the neighbor who stinks up the hall with the garbage that he strews.
Eli propounds on Kate’s erroneous definition of clerihews;
In order to get her to see the light, he gives her a book to peruse.
The church falls short on worshippers who can’t sit in predestined pews,
And Masons turn out their membership for failing to pay their dues.
A husband abandons his wife in aborted attempts to amuse;
Her demeanor is drowned in pot luck casseroles, soups and stews.
A detective sifts through the ashes searching remains for clues;
He’s found an earring, a tooth and a nail, but he doesn’t know whose.
Teenagers wooing, say they aren’t smoking. They are. It’s only a ruse.
They’re thinking of eloping because her father is turning the screws.
Workers waiting for jobs are standing outside in queues,
While the hardnosed factory owner seeks alternatives to use.
Someone is at the zoo with a child his ex-wife would abuse,
And an old man who’s lost a fortune regains it by singing the Blues.

© Michael D. Brown 2011

Guest Poet: Sandra Davies

Circle of Celebration

© Sandra Davies 2011

Sandra Davies is an artist and printmaker and recently-emerged writer of fiction, with a long-established interest in family history. Born on the Essex coast, she now lives in Teesside in the north east of England, both places having the flat landscapes and sea-edged horizons considered essential for a sense of well-being. More writing can be found at lines of communication and some prints at Print Universe
This piece can be found in Sandra's excellent book Edge which comprises Curve of Early Learning, Arc of Adaptation, and Circle of Celebration

Our One-Year Anniversary Together

Guest Writer: Grey Johnson

A Body of Water Invites All Things

As I step down a grassy bank in a slow backwards tango toward a canal, I stumble a bit, laugh, and am not allowed to fall. The breeze is insistent, making twinkling quivers on the surface of the water, which has been fattened by recent rain. All around us are the gray and brown trunks of trees, slender and thickly standing together, their bark silently watching.
He leans me into the water, and as he holds me, I float on my back and talk to a hawk tracing circles between some clouds. My arms smooth the current and my hair comes to life, swimming away from my scalp. His hand rests firmly on my chest, and I feel smaller. I will myself to sink, and holding my eyes open, I cross into a hushed space filled with inky gray and honey amber. The light forms a cool bright sphere above my face, and I feel a garment I am wearing begin to flutter.
I am held, suspended sweetly. His hand moves to my forehead, giving warm, reassuring pressure, like a child might feel as her father checks her for fever. We press me tenderly down.
The water becomes full of nothing but me, and I know that if it pleased him, I would try to live without air, or sound. My heart becomes thin and wide and flickers like silver. Tiny bubbles wiggle up from me like bits of hope, and I do not move. I feel him smile, and it makes me proud to affect him so easily, just by staying still, and waiting.
As I rest there, we watch a transformation. I lose all my edges, and turn into the shadow of a mysterious and beautiful siren, capable of chasing light and lost souls, and of feeling the language between words. My resistance sublimates. There is a long instant of perfect relinquishment, in which I imagine droplets of water plinking into my lungs in a slow, musical fashion, like icicles melting in a perfect cave.
I cannot stay under without him, and he has let me up without warning. When I wipe my eyes and look around, I think he is gone. The air spanks my face, and I need my hearing back, although I do not want it. When I finally spot him, he is in the grass, resting on his back, staring impassively at the sky.

© Grey Johnson 2011

Grey Johnson lives in a small town in northeastern South Carolina. Her garden is very important to her, and so are her dogs. She reads and knits rectangles, but seldom knows what to do with them. She doesn’t have a blog or website, but writes some on the Six Sentence Social Network. You can also check out her brilliant little collections on Issuu.

Guest Writer: J.K. Davies

Foot & Mouth

Duane's grandmother called us to her to tell us a story about the last big breakout, from her chair in the corner of the room on that heavy afternoon when the adults had all left the complex, her cracked whiskery voice pulling us closer in, her flat unemphatic words were delivered in a staccato non-rhythm. The atmosphere of abandonment still felt temporary, we didn't believe the grown-ups would not come back, that they would, could leave us here. They would have to come back for Grandma as she couldn't get out of her chair by herself.
We crouched together on the bed to listen to her, a blanket around our shoulders now that the heating had stopped, imagining the disease stalking the land, a stick legged giant with a flapping coat of rooks wings pointing its myriad fingers at its myriad victims. We could smell the fatty smoke she described, and see her tongue lick around her dry old mouth when she spoke of the charnel stink.
"The pyres sent plumes up to Heaven," she'd said, and looked upwards, and we did too, wondering what we would see there, but it was only the wood-chipped ceiling.
"We had to shoot them all, even those who had no disease. The scientists, they told us it was the only way to rid ourselves of it. The fires, they burnt for weeks, turning the bodies to charcoal," and she rocked forwards, backwards, rocked again.
"Oh, that it should happen again in my lifetime," she moaned
We clutched each other in excited horror, two boys on the edge of an adventure, having heard the grown-ups whisper of foot and mouth and BSE and CJD before they went, wondering if we too would have such horror-tales to tell when we were old.
"But, Grandma," Duane asked, trying to putting the pieces of the puzzle together. "What are cows?"

© J.K. Davies 2011

J.K. Davies is a practised reader & practising writer living in Germany. She blogs mostly at practice makes perfect and has a nasty side at too much practice (http://toomuchpractice.blogspot.com)
Website:
http://jkdavies-dailywritingpractice.blogspot.com/

Guest Writer: Len Kuntz

Thunder Comes Around

We hide under the rusted hood of someone’s abandoned car that we’ve propped up over the lip of an outcropping rock, our makeshift tree fort on ground resembling a squatter’s shanty more than anything.
Rain beats on the metal, little thumps atop our heads. Our breath is cold and vapory.
I know my sister’s staring at me but I keep my eyes on the ground. She asks if I’m mad.
It was her idea to do it. She said he had it coming.
“Damn it, I don’t know,” I say when she asks again.
Hunters were used to coming down off the bluff and marching into the ravine where tall maples clustered and made it easy for deer to forage and keep hidden. Easy pickings. We’d hear their gun blasts on the weekends, hoots and jeers.
Our father was a hunter of sorts himself. In fact, it was his gun I used.
I knew the area the way a blind man knows his bedroom. I found the perfect spot with a boulder for both my perch and hiding spot.
My sister said to make sure I took him down, even if it meant several shots. I’d seen her frightened plenty of times, and many times angry, but never both emotions stirred up simultaneously.
“You sure?” I asked.
Her head nodded swift, like a guillotine.
When I shot him in the back, my father’s shoulders flew up like chicken wings. I hit him in the neck next. Before he could drop, I put three more bullets through his torso.
Afterward, I thought I heard the shots echo, but it was thunder that had come around, and then with it angry, unforgiving rain the size of coins.
He’s still out there in a heap, probably stiff as lumber by now. We brought two shovels, though, and a tow rope.
When I look over, my sister lifts her worried, wet eyes, but it’s the jaw marks I notice, the float of purple bruises tinted mustard. Her lower lip is split and one side is so swollen that it reaches up and curls around her nostril.
It used to be Mother that got his beatings, but she was smarter than us and left a long time ago.
When my sister blinks her eyes at me, I flap my hand, giving her a playful, invisible slap. “Nah,” I tell my sis. “It’s all good.”

© Len Kuntz 2011

Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State with his wife and son. His writing appears widely in print and online at such places as Blue Print Review, Orion Headless, Heavy Bear and also at lenkuntz.blogspot.com