What We Do Not See
by Martin Steingesser
What We Do Not See
“The task of imagination is to imagine the real.”
Robert Sardello
You believe in it, the light—sunlight, dazzling sun
over a field of wheat, or warming your hand like a glove.
What of the dark of the moon? What of the other side?
One morning I walk out of a breakfast café, the sun
winter low and bright brushing snowdrifts
rosy bronze. A few steps from the curb
and I’m down, cars swerving past, a woman screaming.
Was I dreaming? I don’t remember being airborne,
watching faces pass below, eyes following my flight.
“I thought he was a seagull,” the woman whose car hit me
swore in court weeks later. What I recall is time vanishing,
car head-on in a sequence of still images, each bigger
than one before, as doubtful as that bird’s-eye view; that
and landing unbruised, seagulls wheeling overhead,
some passerby shouting “I saw you, saw you flying!”
Ancient Options
by Rush Rankin
i
The pressure in a labyrinth of silhouettes
fascinates and bewilders the Iranian poet
in a warren of underground apartments
and studios when he’s researching
the future. In an office sound-proofed
by Persian rugs on the walls, an unsmiling,
joking, skeptical old man, always suspicious
of sunlight, produces fake passports
for a blind couple. Delicate spiders
shuffle across the ceiling.
ii
Note: The weary counterfeiter, who wears
dark glasses for effect, like the blind,
fails to test the shuffling noise outside
in time (as lights flash
into darkness all over the city).
iii
Whether unwise or just confused,
like Rousseau, who said American
dogs don’t bark, or Jefferson,
who resolved to free all slaves
he didn’t own, the poet can’t find
the algorithm that relates
one atrocity to another,
though he and his colleagues
read The New York Times.
iv
Even with the monitored ethic of class
discussion and obsolete manners
a comedic teacher discovers people
in Kansas value religion
and the inoculation of babies
and cows more than the public
function of taxes. Nothing
else is clear through a window
on the ground after a storm lifts
a mythic house into the sky.
v
The impetuous thinker who points
a light into light, the dark into darkness,
treats the darkness as light, the light
as darkness, hut stays in Italy
on sabbatical, like a reasonable person.
Patience
by David Filer
It’s the chant of cicadas that brings me
out to the porch,
The pulsing edge of evening settling down on me,
Guided by the evening star, now just above the west hills.
Evening has its own song, with words
we cannot understand,
But they seem familiar, as if we’ve heard them before,
Perhaps sitting on a different porch,
in a different life.
Ballad of Another American Boy
by normal
I am from an ancient culture
I am from a new people
I am from the Pale of Settlement
I am from a fleeing mass who walks & prays in circles
I am the grandson of dung-covered horse soldiers & shawl-draped Temple builders
I am first cousin to a total wastral & second cousin to the
World’s most famous mime.
I am the town to which I shall never return.
A history of Dark Handiwork has prepared me for life
The quickening of seasons has polished my urn for death.
I am the once wagging tail on Howard Johnson’s dead dog
I am Harpo Marx chasing Margaret Dumas with a duck horn
Mickey Rooney chasing Corliss Archer
The last hobo jungle on the American River
I am The Little Tramp
The face that will never be printed on the Forever Stamp
I am the last dying elm in the town square
I am hot apple pie at Pops & Skeeter’s All Night American Diner.
I am the town to which I shall never return.
I am the Bijou I am the hoo-doo the fisher of gar on
The Bayou I am the blood in the gutter on the other side
Of the tracks I am the other side of this towns secret sex
I am the rabid firehouse dog wrapped tight in a confederate flag
I am the Monsanto baby with the hydrocephalic head
I am the railroaded the blindfolded the stoop shouldered
The truckloaded I am the black elixir that wakes you
The greed that drives you the machines that run you the
Cybro-hoo-doo that guides you the robot that re-places you
I am the jukebox the jalopy the last wild horse in the western
Sunset.
I am the town to which I shall never return.
June/2018