Michael Palmer
mrgreen@poetrylist.com

Original Sin

There is nothing more exhilarating,

Alex Galper
talantliviy@aol.com

BROOKLYN SIBERIA

Translated by Igor Satanovky and Mike Magazinnik

I live in Siberia
In the very heart of Southern Brooklyn
In the mornings people are flocking to the taiga of Wall Street
Returning in the evening barely alive, frozen, stock-bitten,
Bleeding from computer-bug wounds
Some disappear forever
Mauled to death by the bears of big corporations
Or buying houses in New Jersey
In the spring I see their corpses
Inviting me to follow the same path
From the pages of respectable publications

David Lawrence
awesomelawrence@aol.com

TRUE SUBJECT

I don't want to write poems about flowers.
I don't even like flowers.
I want to write about how much more
important it is to smash heads
than petals.
If you want to make an impression
on the world
you have to start with humans.
I don't care what they look like.
I want to run with the psychologists,
looking into the heart of darkness
like Joseph Conrad.
A good poem does not wear a skirt.
It does muscle poses.
It announces itself at Jones Beach.

David Lawrence
awesomelawrence@aol.com

HAIRLINE

As sixteen I broke my finger on the wall
to get out of gym class.
I was a good athlete.
I punched hard.
It was a small bone.
If it would have broken the skin
I would have sucked on it
like a chicken bone.
But I was too chicken
to make a compound fracture.
It was hairline.
Now at fifty-six my hairline is receding.

David Lawrence
awesomelawrence@aol.com

ABNORMAL

So your indifference was slack
and your jaw was negligible.
Big deal.
We are not talking about cancer.
I can't recollect
the last time you committed yourself
to a hospital.
How have you escaped their nets,
butterfly,
winging it like you don't know it's summer?
Entrapment would divvy out your antes
before the game goes mad or jokers wild.

Arthur Gottlleb
none@Tigard.com

MARRYING MONEY

She squints
at the small print,
signing suspiciously simple
prenuptial papers
in a lawyer's office,
more elaborate than surrender
documents executed
in the Hall of Mirrors.

On the honeymoon
she marches up the aisle
twin beds make
at the resort hotel.
In the bathroom,
she religiously performs
ablutions, perfumes her
body with medicinal smells
of diaphram creams
and astringent douches.

It's a cinch
no little angel will dance
at the end of her apron strings.

As marriage music fades
to funeral march, she sings
all the way to the county
courthouse, on wings, where

the knot she tied
in her gut will be cut.

E. G. Burrows
none@Edmonds.com

AFTER HOURS

At midnight the fog moves in,
smooths the skirts over her knees
and watches the back door for any sign
of a dog or the house-ghost
leaking out to sniff at the air.

Up to their necks in water,
the trees quiver and sigh lustily,
only the blue flutter
of a neighbor's television
disturbing their self-contemplation.

If you should descend from your chariot
by means of ropes and pulleys,
yellow lights at high beam,
you might succumb like a deity
in the arms of the sloe-eyed fog.

E. G. Burrows
none@Edmonds.com

EXCAVATION

A bell rings.  The yellow bulldozer
rears, coled to spring.

A silence follows
except for the grunt of the motor,

the sounds of tearing,
roots losing their grip.

Where the runoff pooled,
obligated to grebe,

to drogonflies and cattails,
a drain directs the blood

of the marsh into culverts,
into the drip pan under the bed.

There are white corridors everywhere,
surgeons in black masks.

Have we dug down far enough?
What have we uncovered?

Death in a funny hat and cloak?
Soul of oak.  Heart of weed.

E. G. Burrows
none@Edmonds.com

CARPENTRY

With hammer and nails, my father
built a fireplace of plywood scraps
and draped it with red tissue paper.
At the foot of my sick bed, he declaimed:
you will believe in a tall chimney
and a flat place on the roof for a sleigh.
Then we laughed together, knowing
Santa would squeeze in anyway.

