by Wayne Atherton

On puddle top
at Puddle Dock,
a symphony of rain rings;
the whipsnap of canvas
mast on Gundalow

Down at the docks at night
Sea waves slosh off boat hulls and
Slashed tire buffer bumpers

Picasso twisted torsos
Dali melted time
Eminem made anger chic but
Dylan reigns as king of rhyme

There’s no time for the present

Step out of the film you replaced your life with

Trust died the day
you found a cockroach
happily swimming
in your restaurant wonton soup

Indians knew how to assign names,
thought them all out.  No easy Dick or
Jane but rather Snow Cloud, Violent Foam,
Makes Wise Choices, Has Crooked Penis

Pimp missionaries converting
jungle tribe souls for
Christian Amway booty points

I prefer the company of harlots
to the company of zealots
Bring back one physical object from a dream and
you will have performed an act of real magick

Your name dies on my tongue like a
melting snowflake or
fog touching snow

Making love with clothes on is like
photographing rainbows with black – and – white film

Bent over in a sand garden, an old Zen master
making strokes with his one tong rake

Black Mack truck tire
carves out winter slush
chunks, hurls them onto
passenger side window of
passing black Cadillac

Sudden terminal illness
sneaks up on you — shakes you
like a feisty puppy shakes a
rope toy

A pair of hairy, blood – soaked fists and wrists
emerge from alleyway shadows to be kissed by
bone – white moonlight

Slightly faster than the speed of corpse,
the cold grey fingers of a shadowy phantom
brush against the inside of my skull
on its way out of a dream I won’t recall

Perhaps the dead
wish to be
left alone;
alive, I know
I do

by Laura Behr

The first notes, sung upside down,
in a warbler’s song.  Eyes closed.
Moonlight stripped, throat full
of love.  Relief bracing, breast bare.
Who knows what is real ?  To break
the day like bone, it takes years to see
something else.  All the good shoulds
have fallen.  It can’t be different.
Near Deer Run Creek, we collected
chicken hearts.  Tiny, blood – streaked
rocks, from the mouth of the streambed,
as the last drop of truth, swallowed,
emptied into the lake.  There is no way
to know how the night shifts.  Cold wind
lakeside, leaning in, erasing every trace.
The hare disappears, into salt grass,
whispering to the earth in darkness.
Thorns, and the pulse of a broken world,
empty as winter woods.  High above
the thistle bush, a pale moon hides
and hums of all that is to come,
separate and uncertain, as lightheaded
stars’ windfall.  Everything I need
knows, five years ago, I woke
to an empty house.  The cycle of days,
and the same world asked me for nothing.

by Alicia Fisher

Lovely is the wild
impassive rise

of the sun.  The day
boils and sings.

I lean into its cusp.
I am here.

This new
is enough.

by Alicia Fisher

God only knows how many people leave sticky notes for their dead, Pens pressed against
slump – shouldered memories.
We crawl into the safety of our sister’s slit wrists.
We soak in that nest of nerves.

I scream down the freeway in my criminal lingerie.
The horizon lowers its damp standards and I am still how many breaths away
From your last ?  I live in a blown fog.  I trace your face with
matches and hold
Your poems, their rivet written in the ash of my ire.

Since then — unbrushed teeth and sad mascara; the sold – out smudge
Of sunlight across my unawake; hair looped and stabbed by some sharp debt:
A paintbrush, a pencil — Sweetheart, tame those wild curls.
Come now, I am a member of the meat packers union, a milkmaid

Leaking sweet down the street.
Last night you came in and scattered
A fistful of teeth: they stood like little tombstones at my dreaming feet.
Who leaves sticky notes for their dead to read ?

You forgot your wine – stained books.  You forgot your baby daughter.
I still wait for the mail — your frantic news.  I still say your name and bury you.