by Bill Edmondson

It can find you in a men’s room
Uphill from the phallic shrine on Molokai
Enter    you enter a life    or what it’s come to
A red marker arrow to the ceiling
Where cliché begins    descends clockwise
Around and around you on whitewashed brick:
In high school    slothy dreams of Charlene
Lipstick on white corduroy
Precocity    a pattern of no work done
Then reckless escape to the sea
Where quick promotion dulls in alcohol
There’s time with a bible    watery confession

In love he’s been romantic    in sex a dog
You turn to follow his drift
To a young woman    her chances sheared
Children appear    are buffeted
More drink and a family tossed off

There’s something you can’t identify    a coil around your neck

Sex again    whatever moves the blood    until

Finally    here in this room
He finishes down at the urinal    commode:
I’m here every Tuesday at 1 p.m.

by Megan Grumbling

Chance glistened in the blue spruce bower so near
my doze: fresh champagne, suddenly, and one
glass flute in wait.  Fizzing awake, I veered
in wistfully, leaned thirsting for the stun
of finding myself tapped to catch the pour.
Later, out at the show, the singing girls
bid proxies pass us popcorn, daisies, fourths
of oranges as they wove warps and lures
from their trombones, accordions, guitars.
Reach down, they called, so we all felt beneath
our folding chairs.  Next to me, where I’d perched
not two minutes before, the winning gleam
arose, the whimsy glimmering almost
upon me, all odds winking.  Ah, so close.

by Megan Grumbling

Have I heard of the allegory of
the cave? he wonders, blue to me in pooled
monitor lume, a dim room of insides,
guess – tellings.  Shadows, shades, I’ve heard
of this — the thrown projections, primitive
slung shadow – plays at shape, a sense – deprived
name – making of our darkness — but that’s all
I can remember now, here in this blue
prelude to a transvaginal, water —
engorged, acoustic.  He knows nothing more
precise, either, of cave – tell, but intends
to look it up.  Meanwhile, the sounds return
our certain things to know: a womb near ebb,
a right ovary longer than a left.

Later, sun – blind outside, I will recall
how they were prisoners in there and trapped
in naming games.  For now, I too seek shapes
up on the bluewashed screen, light in this dark
chamber: a uterus writhing more real
than known, blood rush like chorus, sea creature,
benign cysts that he clicks and tags with red.
Strong echoes in the story, in our room,
our flickering reach for lore’s sure forms.  We dwell
here long or only, blue and calling lo
with all we know, knowing our songs by gloam,
tones both subliminal and high above
our range.  So we are told.  The tunes are clear
strains, just hundreds of times what we can hear.

by Megan Grumbling

     O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible,
          imperious as ever! . . .
     O to disengage myself from these corpses of me,
          which I turn and look at, where I cast them!
                                                    — Walt Whitman

My ghostlings snag unseen over the blue
braid coils, red Asian wool, cream cotton loops

I tread in thoughtless onward.  They detach
by filaments and settle, graze and catch

at ankles, steal fleet instants of my step
clear out of time: In string – tripped Muybridge split

seconds, they mark my movements between ice
and gin, drip rack and cupboard, candlelight

and sheets, are offerings of whispered least
resistance to this gliding, facile grace

of forth.  I go horizon – wild, headstrong,
my grown sun – burnished histories so long

so full.  But seen alone, each strand is scarce
matter enough for hue, honey and ash,

chestnut and silver though I’ve known them, gnarl
and plait, as if myself, and yet let fall

untended.  Only as they break my stride
do I discover what I’ve shed, find time

to kneel, whisk hand through seeming empty space,
sheer circles, and collect myself, a skein.