by Benjamin Aleshire

I study my grandmother dying
once a week for a few years.  I am young
and getting bigger every day
She is shrinking steadily
till I wonder when she’ll disappear in her gown.

The Sunday visits to her home
reek of urine and madness
where cadavers scream steadily in the hallways.
The Discovery Channel blares all day —
though few discoveries reach her
through her catacombs of memory.

My mother and her sisters
wrestle themselves with the prayers
which surface like pale fish feeding
in the morning and at night
for her to just go, to pass —
whispering on the phone
about the sadistic nurse who still hasn’t been fired
curling the cord in their fingers
trying to explain sadism to me

Knowing they lie to spare me,
I find it in the fat dictionary
its pages translucent as skin
which leads me on a scavenger hunt to
masochism    gratification    degradation
and finally to cruelty —
a word I am only beginning
to understand.

by Michael David Madonick

Puffed – up, as if weight might give body
to song, the cardinal’s staccato rakes
the morning air.  Beneath him, in the same
snow – shower, my dog and I are not thinking of
Pissarro, Seurat, whatever pointillism might have
to do with any other movement in art.  The fact is,
at this very moment, my Golden Retriever
is hunched, like an incontinent Slinky, working
her muscles toward some more immediate end.
For this I am happy.  It is cold and the wind
does not discriminate against anything, the living
or the not.  When she is done, her focus returning
from that deep and almost reverent concentration —
a catechism, a mantra — to look at her work, she is
stunned, impressed, and clearly lighter on her feet.
She could be an artist, if she had a thumb, a studio,
a blue beret.  But she seems more earthy, a plumber
perhaps, done with soldering a maze of copper pipe,
the smell lingering, not altogether offensive, above
her achievement.  She might well be thinking — Gold
may not be the alchemist’s intention. I will feed her
again, later in the day.  The bird will be elsewhere
doing what it must.  And I, not worthy
of her earnestness, not sure about my
place in any of this, will hold the red
leash, attend her urges, and wait,
on the weighty and the not.

by Michael David Madonick

it’s hard to keep a rhythm with the wind in your face birds tacking like loose newspaper clouds a kind of wind sock the fluttering street signs no sense of caution somewhere there’s an ocean pushing at the ground and the ground trying not to give satellites decaying orbit stars fixed in daylight fish in the hard current down from the dam and no way to rest except in the small slow eddies behind rock but even there place is defined by what it isn’t the not moving motel six day’s inn marriott holiday inn against the hard currency of the interstate the rapids one cannot pay for such repose the vibrating bed the hot movies for rent the conspicuous hopeful knocks at the door that sadly want only to clean and even then you can’t sit still time for a bath a shower some wanted attention to the self a breath that is so deep it scares you beyond exhaustion into the bronze tinted mirror that flattens and flatters you twenty years or so suggests infinity or the circus booth you’re living in and you want to lift the hammer speed the metal shot up the rail ring the damn bell become a hero because weariness is endemic to travel and the crowd is asking for hope and still you’re not out of it tired enough to go to sleep hit the starchy pillows the plastic comforter ignore the gymnastics of your neighbors their out of church calls to god hell nobody can be this weary this dry in the mouth wordlessness until you find yourself reading the telephone directory looking for family restaurants buffets sushi joints in the middle of Kansas where even Toto wouldn’t want to go home or writing a critique of the dead buffalo painting screwed to the wall it’s then you remember you’re a fish in a stream and on the speckled ceiling a glinting of mayflies or whatever the hatch is in June and you leap for it out of the water into the disgusting air the other side of apathy you reflex hit in the direction of light

by Michael David Madonick

We cannot reconcile ourselves, the incongruities
of our bodies and of our natures, that which is cast

in the purposeful inheritance of our incisors, two worlds
buck – toothed, joined.  Above the water and below,

it is always a matter of mediation, breathing and
holding one’s breath.  That we forage, skim the deep

reaches of the pond and then rise, leaving each measure
of our find on the surface or in our den, is a kind of

communion, an offering, registering the spirit of our dual
lives, the constant transformation, the covenant with

the world we leave behind.  Soft enough for a czarina’s neck,
or fodder for some fiery Cajun roux, the afterlife affords no resolution.

Yet, here, in the now, in the soft repellant glide across
the pond, we are nearly delightful, toppling the bulrush

to make our furtive home.  And if the aroma, our name,
that spreads a warning to our bourgeois neighbors, is not enough — humility

then, has fashioned a tail.