by Joe Richey

Cuba, I tried to explain, is not just
a place where six square walls reside.
Eleven million people raised on revolution live there today.

Remember Fidel Castro’s campesino army’s triumph January 1, 1959.
Victory is especially sweet
when 75% of your army are liberated sugar workers.

An early tourist of the Cuban Revolution,
Jean – Paul Sartre later asks:
“Is building on sugar better than building on sand ?”

Born in ’58 the Cuban Revolution, upon those shifting sands,
one month into my first news – exposed life,
Fidel Castro took La Habana and lit one big fat stogie,

Like my grandfather did that day for different reasons,
More to do with smoke than sugar.

by Lewis MacAdams

                                                 I.

                                            At first
she displayed all the signs:
                           her lashes went on forever.
               When the flood tossed the carp
up on the river bank,
                              she guided it back into the water
                  with her hands.
          When the hawk swooped past us in the parking lot
                                    she noted that
                          “hawks seem to follow you around.”
I don’t know if this is politically correct or not, but

            when she curled her bare toes
                          around the lip of the concrete
it drove me wild.
            The last time I saw her she told me
                    I was unknowable; and
               then the phone calls stopped
                      followed swiftly by the cessation of E – mails,
more silence, and
         the water dripping off the elderberry
  in the rain.           

                                                 2.
              Spray paint can in a hurry to get to the ocean,
                                 a basketball bouncing in the chocolate foam.
Ankle – deep floodwaters wash across the new bike path
         where it curves
                               around the base
        of Merrill Butler’s beautiful
                         bridge at Fletcher Drive.
“What is a white pelican doing there ?” I wondered,
standing on the levee by itself,
              staring at the rushing river ?
                                               I thought it might be wounded
     so I approached carefully,
                      but it suddenly flapped away,
heading downstream
               towards the sea and safety and sanity.                      

                                      3.
“THINK signs will never give way to DREAM signs” Gregory Corso writes in
his poem, “Power.” Whereas John Tottenham muses bitterly that “My life is a
raging river of regrets flowing into a sea of shame.”

Does the river

mean anything more to me

than money ?

                                      4.
How many evenings
have I slumped dead tired in the driver’s seat of my Prius
backed into a narrow parking place
gathering my strength
and my strategies
to make it up the ramp
past the roaches and the rats
and the shuffling zombies
to my sky – cave ?

Did they once eke out a living
shining people’s shoes or
carrying their luggage
before surrendering to
diabetes and crack and the
filthy final wheelchair, still wearing
a shirt with the word SECURITY
sewn on the back
even though there is none anywhere.

by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

I fear one stray word is more powerful than my child’s vitality.

But not speaking can send out huge, mutated thought forms.

It’s foolish to hate a quarrel, forgetting the forces of creativity.
The energy of consciousness and of matter still continue,

absorbing those elements that seemed to me destructive.

The energy of a word is little understood.

Without force, symbol lacks motility.
Context, language, value are terms for a web of patterns within

the attractor field.

Turbulence, emotional upset can increase to a new harmonic.

I don’t force my perceptions upon her to whom I speak.

I don’t speak through the family member as through a telephone.
There’s psychological extension, a projection of each one’s

characteristics, which we use to communicate.
It’s as if I were writing for an immaterial audience, yet I know the

reader exists.
Openings through which words seem to disappear connect my

self I know with you reading, a symbol coming alive.
Then I am acted upon, attuning to force; my desire to be moved
is as strong as desiring peace.
Another’s energy turns my personality out to the material, which

my own emptiness had secured.

I painted over one hundred thousand paintings

I painted over one hundred thousand paintings
Just this morning
When I ate breakfast at two PM
They disappeared

I painted over one hundred thousand paintings
This morning before breakfast.
And I’d like to think they’re still there
Somewhere unseen
Like the rest of the world.