Friend Peter
by Bruce Holsapple
Opened window by the sink
dark wind clattering
thru wood blinds —
reminds me, washing dishes,
of an island breeze
& it is, sort of, me isolated
in the desert highlands
follow the associations: wind kitchen light
shades (shad) ocean Long Island beach
friend Peter
dead now 16 years
Us sitting on a windy beach
looking out at a bungalow
way back, where a writer we knew
used to spend weekends, an expensive getaway
thinking him privileged —
Inside that getaway myself now
how the wheel’s spun round
Peter haunting me
the mixed sense of exile
& occasion
big windows, tile floor
a privileged view
by fact of these dry stony mountains
the reddish landscape
scattered juniper
puts a hitch in my step
stops my breath
walking out on the porch at dawn
Mostly, You’ll Find Me for Franz Wright
by James Rioux
Forgive me this
silly little riddle:
of how the world keeps
giving me these bruised sunsets pooling
into night, the endless jokes with no lines
punching me awake —
and how I fall
asleep watching myself watching myself
etcetera, in the most unzen
of states.
Mostly, you’ll find me pumping gas
with the others.
And less and less often, with these words
that ratchet down
the distance,
convincing even the difficult
company of my thoughts
there’s this listener.
Kevin Sweeney
is chair of the English department at Southern Maine Community College and has published poems in a number of journals. He has two books from Moon Pie Press, Rags of Prayer and Ordinary Time. He is a poetry editor at The Café Review.
Mark Schorr
serves as Director Emeritus of the Robert Frost Foundation and teaches at Cambridge College in Lawrence, Massachusetts. His latest book is Bridges to Kerouac (Loom Press), 2015.