by Matthew M. Cariello

Then I knew one word,
birthright’s rudiment
uttered in hunger’s warm room.
The sense of me without sense.
I would have finished life then,
but, perfectly happy, but
the room collapsed
when by morning I lay
among the broken trees
beyond the open frame,
and it came creeping through
the burnished leaves:
not me, not hunger.
I named the thing
the name it gave
itself, the sound it
made just being there,
heard it first time
clear as another’s word.
Deep in the branches
of morning the memory
of birds calling.

. . .

When she found me clinging
to the screen two stories up,
she would swallow her panic,
hold my shoulders tight,
and ask me to say what I saw.
If I knew no names, she pointed
and named for me.  And so
articulation was first
folded in words my mother
said: hedge ivy bricks
chestnut alleyway gate
trees bucket.  Yet an invisible
counterlife chattered
in my ear as she spoke:
car, yes, but car running,
clothesline’s cry; I heard in rain
the downspout’s talk,
traffic lights traded
colors, birds held up
the shining wires.  That
was the word, the word
was that that was them.

. . .

Late afternoons, the backyard
was half in shadow half in sun
and broken puddles etched
contradictory houses and
there were more bricks in a wall
than were possible to count
and the iron gate squealed
secrets and an airplane
droned my name.  I’d sit
in the window and sob,
cradled by my mother
as the large world surged.

by Matthew M. Cariello

Clutter in the vestibule
where steps buckled
and mortar cracked.
I watched my father
crawl into the dark
beneath the stoop
to prop up a failure
in the foundation
with a moment of faith
across the gap —
steel pipe, chicken
wire and cement.
I peered within the space
between holding-up and
breakthrough, learned
the way he’d brace
himself to the tasks
at hand.  A muttered
phrase or sigh or
whistle, the tapping
foot, crossed arms,
the sharp echo
and flash and smoke
of a match struck
before his face to meet
the cigarette’s judgment.
At times his patience
cracked, for this work
wasn’t his job of life.
The reluctant hammer slipped,
the trowel gouged when
it should have smoothed,
underpinnings he’d
constructed slipped
and tore.  I watched
and learned to watch,
and wait, and rebuild
what had been razed
and razed again.
After three days among
the dust and chiseling,
coughs and scuffs and scrapes
of wet cement,
he emerged white as ash.
Beating dust from
his body, shielding his
eyes against the light,
my father laughed
as he left the dark.

by Matt W. Miller

Tell me the pocketknife
that was left over from a dream.

Tell me about black bread,
pork and beans, stains

of cigarettes on your heavy
mesh jersey.  Tell me

the winter was anomaly,
tell me moss and willow.

Hip deep in the brook,
stones are eggs you tell me

this and then we lean
into the dragon of play.

Shadows tell me
where catfish crawl.  Jump

you tell me by the mud
where the wasp star digs.

Tell me how to whittle
this stick into what shape

I want.  Tell me there are coals
left for your lungs.

The falls are too close,
tell me louder the grass

has not grown over
your brown earth of eyes.

Tell me out of the tunnels.
Tell me the sun,

the wax.  Tell me again
about the water.

by Ethan Stebbins

If I could place a value
on the entire coast of Maine
or account in full
for the people I love
or even approximate
my emotional response
to the rose-breasted grosbeak
or bulbs of roasted garlic
the terms of expression
would never end and never repeat.
Which is not to say
it can’t be done.
There’s a man in China
who knows 67,890
digits of pi.  I love that man.
I love the whole idea
of China.  It’s only
an earth’s diameter away.
Divide the circumference
by that and you get
the human capacity for affection,
which is not rational.
Which is infinite
and hard to put in words.