POEM: Homemakers, by Pablo Miguel Martinez

When two men make a home
it is more than board
and wire and stone; it is
a puzzle, an address
for neighbors' scorn, this
the husband and husband know,
so they frame their home with care
and well-tended beds --
bearded irises, starry
corn-blues. This is how 

they make it new.

These men will gripe and cook
and such, but mostly they will love -- 

they will love in that Genesis way,

before the hissing and the shame;

they will let music play

in formal spaces, they will stir 

the breeze with uncued kisses,

then shush the night

with circles traced

on gym-tamed places.
This is what two men do
when they make a home:
they vow to crumple blueprints,
they vow to make it new.

-- Pablo Miguel Martinez

[featured at http://www.glreview.com/issue.php?issueid=95]

Poem: Veteran (ef)

In years of shared service
We are friends.
By unguarded moments - 
Stealthier than recollection
We are captured.
Within limits without seconds
The heart's wandering borders & boundaries
Are not contested by their absence.
It is the container they present:
Interstitial walls,
Permeable in solution.
Challenges answered with
Incanted hellos and
Seals restored after
Harbored farewells.
That stronger love
Fed sweetness and spirits
Yet fendered with spears.
10.14.12 - eaf

'a little bit' by Stuart Crowther

Poem: Forecast (ef)

Just now - the opening of Spring.
Yet with an oracle's reflex
a flower's lashes flutter,
divining Summer's end:
spindliest shadows -
licorice whips -
gangliest basil.

eaf

POEM: Fighting Fire, by Michael Montlack

I first felt it that afternoon in your family room
when you offered me your toy chest's newest claim--
the red plastic bullhorn, a miniature of your fireman father's,
a birthday gift for his only son:
Ten years old and nearly half my size!

Go on, take it! your voice projected,
the hollow horn's mouth aligned with your own
like a kiss I could see inside,
one that amplified some unspoken urgency,
a pre-adolescent emergency:
my own inner fire.

Really, take it, you said. He can get me another.

Were you casting off some hand-me-down
or trying to please me, your new pal?
I worried and wondered
if all my desires were as easily sensed.

I didn't want someone else's present.
What I wanted was that kiss.
I was just scared
someone might hear.
So I buried it one night in my backyard
and prayed for your father's forgiveness
then swore I'd never again take
a gift I was not ready to accept.

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (Nov 1, 2007)
COPYRIGHT 2007 Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc.
Copyright 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

Poem: Waxy & Battered (ef)

Waxy and battered - weary we return
Television sparks and invades the room
Done skiing - spent with numbness & burnt by snow
A shortcut across the years, back to Maine
Single-pane storm-clouded windows
Heaving with frost & heavy plastic
Thoughts swathed in so many layers
Flying wild into the wind, then avalanche
We cut trenches across the plainness

Until our legs, arms & lungs surrender
This is the art of retreat:
The warmth of a hot shower, catnap,
Belly-filling meal & tannic, sating wine,
Sleep-inducing sex.
A wish you'd been in my deeper past.

03.01.08 ef

POEM: The Astronomical Hen, by Cynthia Zarin

re-posted from Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine on Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Like hearts marked out but not yet colored in,   

Each of her feathers has a black edge,   

as if an India-ink mantilla stretched

from uncleaved neck to her fantail. The pen,   

homemade, spilled some darkness now and then.   

She doesn't lack for suitors. Poor rooster,

who pours his own loud heart out to her,   

surely his begging does no more than force   

her to peck out a crooked tattoo in the dirt

of the pen. Is she stumped, sad, anorexic?   

It's perfectly clear she doesn't lay eggs.   

Can it be she's simply in love with herself?

Her eye obsidian, eye of the world,

at night she watches the stars drop from shelf   

to shelf, to minor études she unfurls

in her head. By day she hunts and re-pecks   

the pinprick holes of her intricate sketch.   

If she's done by dusk the first stars can rise.

Cynthia Zarin, "The Astronomical Hen" from The Watercourse. Copyright © 2002 by Cynthia Zarin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: The Watercourse (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)

Poem: Direction (ef)

You'll only arrive at this house through
the woods we grew with purpose
Those birches dance
in costumes curled & fringed
Lights wink between the two
still flirting with the handsome oak next door
While below graped canopy
four chairs collect deep shade
emptied now of long-awaited guests
Sensitive ferns beside smooth purple stones
focused on this visitation
Heavy, cool air, fuels the spreading greenness
embedded in every surface, as if footsteps
you might fit your sole into each morning
and trace, still sleepy, a path older than ants.

eaf

POEM: Prospero's Prospect, by Jay Johnson

This I abjure:
rough young magicians with red hair
and freckles and the memories
of them which have dissolved me in tears.
Full fathom five
my father lies and my beloved
and my beloved and
the ones I thought, however briefly
beloved
and of their bones is coral made
and of my heart
is hope squeezed not quite dry.
Even as the leaves cover paths
and grasses parch, there is nothing
but expectation
of the island, the prospect
of the buoys tolling in the sea
the cloudless sky
the spells
for which no longer have I breath,
of the final nothing at all.

