by Elly Bookman

There is a morning, and there are
brown eyes rising somewhere
against a dense piano bass line
meant to begin things.  This river

has come to fill in the dug – out canals
with whitecaps cropping up so far between
that I learn the catch of that dawn

and fear floating off: there is the return
as my now still, different self

to the city I left still growing.  Now

standing just before it all comes into day,
when the light lands like a bruise

at my feet and aches in the air
around me, there is barely breath left
to convince against the improbable

second love: I believe it unique,
capable of encouraging a big eddy
around my whole inside song.  And there
is the gleaming, auroral blindness.

by Elly Bookman

In a living room that couldn’t
have been ours or even anyone’s we knew

because it was decorated
entirely with stainless steel
and round furniture

and none of us would’ve wanted
to make things look like
the terrible future like that

we were kissing when we
realized we’d never kissed before.

And there was so little room
there on the couch whose edges
only curved and never broke off

that when we realized
there was nowhere to prop
our selves as we fell under the force

of knowing the real strangeness of it
because we knew also even then
we wouldn’t remember

much more than the coming – toward – you
looks in each other’s eyes, it being

so late and us being both so
drunk from a million things,
who knows what things, but

I think at least while we were kissing
and realizing we were kissing

I remembered your boy hands, your
tiny tiny little boy hands that dug
once into my plastic toy organ

that first time I knew you
and I think I felt just the same

as I had then, watching you play
loud triple chords on something

that was mine, that you were
assuming enough to caress and make sing
with your same fingers, pressing.

by Douglas Woody Woodsum

Light spring rain on a metal roof:
hi–hat and snare at the start of a song,
measure after measure till the rest joins in,
till the rest joins in, till the rest joins in.

Light spring rain gonna do it alone:
hi – hat and snare all you need for a song,
all you need for a song, all you need for a song.
The wet cat’s happy just to tap along.

Light spring rain doesn’t last very long.
The pipes start ticking when the furnace kicks on.
The roof stops singing, but the rhythm’s passed on.
The rhythm’s passed on; the rhythm’s passed on.

by Douglas Woody Woodsum

Someone hammered something so thin
It could not help but bend and hang
And did it again and again until
A keyboard made of wires seems suspended
Or a chopped harp.  Maybe the butcher
Of woodwinds did it, preferring the ring
Ting, tinsel and tang of metal.
Maybe the mad alchemist turned
His own bones to brass then hired
Me to strum his dangling ribs.
Frost says a thing or two about desire
Fire and ice, like most poets do.
But you clothed them one by one
Led them to the door, said farewell
Then dressed and took your leave as well
Leaving me this emaciated xylophone.