Meditation Sense
by
Chris Crittenden is a hermit living in a remote area of Maine, but travels to Los Angeles to see his father. Some recent acceptances are from: Boston Literary Magazine, Main Street Rag, Drunken Boat and “Walt’s Corner,” a literary column in the Long Island Newspaper, founded by Walt Whitman. He’s scheduled to be interviewed on Poets Café, a radio program of KPFK in Los Angeles, where he intends to mention the wonderful team at The Rose & Thorn.wooed by air
that tiptoes
a staircase of temperature,
creeping up and down
my body's slopes,merging with aches,
numbing or spicing them,
slackening pores,
rooting under nerveslike curious
puckish heat.i'm a piano
with untold keys
fused into seamless
swells and ebbs-
so many fingertips
of relic and memento,glissandos in strewn sprays
through my tuned spine,
mingling with minstrels
of joy, with the fervor
of Mingus-mingling and evaporating,
playing my organs,
humming my coccyx.
M&M’s
by
Morbidity & Mortality conference at the morgue:
I roll the body out of the stainless steel freezer,
wheel the slick quiet rack across the black & white tile
floor, damp, cool, hosed down after all that bleeding.The towel molded to the shape of a face, I know
the bruises underneath, the black lined eyes
the crusted blood we left on the lips, the chipped front
teeth. I am the presenter. You’re in the theatre audience:black-bearded. Blue eyed. Blue. All the white coated men
hold their knives up to salute us. They will open the abdomen.
Weigh the liver, spleen, womb. I am in charge of the scale.
Heavy shears clip bone, split the chest. The heavy heartfills my hands. I pass it into the darkness to you. The cloth
slips, a bit of pursed lip breathing from the corpse. My face.
A little breeze from the freed soul. I take it in my lungs.
Kelley White writes: “A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Medical School, I long to return to my childhood home in Gilford Village, NH, but am unable to leave my inner-city pediatric practice in Philadelphia. Poetry keeps me sane. My work has been widely published over the past five years, including several chapbooks, most recently Rule of Thumb, which received the Cynic Prize from Cynic Press, and full length collections, most recently Living in the Heart from Word Press. My poems have appeared in numerous journals including Exquisite Corpse, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle and the Journal of the American Medical Association. I have just learned that I am the recipient of a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.”
The Big Bang
by
Elizabeth Lara writes: “Writing poetry has always been a necessity for me, a way to remember the shape of a moment or capture a feeling that I know will otherwise slip away. I began writing when I was very young, but published for the first time in my 20s, when I participated in a poetry group in Washington, D.C. There was a long hiatus while I raised my children and focused on my career. I now live, study and write in New York City.”A blank
sheet
of paper
and Iam supposed
to fill itas if
it were
the gas tankas if
I were
leavingon a trip
to Massachusetts
I admit
I am
attractedby its
explosive
qualities
Jonagolds
by
Patrick Carrington is the poetry editor at Mannequin Envy and author of Thirst (Codhill, 2007), Rise, Fall and Acceptance (Main Street Rag, 2006), and the forthcoming Hard Blessings (Main Street Rag, 2008). His poetry will be appearing soon in The Bellingham Review, Tar River Poetry, The Connecticut Review, American Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, and other journals.Disease slithered into the orchard like worms
into your apples. Without you to pick them,
they had fallen and decayed. And you
could do nothing but lie and listen
to the heavy thump, thump, thump
as each one smacked the ground,then wait for the stink. By October
your skin passed yellow,
as if fall had dyed you and the rotted
fruit from the same bottle of iodine.
The doctor did all he could, said
your breath had become God’s business.
I was there for the last windy miracle.
At first frost I poured you,
watched coming winter blow
your ashes to glass across the lake.Each autumn I come back. The trees
are bare now, done in by moths
and fire blight. The empty branches
ripple across your wet grave
as if leaning closer to your hands,
asking them to rise up through the water
and pluck, while there’s still timebefore the freeze. When I lie down
on your bed, I feel my arms
try to lift themselves up
to the trees, my tongue form
the curses you would have spit out
like poison if only yours
would have worked right. Sometimes,
I even hear the thud of those big apples
dropping, one by one by one.
