Journal

Weight

Like rings
of a tree, my waist is a measure
of my life, which, as anyone can see,
has proved a generous, if too solicitous Mom.
In many ways, I’ve been well fed.

Now some take half and half
in their coffee. I take cream. I haven’t wallowed
in sensuous pleasure, mind you— ripe
as I am. My weight is a willing fate,
and the sweet padding
of amorous memories
has kept me warm
on many a winter night, though I must admit
the nostalgic load my old heart lugs
may wear it out.

Clover plumps
for market, friend, but what’s more thrilling
than a lifelong field
of worker bees reeling
like drunks
in the wind?

Ken Anderson (Atlanta) has two poetry books: The Intense Lover (Star Books 1995) and Permanent Gardens (Seabolt Press 1972). Recent publications include Café Review, Hole in the Head, London Grip, Lotus-eater, and Orbis. Currently, he is looking for a publisher for a book of personal poems entitled A Sweet Oblivious Antidote. 

Stafford’s Thread

–after William Stafford’s “The Way It Is”

I’m hard on things. I wear them out.
So I worry about Stafford’s thread.
It might break as I trip through life,
making turns, not letting go.
It needs to be more substantial,
say a steel chain,
the kind with pleasant tinking
as it’s dragged around,

not shackles, though.

I would count the links,
each one, a day,
sunrise to sunset,
then dusk to dawn,

hold it like a rosary,

trace back and forth
across the links
like Hansel and Gretel,
reviewing where I’ve come from,
the white house with green shutters
in the graying neighborhood
of my memory.

I must confess I hurried
through a lot those days,
looking ahead like youngsters do.
Just like I said the rosary as a child,
my hands barely touching each bead,
praying like a motor to get on with living.
‌

Still Jamming

Verde and Becky at ninety two
still travel the sagebrush sea,
Oregon and Idaho,
to bluegrass festivals where they jam in camps,
sometimes, literally ‘til the sun rises.
Tonight: Fossil, Oregon, population 471.

Verde picks on mandolin, Becky rides guitar.
Lanterns placed on dusty ground
in the center of a circle
light only some of the musician’s faces
like the way spokes radiate
from the center of a wagon wheel.

Verde moves in and out of the light
as he wanders the arc, plinking.
This is not wild foot-stomping brouhaha,
but music that crossed the plains
soothing settler’s evenings on the trail,
wrapping a blanket of calm
around the listeners who hold the circle.

Becky stands very still when she strums.
All the music flows to her fingers.
Her eyes dance with the stars.
Dust makes the lights glow.
Some sit in chairs, instrument in their laps,
many stand, dancing with their knees.
Not much singing, just a dulcet melody
travelling from star to star.
This sound belongs to the night.

Frank Babcock lives in Corvallis, Oregon and is a retired Albany middle school teacher and owner of a bamboo nursery. He writes poetry to share the strange thoughts that rattle around in his head and to get them off his mind. He started with an interest in the beatnik poets, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He has a long way to go and much to write before he sleeps. Poems published in the local Advocate, Willawaw Journal, and Panoplyzine.

Tumbling to Spring

As a passenger, I fell out of the car onto the lawn,
talking. You must have known that casual conversation
exploding from mute behind glass and metal.
Follow it. It’s a jangle of cross-bred quips and
the final gurglings of a plowed fallow. Love
makes us sit in place rewired, takes women
from the world one by one. So, love, leave
us alone. You will. The conversation was Abercrombie
or, like the words you heard, tumbling us to spring.
We’ll play snakes, looking for a greener patch
knowing the dominion of days is our blank page.
Back to sky. Just sky and leaves. Glass
stratosphere. Enchantment below. We’re quiet.
Solid at our backs, leaping against the pull.
‌

There is Nothing a Hungry Animal Won’t Do

The Yosemite
It is just wilderness and fear.
You finger the explosives.
It’s cold. The cherry bomb if bear,
then CRACK, a twig, nearer,
the matches, fuse, then BOOM,
the distant cheer and a car
barreling away in the quiet
of the last echo.

Silently, resisting the reality of being stalked,
hair and nails growing like silly string,
fragrance shining like tender
morning light in a mood of wonder for us,
those blind to scent.

When you bashed the weasel
he itched his arm
unconsciously. Still, you wake,
beating the animal in your camp
to death. Stop
at nothing to zipper the itch.

No sleep. The animals return.
Repeat the mayhem till birdsong.

