by Leigh Donaldson

The silent group
sits in front of a building
made of brick and mortar
that houses shiny, red,
toy–like trucks.

They smoke half–lit cigarettes
waiting for
the shriek of catastrophe
that springs them into sudden life.

We all sit
outside the structures of our lives
waiting for a pillar to fall.

We believe that only then
will we know
why
we sat and waited.

by Nancy Jean Hill

Consider, if you will, a middle–aged man
scattering ashes into a wicked winter sea
while his wife stays in their marital grave
wearing a feather pillow over her head,
snuffing out visions of loyal dogs, now dead,
shutting up the perpetual bark of grief.

Consider the hunching down of grief
and all the tears wept by a man
who carries to the shore’s edge dead–
dog ashes and scatters them into the sea
while scavengers swoop from overhead
hoping to be nourished by the grave

nature of this man’s grave
errand. Consider what grief
he feels. Never getting ahead.
Never being the kind of man
who could rise above the sea
and save his dogs from being dead.

All of his passion spent on three dead
dogs and his marriage digging its own grave
the way his dogs dug for bird bones by the sea
and came up with nothing but grief,
the merciless snap of sand crabs, making the man
want to cut off the little creatures’ heads.

Tearing of the flesh and mutual beheading.
Words that dripped with irreconcilable grief,
the onerous path of this wife and her sad man.
Dogs that saved the marriage gone to their graves.
Ashes kept in urns for years. Dead
love, dead dogs, thrown into the sea.

Ashes vanish like ghosts into the churning sea.
Beach combers, shell seekers, turn their heads
toward grating screams and grieve
the many years they’ve spent in deadly
quarantine, knowing not ’til now the grave
needs of a lonely man.

The silence of a dead sea echoes like grief.
A man wades toward a salty grave.
Onlookers shrug, then bow their heads.

by Ron Salutsky

My friend the heroin addict & recovering Catholic
used to cross herself after she tied off
and when the redluscious bloodflower bloomed
in the syringe’s vial–stem
Ave Maria pues, she said,
I love you to whoever was there
before her eyes rolled up and closed.

Her moon is purple
with tiny, iridescent crucifixes
in its border
and it’s so much beautiful.

Last Friday the first thing I saw
in morbid Anthem Estates as the work truck turned a corner
toward the job site was a San Pedro Cactus
beginning its bloom day — the one day
of the year

it presents its off–white blossom. I thought of you
and wished you a happy bloom day. Right now,
the daffodils are everywhere back home
and I miss the forsythia.

by Ron Salutsky

The dwarf came to on the train tracks
after a night of heavy drinking

following the part where everything quiets down
and two people are on a sofa

and one asks
Have you ever been in love?

Have you ever hated anyone?
might well evoke the same memory,

the loved, the hated, one. Here the ferries
haul islands back and forth while the townsfolk

stand still in the bay. Terra firma
is no longer possible, so the army

went home. The peddler leaves a totem
of bone to be washed by the tide,

giving much less to the sea than is offered
in return. It is Sunday anyway

amid the cattle’s low, and I repeat to myself
the word adios: to God, to God, to God.