Three Poems by Linnea Harper

Cactus

This potful of cactus

is a desert. It prickles

and blooms.

If you were here

you would be napping

in its shade,

covering your nose

with your sombrero.

Your fingers would be

picking perfect chords

the way they did

when you dozed off

and I ran four light

fingers down the full

length of your arm

and held them there

like strings

for you to play on.

While I’ve got you in this pot

I’d like to talk.

These indoor winds

are drying out my skin.

I feel the old scales falling

to the floor

and belly through them

limbering my cool reptilian

coils.

I leave a thinning trail

for you to follow when you

wake

in case you’d care to strum

these desert bones.

A Grievance 

The heart stakes out its own metaphor:

Creaky timbers shore the entrance

to a shuttered mine.

The wood sings, it moans

as the delicate balance that has held

since the last seismic shift

slips, rips cell from cell

clean down the center lines

and the structure collapses.

This was the site of the portal

to a delicate rape:

You made false time.

I waited like the mine waits

for a shaft of light

and settled for the usual:

perfumed hair, silky smooth legs

and clean white sheets

that I twist in my sleep

into a shroud for anticipation.

Chilled  

                                                      

Chilled, you say.  As in— somewhere between

five minutes in the fridge and packed in dry ice—

the right way to serve Chardonnay. Chilled, like

a gust of fog off  the ocean slapping you hard

at the edge of truth-- no hat, no mittens. As in,

I’m standing here wet and naked with no towel,

for Chrissake! Or, Keep that kidney on ice till we

land, doctor!  As in hung out, calmed down, or

frozen out of something you had hoped to warm to.

Chilled, you say, as if a personal climatological

data point could clarify as much as a good hard

swallow, or a cold crystal goblet whose wet lip

moans your song as my finger traces the rim.

Linnea Harper lives on a tidal slough on the Oregon coast, near the mouth of the Alsea River. Her poems have been published here and there, including in CALYX, and she has been a finalist for the Bunchgrass Prize. Before she was a poet, she was a social worker, and before she was a social worker, she was a poet.

Two Poems by J.K. Durick

Reply

 

There’s a message in your hesitancy,

That gap of time before you speak
That tells me more about the moment
Than any words you may come up with.

I have been studying all your silences

For many years now. I note each pause,
Its spacing, its timing and then its cause.
I have made a science of your silence.

I have become an expert on uncertainty,

A connoisseur of caution, a devotee of
All doubtfulness and your indecision,
The local authority on tentativeness.

And I have tried everything to stop it:

Fed you lines at times, kept talking over
Your pauses, or quickly looked away
As if distracted by what you might say.

And I have imitated you to you at times,

Used your gestures, opened that chasm
Between my speaking parts and filled it
With the nothing you’ve always shared

with me.

 

 

 

 

A Slip

 

It was something

so small

 

in the greater scheme

of things,

 

a bit of history

that can’t be fixed,

 

misplaced words,

a lapse in judgment

 

with consequences

as heavy as time

as heavy as silence.

 

Normally, we said

the expected

as if it mattered,

 

patterns we could

predict and tame,

 

routines we knew

were safe to say,

 

except that once

when I went on

to say what I said,

 

words, I still hear,

things, I should never

have said out loud,

but did.

 

 

 

J. K. Durick is presently a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Literary Juice, Napalm and Novocain, Third Wednesday, and Common Ground Review.

 

A Poem by Tendai R. Mwanaka

LOVE CAN BE

The last

      of the sun’s light-
      gilding the lone bird’s,
      flighty feathers.

Women

      whirling before-
      an inner eye, heads thrown,
      in an ancient movement.

Straggling
      across long-dead...
      faces, the mating dance,
      of African women

Like bees

      returning often-
      to their hives,
      our caves are still there.

And love

      can be a lonely-
      estate, of wounded seams,
      and tarnished dreams.

