by Lee Sharkey

I placed my hands beside each other, one palm down, one up
I closed and opened them like wind turning pages,
as if I were the book I held when prophets railed and avarice
rampaged
like leaf fire dancing, all the shame, all the same, the many fire colors
forked.
I stood on the far side of the fire in the form of someone watching
trees exploding,
wedding rings melting, sheep’s fur sizzling to sparks tossed skyward.
The page kept turning, fireflies flashed in vanishing colonies.
My hands turned frantically. An onslaught of concerns battered
me:war’s dumbstruck children; sadness on the breakfast plate;
the long sorrow that sets into my loved one’s face
when he stares into the absence that claims him.
Then wind turned the page again. I remembered I remembered awe.
Now the fire was a painting: the many colors of my own house
burning,
the stripes, tightly woven, a coat of many colors
to wrap myself in, nights in the desert. The red winds moved
westward,
the blues moved through me to become a sky.

by Lee Sharkey

Every day the father lifted it from the closet shelf
The ritual attached itself to the girl’s sense of morning
Crowning the mysteries of dress and grooming
The father fierce and tall as a giant

The house kept its doors closed to the stranger
The father tip toed across the floor
Every morning the clock hands began the same passage
The father shaped the fedora precisely as he liked it

The father knew little of its history
Not the felt or the felt-maker
Not the beaver in its underwater cavern
Not the formidable Sarah Bernhardt
As Fedora or her androgynous Hamlet

Once a father stepped to a beveled mirror
Straightened his scarf
Buttoned his overcoat with pink fingertips
Adjusted a fedora’s brim
A rare sensuous gesture to console himself

He ran thumb and fingertips over the felted fur
Tugged on his leather gloves and pocketed his keys
Stepped out into the weather
Slid carefully into the driver’s seat of his Desoto
So as not to dent the crown

For he was meticulous, incurious, obsessive, tight lipped
For he erupted when the girl defied him
For the Depression was a black cape dragging behind him
The Shoah, a ghost sea troubling the shore
And the fedora kept its secrets

by Kenneth Rosen

Cove St. Trivia
for George Lloyd

On the beaches of St. Trivia
All bodies are soulless half-naked,
Hypnotizing, gaze-gobbling
Coves and holes.  Sunlight adds
Sight’s weight to taffy’s amber
Expanses, shadows of sapphire,
And prior alabaster privacies.
Shoreline trolls, we are obedient
To evil’s innermost guiding star,
But with an intensely tentative
Languor, all while the sun’s

Acetylene hammer slaps, slops
And dissolves into rinsing lace,
Collapses as slag and retreats.
Its residue, bestirred pearl grit,
Accesses elastic hems’ tender
Sanctum sanctorum.  Nothing
Is forever.  Start at the bottom
And work your way up into beige
Iodine moss, sunset’s grenadine,
Heaven’s gentian, and the sweet
Point-blank orifice of Mt. Aetna.

by Dawn Potter

Countless smart people have ordered you to buck up.
This tottering world, they claim, requires you.
Thus you obediently cram everything you’ve written
into a virtual envelope and shoot it into the aether.

Meanwhile, two young guys have ripped out
the third-floor skylights of the house next door.
Now they are propped waist-high in the open holes,
and they are murmuring to one another —

maybe about measurements or lunch,
maybe about the baby-blue sky
dangling like a stage set behind their curly heads.
This opus you’ve invented is altogether fraudulent.

You, with your feet planted boringly on the ground,
cannot compete with an air-show.
A vortex of gulls circles overhead.
Fingers of loose shingles waver beneath a modest sunbeam.

How is it possible to buck up?
Every word you’ve written has already been lived better.
Publish a thousand poems and you won’t escape
the same old keening sorrow —

you, there, weighed down with your concrete galoshes
and your armload of Danger signs,
squinting up at two young steeple-jacks and wondering
how anyone manages to end a poem with hope.