by Klaus Gerken

Canto II

Riverrun
Locksmith
Flow of lava that destroys
but replenishes the earth
Life was not possible
without the lava

Building block
Lego
Hills of garbage
Excellent chateaus
towns
cities
are built on

To find civilization
look for garbage

The extension of art
is its foundation
thus for life
a journey
not a resurrection
but a continuation
star matter formed us
so eventually
we will form
stars again

The great nucleus
swallows
swallows matter
crushes it
in an elongated
everlasting
time continuum
however we don’t
like it
it is so
we can
approach
but never get
to zero

There is purpose
in everything
otherwise
the universe
would not exist
otherwise
no thought viable
we would be matter
without formation
thought without
repatriation
all envelops all
our petty egos
entangle the
entanglement

Flash flood
where the watershed
collapses
and the cardboard boxes
crumble in succession
displacing without
judgement
nature’s beauty
is its existence
not the artificial
vanity of gods
Nature does not pretend
it acts and then
amends
the cycle of forgiving
not collusion
where collusion’s rife
with explanation
Only a fool need to explain
what nature has no
need to

Life is a flash flood
over Gaia’s raped body
she is our foundation
she is our mother
there is no god no other
she suckles us
her milk is our sustenance
and sol is our existence

When the morning comes
we will awaken to the glory of the sun
rising in the east
otherwise we will awaken
to the cool nurturing
rain
grow grow
always grow
whether mind or body
always grown
new that tends
the future
you will never see

Canto III

I have no possibilities
other than being
a possibility myself

by Justen Ahren

          “what times are these / when to write a poem about love /
          is almost a crime because it contains / so many silences /
          about so many horrors . . . ”
                                                                              Bertolt Brecht

Above the skyline of the city, an orange flash
black smoke, minarets,

shattering glass — I rise and bring my lips to hover
above my lover’s navel, inhale

her sweet, wet morning scent, the alarms, and fires. These things happen at once,
they happen

far from one another and no actors were used in the making.
     The television news
recaps another overnight bombing,

the probable number of casualties, the Dow Jones is up 1%. When I look up, I see
spheres,

clear bubbles floating around my lover’s head, circling her shoulders.
In each, something witnessed,

or televised, or perhaps, too, in real life I saw a girl carrying an
     ember on a leaf
through the gray drizzle of dawn,

blowing upon it to keep it alive. A boy shits in the rubble, a dog sniffs and eats it.
In another bubble,

chunks of snow are rocking down in haloes of streetlight, blending
     with the black avenue
of a woman’s hair. Soldiers slump

in trenches, the snow building on the rifle barrels. A father searches
his grave hands. A wad of paper tumbles

on an escalator. A mother knits her fingers over an open fire. And there are more,
many more. In one, Ash

trees lining the river are strewn with plastic chairs, and clothes.
     A family gathers
around a table in a house with no front wall.

Visible, they eat. In a field, a boy writes his name with a sparkler. He doesn’t
know the bombs his country spends

in other places, he doesn’t know I lay with my lover,
a frightened electricity

flickering in the wires of me. How easy it is to kill
out here among smoldering stumps, in desert cities,

among cows grazing on scraps of cloth, and in here,
the weatherman says we should expect snow

before it changes to rain. And I finish my small violence, occupying her with my
lips,

while the latest scrolls across the screen, twenty –four confirmed dead, with the
score of Sunday’s game.

by Justen Ahren

i.

When I need to see god, I watch my children sleep.
The trees in the distance
sway in the wind and snow. When I am in need,
I interrogate memories,

hold again my son’s hand in mine, see the tiny sun
in my glass of water.

ii.

I dreamt of silver buttons on their black coats.
I dreamt of snow

remaining on the coat sleeves, a moment before
melting, the fine lattice

of the snowflakes silence, miraculous
silence, the rifles aimed at

the buttons, I dreamt of
the air before the shots.

iii.

If I am a seed, are you what I open for?
And what are you now I am leafless

that for which I have lost everything?
I don’t mean to bring you down

but to ascend, what is required?
Love, do not tell me what

or who you are, I have no need of certainty.
In the search I may acquire

bright pieces, dribbles and grams.
My ignorance is your feeling

into the world as a creek. I, too, am being
gathered by a sea.

you are not remote, but always,
inevitable.

iv.

I met a woman last night in the Jardin just after midnight.
She introduced herself, and we sat together

on a bench. She fingered the buttons of her coat.
A child slept on her lap.

And feeling her need to talk, I let listening be my service.
That was all, I listened.

And I can’t say what, if anything more than this, I did.
And what was said, I don’t remember.

But, two strangers, we were no longer strange,
just openings between which god flew.

by William Carpenter

It’s one of those nights after the surrender of Iraq,
not much on TV any more, your family’s in another state
for Easter, and you’re watching “The Civil War” again.
McClellan’s wasting so much time at Sharpsburg that you
get a beer out of the kitchen and come back and he’s
still staring at the river. You shout at the daguerreotype:
attack, get it over with, Lee’s weak, you can finish him
off, but he won’t listen and the war goes on, the amputations
without anaesthesia, the men saying good–bye to their own hands
while Walt Whitman reads to them from Sir Walter Scott.
You’ve seen it twice. You know how it’s going to end.
You step out on the porch and look through the window
at the empty chair watching Jeb Stuart at Bull Run.
This is a foggy evening. You hear a footstep on the lawn,
a voice. You see a man with a white flag tied to his rifle,
a man in uniform with a leaflet that says I SURRENDER.
He’s got an eye missing, a tied–off pantleg, an AK–47
and a hole right through his chest to the other side.
He’s an Iraqi. He’s one of the dead soldiers that got bombed
by the B–52’s, and he wants you to bury him, not in the desert
either, but in your own front lawn, where your grass is just
sprouting like the first tender appearance of pubic hair.
The corpse looks through the window with his good eye while
the Union army under Sherman torches Atlanta, and the sight of
all those fires excites him even though he’s dead.
You want to give him a beer and feed him, but he starts
kneeling and kissing your hand, he starts pulling you toward
the lawn and making motions like a man digging a grave, but
you can’t do it, you can’t bury a human being in your yard.
He points with his rifle toward the flower patch, where
your tulips and crocuses are just coming out. Now the gun’s
right on you, and you don’t ask if a carcass can still pull
the trigger, you just dig, and when you’ve finished digging
the man lies down. Back on TV there’s a parade in New York City.
Lee has surrendered at Appomattox and the war is over, but not
for you; you have to cross this man’s arms over his chest and
lay his gun beside him and cover him over with black garden dirt.
You have to replant all the bulbs in the dark so that your wife
and kids won’t stumble upon the body and find out. You have to go
in and watch the shooting in Ford’s Theater because it’s not complete without the assassination; but it’s too late, they’ve shot Lincoln
and played the Star Spangled Banner and the screen is blank, it’s
only you and the dead soldier and there’s nothing he can do to help.