by Barbara Siegel Carlson

Two o’clock on his way home.  Sun beats
down his neck, so he takes a different route.
A pigeon begins to gurgle
as though calling Franz, Franz,
your dinner is ready !  The voice sounds
like his old nurse who gave him oatmeal in bed and told him
the story of a man whose back was scarred
with a map of a city.  A building’s
on fire — the walls roar
into the sky.  For a moment a human figure ripples
at one of the windows
into a soundless plume.

by Gerd Stern

when you’ve got to go
it’s a pisser of a when
not just you won’t stay
can’t, that is, however
will you be going now
here, there, whenever
hit, rush, flash, on
suddenly, necessarily
given orders to comply
with balance of payments
for do not commandments

if ten are, were enough
making minyan concensus
for thou shalt not commit
instead of better not do
whatever good goes unpunished
close mouthed, open quoted
on poppa’s one  -way phone
and we can’t call you back
to heal undercover scars
careless love prohibitions
saved message folders
dialing artifactual remembrance
coincident synchronicity

forgot to forgotten
crossed lines, wires, ideas
direction beaming up stars
face opposite dark corners
cojunct intersected crossroads
as out of sight family icons

mindless, off the board, pawns
waiting impatiently for end game
to start over, to return reborn

by Gerd Stern

there was nothing to forgive
then murder impossible to forget
drove your express spirit beyond
this back beat of no time
like no – ow – now presence gone

remembering your cramped tears
homesick ready for return
stone buddy cool dude games
Gofer Topher an’ Rasta Granpa twogather
inhaled our drug o’choice
voicing synced to Stop The Violence
snorkeling o’er Poetreef coral heads

life’s quick if it’s not
where is it there you’re gone
to be scattered ashes on Tamalpaian peak
highbeam grin turned to us
from twenty one years of photolit
token keepsake images portending
immediate fatal finality

that shot too unexpected
to be true

* A local custom; checkin’ out the sunset from Bolinas Ridge
on Mount Tamalpais

by R.S. Mengert

When I was a boy, I dreamt of being
an astronaut.  I grew up freakishly large
and half blind.  No space for me.
No floating embryonic in the zero – g void
bathed in the silver effervescence
of the starlight.  I must walk the earth
of stone and mud as I do tonight,
bound by gravity and fear.

On nights like this, I should just stay inside and drink,
or read Aquinas by the yellow flicker of electric light,
the hum of a cheap space heater.  He said evil
is nothing more than the absence of good,
just as cold results from lack of heat, darkness
from the lack of light, and that all of human
kind is holy in its nature.
In the frigid early dark, the cobalt sky is fear.  The pockmarked street beneath my stairs is black
and solid, swallowing the light the day has left behind.  I will step down to walk on it, and take
what darkness I can.