by Carter Ratcliff

Those who learned to play checkers
as children played checkers throughout their lives
and they were the great majority.

Then majorities were redefined.
Even the sky was gerrymandered.

Everyone now plays chess.
Gambits proliferate
and we have nothing to love
but love itself.  Sleep

is hectic.  Investigations
of recent incidents have implicated,
so far, only stalwarts of the disloyal
opposition, shadows

as elusive as you
would suspect and
heavily armed.  Or so we
further suspect.

Evading ourselves, we say
this is coalition politics
as usual.

Friendly fire,
enemy smoke
and mirrors
of unknown provenance.

by Alice Notley

I made it honey I lost everything
isn’t that marvelous      I remem-
ber      us      without hating you
I remember your companion the
leech no longer red-black no long-
er valent      Only polyphonic minds
words like light wraps where one
had shoulders      I remember you
were in a vicious dream I had I’d
known you for seven years      in an
apartment on third street      you
wanted to slap me around      But that
wasn’t me      though I wore the inveterate
sign of the grey-black dove ruby blood
and had already been slapped by a sonof-
abitch      I’m mindless now except for ba-flit
rumors and happy to be so gone I just talk
words come from nowhere to be said

We go to the rim of the abyss or margin of Lake
Unconscious      That’s where I live that’s where
The cross is      whatever tells me what to do or
Vice-versa      I’m asking it things is it just me
We are asking it to know more if we can that is
Articulate our infinity      continue to collage our colors

I left you for
Articulation      Why
I have such thoughts and words the silver fabric beaded
Shivering

On the cross of thwartedness watch my mind despairing
Metallic late-day gold weight so you can know
How you feel      I was just up there part of my juju
I remember how you had wanted me to believe
That everything is regulated well it isn’t it’s created
right now

At the lake you have depassed Devil’s Elbow and dived in
help me know      you ask it
but all knowledge comes from me the crucial phantom
directing the collage

the path through not for physical walking but a tracer
or more than one      this is the path through or one

the path swirls sometimes like a ribbon      what is it for
nowhere to go

a glimpse of it sometimes      paste on glimpses

you led us Alice across the plain to here to create new beauty
but we are have been and will do so in no particular order of tense
it is now the past some past one says and I’m alone in a cloak
a mute cloak of the impossibility of intention or procedure
I don’t want to go on and when I followed you Alice
I wasn’t sure I wanted to futility didn’t matter either
this is no story it’s a cloak it’s my beloved listless aimlessness
shall we paste it on the abyss it’s still mine and I don’t want a thing
even to paste even to paste with a voice what color is your cloak
darker than a witch’s mind and I want to stay like that

by Bob Rosenthal

I remember picking sides
getting picked last
no choice at all
I choose a boy like girl

my side is always her side
mula bandha unlock chakra to my heart
I remember only boys and girls
separate entrances first grade

liking girls is the one thing I do
now it’s like being Jewish
another choice that chooses
so what ? four or more genders flow

binary is no longer a planetary view
and you still mean the world to me

Alex Katz   Twentieth Century French Poetry Poster

by Tom Savage

I met with, and sat with,
a number of saints,
all Buddhists, and
all when I was very young.
First there was Goenka,
whom I sat with many times.
Then there was His Holiness,
The Dali Lama
and finally the Korean Buddhist saint
Sun Se Naem.
All long ago
but still dear to me this day.