Lawrence Bridges‘ poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). You can find him on IG: @larrybridges

Four Novembers

Child

My parents could not promise when we arrived
that we would not stay put for good

for they were experts at leaving, a hug,
a wave, an overloaded car

following the moving van as if we did not know
where it was headed

but wherever it was headed was good enough.
Our crying stopped in the distance

between our town and the next.
My mother said the friends we lost we would gain back

except they’d be new faces in new places.
But as we moved to the next place

the number diminished, until at the end of the moves
there were no friends left.

My father said we always had each other, but then
I left in November.

Mother

My mother died before Thanksgiving.
The memorial had turkey, potatoes, and squash.

Snow fell that day. I had desired a casket
to carry, but her body had been cremated, ash like snow.

She had spoken in tremolo, a fluctuating and warm sound,
and in the whiteout the memory of her voice

seemed to clear the road. The next day under more snow
the road could not hear her voice any longer.

Since that November, I searched for the road
that carried her song, that burned off the cold,

through one town and the next, never settled,
a Main Street, a side street, a lane the wind could empty.

Father

One year after my mother died, I walked a path
in a field of reeds with my father to an opening in a marsh

where geese and egrets congregate before flying south.
Wisdom had once flown out of his mouth,

but wit and humor had left him, and the following spring
when I returned, the geese had not come back, and never would.

Spouse

I chose to fast on Thanksgiving, took a narrow road
east from the college to an esker

where Ojibwe drummed and I drank so much tea
I jittered, clenched my teeth

and muscles and beat my feet to an awkward rhythm.
I could not dance.

I had lived ten lives in ten towns until college
and the constant mooring, unmooring made me travel lightly

as if I had stored my heavy possessions at my parents’ home
and would return for them later. I never returned.

When I married, I carried my bride into an apartment
and felt in my arms the weight of my life,

a joy I could forever suspend, inhabit,
a transiting home that stayed in one place.
‌

Swamp

My brother wears boots to tramp the swamp.
Even in summer, he tells, there’s invisible water
below each step, up to an inch, and ruin
comes to leather. Once, he said, the suck
of the soggy turf took one tennis shoe
and he was made to hop on return,
felt like a wounded cricket, except he can’t sing.
Larch thickets and paper birch populate
like mangroves in a coastal glade.
It’s where you grew up, he says,
where you return. Home.

Midges and non-malarial mosquitos prevail
but for a constant brushing with flailing arms
like window wipers in a storm. It always feels
like you’re playing charades with children
showing them an awkward flight, a propeller
of a plane or wings beating against the air.
They get it right away. The midges don’t.

I’ve had the opportunity in spring to stand
on the side of the road near the swamp
when the water is six inches deep
and watch deer wade, wonder where they hide
in such muck. Their hides look clean,
and somehow, they pick their way and hooves
don’t sink and foals follow almost dry.
It exhausts the eye to wait for them to move
any length, and who as a kid could watch
an asphalt truck take a day to lay
a short stretch of road? That’s the pace
in the swamp, not slow, but unseen,
requiring the patience of evolution,
one mutation on another, or none at all.
Standing on the road, I could see through
the looking glass of water to the sealed wood
of birches and the tangled mass of larch
and within the mess a thousand things
in swarm, nothing bigger than a tadpole,
darting, resting, molting, devouring,
some with those tiny bubbles of air
they’ve drawn from the surface
still attached to their heads,
astronauts or argonauts of their own dimension.
I got down on hands and knees
and admired the goo, water thick
from winter melt, and felt grateful
for this, and for rising from rickety knees
that popped so loud it scared the tadpoles.
I saw far off an egret gauging my interest
with that one-eyed look, a parent perhaps,
wary of my venture into its children’s park.
I felt at home there, but like a relative’s home
at which your intended stay is short,
for after all, I’d evolved, no more gel
and motive tail, I’d become a modern nomad
traveling from one territory to another
for work, and home had become
what I carried, like a burden, on my back.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, spending the seasons dodging fires, floods, earth-shaking, and all the other scrambling life-initiatives. He has contributed to Heartwood, Tiny Seeds Journal, Vita Poetica, and Willows Wept Review. He has a chapbook. Little Popple River, for free download at Red Wolf Editions.

Ithaka (Concept Island)

equanimity

as if here you could combine things in such an order
that the gleam of sudden violence ends
‌                                                                     (did the suitors need need to die?)

what humanity wrought gradually—its war and pestilence
dripping from the curve of the moon

blood-red
‌

or else to lessen it, to see it lessen, like some mirage
peeling from the road’s dusty lip

where loquat, figs, apricots, and sage undo their straggly strangling
climb to the fence (neither is the road very real)
‌

to be as starfish

they move in glass sheets of water the auburn of autumn leaves

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.