The sky becomes what is added to it–
      a radio tower, a stratus cloud, a fleet of Chinese kites–

until one day, a day like today when winds gust east, then
          west, blowing hard off the lake, 

the sky becomes what is taken away,  

      a vapor trail vanished.  The absence of geese.  A gaping
      space where before there was none.

Begin, again, the slow math of loss.  Use feathers, flint,
         whatever is around,

until the sky, once more, fills with that which is offered to it–

our love-cries, curses, kaddishes, our whispers, our howls,
      our longing, our singing, our long, long, keening.

The above interview aired on the radio program Eight Forty-Eight on April 26, 2006. It details my multi-media performance “How to Catch a Falling Knife: the Illuminated Text.”

 
What struck me first was their panic–
how tangled in hoses my father,
swabbing muck from my eyes,
clutched me like a baby
gorilla: unsure whether
to hold me or hurl me.
Under the angels’ white lights
my mother shrieked; my sister,
I recall, leaked tears for fourteen
floors. Black day, black day,
is all my brother could mutter.

Then, quick and blue, I saw
my first bird: again and again,
beating its beauty against
the clear windows of my new home.

Same year I asked my dad for boxing gloves,
Boom Boom Mancini killed a man

with his hands. A Korean boxer in yellow trunks,
who went down twice in the twelfth and didn’t get up.

I got the gloves anyway, ruddy leather mitts
weighing a pound a piece. Georgie and I

could barely keep them aloft
as we circled each other in the basement,

an egg timer ticking away on the ping pong table.
We’d duck, bob, and duck

to boos from the stands and flying beer cups.
Lazy hooks sailed wide. Jabs died short.

Only once did I stand over Georgie,
the way I’d imagined. Blood

wormed out of his nose. His eyes fluttered shut.
I raised my gloves above my head,

then ran from the house.

 
Always Watching Light
and Shadow Skinny
as a Willow Switch
are names I would choose
for the boy skipping stones
across the flooded quarry.
In high summer his hair
is milkweed silk;
thrown into a well,
his voice sinks, thins,
and rebounds,
reedy still.

Look after this child,
cowlicked and burred,
at least out of the corner
of your eye. Selah.
Let him sit late in the day
where he can’t be seen
from the house, Petty Thief
Stripping Petals from a Peony,
white as winter breath:

God is my judge. God
is not. God is my judge.
God is not.

Let petals snow on the lawn.
Let no harm, let no harm come
to the Collector of Small Animal Skulls.

http://versemag.blogspot.com

 
When I called my heart dark
hammering and your temper wild mint,
I made a mistake. I should have said

what I meant: the sucked orange

is not a symbol or the deer nipping
shoots outside the missile site.

It’s not the year of the rat or the year of the snake

and the fat, yellow moon, despite what I whispered
at the top of the stairs, is only the moon.

I have no kinship with steel,
no understanding of clouds.

My family is becoming
a bucket of teeth

but numbers are more exact than words.

This table, this chair: I forgot
to describe this table, this chair.

Strike the word mother wherever you see it.

50 and 6.

Rip those pages out.

Clattering off taxi cabs, catching
the sun like ice skates,
this shower of sheet metal
is ruining tonight and its soft
accordion music. I cannot hear
the silver slap of your laugh
on the water. Pass me
the dish of butter roses,
love, sounds like something awful
and permanent. I’ll always be
your long blue bottle of sparks,
you scream, but your French
is broken and our waiter weeping.
“Girl with the Flaxen Hair” I want
the accordion to play, for you
twirling a pink cocktail
umbrella, wearing shattered
glass in your hair.

Photographs pictured here were taken between 2001 – 2005 at Frankie Machine Garden in Chicago’s Ukranian Village. While gardening there, I documented the life cycles of its people and plants. Season to season, frame to frame, the light, the landscape, and the weather changed, as did its people. This series is dedicated to Javier Mentado (1948 – 2004), long-time gardener at Frankie Machine.

Zero can hold me for days,
small sack of white,

and I hold it back
carrying it with me, hollow

as a wingbone,
weightless as winter light.

I bring zero here—
where the wind empties,

again and again, its mouth,
where seabirds circle and sing,

where men squat on buckets to fish—
and it swells in me, wet days

when the boats ghost past–
a zero so large I know

I could pass my body through it.

