by Arthur McMaster

Old Uncle Gordon’s train is still up there, in the attic,
laid out not far from Mother’s good china,
this one–of–a–kind collectable:
six distinctive pieces reposed in a small, cardboard box,
trussed up with time, and tape,
and not a little melancholy, its parts
wrapped tight in the Wilkes Barre Times Leader.

June 12, 1957: Jimmy Dorsey, Dead, we find.
Lung cancer. His clarinet silent. That talent stilled.
For years Gordon had kept that set on his living room mantle.
It connected him with something, he would say.
A let me tell you about kind of thing.

They liked to entertain. He and Edie. Music, cocktails . . .
Then one day he wrapped it up. Put it away.
Edie gave it to me when he died. They had no children.
So, there was that.
One of those, Would you like to have this? kind of thing.
Sure, I agreed. Why not?

My wife tells me that train has seen better days,
but then who or what hasn’t? — this never again combo —
this winsome black locomotive, once full of whiskey:
four smoky, amber shot glasses opining in the coal car
Maybe meant to resemble, what? —
the engineer? His brakeman? The switchman?
The Negro porter selling Chesterfields? Or young Gordon —
the part–time, teen–aged telegrapher who so loved Jimmy Dorsey?

by Arthur McMaster

and I’ve given this some thought, would likely be a younger me
stretched out in my fading Birdwells under the shade of an old
carob tree on Crete, having just had a long swim in the Aegean,
re–reading nearly any Dickens novel — well, except The Old
Curiosity Shop — a few juicy figs at my fingertips, a chilled bottle
of something lemony nearby, the neighboring cicadas, which can
be ever so distracting, just then behaving in their piney
apartments; a lithe and comely Greek maiden in over–sized
sunglasses occupying a brilliant orange bath towel under the tree
next to mine, she reading Simone de Beauvoir, making winsome
noises, while stealing a glance now and again at me — pretending
to ignore her — she, working up her courage to ask if she might
step over to my anxious camp, bringing, perhaps, something to
remind me of my distant youth.

by Arthur McMaster

has little or nothing good to say
about the Poet–Laureate of neighboring Newton,

blaming her for their having been caught
some years ago, in flagrante, as it were,

in the back room of their shared Borders
bookstore following one reading together; not

that she was all that ready to overlook
how he was the one to insist they read Keats,

and how everyone knows how that kind of stuff
turns out — all that business about kissing

and eternal bliss. That need to “lie together
in the heath.” Or how he’d promised to flesh out

her fulsome abstractions. Forgetting how
she had boldly praised his startling enjambment.

by Lucas Pingel

Sometimes when the snake tries to swallow its tail
it succeeds. Let’s get a tattoo of this so we never forget.

Look at the walrus catching every egg
the eggman fires her way. How we identify

in this moment is only temporary. Every bomb
that has ever dropped has always been justified

by somebody, every bullet, every cursed spittle
containing the code to humanity shows no clear

sign of the little monsters inside us. When I’m asked
how many siblings I have, I don’t know

what to say. When I erase him, I feel a little better.
A tiny little murder I nurture into the world

that will eventually grow up. There are days
I can feel how it sits within my throat. There are

other days, like this morning, where I’m fishing
little bits of shell from the bowl of raw eggs

that got there either because of my lack of precision
or because they see themselves as the food, not the waste.