Thief of Excuses

by

Mark Joseph Kiewlak

I don’t take water
from the ocean;
I become the ocean.
I meld
and contort,
unify
and allow.
I don’t cut down
any trees
that haven’t agreed to it.
I don’t arrange
my furniture;
I let it
arrange me.

 

Mark Joseph Kiewlak has been an author, mainly of short stories and poetry, for about fifteen years. In 2008 his work appeared in Wild Violet, The Oracular Tree, Black Petals, AlienSkin, and The Bitter Oleander. Mark was also privileged to have served as judge of the 2007 Wild Violet Fiction Contest.

Milonga for a Blind Man

by

Lois P. Jones

Time is both loss and memory.
—Jorge Luis Borges

In the middle of the night
a man takes a key
from his pocket.

In the middle of the night
he climbs to the top of the stairs.
From his balcony he remembers daylight,

the crumbled cement and the cracks
on the tavern below. The way the sky spoke
to him, the last one with anything to say.

And the opening of the flowers
when they would open for him.
Pink or coral, her lips staining
his with a memory – a breath

and a daydream of pampas and hibiscus.
His shirt buttoned down to the waist
and the white skin of a butterfly.

In the middle of the night
he remembers a snow heart
and the red walls of morning

where he walked the streets
in search of distance. Someone
has counted his days

before he was born. And this blindness
that followed plucked out his eyes
to sleep. It always comes to this –

edges fading from the familiar,
a city vague and celestial. He has lost
count of all his endings.

 

Lois P. Jones has been published in The California Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Prism Review and other print and online journals in the U.S. and abroad. She is the co-editor of A Chaos of Angels (Word Walker Press) with Alice Pero and a recent documentarist of Argentina’s wine industry. In 2008, she was the recipient of IBPC’s first prize honor judged by Fleda Brown. You can find her as co-host at Moonday’s monthly poetry reading in Pacific Palisades, CA, and hear her as a guest host on 90.7 KPFK’s Poet’s Cafe. She is the Associate Poetry Editor of Kyoto Journal.   

If Asked One Can Walk On Water

by

R Jay Slais

His tucked away young
line up gripping at dirt grains
under the bank overhang.
 
They watch as Water Strider
ripples the creek
across the reflective pool
 
beyond the fallen log
that restricts the flow.
He skiff skims upstream,
 
then a float back lesson
in effortless management
with the new dead leaves
 
until log bump, tilt, rise and sink,
leaf tension lost, sunk
into the muck shade
 
with the duckweed and lily stem.
Cleansed of his hardships,
another surge is desired
 
to again break open the sun
held upon a mirror,
the spoon-smooth waterglass;
 
father bug like a god.

 

 

At the Traveling Monet Exhibition

by

Jacqueline West

It costs extra to see this.
The familiar haystacks,

the classic recipe of pastel
slash, reflective arcs

analyzed to the particles of color.
The bridges drooping their eyelids

over the still swirl of oil,
coasting lilies

knotting their hidden stems. 
They drip and scud

in this separate room
where parquet clicks

under a crowd of heels,
eager noses lean over velvet ropes.

This is all to be expected:
the grand, blurred memories

of French countryside,
of faceless daydreams. 

Bodies don’t belong here.
But here she is –
 
the lonely strangeness
of the human shape

a shock, the eyes closed,
features in the erasure of death. 

The artist’s wife.
He must have worked fast,

finishing two studies
in the hours between last breath

and burial,
the slow shift from the first

to the second seen only
in the tilt of her head,

a sagging dahlia.
The fields and the gardens,

water lilies, rivers
are anyone’s.  This was his. 

Her veiled face has the same
hue he used for the sky.

 

 

The Eyes of Owls at the Zoo

by

Patrick M. Pilarski

open dark and you fall
thick thick and wanting

into their heavy question,
the deep pivot of the where

did I put my soul and the
black rustle did I

deserve it in the ?rst place
that sucks like wind

through cliffs, parts
the frost-heavy air

before turning, slow and mechanical,
to the north star;

dismissing with a closed lid,
an arched and greying

feathered brow.

 

 

Patrick M. Pilarski lives in Edmonton, Canada, and is the co-editor of DailyHaiku—an international journal of contemporary English language haiku. Patrick's poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan, including PRISM international, The Antigonish Review, Literary Review of Canada, Misunderstandings Magazine, The Prairie Journal, Other Voices, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and on CBC Radio One. His first full-length collection, Huge Blue, (2009) is forthcoming from Leaf Press, and he is the author of one chapbook of experimental haiku and haibun: Five Weeks (2007). More about Patrick and his work can be found at his website.