by Nancy A. Henry

Given my inheritance of glass clowns,
I cannot flee this place with impunity.
Why should you shiver?
Why withdraw your hand?
Embrace the self-sealing envelopes,
individual packets of butter!
Aren’t you just so happy to be alive in a world
wherein there exists the “G-spot Tornado”?
A cure for all manner of reptile dysfunction?
Let us venture out into this mysterious froth, and be cleansed.
Let us blunder forth sullying our soles in this muck,
And be saved.

by Gerard Grealish

Though you have just run half
of what will be before you three weeks from now
and you are still, on this long distance
call catching your breath, you want
nothing more, so you say,
than that balance that brings to breath
a certain peace.

I can only imagine
the rhythm of your breathing like mine
when I ran so many miles less so many
years ago and a crow, spooked
by the sight of me and the small thunder
of my feet, cawed its way out

of a tree
and the blackness of itself
into the dawn.

by Gerard Grealish

          “No se puede vivir sin amar, were the words on the house.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Out of the almost endlessly parched
earth of northern Chile, yellows,
reds, blues.

Wildflowers not seen for decades
arise.  Arriba !  in the Atacama.
Sin flores, no se puede amar.
Sin amor, no se puede vivir.

A homeless man must be
drunk again.  No es posible, he mutters and
as if he were right, reports
of rodents rampaging, of rat crap floating in zephyrs
resonate over the air waves
as if the lungs of local residents
were screaming mantras, were shrieking “Hanta !

Hanta !  Hanta !  Hantavirus
you are killing us.”  Sin muerte,
no se puede vivir.  In Acapulco,
the little children haunt the streets
out of thirst.  Agua, agua, por favor.

Sin agua, no se puede vivir.

El niño, strange child,
your warm breath dries up the riviera

dampens the desert, drops snow
where snow seldom falls and drought
where metal rusts as a matter of course.

Then there are flowers.

Whose child are you anyway?
I can almost hear you
crying out “No sé !  No sé !”
Oh, so beautifully.

by G. H. Smith

If you go looking for the devil,
you will find him.

Even on a sunny day
by all accounts ablaze with piety.

Even in the sanctuary of your dreams.
(There’s sanction for pretending.)

If you go looking,
what can you expect?

Two ride out, one rides back
is the story of dangerous waltzes.

But not to yield
is a damnation too,

to hunker in the junker of a bunker
watching the endless war on the news.

What we do with the evidence,
our embered shoes, those ashes around the heart,

tells the more telling tale.
It’s worth remembering:

at least if you find him,
you’ll know someone new.