Request to a Glass-Winged Butterfly

by Carmen Mason

Might you
fly as slowly
as you can
so I may
take in everything through
your pellucid wings?
It’s so less overwhelming
like that
peering through you
like that.
And if you would
on another day –
may I use you as a parasail
and ride you for a while
and pretend to
be seen clear through
and not found wanting:
just what I am, here and there?

Oh, just for a while
to be ringed in
iridescent phosphorescent
high hued vistas
never seen
before!

 

I have been writing poetry and prose much of my life. I’ve been published, won prizes but realize I write most for myself — to express, explore, expunge and exhort.

Before It All Turns Gray

by Mark Fischweicher

In Tucson, people sit tossed
among the fractured cliffs of
two low hills by
Gate’s pass, gauging sunsets
or as it happened once,
when I’d already stood to leave,
and the light slipped out
from under the fast becoming grim horizon.
Light from darkness;
……..catching the Eastern! fringes of
a skyful
of leadened clouds
and scratching them
with bloody fingers
Backwards
cross their splintered edges
as if Dawn were coming now,
Helios waving
from east to west
good-bye.

Imagining the ‘day’ that might have followed
we all applauded.

Imagining the cold dark day,
hundreds of absolute hands.
And the line of headlights leaving, the only ceremony, and
darkness, the only encore.

And yet, you see,
for me, it is the moon
in bed with the mid-day sky
that I love most.
………………………..There.
As if it were there all the time
day in, day out
shoved out on stage while the sun
still has all the lines.

In swells and streaks its light
defines itself.

Demanding I go see

 

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.

Canine – A Sestina

by Mark Fischweicher

More than fifty years ago, I bounced, backwards; sinking like an anchor,
in the Long Beach pool. My chin, chopped by the edge, my teeth,
bloodied, but cooled, soothed by the sudden disinfectant bath that enshrined
them  —    Lifeguard’s advice: go home kid!  Without a doubt, these
…………………………………………………………………dried out boney relics
were a long time coming.  I was round ten, then but that was probably
…………………………………………………………………………………the root,
the first cause of it all. .I bet my eyeteeth on it, my tusks, my canines.

 

Overcoming obstacles, on either side of a Buddhist altar sit elephant tusks,
……………………………………………………………………………..not canines
as I thought, but incisors, like the ones pulled by my dentist,
…………………………………………….one by one, from their jaw bone anchor,
along with the occasional bicuspid or molar (maxillary or mandibular),
……………………………………………………………………………and their roots
making me, now (wisdom gone decades ago) just about toothless,
and my little (5” tall) bamboo, souvenir, two-story jewel-box house…
…………………………………………………………………a tiny mini-reliquary
where now reside the remnants of my mouth…enshrined.

 

Not like Siddartha’s, pulled from his funeral pyre, with palaces and shrines
built up to hold them, with princes and kings at WAR to own those canines.
Nor like George’s – cow, horse, HUMAN, walrus, ‘Presidentures’ –
………………………………………one full set left amongst the other relics,
the pewter spoons, the painted plates and porcelain pitchers of Mount Vernon,
………………………………………..but not one good tooth to anchor
to. (He had some odds and ends in a desk drawer there, hoping to add them,
………………………………………………his “own, two, small teeth”)
to the set… And, still desperately hoping to recapture NY, despite the English
…………….victories in the south, he stayed rooted

 

Where he was. “Little prospect of being in Philly, soon,” his ‘captured’ letter
………………………………….to his dentist read. He, by Then, ‘enroute
(upon advice of Rochambeau) to Yorktown   “Check out the cannon display,”
…………………………………..a tourist wrote of that old battlefield shrine,
“It’s easy to picture history coming to life here.” Not that they (or I) could see
…………………………………….it coming, like a kick in the teeth
or a baseball my son pitched, ‘warming up,’ before I had my mask on.
……………It is a Dog Eat Canine
World out there, and that last ‘two-seamer’ truly loosened ‘em up. Now, like
…………………………………………….George, nothing left to anchor
the new bridge to, to latch on to as walruses use their own tusks to do, pulling
……………..themselves up on the soon to be relic

 

Of the past, the arctic ice, its cold wisdom keeping storms down;
……………………………………………..with polar bears afloat on relics
of their own. How can we ask them to pull up their roots,
when for us, it is said, “the foot feels the foot when it feels the ground,”
…………………………………………………………………..anchored
in some primeval belief that we are here together, not bowing to the shrines
of human progress, knowing that the obligate carnivorism that the elongated
……………………………………………………………………………canines
the sabre toothed cat enjoyed, may in fact have led to its own extinction, teeth

 

Not withstanding. As I lose them, I think of you, narwhales, walruses and
……………………………………………………tigers; let us fight, tooth
and nail, to save our home, before our blue earth is consigned to become just
……………………………………………………another relic,
afloat in the darkness. What can we do against it? We can’t wait until its
…………………………………………………..raining cats and canines.
We can’t disregard our own flimsiness, as dependable as any wispy cloud
……………….without roots;
i.e., the eternal light on the flagpole in Madison Square is always going out.
……………..What kind of shrine
is that? “In memory of those who have made the supreme sacrifice,” someone
……………………………………………………..has pulled up the anchors

 

Alas, poor Yoric, is there no sanctuary, no shrine where I can worship
…………………………………………………..something more than relics,
where poetry comes every moment without pulling teeth, where my sorrow
……………………………………………..does not weigh me down?
I hope I haven’t led you astray trying to root this out, O Kali, dark goddess of
…………time, against these demons,
……………………………………………………bare your fangs

 

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.

