by Paul Christensen

I was upstairs in Jack’s house
on the flat suburban prairies
north of Dallas, tossing
among the words and muses
of his little studio.  Ten a.m.,
with the stairs creaking
as I came down, the kitchen
air singed by strong coffee.

He was gone, and Thea
left a note on the fridge.
I ate the plums, so cold
and so delicious she
was saving for Jack’s supper.

A mug of java, a chair
suspended in the half –urban
sunlight of the room,
the working world having
left this island to the crows.

I heard his son Jacob
in the living room.  He wore
a robe over his lanky bones
and greeted me kindly,
took the opposing chair.

There we were, two orphans
of Jack’s hospitality, homeless
in this wide, too sunny plain.
Thank god for the roofs
that contain our imaginations,
I said, and he looked up
as if I were making sense.

He died at twenty – three, letting go
from a rope Jack had tied
securely to the sky,
and I could understand
after a morning’s unrehearsed
duet of nut cracking
why he loved him.

by Paul Christensen

When Jack said getting his first real job
(SMU in Dallas) saved his life,
he was like an trapeze artist
in the Cirque de Soleil, good
at flipping thin, tight bodies
through the air, each against the edge
of the dark, escaping death just as he reached
out his hands —
                        to write another poem,

light –hearted, ironic, what you learn
in the iron – wrought winters of New York
if you’re sensitive, and Jewish.

He had his light on
all the time, flashing in a blind alley,
a cat’s ravaged eyes, a student’s
inarticulate questions sobbed out
in an office at four p.m.
When Jack reached over and cut
a poem in half, switched the ending
to the beginning, the student,
crushed by the weight of her own
stupidity, pulled off the mask
of watery despair, and smiled.

Save me, save me, his audience
cries in its stony muteness,
tell me I am a fool, that I cannot
stand the lousy world I invented.
And Jack would remove
the dignifying robes of art
and stand before them, half –
clown, half sage from the woods
teaching them a foreign language
while they interrupted him with laughter.

by Ariana Nash

I have made a sister of a stone statue,
who willows her head
into her lap, bending over ferns.
She wakes me up in the morning to ask
if fronds can pass through stone,
as if dew were more transcendent than tears.
           My mirror is smudged
and dusty.  I am dressing
in the reflection of eyes these days, glinting
and glorious there.
I was a woman made of jade
stalking lily ponds in Tokyo but my poem
lied about it.  I stuffed the folds of her body,
her eternal fat, into a jar, where she stands
nose pressed against glass, looking foolish
gulping for air.
           I am not
holding the world close enough.
I should wrap my arms around a telephone pole
and wait for the surges of electricity
to reconnect me to the friends I love too much
to let them see our distance —
the ones I don’t call anymore.
Instead I untwist and rebend paper
clips with love for them —
small monuments to fear.

by Ralph Angel

Were you guilty of something
your story would wear a black suit
and come to an end.
I leave you alone.
I mop up the afterlife
and slick back
its hair.

The sun blows so hard
the leaves have returned to their trees.
Their eyes are wide open.
Saltwater fish
slide

through the streets.

The pedestrian said there was sad
and oh how it would be
more interesting
to paint

her skin and hair.

Were I naked now
and am.