You won’t remember the pig’s head
hanging from a tree
at the end of this poem

and I, most likely, will forget

the pattern of yellow petals
blowing across
your softest sweater.

When you watch me
grip the hatchet, I become
a hatchet–

notched oak handle,
cold steel head.

When I glimpse you standing
by the woodpile and hear

you gasp, you become the gasp

until later you become
damp smoke. Then crying.
Then whiskey.

I’m not these words, though
I expect you think I am.

I’m taillights disappearing.

I’m what’s hanging still
from a tree in brown light
at the edge of the yard.

––My grief is that I bear no grief / and so I bear myself.
            	   					   –Jon Anderson

I’ll look up.
I’ll take a drink of water.
I’ll set down my cup.
When it’s time.
I’ll close the book I’m reading.
I’ll leave through the sliding glass door.
Then stop.
When it’s time.
I’ll blink in hard light.
Bring my hands to my face.
Then let them fall.

To the man sitting on my steps
I will answer, Wind in winter
taught me to stoop.

To the bills and letters in the red-flagged box
reply, Take my boots,
my books, the jar of sea glass,

the sick orchid I never let die.
As I walk the white streets,
traffic lights will blink

amber and amber.
To the rusted bridge I cross
I will offer, Here is my name

weighing no more than sunlight,
my height and weight,
the blue of my eyes.

When it’s time.
I will stand like a man at attention.
I will empty my pockets

of keys, chap stick, pens,
a thin fin of jade
I was never able to lose.

When it’s time,
I will stare at the frozen river
and sing, I am the son of a photograph,

the son of a photograph,
until my voice sounds strange
floating like smoke into cottonwoods.

 
The Anatomist

(Sir Astley Cooper, 1768-1841)

His was a ghastly business,
or so the public said, though
he knew better: crowds gathered
five deep at each dissection,
grown men who had seemed
at first so cavalier about the corpse
would faint and swoon like women
at the first sight of any bloody organ.

And they were wrong, too,
to call it a business, though
it brought him his living,
and money was exchanged discreetly
to the louts who showed up
at his door in Surgeon’s Square
bearing their newly dead granny
or some stranger, still streaked with muck.

Surely it was an art. The eyeball’s
delicate removal, the labyrinth
of veins and arteries, the incisions
finer than the fine muscles chiseled
on the stomach of Michelangelo’s David.
Even his peers bravoed, gathered
around the theater, as he triumphantly
held up cystic lungs and livers.

And those who most appreciated
his ingenuity were rewarded.
He would scratch the names of friends
into a bone he’d feed the mangy lab dogs,
and when he would dissect them
months later, the bone would be
extracted from the stomach, the name
eaten out by gastric acids in intaglio.

Though even he admitted the artist
is always lonely. Nights, he hefted the scraps
of the dead he had perfected and carried them
stealthily through the London fog
to the corners of the hospital grounds,
where he laid them on the grass
like sleeping children, the vultures
shuffling quietly in the courtyard.
 
 
Colleen Abel was born and raised near Chicago and has lived in a bunch of places since then. Her work has appeared in journals such as Heliotrope, Evansville Review, Bellevue Literary Review and others. A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at UW-Madison, she was recently a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize and the New Issues Poetry Prize.

 
NAUGHTY FAWN, YOU’VE BEEN IN THE FLOWERBED

Again, xylem-tripe
in the tufts of your grill,

torrid prints in the gravel-kibble
as you darn the fauna wif
your wake of pheremones.

Naught fawns
don’t titter

them shits don’t even snicker.

They fewmet
my Tec-9 Anima

an impala of coitus
jackhammers.

Them shits is insolent lechery,
nubile, indecorous tramps.

They make we want throttle
the Burghers of Calais
several monsignors
and the loincloth satrap
of the Ganges.

And yet none shall remain to guide
the tenor of my stripper-pole

when I am ill-disposed, slaughtering
niggas with my discursive
scimitar?
 
 
 
PLAYING THE WORLD’S SMALLEST PITY-VIOLIN: RUB YOUR INDEX FINGER AGAINST YOUR THUMB AND YOU CAN PLAY TOO.