                               JAY JOHNSON
                               as featured in the Gay & Lesbian Review

Poem: Antipodes (ef)

"Yonder in Ethiopia are the Antipodes, men that have their feet against our feet." ~ Bartholemus Anglicus

Even the bereft take advantage of a window's uncostly function -
But no transparent choice guarantees an apparent outcome.
Through crust & core, shovels hammer in hopes of riches and great escapes -
Those wounds never heal. When a women's mantle is disturbed - she'll leak her innermost secrets - so don't be too hasty.
Bide your time, taking away slowly spoonfuls of dirt.
If you leave your perceived Siberia in haste just to pop up in Antarctica,
You deserve a penguin's sour upbraiding. To not be kitted for the occasion -
Is to be vestigial, tuxless & fucked.

10.14.09

POEMS: Assorted Finds...

This Is Just To Sayby William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams

***************************************

The Hunch
by Kevin Young

She wore red like a razor — cut quite a figure

standing there, her slender danger

dividing day from night, there

from here. Where I hoped to be is near

her & her fragrant, flammable hair —

words like always entering my mouth

that once only gargled doubt.

You see, I been used before like a car…

Between us, this sweating, a grandfather clock's steady tick, soundtrack of saxophones sighing.

It's been too long — a whole week

since love burned me like rye. I had begun

to see the glass as never empty

& that scared me.

She fills me like the lake

fills a canoe — no rescue — & to swim

I never learned how.

From BLACK MARIA by Kevin Young. Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Young.

***************************************

Which the Chicken, Which the Egg
by Ogden Nash

He drinks because she scolds, he thinks;
She thinks she scolds because he drinks;
And neither will admit what's true,
That he's a sot and she's a shrew.

From Nash's The Old Dog Barks Backwards , published in 1972.

POEM: The Ancient Chinese poets often parted on Mules, by David Masello

The Ancient Chinese poets often parted on Mules

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The, July-August, 2009 by David Masello
When you are far away like this,
I replace my time with yours,
the one you are occupying.
You arise when I do not,
take meals before I have an appetite,
love, perhaps, someone who is not me.
You have led an accelerated life, yet
your flight tonight follows the horizon.
As you speed westward, you slow.
It will be dark when you land.
We will both tire as the moon rises.
We will sleep together.

Morning, the sun will heat
us to the same temperature.

(c) 2009 Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc.
(c) 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning

Poem: Canopy Tour (ef)

If it could be written
in words, all of it -
the clearing of the woods
down the gorge
wouldn't provide enough paper -
but there are so many things worth writing:

The woven nest whose tendrils
snake the rafters
that fat-bottomed bee
she bores the beams and rails

Sun and shadow mutate from
mid-day dapples
to six o'clock streaks and stripes
Regularly, the blue-jays terrorize
the robins, "Cheer, cheer!"
A cardinal, to spite its weaker song
fans the braver fire of its plumage
against which the robin's pale orange blush is shamed.

Will there be a roast tonight?
Will those broken cords be put to use -
cut loose into a crackling moonlight sonata
while we are still able to hear it
and while the woods around are still audience?

Beech twigs at daybreak
clears the palate - coffee pulls the shades open
Spatters of separating forms
evolve in God's country
the oddly mittened sassafras,
orange & ribboned mushrooms -
the companions of coal.
Animated wood smoke
tests memory's rafters -
recalls California or Maine?
Suddenly, I am ten,
with Betty on a stone beach.

Or that visit with Ben Franklin which yielded little,
But called to mind:
"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing."
I have done so little of either lately, I reflect -
I've missed you, my friend, and it's my fault, really.

What becomes of the world
emptied of the wild and woolly?
The incorrigible flirt of birds -
their inexhaustible metallic twitters;
What song accompanied Adam's expulsion
from that first forest?
The retreating and silenced hemlocks, their crushed needles
evoke poisons and potions.
The dimming of the lanterns, the wetting of the coals...
What soft smell will be registered
by our human exit?

