by Rebecca Newth

For behold you look for the dill sauce
            but it is deep in the cupboard
and lo, there is no one to help.

Had you desired it, you might have
            found another at the grocer
or crawled into the cupboard for it

that you might be pleased with the lamb
            rather than troubled
and your nose seizing up with dust;

nor should you seek from your neighbor
            for yet your own shelf–space
shall be washed clean and you shall know what is within it

whether there be dill sauce or not
ye shall know.

by Gerard Malanga

The sunset coalescing.
The twilight waiting waiting patiently.
Those commingling voices snagged in some forlorn vista.
So many images waiting your return,
your gifts transcending you.
A magic unexplained, confusing.
Those dreams that have eluded you.
You would’ve been more at home, but where,
                                                              wide–eyed and remembering.

by Gerard Malanga

       Photographs have a way of becoming souvenirs of happier times,
reminders of a time and place; sometimes
the nd as a stand–in for “no date”
or some such date is missing.
The angle of a certain autumn light.
A street awash with what had been a sudden downpour;
now all that’s gone.
And what remains a kind of nothingness, a quietude.
A beginning to somewhere somewhere else or somewhere’s very end. A few snaps
tossed in a shoeless box, forgotten.
What remains the memories unphotographed.
They, too, become what nature quietly bequeaths
as a gentle linden furling or unfurled.
So many sudden moments once imagined, imagined still . . . c.

by Gerard Malanga

       Lost among the rubble of greed, the deletion of history,
pre–history, post–history and beyond the beyond.
Lost to the memory, though memory persists
within the mind’s eye, the camera eye
as consciousness clearly defends and reminds. The why
and the wherefore, as biblical greed entices its way
through the overlooked byway, all those cul–de–sacs,
those old, old stories, those elusive shadows
cast by the overhead el tracks.
Those tracks gone, too, and their sleepers.
The clang and the rumble echoed in memory’s ear, in a child’s ear, my ear
moving through Time. All those ghostly gathering rumbles
until only the echoes remain and deceive,
until all, too, is gone to the touch.