City on the Edge of Forever
© Lorene V. Garrett


We built the Enterprise when I was six.
In the courtyard between bricked apartments
for military families with kids. Our starship,
sculpted from Texas-sized tree branches
took us anywhere we wanted to go.

My friends and I traveled the Universe at warp speed.
Each playing our role: the smart kid, the black kid,
the kid who picked his nose.
Everyone wanted to be Captain Kirk.
We were the kids who learned to bloom where planted.

We saved the galaxy to save the world.
Until Mom called time for dinner, homework,
or travel to another city on the edge of forever.
Beam me up Scotty.
Aye. Aye. Captain.

_______________

Good Wives Don’t Drive
© Joan Jobe Smith


My father refused to teach my mother
how to drive his car, he said it
wasn’t ladylike in 1949, a woman driver
was no better than a streetwalker, she was
to take the bus and be a good wife like
his mother was so my mother took secret
driving lessons, the instructor man
coming every day in his gray sedan
to show her how to let out the clutch
just right so the car wouldn’t jerk, how
to work the choke and the radio, make
turn signals, arm bent up for right,
straight out for left, down for slow
me in the backseat watching as we drove
the L.A. streets: Firestone, Rosemead
Sunset Boulevard, Pico, La Brea and
Santa Fe and the day she got her driver’s
license she bought herself a green 1939
Ford coupe and waited in the front seat
in the driveway for my father to come home
honked the horn at him when he arrived
and said Hey handsome, need a ride?

_______________________________

The Decanter
© Bill Mohr


One by one, Charles summoned
each of us to dinner and gossip:
a movie star, unnamed, whose crush
on me might seem improbable.
Charles smiled as a lid turreted
dissolving spices. "As soon as
the doctor pronounced Lee dead,
I got in bed and held him for
a half-hour. “This decanter – "
He lifted it from polished oak, and paused  --
"Lee bought it as a gift when he was
working as a call-boy in Hollywood."
How long ago was that? I wondered.
Thirty years? Irreproachable
glass flowed like recessionals
of haunted light to a swirling brim.
Once, when I visited their rented house,
Lee seemed exultant, yet contrite.
"I'm sorry to make you wait, but I need
to wash up first. I've been working in
the garden all afternoon. I had a vision.
I was weeding, and…" He hesitated
and smiled. "I'm not going to tell you
all my secrets." "Could you toss the salad?"
I looked back up at Charles, who hunched
at the stove, ladling a finished sauce,
the one that Lee could never taste
without a hint of love's vast waste.

____________________________

My Father’s Brain
© Clint Margrave


I’m looking at my father’s brain. 

My sister and I found it
stuffed in an envelope
in my parents’ garage
yesterday.
 
Only weeks before,
it had been alive,
now it was here,
stacked in this box,
with all the other
stuff we don’t know
what to do with.
 
“That’s the frontal lobe,”  my sister says,
picking it up
and turning it around
to show me.

“Can I keep it?” I say,
lifting it into the sun
for a better glimpse. 

“Do whatever you want with it,”
she tells me.
“It’s yours.”

_________

An Irish Christening
© Donal Mahoney


Thomas said
you can't go home again
but I did
for my sister and the christening
of her first.
 
Everyone, on folding chairs, against
the whitewashed basement walls, was there
for ham and beef and beer, the better
bourbons, music, argument and talk.
 
Maura came; she hadn't married.
Owen, fist around a beer, announced
I owed my family the sight
of me more often.
 
Hannah, thickset now,
gray and apronless,
rose beside the furnace,
wolverined me to the coal bin door,
 
asked me in the face
who or what it was
that kept me anywhere,
everywhere, but there.

__________________

The Most Miserable Go-Go Girl of Them All
© Joan Jobe Smith


Mitzi Malone was the most miserable go-go girl
of them all. High heels hurt her feet, she hated
the white bikinis, stinky beer, the mean Simon
Legree bosses, the band, bright lights, the men,
the drunkards, derelicts, deviants, cheaters, liars
cigar-chomping Big Daddies wearing sapphire
pinky rings but the man she hated the most was
her husband who made her work in this god-awful
place so he could own a heated swimming pool and
a motorboat, yet she was the most popular go-go girl
of us all. Legs, they all called her she was so Betty
Grablesque and soon, to get even with her husband,
Mitzi Malone took a good-looking lover who adored
her, drove her to midnight coves in Laguna Beach
to make mad love in the sand and foggy moonlight,
snuck into her house after her husband left for work
and her two kids went to school and they made love
in her husband’s bed while Barbara Streisand cooed
lullabyes on the stereo but Mitzi Malone refused to
marry her good lover and after 15 years he went away
and she got fat, got a cat, her daughter died, her son
turned out to be gay, she forgave her husband, cared
for him through 3 hip surgeries, moved to a gated
community between green California hills with 2
golf courses, goes on Caribbean cruises, learned to
tango, and now is the most popular woman in her
bridge club and last week when I saw Mitzi Malone’s
old lover and he asked how she was, I said, “Fine.”