He was a magician, my father,
with prestidigitation
tucked under his pastor's gown.
He could palm a quarter
and blow it to Kingdom Come.

At Christmas, the bricks became real
like the presents stacked under the fireplace.
I would rise then and walk from my bed,
cured of my afflications
like Lazarus raised from the dead.

Michelle  Brooks
mbrooks7@juno.com

CHAMPAGNE

Not knowing I was pregnant, I took
a drink before his mother's funeral,
two in fact, without food, a medicine
for the soul.  The church bled flowers
while I cried for all that I didn't know
I would lose, all that I didn't know
I had.  I counted my sins - venial, mortal -
while a woman spoke words I understood
in a language I don't, leading to a place
I had often been.  Sometimes I wish
I were drunk all the time, truth bubbling
to the surface and evaporation before you
can feel it, like the type of love that leaves
you giddy while it last.  I can tell you this -
I have taken in too many things that I
shouldn't.  If this story, such as it is, has
a happy ending, I'll be as surprised as you are. 

Doug Ramspeck
sutton-ramspeck.2@osu.edu

Sorrow's Measure

She lays a trap of pixie cups, ladder lichens,
toadskin lichens, split-gilled mushrooms,
milky caps, pig's ears, stinkhorns, fairy butter.
She ventures deep into the woods--slipping
out her bedroom window after midnight--
and searches everywhere for rotting wood,
holes punched like sorrow in dead trees,
leafy dreys, decaying smells of forest loam.
The night is restless and moldering
around her.

Her father first took here there in moonlight.
"Watch," he said.  "Watch this."
He smeared rotting collybia, sulphur top,
inky cap, and bitter bolete on the tree trunks.
"You'll think they're bats," he said.  And stood
in moonlight until the clouds came by
and swallowed everything away.
"Tell yourself he died," her mother always said.
"Imagine he can't come back
because flesh isn't capable of digging out."

So when one lands on the tree she always aches
that it were him.  "Watch," she says with loving sorrow.
"Watch this."  And takes her brother's pellet gun,
lifts it to her shoulder, and shoots
the flying squirrel dead in the eye.

Doug Ramspeck
sutton-ramspeck.2@osu.edu

Still Life

August Sunday.  My great-aunt, nearly blind,
sits at my kitchen table and instructs me
how to cure insomnia by mixing wild geraniums,
purple avens, musk mallows, toothworts.
Later my grandmother makes us tea and tells
about her latest dream that a five-lined skink
climbed into her ear and whispered she
would die before the winter.  I step outside.
My bitternut hickories have survived cankers,
white heart rot, witches' broom, leaf blotch,
anthracnose, nut weevels, twig girdlers.
Mornings, sometimes, driven restlessly from bed,
I hike before first light to the bottom of the mountain.
In the mottled gray, I listen to the pileated
woodpecker and the wood thrush, or I think
about the hickory nut custard pie my mother
might make for us on Sunday.  My grandfather
insists our mountain speaks to us in great
and mystical voices.  He believes that the secretive
red-bellied snake will appear to us in the hour
before we die.  Sometimes he hikes with me
high into the mountain laurel--in case, he says,
our snakes have need that they should find us.

Doug Ramspeck
sutton-ramspeck.2@osu.edu

Moist Earth

Wild geraniums claw through the forest floor
with open mouths.  And all that we have loved--
this fumbling, canting mask of memory--
closes around us in a familiar undergrowth
of loam, filling our lungs with its dense,
intoxicating brew.  This is not safe ground.
We hike wordlessly beneath the canopy of
branches, and what pours out of us is leaf
river--it soaks the earth with a moist, wild
ache.  At once this slough of green marrow
overtakes us, the wet air and the undulating rhythms,
the forest sunlight flooding from the branches.
We steel ourselves against its breathless current--
we pretend we do not know where it will carry us.