Giving up ‘eyting was like superhard, super—
superhard. A reservoir sprung all up in my shit,
and I began to beast

and I found myself beasting for Marlboro Reds,
and I found myself at the Museum of the City
in front of the Magnum photography
with poignant garbage
in my headphones
and began a pattycake of tears
a pavilion of pathos anthems
repeated mantra-tomes
to the intercom of my amygdala
to let go of the poison
let the poison go, Scorpio.

Scorpio, let the poison go!

 

Yago is from the People’s Republic of Miami but he was born and raised in Bensonhurst. You will mistake him for being Pakistani or possibly Puerto Rican but definitely not an Argentine-American. That is because Yago’s mom is Tucumana which means Yago’s grandfather used to wrestle pumas and curse in Quechua.

Yago teaches 11th grade English in a trench in the Bronx. Hopefully, the only thing that will survive him is music. And, religiously, Yago operates indoor pick-up soccer at the Harlem Y. Yago’s work has appeared in COMBO, Lungfull!, LIT, Exquisite Corpse, FIELD, and the U.S. Latino Review. In 2005, he self-published, Rubberroom, a play in free verse about a first-year teacher that is disciplined off-site after throwing a chair in class.

 Three Poems (audio)

A Field 

A field
of birds is an outline of a shoulder is a room

 
 

                                                                       Images
                                                                       contemplate

                                                                       Near
                                                                       completion

                                                                       Beautiful
                                                                       reaches

                                                                       Increase
                                                                       a meaning

 
 

The Boundaries

                                          The boundaries cross into each other
                    and arrest the private space.

 
 
Jenn Morea is a poet and literary arts educator who has led workshops in public schools, universities and arts organizations for eleven years in communities throughout Chicago. Her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Make, Slope, Wicked Alice, and elsewhere. She teaches for Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Community Arts Integration Mentorship Project (AIM) and for Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE).

 
Runaway Song (Audio Track)

Rollover Crash Carrying Pigs

They scatter sweetly, confused
while frank sunlight washes them in gold and red.
Casting a porcine sheen over the jam of cars, vans, and rigs
is the rollover crash carrying pigs.

Where to go in the maze of straw, oil
and blood? How to live?
Through this disaster, this big cosmic gig
of the rollover crash carrying pigs.

Scrambling they root for kin or calm
as in the unjointed time
of the wake of the shock—
some insupportable news,

a swift deep cut nicking bone—
when the laughing squeal of despair
writhes in the brain’s rent pen:
that rollover crash carrying pigs.

We’ll remember it as stilled hooves,
an edged barnyard scent,
an unease with the pure pain of innocents.
Yet like the news hour’s lost, last year’s hospice pass

from the other side of the highway
the pause doesn’t last.
Onlookers creep past the mess while you dig
through your rollover crash carrying pigs.

 
 
Box of Elephants

We live with a tiny herd
each the size of a tea cup and tumbling

past our bowls at breakfast, I dream.
They tip at our feet in twos and threes,

tripping the dogs, moving around
and under, they seems to float over us,

a grey and jubilant weather.
When I wake in the eggplant-purple

dream-night and touch the bedside box
where they stand body-to-body,

a dozen crime-dark eyes gaze back,
blinking coolly. Offspring of what

stormy vision, what premonition?
Mornings I lie spent,

one hanging back at the edge
of the open notebook, shyly skimming

her trunk along my thumb,
caressing where the flesh meets pen.
 

 
Josie Raney is the author of American Vignette,
published by Tia Chucha Press in 2004. A recipient
of a Fulbright Fellowship and The Guild Complex’s
Emerging Poet Fellowship, she lives with her husband
Josh in Chicago, where she does a little of this and a
little of that. She can be contacted at
josieraney@hotmail.com.

 
Another Sunday Morning (Audio Track)

 
     
The Poplars of August

I say this, but it’s not me saying it.
I’m a two-way mirror that looks in on a room
the width of a hand stretched temple-to-temple.

Inside the room houses and people wink
open and closed, trees wave
like trees, the ground moves in big circles.

And these things I tell you about myself –
all lies. I drink to remember
and all I remember is the past.

Meanwhile the present,
the present – if only I could
remember the present – if only

I had some kind of blueprint
or a glassblower’s rod to grapple
this light – then I could –

Then I could tell you something I mean.
Meanwhile – the poplars of August persist,
persist,

and the slippery glass I lean into,
and the imprint of my hand
and its valleys and signs.

