By Vanessa Vie

Welcome the new year with a hard
beat, after tears — and guitar held
between my legs — were tears
of joy. I’ve never felt
this grateful before;
Reasons are myriad
Myriad my prides:–
Blessed the daughter
& blesséd the ghost
of my truest love
Blesséd the voices
& blesséd my friends
(on the telephone)
Blesséd the saviour
of my skin — she knew
— In awe of pray
Charity holds
the Key
Myriad in my key–
ring — I play the act:
One door only
to the abandonment
of Faith. To the yellow
fence I went before
the end. The end
of year with the next
stone, step by step.
Pine–twig crown
— a Christ’s
hanging from it
Merit of us — artists
keeping the Faith

We surely know
with all wrongs
to heavens fled

What turbulent doubts
What trust
in each other’s held

1st, draft January 19, 2024
A good year for the arts, and in general.

By Vanessa Vie

Abdominal strength & Kerouackian
Initial extra–tipsy state — it’s a good Night out in i send a text to
my mother:
— you are not doing the right thing
— what do you mean — ?
— at a human level, and responsibility

I drink, and drink: half a bottle
Three quarters —Wine:
I need it — wisdom. Never
Again
Look at me with my granny
–cord
Ecstatic after Highway 61, and now
Parker sits me at the keyboard — gosh
I understand drunkenness and sax speed
Empty, more — after grief; death staring straight
To my face. Walk away from keyboard
Rich. O I cry your death queen mother
Who is to cry mine — ? I don’t speak contemporary
Slangs. With a sip I go back to Jazz.
Unrequited it was — but I do it for love

For the love of Art, and you. Spirals, and gargoyles
in the flat lived in, and we got in heat
sucking my Milky Way: — It was my offer
nevertheless, an entwining of “it meant to be.”
On my knees for love, like I poet I think
Of parallel realities; until the vinyl scratches.
Nothingness. Double Hammer, Splits
Dogs, Slcaford
Mods, Amyl &
The Sniffers, Skepta,
P Money, T Verb
I like it. These arc times
for Punk, Grime, Drum
& Bass arrest. Hip–hop
We’re sad
at war.

Feeling guilty for the drunk
Amount, I walk into the empty
Streets at night; fetch an abandoned
Frame with possibility in the mould.

Sleep. Wake up before dawn. Walk
Again into dark park, to the rim of lake.
Water splashing gently, and harsh —
only sound and my breath. And inly
Gently, and harsh, my thoughts.
Philanthropist, or naive, who knows
So
Sad, inebriated. Walking to the rim
of sky, of water, hung low
Under resplendent full circle
Moon, and still sleeping
The ducks, and Swans
Only one swan up
— Song.

(draft 28 December 2023)

By Matt Miller

You walk into an outside overripe
with summer and there is the gopher,
brown as raw sugar, again camping
out by the compost bin in the backyard
like some fat and greedy grocer,
scanning the coast for cutpurse
clarity, not one ounce of charity
as he nicks and picks tomatoes tops
and carrot lops, all the uneaten beans
and lemons squeezed limp for lemon
water, amid the muck and miasma
of rotting rinds and coffee grinds,
the gopher, a pocket gopher, perched
upon the grass and eating the flower
heads off the white clover. This suburban
mobster, family Geomydae, never
goes against the family, and in fact
he never settles down with a family
and only cozies up during seasons
of breeding then back to the business
of the lonely digger, the larder hoarder,
packing his den with dinners as a dragon
does gold, all against the monster winter,
by filling with food the fur lined pouches
of cheeks that reach from jowl to shoulder,
carrying his sustenance in his countenance.
Noah’s ark was made of gopherwood,
but the word is not related, from the Hebrew
“gofer” a word never used in the Bible
again, a word to the last still teetering atop
Mount Ararat it seems, ready for another
close up, Mr. DeMille. Gophers go back
30 million years, but Creation would
have it that the gopher rode upon Noah’s
wood wondering would his cousin
the woodchuck whittle away the wood
that would whisk him towards new turf
to tunnel because he is built to turn earth
with those mad jacked forequarters and
his clickety clawing front paws. His short
fine fur doesn’t cake amongst the wet and
mud and his tender whiskers, well, they
let him whisk about like a diva in the dark.
Gopher is some say a Muskogean word,
but some say it’s from the French “gaufre”
meaning waffle, waffle because he is awful
skilled at architecting honeycomb patterns
of holes that look like waffles but why not
call the gopher a honeycomb, why not
rayon de miel? Many say the gopher
is a pest. Google gopher and it’s much ado
about his murder. For what if he digs
so many holes, made so many waffles
under your house that some September
Sunday while you are eating homemade
waffles with your family the whole house
falls, waffling into the waffles of tunnels
crushing the gophers lair load of provender
even as you pour syrup and butter onto
your own fodder? But he is a gopher
just being a gopher. So go back inside
and just let the gopher go. For now.

By Matt Miller

What leaves left in the maples crackle
to brown dust in the breeze and the sun
seems always sideways since we all rolled
the clocks back and there’s something grim
in the green Astroturf of this football field
as I stand on the sideline, at practice, talking
to one of my players who has a torn hamstring.
I tell him I can still feel my tear, when it’s cold
like this, that window shade snap in the back
of the leg 30 years ago. Watching drills, he asks,
What hurts the most? And I know that he means
what of my flesh and form is an ache that never
goes away. Suddenly, I see how he sees me, old,
that I must hurt everywhere and not just some
somewhere, like him, snug in the fleeting sting
of youth. What joint, what ligament, what bone
bent wrong long ago groans me into every morning?
Maybe he sees what’s to be. Maybe he’s watched
his own dad stumble up a step because of a knee
that doesn’t want to bend. So, I tell him nothing
really hurts that much. But I don’t believe even he
believes the grin through which I tell him this
as we look back at boys launching their bodies.