Romance With Plumbers
by
When a house's subterranean
water roots need extending
into a new room
or out into the yard
to feed the new trees—
call in plumbers.
They'll arrive wearing
root wrenches and solder horns
on their belts.
The house will smell like
a roux of wax, sound like groan
valves, feel as looped
as a twisted garden hose.
But when you're not watching
the plumbers will turn the water off and
whistle “When You Wish
Upon a Star” into the hollows
where the water was.
When they turn it back on
you'll wonder how you keep hearing
their tweetles just below the shush-tones
of the running water.
For weeks after
you'll wonder how you still smell
hot wax in the basement plaster.
B.A Wingate was born in Ohio and has traveled widely. Her work has previously appeared in the Santa Fe Literary Review (2007) and The Harwood Anthology (2006), published by Old School Books. Recent work will be appearing in Natural Bridge (2008) and in a new anthology titled Looking Back to Place (Old School Books, 2008). She is a poet and climate scientist who lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, a computational physicist, and their two dogs.
She doesn’t question it
by
M’s work has appeared in a number of journals, including Pedestal, Gumball Poetry Journal, Word Riot, Mannequin Envy, and Half-Drunk Muse, and has received recognition from the Oregon State Poetry Association. M serves as an Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection and is an administrator of an online poetry site called Wild Poetry Forum. In the few seconds a month when she is not working on these projects, she reads mostly novels, walks along bustling city streets with her man, and is grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life.(after How I Knew Harold by Deborah Harding)
Around 1989
Tom and I buy a house we can’t afford a mile from Redondo pier. I microwave Lean Cuisine dinners, impressed by the nutritional bang I get for my 290-calorie buck. He sits on the pier at sunset breaking the bread I won’t eat with gulls.Around 1973
Karen and I have cramps on P.E. swim days. She says Mrs. Miller is a dork because she wears her glasses around her neck like a whistle. Karen pretends to blow through the earpiece on hers. We both think this is funny. We fail the class.Around 1995
at Tom’s wedding in Barbados, I faint from the heat. His bride offers me a glass of ice from a sculpted fountain. I tell her I’m allergic to water. She doesn’t question it.Around 1964
at the Wilson’s barbecue, Danny Hutchins falls in love with me. He threatens to throw me in the pool. I slap him so hard, he cries.Around 1992
I read that swimming can be either very natural or very unnatural, but is generally somewhere in between. The therapist says roughly the same about second marriages.Around 1966
on a shopping trip with Mom, I drink from a fountain in the Wanamaker’s cosmetics department. It’s perfume. I’m too embarrassed to spit it out.Around 1983
on our honeymoon in Acapulco, Tom asks the Kookaburra’s owner about the birds he keeps in the dining room. He lets them out of their cages. For dessert, I am in the bathroom losing dinner. They blame it on the water. A bottle of Pink Gold costs $20 American. Eight years later, we divorce.Around 1969
Mom takes swimming lessons. She learns to twist through Rehoboth Bay like an otter. Dad elbows me in the ribs, yelling, “She’s a natural!” I suck salted pumpkin seeds until my mouth turns to sponge.Around 1956
I have my first bath. Immediately before falling face first into the champagne fountain 27 years later, Mom announces to the guests that I screamed from the minute she put me in the tub until the minute she took me out. None of us knows what this means.Around 1968
Julie and I rent rubber rafts and drift too far out into the surf. The lifeguard I have a crush on blows his whistle. Mom stands on the sand screaming. Dad is engrossed in The Liquidator.Around 1987
at an outdoor wedding Tom is photographing, I tell him he will fall in the water before the day is over. He laughs, “What are you now? Psychic?” It costs $200 to hire a diver to retrieve the Nikon from the bottom of Lake Tahoe, and the telephoto lens is a total loss.Around 1960
at the YWCA, I say no to all invitations to put my face in the water. Mom peels off her nail polish with her teeth. The instructor tells her to put me in the bathtub. She says I need to get a feel for how to float without resisting.