by Richard Tillinghast

A girl’s own heirloom
           cached in a drawer
with the snapshot of a horse, some nail polish
         and a postcard from Venice.
The ring is a source of envy,
                 and she loves that.

And yet what is as light, as empty of content
          as a diamond?
Not even snowfall,
            big, clean, absolving.

And even if it’s stolen,
                              even if the thief
           wraps it in a cloak of deceit and
sleight–of–hands through customs
      and it’s sold on the street in Aleppo,
still nothing dims it, there’s a star inside.

by Richard Tillinghast

           Some impulse comes searching,
sits in a parked car and rolls a smoke,
                         rolls down the window to look at
porches where rocking chairs creaked,
                invisible now,
        iced tea with a sprig of mint,
                      fireflies on summer evenings.

A city block,
        most of its houses demolished.
Now there’s a parking lot, an office block,
and a brick duplex where all were
                 white clapboard with gabled roofs.

A dismantled library.
Someone’s Wuthering Heights from college,
                          its cover distressed,
        turns up on a $1 table somewhere.
A man in Seattle makes coffee and settles down
        in front of a rainy window
with Cathy and Heathcliff ’s story —
        the pages impressed with the unseen imprint
                        of another’s thoughts.

Chipped around the rim and inexpertly glued,
        a delft platter in an estate sale,
                    once part of a dinner service.

Nothing, surely,
                  compared to the fragmentation of an empire,
         the dissolution of its provinces,
small countries now with their own
                         parliaments and currencies,
         the mother tongue devolving into patois and creole.

A little girl looks out at me from a picture frame —
                 silver, 1910 perhaps.
Someone has tied a pretty bow in her hair,
        and they’ve sat her in this impressive chair.
She smiles, but I think she’s unhappy
        now she’s someplace no one can see her,
                 no one who would have known her as a child.
This daughter, this mother, this aunt, this cousin —
                         she’s an orphan now.

by Christopher Seid

You can spend years looking
over that wound, in isolation,
licking your room. Only
your former classmates

flipping through back and white
pages of yearbook windows
care — unconscious or not
of the blacklit noon.

No one asks to be hurt
like that, on the receiving end
of a metaphysical bitchslap.
It’s your test to touch the edge

with the toe of your boot
and miss the shifting sea —
cumulus clouds accumulating
like egrets of foam

on a wheezing tide. It’s okay
to carry that burn as a crescendo,
birthmark that never deflates.
It’s your right to trade, to toss

in a hole all the pain
of a star’s stain — five–fingered
floodrush, nickprint on
the bleeding page.

by Christopher Seid

Evening dawns. Everything stalls.
A husk of landscape shucked from cobble
and copse, smoldering snow thrashed
in the daily wisp of willows.
What dies? What lies? What dries out?
Fires flying in the eyes of those men
combing the cropped grass for grubs,
the distant highway’s diminishing whine
and circumnavigational rhymes.
Everything slows — but everything sings.
Coals seethe long after their tender’s retired
and smoke sags over the empty stage.
The hollow dark. The holler darker.
How long has the audience been estranged?