POEM: The Dump, by Thom Gunner

THE DUMP

He died, and I admired
the crisp vehemence
of a lifetime reduced to
half a foot of shelf space.
But others came to me saying,
we too loved him, let us take you
to the place of our love.
So they showed me
everything, everything--
a cliff of notebooks
with every draft and erasure
of every poem he
published or rejected,
thatched already
with webs of annotation.
I went in further and saw
a hill of matchcovers
from every bar or restaurant
he'd ever entered. Trucks
backed up constantly,
piled with papers, and awaited
by archivists with shovels;
forklifts bumped through
trough and valley
to adjust the spillage.
Here odors of rubbery sweat
intruded on the pervasive
smell of stale paper,
no doubt from the mound
of his collected sneakers.
I clambered up the highest
pile and found myself
looking across not history
but the vistas of a steaming
range of garbage
reaching to the coast itself. Then
I lost my footing! and was
carried down on a soft
avalanche of letters, paid bills,
sexual polaroids, and notes
refusing invitations, thanking
fans, resisting scholars.
In nightmare I slid,
no ground to stop me,

until I woke at last
where I had napped beside
the precious half foot. Beyond that,
nothing, nothing at all.

© 1998 Thom Gunn

POEM: Lucky, by Tony Hoagland

Lucky by Tony Hoagland If you are lucky in this life, you will get to help your enemy the way I got to help my mother when she was weakened past the point of saying no. Into the big enamel tub half-filled with water which I had made just right, I lowered the childish skeleton she had become. Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed her belly and her chest, the sorry ruin of her flanks and the frayed gray cloud between her legs. Some nights, sitting by her bed book open in my lap while I listened to the air move thickly in and out of her dark lungs, my mind filled up with praise as lush as music, amazed at the symmetry and luck that would offer me the chance to pay my heavy debt of punishment and love with love and punishment. And once I held her dripping wet in the uncomfortable air between the wheelchair and the tub, and she begged me like a child to stop, an act of cruelty which we both understood was the ancient irresistible rejoicing of power over weakness. If you are lucky in this life, you will get to raise the spoon of pristine, frosty ice cream to the trusting creature mouth of your old enemy because the tastebuds at least are not broken because there is a bond between you and sweet is sweet in any language. "Lucky" by Tony Hoagland from Donkey Gospel. © Graywolf Press, 1998. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Poem: What Obligations... (ef)

Sheets shook of sand
We fold into the wind
We are the salt & sun we’ve absorbed
But we do not grow

Basics of tasting
Palates of blues & citrus candy
Burnt into crystalline entries

An arrangement of stones
The constellations on my back
Weigh little – elliptical allusions
The ebb & flow of my confidence.
And my confidantes:
Weak as our strangest link.

Our laughs and loves
Great wines and deep hurts
All held in escrow by
An institution which draws little interest
But which suffers perpetual withdrawals.

I’ve created this little world.
What obligations are here to maintain it?
To sustain its law & order –
To not move on as the world in which
I was created finds itself
Short on the upkeep by its creator?


Image by Wordle.net

What Do Angels Know (ef)

What do angels know?
They have no memories
For they travel at the speed of light
Dancing at the tips of its original rays.
Its always exactly yesterday
When you met them
And they smile & wink as if
They've known you since birth
Because in some sense,
They knew you at your birth
But even now barely register
Your face for the reflection of
Their own light in your wrinkling eyes
And besides they are already
Well into tomorrow - witnessing another newborn
While your greying hair and gnarling hands
Though tired - even now are too fast & agitated
For an angel's full attention.
They will know you again
The very moment you slow down enough to stop.
In that moment - finally able to catch up with you
They will pick you up and say your name again.


Image by Wordle.net

Global Cooling (ef)

Pump stopped
Heart beatless
Rhythmless echoes below
Circulation maintained
Differentially between
A hot head and
A cooling libido.

Tooth (ef)

Your universal truths
are long in the tooth
well-worn, not fit for chewing
on tougher meats
it's satisfaction worn down
to softer dough & doughnuts
and me
just a tip of the iceberg to show
fathom my form
classic, pure chilly magic
flowing cool over the desert
casting soft & ankle deep
a fog
for effect - you could file
your dental work back into shape
or spend thousands on a
replacement pair
but you'll never outswim this shark
with rows & rows of waiting teeth
to spare.

Morocco... (ef)

Is Morocco spicy?
I'd say it is.
And could it ever have cowboys?
On camels, maybe yes -
with names like whispers
or shifting sands
again - it's quite possible
dunes, beaches, grasses, wind, fog, mule deer;
this place has room.