by Stephen Petroff

Making a Meal of Receding Footsteps
(Zoom–Orphic Lyrics)

“. . . barring cogent reasons, a scholar is never without his lute.”
— Li-Ki (Book of Rites)
(Source: Achilles Fang)

This summer, we’ve had
odd reports from the coastal towns:
a lioness is swimming from island to island.
Schools of inkfish have been coloring the coves.
Fig trees have sprouted on the ledges.
On every hot day, our fishermen have been hauling
from the water, in their traps and nets, music that
was popular a century ago.
Where people live down by the sea, there are always
ghost stories of this sort being told.  Each evening,
a fox stands in front of a white lilac that grows
by the door of a cottage near the shore, calling a
woman’s name.
As a scholar of these studies, when I listen
to the old ballads, I know that the first people
who sang them were living just as I do,
brilliantly careworn.
I held in my hand
an old Greek coin, so badly used by Time,
that the image of a lyre on its face
had nearly vanished.  It was there only if
you knew it was there.

by Betsy Sholl

Just one leg in a doorway, nothing more.
Outside the full moon, salt air bracing,
so we put on jackets and went to see —

our friend insisting we leave the window
and enter the night.  Just my left leg
still on that threshold, the rest of me off

with the others on the dirt road, the rocks
below rumbling in surf, and the moon
slipping through a thin cloud as it climbed.

No picture of dinner, barely begun and left
on the counter.  Though the afternoon
even now is fresh in my eyes —

Sky Road, the wide stretch of glittering sea,
light’s dazzle across islands and cliffs,
the moment’s tide still rising.  As to this photo

made by a thumb slip as we rushed out the door,
most of me was already gone — into runoff
and seepage, into spindrift, moon scatter.

We left squash on the counter, cubed and ready
to be baked with an apple and whatever else
we ate that night, which I have forgotten,

though it nourished us, it’s helped me arrive
at this moment, this wave rising to a curl
before it tips and crumbles into bright foam.

by Betsy Sholl

Underground Railroad,
Walking Tour, Portland, Maine

Deep water once where we stand.
Fog and a British brig from Savannah

where now the parking garage glows.
Then: ladder tacked to the wharf, dory below.

Come ashore, the captain would have strolled
among shops, till he found a conductor.

The sailors would have turned their backs,
so they could swear under oath they saw no men

row up, pull away, the fugitive shivering
among them.  No name, not one detail

about that man who by morning would be
booked to Halifax or St. John.

Silence now, where words must have passed
between them, gestures and warm clothes.

Silence among us too, as the talk ends,
as fog thickens its ghost ocean around us,

and a man looms up, startled to have come so close,
then stumbles off, his reek lingering.

Cement walk, guardrail, flickering harbor lights,
distance like mist seeping into our clothes, our hair.

by Annie Seikonia

in my vena cava
the surgeon found nanoscopic
relics of Portland

a tiny Victorian house
surrounded by roses

two rotting piers
encrusted in barnacles

and a rusted English Raleigh
bicycle circa 1940

in my atman
the nun found closets
filled with black vintage dresses

a wandering band of
Tuvan throat singers

an athenaeum of
illegible journals

and a wildflower meadow
humming with bumblebees

in my corpus
the oneironaut found the
ocean shore in summer

tinkled by
the bobbing music of masts

embroidered by seaweed
printed by paws

awash with the blue air
of distant tides

soon everything will change —
soft things collapse and die