Tendai R. Mwanaka was born in Zimbabwe, in the remote eastern highlands district of Nyanga, in Mapfurira village. Left Nyanga for Chitungwiza city in 1994, and started exploring writing that year, when he was barely twenty. His first book to be published, Voices from exile, a collection of poetry on Zimbabwe’s political situation and exile in South Africa, by Lapwing publications, Ireland, 2010. KEYS IN THE RIVER: Notes from a Modern Chimurenga, a novel of interlinked stories that deals with life in modern day Zimbabwe was published by Savant books and publications, USA 2012, found here; http://www.savantbooksandpublications.com/9780985250621.php. A book of creative non-fiction pieces, THE BLAME GAME, will be published by Langaa RPCIG( Cameroon 2013), a novel entitled, A DARK ENERGY will be published by Aignos publishing company( USA). He was nominated for the Pushcart twice, 2008, 2010, commended for the Dalro prize 2008, he was nominated and attended Caine African writing workshop, 2012. Published over 250 pieces of short stories, essays, memoirs, poems and visual art in over 150 magazines, journals, and anthologies in the following countries, the USA , UK , Canada , South Africa, Zimbabwe, India , Mexico, Kenya, Cameroon, Italy , Ghana, Uganda, France , Zambia, Nigeria, Spain , Romania, Cyprus, Australia and New Zealand.

With messages

Written on the

A Poem by Colleen Colkitt

Kiss/Bruise

It took every red blood cell in me
To force my lips to form the words
To tell you to leave that night

It took all of the space between my lungs,

Bloody and dark,
To tame the taught tightness of my heartbeat

And it took each inch of the black heels

I was stumbling on
Not to fall back into your arms

Because,

Would you kiss the darkness between my ribs?

Would you gives names to every paper crane I strung from my ceiling?
Would you look in my closet and love
Each demon dangling from clothes hangers?

Sigh, roll your eyes, and rub your mouth.

You flex your calves

Flee into the night
Where you came from
Back to your mattress that rests on the floor
Back into the easy arms of
Those smiling smoking girls
Who answer when you call
Who leave their mark on your neck,
Claiming you,
Owned.

But when you call me,

At three
seventeen
in the morning

“Come over.”

I’m already shoving my black heels on

Tucking regretful red blood cells
Tightly between my lungs, and
Giving your name to a paper crane on my ceiling
Swinging like a pendulum
(Or a hanged man)
Ready to make a mark of my own.

Colleen Colkitt is a freelance writer of fiction and poetry. She lives in Buffalo, New York with her family. She will graduate from SUNY Brockport with degrees in Creative Writing and Communications. Her work has recently been published in Bare Hands Poetry, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Poetry Bulawayo. Look for Ms. Colkitt in Daily Love, as she was featured on the site in February.

A Poem by Joop Bersee

Grown Tired

Of her feet and the fire
getting cold, the lightning speaking,

not interested in words.
Creation becomes a threat,

love falling into bushes,
thistles, nettles, round spiders,

hungry. When will the gate close?
Before or after mercy?

Before or after the thief
in the night, in the garden?

Not interested in words.

Joop Bersee was born in the Netherlands in 1958 in Aerdenhout. From 1989 to 1996 he lived in South Africa where he began writing poetry in English in 1991. His poetry has been published in South Africa, England, Wales, Canada, Brazil, India (in a translation),the United States and Ireland. In 2011 he was one of the winning poets of the Dalro Award in South Africa. Currently he works for the library of a museum in Amsterdam.

Two Poems by Anthony Ward

Rose Tinted

I’ve been pricked by many a rose.

Drawn by the petals that attract me,
Reaching to grab that which exalts my heart,
My thoughts redundant to the pain
I bring upon myself with such careless folly;
Causing my blood to flow and stain my flesh
With such blush of self conscious arousal,
Making me retract my initial advances
And simply admire her aesthetic frivolity.

Re-cognition

Are you that girl

That passed me by on the gilded earth?
Gave me an attack of epistaxis?
Back then, when I’d resigned myself to a future
Where we’d never meet.

Are you that girl

I saw almost a lifetime ago,
In another age?

Or am I merely imagining that you are-

That girl who caught my eye and threw it back,
As if we’d found one another in an instant;
Falling in love for a moment.

Or did I just image it

As I imagine it now?

Anthony Ward tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including The Faircloth Review, The Pygmy Giant, Jellyfish Whispers, Turbulence, Underground, The Bohemyth, Torrid Literature Journal and The Weekenders, amongst others.

A Poem by John Grochalski

you keep the guilt alive

her last email to me reminded me
that i was amazing yet married
that i'd done nothing wrong to her
just that it was just too weird between us
and better for her not to keep in touch
best of luck and please don't take it personal, she said
her words burning me over and over again as i read
memorizing this fresh end like a shakespearian sonnet
thinking you keep the guilt alive doing it this way.

John Grochalski is the author of two books of poetry: The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (2008, Six Gallery Press) and Glass City (2010, Low Ghost Press). He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, the part the tour buses avoid.