 

What’s for Dessert in this Desert?

by Tom Ashley

The familiarity of it all is too easy.
It must be like those born without
without limbs, without eyes,
with wrong skin, with wrong height
with wrong schools and neighborhoods

It’s familiar places we find ourselves
in but familiar can be dark and sad
crushing, humiliating in its touch
controlling the dials as ghosts do the work
in fields of the mind and its memories,

But it’s of wrong messages I wish
to speak and do so in harsh tones
to scold those who were ever
mean to those little ones who
had a long and lasting road to travel

It’s late in this game clocks whisper to me
pictures are beginning to fade
people have gone missing, good ones too,
please not the one drinking the essence with me.
only fools cut out their hearts and live on

 

I have infinite gratitude to the fabulous Sarah White and my classmates who nurtured the imagery, passion, pleasure, emotion, insight and the gift of a lifetime I found  in poetry.

Oh, That Side of the Dollar

by Tom Ashley

Why don’t you ask
the polar bear standing on
a piece of ice looking worried
or fishermen in Louisiana
thinking about tomorrow
disturbed at all with the fires
or the floods
maybe the refugees
lost at sea or starving
and the elephant tusk they
make such beautiful bracelets
sealskin and penguin
so soft to the touch
kiss your grandchildren goodnight
and tell them you’re sorry
it’s a bit hotter
and used to be greener
but you drank all the oil
burned a hole in the sky
followed the money
killed the planet
and left no future
not even enough
to forgive your sins

 

I have infinite gratitude to the fabulous Sarah White and my classmates who nurtured the imagery, passion, pleasure, emotion, insight and the gift of a lifetime I found  in poetry.

What is it with old ladies and babies?

by Elaine Greene Weisburg

My phone doesn’t text and I’m still tablet-free,
On the bus I’m just riding and looking around.
I study the thumbers engrossed in devices,
while hoping a baby soon will be found.
No matter how little, a baby likes eye play–
We gaze at each other as long as we can.
I love little babies so I am contented
if other old ladies stay out of my way.

Elaine Greene Weisburg spent about twenty years each at House & Garden (Conde Nast) and House Beautiful (Hearst) as design reporter and features editor, eventually editing a memoir column and two memoir anthologies.

Three Afternoons at Beach Point

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

Breeze wrinkles the water and one lone
gull sits on the sea wall, seeming
to contemplate the blue pleats below.
Three cormorants rise up and drop down,
their strange shapes, arrows in the sky.
One small sail seems stuck on the horizon
and here I sit, waiting for you.

High tide; bay sloshes lazily against the shore.
I, solitary as the distant passing sailboat…
My calls unanswered.
A man kayaks by, sliding along like a dish
on a table top,
and here I sit, waiting for the world.

Today a wild wind smashes steely waves
against the shore.
Alone on the deck I am attacked by air,
ripping at my hat, yanking at my hair.
The small flags shimmy; dance a rhumba.
Shake it, shake it, shake it says the bay,
and I sit here waiting for tomorrow.

 

Harriet Sohmers Zwerling iss an ex-expatriate, explorer, educator, experimenter;
author of two books: Notes of a Nude Model and Abroad, an Expatriate’s Diaries.  Also a grandmother, awfully aware of the waning of time.

Vacancies

by Mary R. Smith

 

The Chobe River boatman
takes my hand, steadies me
settling onto the bleached seat.
He navigates the murky waters.

The motor begins to strain
slaps the flat bottomed wooden
boat upriver. I have my
eye out for birds in hiding.

A sweep of dry mud appears
along the river; propeller unwinds
white caps scuttle, we scrape
and drift along the edges.

The bank is scored with holes
at orderly intervals. We wait
in a humid hush. Then ancient
murmurs rustle those vacancies.

Bee-eaters burst from their shadowy
burrows, a frenzy of carmine.
Curved beaks,whorls of wings
tessellate the clouds; tiny feet
alight, resilient on papyrus arcs.

 

“Learning to write poems is a journey – both a struggle and a delight.”

Constellation

by Mary R. Smith

“Thus the name, in its very obscurity is the constellation of truth.”
from “Constellations” by Alexander Garcia Duttmann

If the constellations,
constellatio,
set with stars
are shapes imagined
and named
by Greeks or Arabs
in myths and stories
of archers and twins,
scorpions and goats;
if a discontinuity of stars
perceived in patterns
changes with the vantage point,
unfolds without idea,
waits for an apparition
astray in a stream of stars
separated by light years,
are not as close together
as they seem, illusion thrives.

If astrologers can predict
a life journey with star shapes,
insubstantial reality,
then linguists and philosophers
using the same trope can name
what they can’t name. So.

 

“Learning to write poems is a journey – both a struggle and a delight.”

At Starbucks

by Charles Troob

Near the corner of Doubt and Trust
a dangerous intersection where boys playing stickball
are routinely knocked down by speeding garbagemen
turning left without signaling
I saw a woman on her bicycle texting intimations
of the apocalypse to her broker–
or so I fantasized, from the tense but beatific way
she clutched her iPhone while pedaling.

I was sitting in the Starbucks on Trust.
I’d gone there to ponder
that morning’s disinformation and to digest
the falafel I’d purchased off a truck with
a sticker saying, “We all eat the same food,
so why can’t we get along?”
It sat in my stomach with the over-roasted coffee
answering its own question.

She took a right on Doubt and sped away.
I wanted to run after her
but I had this poem to finish
while my gut settled itself.

Charles Troob wrote these for Sarah White’s poetry group. Occasionally he gets lucky and something good comes out.  Enjoy!