by Wade Linebaugh

These
are the final nights of spring.  A man
feels God under the hot stars,
when he must take fistfuls of grass just to stay
down.

The man and God climb a stranger’s stoop.  we
sit like bums
on the concrete.

God looks at him (me).  Says: let’s
get the fuck outta this town, man, go
and watch the hippies dose.
we (both of me) just stare
at God.
this is how God deals with the inevitability
of boredom.

Creating creation got boring
he says to him
two minutes after it was done.  Why
don’t we go down south
wake up buried in snow wishing
our lips were still pink?

You and me, he says, let’s drink
it in: dirty wet and sweet
like when you finally saw that windmill, that
big flat valley and those
telescopes.

I was there,
and I dug it.

by Wade Linebaugh

the pebble in my mouth
tastes like chalk,
an acrid river-rock
culled from the bed of earth’s strangest river.
i sympathize with it.  i feel chalky, too.
& so i turn into a rock, flutter fast down

& i’m in a field one moth’s -flight
from life, young people.
where the grass twists
with garageband hiss
& lilting strains
of broken voice, broken boy.
i see the moths,
not fooled in this field,
they make a pulsing, flapping cloud.
i can’t flap, but i pulse (as near
as rocks can do) & pulse:

what sort of sky
could brace this cloud? what
kind of rain could it rain?

by Wade Linebaugh

Being a strange boybird, Icarus is too busy
to take Mom & Dad’s calls
& a little girl eats wagon wheels
covered in tomato sauce & all
earth’s grandeur, i can see from here:
fifth pylon on the second bridge.

This is where i see this Sibyl city, waiting
sandgrain years, here where airplanes
land & climb, she keeps getting older
never younger & i’m underwhelmed,
a boy seeing the Rockettes from too far away.
Oed und leer, das bay.

Out here is where i sing
next to cars & mud; i sing to my caged
city’s candles as the biggest one falters
seizes & trembles crepusculent smoke
into fusky purple air.
How many more little girls & boybirds
are in their cars tonight?  Driving behind me,
fifth pylon on the second bridge?

& Now two hundred thirty thousand new candles cluster,
bright fireflies double by the bay almost brighter than the sun
&, rere regardant, half million more over my left shoulder:
diseased fireflies forming nightroads in lines of green & blue
for people to drive safely out of the sky.

by Anele Rubin

To whom can you say
the wind suddenly stopped, the evening clouds
were tinted pink, the mare
laid her heavy head
on my shoulder?

sky with a bright half moon
seen for a moment
after midnight
from out a farmhouse door
is worth more
than all art?

love for those beyond reach
is an unbearable bloom?

Whom can you tell
when you feel you’re dissolving
when you can’t make yourself move
when mind seems like an ocean rolling
enlarging and washing
toward but not reaching
not breaking?

To whom can you say the door opened
on darkness, a moon half lit,
stars bright with fire too far to feel,
cold grass under bare feet,
dark mountains enveloped in darkness,
invisible trees and night’s creatures breathing?

To whom do you say

eyes tend upward,
so much is buried in the earth?