by André T. Demers

In the end, she said,
he survived.
Besides, she sighed,
they say that love is a road
and even crawling is heroic.

She smiled, and pictured him naked
on the white sand beach of Negril.

by André T. Demers

The floors slope
from east and west towards the center beam of the house.
Four pine wedges had been hammered between
the lateral joists and the main support to bridge the gap
as if the builders had said,
close enough.

It was 1917,
and close enough was enough
for carpenters
who would fall
retreating under German shells at the
Second Battle of the Marne
because they were lost in the smoke
and had never learned what a straight line was.

They left nails underneath the molding
so that I could bleed, too,
as I was sweeping the vinyl floor cloths
we found
rolling back the carpet
in silence.
My heel, stung, a drop of blood
on the floor with the dust
and toast crumbs of the generations.

But we lifted the tools of pride
and kept working
as if it would ever end,
as if each coat of paint made the room larger,
as if the horseshoe,
points–down above the lintel,
was spilling our luck onto the ground.

by S Stephanie

Something about the clouds in the windows
was upsetting, they were traveling
on before I could grasp them
and the poets were reading faster
love, dogs, and deer leaping away
so quickly their legs were left behind.
I kept hearing the bodies
of sunken ships, their half buried bells
muffled, going through the motions
of clanging. They had tried to surface
they really had. The smooth
skin of dolphins, the rough barnacled
breaching whales, the surfers
and the sharks that went after them even
all beckoned. Yet, there was something
about those clouds, their insistence
on dispersal perhaps
that ships and I could not rise to.

by S Stephanie

Lorca’s Calling
     after reading the documents on Lorca’s death
     finally released by Granada Police, 04/2015

I’m calling in all of Lorca’s small animals tonight
drying off each one’s colorless coat of rags
while the truth behind his execution dies in a wind storm
of a thousand White House emails and a few deflated footballs.
Countless stars, moons and their mountains drizzle down
     New York’s cheeks
uselessly, and hot, white gullies of deceit flow by
unnoticed, while I dream of kissing Lorca’s forehead twice
and one day asking him if our sun will ever be lit.
I’m wiping all of his children’s blank–egg faces
I’m charming his city–colored snake back
into its basket before the media carries us away.
I’m hiding all on the fourth floor of my memory
while newscasters and journalists are busy with Benghazi
while the literati waits for the next best poem.
As useless as this small act seems, I’ve heard of wet pens
discovered years later under the floorboards in the attics of war.