March, 2009
SARAH LINDSAY
Look Again
I know how little I know
from observation:
that the dog sleeping on the rug
with pure concentration
will be sleeping, each time I look up,
in a different direction,
that five wart-lidded mushrooms
can form on the lawn
in the time rain takes
to shift from falling to fallen,
that my eyes are too slow
to track shooting stars, too quick
to spy continental drift,
and Earth conceals its spin
by spinning me with it,
that a tree won’t let me
see its growth, only its height,
that hairs on my head go singly gray
only by night.
This is an excerpt from Twigs and Knucklebones, Sarah Lindsay’s newest book. Printed by permission of the author. For information, go to http://www.coppercanyonpress.org.
RHETT ISEMAN TRULL
The Streets of My Heart
for Jeff
What a display. The light chromed off the ornate lamps and signs,
brass bumpers of the Cadillac Sevilles,
spatulas sterling-gripped and forks gold-tined
that swung from every balcony’s smoking grill.
Girls half-undressed came masquerading, frills
on sale to the debonair boys. Parading lines
of pigeons, curbside, puffed like helium-filled
balloons no one saw deflating. The shine
must fade, the city still, to gleam, to escapade anew.
The streets of my heart while sun-licked, well-trafficked, amazed,
hosted a previous traveler or two. But none until you
paused to point out beauty I missed: loves taxiing away;
the saxist on Oak, case open for coins, blue kiss at high-noon;
jay-filled sapling in a slip of leaves, some stenciled to the walk by rain.
“The Streets of My Heart” first appeared in American Poetry Journal.
MICHAEL BOCCARDO
Edward Hopper’s “Room In New York”
Early evening, a man and a woman sit inside a room
the size of a heartbeat, the walls lit like honey. He is leaning
into his own shadow, elbows balanced on knees, thumbing
through the classifieds. Smudges of ink bruise his palms,
petals of purple hibiscus. Moments ago a slipper of glass held a clutch
of flowers on the small table between them–pinwheels of hydrangea,
daffodil, snapdragon–but the woman grew frightened of them,
their thirsty faces tilted upward, always huddled together
on the brittle stalks of their necks like children, imploring and expectant.
She tossed them over the window ledge where they landed like crayons
along the sooty pavement nine stories below. Afterwards, she drifted
to the piano, her dress blazing down her legs like the stain left
from a ripe plum. Another hour will pass this way: heads bowed,
bodies rocking in place, his tie a loosened cord, sleeves unrolled; her hair
cradled in a stiff knot at the nape of her neck, fingers dragging
the keys. Around them, notes stroke the silence, a lullaby of regret
tucking them in for the night, their gaze flat, hollowed, lingering
in opposite corners of the room like ruined blossoms.
Previously published in Asheville Poetry Review.