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 Victoria Livingstone

     The first time
     I didn’t know you.
     The second time, I did
          — Federico Garcia Lorca

I fell for you, into you, fell
into the muddy water that flows
through you and gurgles up to your river eyes.
But that wasn’t you.

You knew me, drank me in from the beginning,
thirsty from one meeting, recognized
in childhood photos
my sad blue depth.

And then I met you on land, met you in the wide
fish eyes of other women, in their open fish mouths,
in their wet bodies that had also opened
to your muddy flow.

You didn’t know me.  I like to think you didn’t
know me.  Know me now, not as a quietly drowning
child but as an amphibious creature, able to surface
and walk away.

by Victoria Livingstone

The December sky fills the salt flats with water
and the Earth becomes a mirror.  Flooding
blue erases the horizon — even denser matter
can’t save the division.  Shifting clouds find constant
symmetry, mountains float in their own reflections.

A Japanese tourist rides his bike across the Salar,
drifts ecstatic until illusion disorients.
Burned by the sun, by the wind, by the ice
that’s really salt, his eyes give up.
When they find him, he is crying.

“Went without sunglasses!”  The natives say, knowing
human limits, and begin the work to reverse his blindness.
Junichi sits in a room of any color
but blue, listening gratefully to grounded
voices until he forgets that everything is sky.