by Thomas R. Moore

After I set my book aside and turned off the Sox
in the fifth when Ortiz whiffed for the second time,
I dreamed of whales, though somewhere in that sea

I heard the brief screech and clunk of car
meeting spruce and wondered at the whales.
2:00 a.m., I drove down the gravel road

to the highway and found a car breached, tail up
in the gully below, one light still winking hopefully,
a bloodless fellow standing on the tar,

the chef, he said, at the new restaurant in town —
he’d stayed to close the bar.  I went home,
called the cops: Where is your emergency?

though it wasn’t mine at all and soon static crackled
and a winch sang as it reeled in the catch.
The Sox lost.  The neighbors heard it all, rolled over,

never called, but I had seen myself careen down
that gully, head into airbag, flames rising
in the wreck, and later couldn’t find the whales.

by John Driscoll, M.D.

This morning I sank into myself
Putting aside the cigarettes and whiskey
I dropped like a stone
leaving but a vanishing ripple above.
I fell into the slime of self,
the elemental nutrients of being.
Here I found deceptions and broken treaties
but in the murkiest strata
I came upon the will.
Curious that in this dark space
I would see light with no lamentation.
It was pure and sparkling.
Its drama was life with no mask,
no actor’s pigment for the persona.
This thing that I call will filled me with the energy to surface
and once above,
having caught my breath,
I felt no need to return
for awhile.

by John Driscoll, M.D.

He whispered seamlessly
to his wooden man
whose lips moved,
eyes bobbed and who
was painted into a black suit
effortlessly tailored to his dwarfed
frame.  I heard the wooden
man speak at a church
in a small Southern town
on a hot day.  He hauntingly
exhorted a God that he could
not have known or understood
but I believed him because I was young
and thought that the oaks sang
to me in the wind at night.

by Dan Murphy

                                            — Es mejor vestir Santos
                                     que desvestir borrachos

If you lived here you’d be
                       homeless by now

Or own the liquor store by proxy,
                       poverty on first–name basis.

If you lived in full you’d be spellbound
                       with homesickness.

O, but we have the bellyache
                       these hundred years,

The nations we gorged upon, will not
                       dispel their dialects

Of shoes, transistors, Thalidomide and tonic
                       haggling for a fair price

At a market place whose stalls await
                       the rise of sun to turn the straw

In brick to gold.