A white ceiling yields no answers
© Luisa Peña


     this used to look different,

but I have crossed out and switched,
I have gone back so many times
I forgot what this was supposed to be.
I lost the feeling in all the meaning.

     this was supposed to be about you,

about how I’m afraid of living,
how my mind is jammed with indecision,
how I’m forever editing my past and future,
but how being with you

     was like falling into sleep,

that moment between consciousness and unconsciousness
when I cannot care to think,
when what can’t be said or understood
has no weight.

     this was supposed to be about

how, for a moment, my emptiness was gone,
not filled,
just gone.

________



Her Side of the Bed
© Macrae Sutherland


Her Side of the Bed

is cool
calming in the way
a mother’s hand feels
against a fever.

Her pillows smell like lavender,
a remedy to help her sleep.

She has tried warm milk
Chamomile teas in handmade mugs
meditation
the Rosary
whispered to the ceiling.

Sleeping pills provide
a few hours
of dreamless sleep,
alone
in the darkness of her eyelids.

She prefers
the solitude of rest

to the company
of the stranger
sleeping

on his side of the bed.

__________________



Belly Lint
© Steven Carey


On sunnier Sunday mornings our mother
would slip into our individual bedrooms

and send us into hers, crawling like lynxes
through mountainous curling sheets

and comforters to our father, still sleeping.
Tickle him awake, she’d say as our fingers clawed

at his sides, armpits, the wrinkled valleys
of his feet. But he never bolted like prey.

Carrion, his coiling body buried itself
in snowy sheets as we dug for the sweetness

of knowing he wasn’t impervious to our touch.
Then as we got tired again, starving in the widening

king-size fields, he’d let us pick his body clean.
We wondered how it got so dirty.

Funny how I remember that most, the lint
I used to find in his belly button, grey and worn

like the lint I would find much later in life in the dryer,
in the catch—how I remember him letting me pull

the stringy bits out with my nimble fingers,
and how I find it now in my own belly button

knowing that’s where I was most connected
to my mother, and how I would let my own son pick

like an animal at that, my most intimate of parts.

_______________________________________


Portrait of My Parents, 1983
© Katrina Prow

This is what we look like:

red ties of your bikini
and my fingers in a knot
the trailing hairs of boyhood
on my chest
and still—the freckles.
I’m pale
and you’re an olive
scowling at the camera
the shot someone snuck
campground setting.
Soon,
            we’re married
I take you for the ring
the one you said you’d leave me without.
Me and you and the beers in the back
my powder blue truck
still sparkling
before the rust of years
and the children we’ll scorn
and the money we’ll lose.
Babe, the blue pickup
and your legs crossed
shining like the sea-wrapped land
of Carpinteria
and that curve on the 101
driving bold like wind
seatbelts
                   off
the way you smiled when you said
not yes
but what took so long

________________



The Beachcomber
© Jeffrey C. Alfier


At the final anxious edge of Sunday morning slumber,
he inhales a moist wind in salty collusion with the girl
he held all night who wakens and pulls her sandals on.

Finally rousing, he watches her turn and give him
the well-charted landscape of a wry smile, a look that says
his body can no longer underwrite her unhealed history.

Watching sunlight finger its way through fog, he plays-back
a phone message from his all-too wary daughter reproving him
with frayed indulgence, Daddy you can’t cure that much loneliness.

Through a sea-charged wind, the girl paces the boardwalk,
the redolence of her days left behind in the cooling dampness,
like his lust, like something the sea gave up, refusing to reclaim.

_______



The Family Tree and the Roots and the Weeds
© Joseph Reich


what my wife found out this weekend
at the funeral for her grandma which
her mom never told her and always
kept on the hush-hush all revealed
to her in one single lunch eating at
one of those boxcar diners in jersey
was that uncle bobby all told to
her very casually by uncle bobby
was he was caught dealing
heroine to an undercover
cop and was in rykers
and then sent up
to singh-singh  
and then he
started cursing
at her cousin gina
and they have a very
interesting relationship
ordering a stiff drink and souvlaki
and kept on pushing on her the
split-pea soup and she told him
she didn't want it (brought back
for me on the bus two great big
sticky pieces of baklava and a
beautiful black sparkling antique
ring from her grandma) then began
bragging about building jumping
and bringing a hooker
to uncle hermann's
wedding and told
her she wasn't
half bad and she
asked aunt fran
is this all true
and simply
shook her
head and
ordered
a stiff
drink
too.

___



Holding Pattern
© Tobi Cogswell


A silent stride on hardened canyon floors
the man does not look down while scanning the
depths for movement.  Cacti not even in
his field of vision stand squat and formal
and are gracefully negotiated.

A book in one hand, the spine cracked across
his giant palm, sometimes he walks and reads,
other times eyes like pinhole cameras
record the scene for hasty calls abroad.

He misses his daughter on these mornings.
He writes the words he wants to express, and
counts the days they have left to be apart.
Saguaro stand, witness to his sadness,
fraught with beauty and unspoken language.

In his care she has placed her family.
They gather – three generations of men.
The wiser one wanders the landscape while
the middle one works to be a father.
The young one will learn from both as he grows.

When his daughter returns, the trees will be
lit on both sides from the sun, saguaro
will yield a nod in greeting, their shadows
banished from showing their dusky faces,
her shadows hidden under lock and key,
his shadows drifting outbound with the clouds.

______________________________________



Turning Frank into Fred Astaire
© Fred Voss

As important as the general theory of relativity is the iron skillet
in Frank’s kitchen
and what Jane can do with a quesadilla
on it
scents
rise from it stirring a love in Frank’s heart more profound than Newton’s
laws of physics
a love
that makes a grass blade
rise toward the sun
all the men carrying lunch pails file into factories with smokestacks roaring flames  
     on their roofs
what Jane’s fingers
can do with a red onion
a slice of cheese
a tortilla from Olvera
Street
must rival
the explosions into being of the stars
as Frank
forgets drilling holes through steel with plus-or-minus one-ten-thousandth-of-an-inch
diameter tolerances
and puts his arms
around Jane’s waist and dances her across their old cracked linoleum kitchen floor
one
with what makes Orion’s sword climb
back up to the top of the skies each year
snowflakes
be different
as fingerprints
birds
fly thousands of miles to sit in trees outside windows and sing songs
to make poets
drop their pens
Einstein
look up to the heavens and sigh because he knows
nothing.

_____



Rise
© Stephen Mead


Faces
Upward tilted, chins
Striking nothing but
A sky ocean, an ocean,
Period, with perhaps
Mandolin-playing donkeys,
The eyes, el hombre, of
Orion, of Orpheus thick
Behind this cloud, that
Ever-reaching elm as winged,
No, we won’t need wings,
The mercy of prayers
In what we, brother, are,
Sister: earth voyagers
On the lam &
Fighting another cold again &
Rising Empire State high,
Everest wide because
We want it all still
To be living,
Rich asphodel singing:
Yes     yes     yes

When we return


_____________