 
 
That Was a Time

They began to build a house for me. I put in my hand,
but they continued to help, even when I didn’t want them to.

One of the bricks of the foundation was half-rotted,
and over on the east side they forgot one entirely.

They added buttresses, and a deus ex machina,
although it ruined the vistas,

and scraps of plywood over the gaps
to keep the cold out.

Newspapers talked, and poetry
in the most oblique, cryptic manner.

All the while my guitar had to polish its own neck.
That’s about the time that ink

and those funny glyphs disappeared;
even the futile scratches in the rock faces.

That was a time. You remember –
about when the corporation formed its perfect union.

It’s not that everybody stopped talking,
but listening lost some of its distinction.

Just breath and ink,
and the memory of this and that.

One of the smart ones noticed that it wasn’t talk at all.
People said, “This,” and “This,” and “This,” and “This.”

And then, for a long time, nobody talked. Or, if they did,
it was through a series of hand signals, or articulated grunts.

All the while we stayed inside, fiddling with the dictionary.
Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. Holding down pages against the wind.
 
 

David Ruekberg lives in his maternal great-grandmother’s birthplace on the O-at-ka Creek near Rochester, NY, and teaches English in the International Baccalaureate program at Hilton High School. Publications include Yankee, Poet Lore, North American Review, Mudfish, 88, and others. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson College in January, 2004. Website: http://poetry.restory.net.

I Know Why I Make the Past A Destination  

I remember the ivy,
the way it whiskered up the brick
of the hospital’s old wing,
its broad, red-edged leaves lifting,
drowsily, like paws.  So beautiful,
and disturbing—its tenaciousness,
the way it seemed to insist climbing
was the only natural thing,
while, across the lot, the new glass wing
I waited in shivered like a mirage,
like a rib that had been extracted from a cloud.
We don’t need medics to push you,
these things run on tracks now,
the doctor said, and he looked familiar
in his white coat and corduroys,
explaining how now it was possible
to get a map of every illness you’re likely to get,
or to die from, in your life.  

I kept looking past him, at the vines outside,
those burnt hands curling,
thinking it’s always been frightening
to be alive, the way we can almost,
but never quite, remember the future.

I’ve traced fate on the underside
of a hand, and on a leaf,
but that was quaint,
nothing like it would have been once
to pass your palm, damp and shaking,
across a table to the reader you needed to believe.   

It must have felt something like this—
sweating under a paper gown, swallowing blue fluid,
buckling the body and its unknown future to a table
that inches persistently forward under slicing light.  

Always this stillness before you divine.
 
 
 

The Animator  

It’s terrible work for the lighthearted.
I meant to do cartoons or video games,
but the law firm had the only job I found,
doing reenactments.  Each week,
a lawyer sends in a single-spaced brief
and I begin again the history of blame.
I order the events like a dog-eared deck
of cards, show how a lover’s finger
stiffens, in increments, as it pulls a trigger,
or the way a semi-truck can ricochet
and swipe a van like a bottle over a guardrail.
Once, I had to follow underwater,
make the father unbuckle all three kids
before he ran out of air and couldn’t kick
the windows free.  The children’s hands reached out
like starfish, their hair rose into golden bells,
but their faces—I had to make their faces blank.

Mostly, we concern ourselves with things,
frame the flight of a bullet as it tears
through a jacket, into the dune of a woman’s breast.
Did you know bullets explode into roughly drawn stars?
Have you ever seen cells rush in to sluice a wound?
You can almost hear the body’s coalition
roaring with rage.  It gets predictable
as science fiction—skin a desert crust
over red drifts of tissue,
ribs the battened hull of a mother ship,
and the blood, the minions and minions
of diligent soldiers.

My job is to direct the juror’s eye,
so I cut a little beauty into every frame—
maybe a rain-slicked street ribboned with headlights,
a maple leaf or worn gold ring.
But the best it gets is when I spend all day
with something small and concrete—
an axle, say, or a buckle— something
that failed through no fault of its own.
 
 

Rachel Webster grew up in Northeastern Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Blackbird, The Southern Review, Rattle, 13th Moon, The Madison Review and the Oyez Review.

She has received the American Association of University Women Award and an Academy of American Poets Young Poets Prize. Currently, Rachel lives in Chicago, and you can see more of her work at www.myspace.com/rachelwebster. Contact her directly at rachelwebster10@hotmail.com.