_________________________________________

The Movie of Our Lives
© Stephen Mead


Who will write the roles?
Who is mad enough, inspired with it?
Whom, lit as a burning barn,
whom the soft cinders of some garment
from tinsel town?

Childhood’s, child, the costumes,
the landscapes, & who’ll play our parts,
breathe beyond subterfuge,
expose our different backdrops?

You would do, child, you the comic dramatist,
you, man of theatric passion, of the cruelty,
the gentleness, of any poet, punch-drunk.

Oh, but I am idiot’s delight, passing masks
like hats for the put-ons, the tests,
as though our kisses, if screened,
could somehow be more real.

Feel.  Caress.  It’s all touch to touch,
all the circuitous race of sacrifice turning Paradise
into Common Ground.

Meanwhile there’s been terror.
Picture your grimace, my twisted face
& the tear soaked rug.
Remember the shove, the bookcase as blunt instrument.

Oh lover, oh playmate, pal of the box-not,
with our voices at fever’s pitch
& all the rooms as Virginia Woolf’s
in who is afraid of…

What was that insanity if not of the gun-shy
starting to go off?
What but the shock to kill for love
as though to protect its prize, its possession,
should the cherished dream stop?

Record this, love?  Tape our minutes?
Could the Christmas tree be camera,
& us, head to head, swept away by our want?

No, love.  The director’s in Bellevue & the Extras
are striking.  No, love.  We are our own Cinema
now sniffling with cold symptoms, now dumping
drinks into plants.

Yes, we are mad, as original as magic,
settling our nerves in each other’s arms.
Come, turn towards me, spot-lit.
Let touch be touch, again that amen,
with nothing out of focus.

_____________________

Rolling Dice from the Shoulder
© Fred Voss


“They’ve got my body but they don’t have my mind!”
says Gus
as he sweats pushing the lurching 1-ton lift down the machine shop aisle and by the twinkle
in his eye I know
he’s looking at his rock collection in his mind
all those crystals
he’s found in geodes on trips to the Sierras under black light
in his garage
as he dreams of finding a mother lode of gems like those rock-hounds he reads about
in all those rock magazines he buys
Howard
with his nose to the grinding wheel as he sharpens a carbide cutting tool until a cloud
of steel dust chokes
his face
is probably in Vegas
again with a beautiful babe on each arm as he rolls those dice from his shoulder
and strikes it rich
Rodney rides the perfect wave
he’s been looking for all his life for 15 minutes in the warm buttery sun at Waikiki Beach
as he stands in the dank corner of the shop feeding stinking brass into a saw blade
with cold slimy coolant all over his hands and arms
we all go to Heaven
each day in our minds as the steel dust rises
and the hand grinders scream and the time clocks
tick
I’m writing this poem
as I look out a tin door at the mountain
I climbed with my father when I was 8
my hand
in his as he breathes again
and there seems nothing in this world I can’t
conquer
we all go to Heaven
on this concrete floor to keep from being swallowed
by a tin-walled
Hell.

____

Landlady #5
© Tobi Cogswell

Her fingers swollen, stiff and rigid,
she wears her rings around her neck:
a wedding band, purchased quickly for $40,
the gold lasting longer than her husband’s
tired heart, her parent’s bands, silver
and scratched, and a tiny hoop,
a forgotten earring shared with the
shiny carpet, left behind by a daughter
far beyond successful in her fine life
and rare to visit.

She recalls a time when she held the cello,
graceful and joyous, her future falling into place
with the sound of notes played with ease,
puts her hands in a bowl of ice,
flexes her wrists, plans her day.

These beach boxes in her care –
a uniform sand-scratched ballet
of pastel siding lit by morning sky.
White windows and coffee.  She checks
the quiet house, the one she saves for
women in distress, the one she rents
for next to nothing, where “first and last”
is often the same – she sleeps at night
because of this.

Her twin sister on the other coast
charged with a cadre of
silver airstream summer rentals,
squints at the rising tide,
gets out her heaviest wool
and listens to the changing
seasons, gray on gray,
not even a gull to drink a
sunset toast with her.  She
exhales, offers her hands to
the frigid water and flexes
like her twin, sharing a common
language, a conductor before the
deepening tomorrow.

_________________