by W.E. Butts

There’s a Buddha on my desk,
and he’s laughing.
We of the West believe
if you rub the Buddha’s belly,
good fortune is certain.
But none of this matters
tonight at the pool hall,
here with a friend —
his shrewd eye and steady hand.
Again, my shot
misses its intention,
and I’m moving inevitably
toward some final chance.

The Buddha was a gift
from my wife.
I believe she meant it
to point out the way
to be different from the self
is to be the self.

For example, the sly
yet generous – hearted manner
with which my friend approaches
the green table and stands,
for a moment,
like a Chinese monk
meditating at the edge
of a quiet field,
is exactly who he is.

He understands
what’s important
is more than knowing
what will happen next;
that paying attention
is how we come to the small globe
about to spin away from us,
and call it “safe.”

“Eight Ball” was previously published in The Aurora, and was reprinted
in Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café (First World Library, 2006).

by Jim McGarrah

November 23, 2009
     — for Jack Myers, teacher and friend

In front of me silt and driftwood
clip along driven by the current past buoys
listing in the breeze.  Jets grumble overhead.

Veteran’s Bridge flexes its girders,
a muscular moaning with the weight of life
as cars and trucks inch their drivers toward work.

Death rises from the water as a mourning fog,
shaping shadows of a city along the water’s edge.
Huge husks of empty brick and glass begin

to penetrate the gloom and above it
enter a blue womb of sky.  Topaz –crowned mallards
rock across waves, davening as if this river

were a temple.  Belle of Louisville, revenant of a more
poetic time, steams around the cutbank and disappears,
her captain left as memory in the wake of history.

by Daniel Nathan Terry

graveyard flowers litter Shipyard Boulevard — petals of plastic and silk, stems of stiff wire.  As we pass over the wind’s wreckage, you stare through the passenger window and say, “Sad.  I wonder who picks them all up?”  I would answer the obvious — inmates on work detail, a road crew, the caretakers — but you’re not asking about jobs and duties.  I know you; you’re wondering who these men are inside, whether it grieves them to gather these tattered bits of color into black bags and toss them away as if they hadn’t been picked by fingers opened by loss.  As if they weren’t mementos of what finally becomes of us all.

Because of you, I want to be the man who knows which garish bouquet goes where, who brakes in the middle of the street, door flung wide, then peels each false leaf from the asphalt, gathers them all until the last fake flower is whole again and tucked respectfully back into the smooth green blanket so carefully drawn over the dead.  Or better yet: for you, I want to be the kind of man who sees this sad morning as the evidence of a blossoming, or the fallen confetti of a parade — as if the dead woke during the storm, threw back the covers, and danced in flowers and thunder until the sun came up.

by Norbert Hirschhorn

My ancestors came from Africa, once,
footprints preserved in volcanic dust,
families walking side –by – side,
trying not to get lost.  Their early words
must have been: “How do I get to? . . . ”
a waterhole, safe trails avoiding
sabre – tooth cats.  I was in a jungle once,
in Surinam, tracking with our Wayana
Indian guide under high canopies
of birdcall and buzz, when with Darwinian
sheepish grin he announced he was lost;
we had to wait for someone to show us where to go.
I was in Deutschland once, my father sleeping rough,
evading the Gestapo until we could all escape.
I was in a marriage once, sleeping rough,
no idea how to get somewhere I didn’t even know,
searching for love where it couldn’t be found.
Now in London, I often give directions
to drivers that, since I walk, put them at mercies
of one – way streets; they’re long gone when I
realize how wrong I was; wonder if
they ever found where they wanted to go;
think about directions I’ve always needed:
how to be good, which way to heaven.