John Sandoval

(…is the cup equal to the broth
or is the broth forever poison
to whatever pretends to contain it…)

at twilight, the play of children is heard
their voices soon to fade
then to bed and dream, to scheme and construct
the scratched logic of prayer in the dark
of fingers by instinct counted
the prayer void of light
the taste of dusk ever arriving and departing
every word murmured precious as just found pennies
all thought an angel’s tender legal
upon that sidewalk, in the dark, I stand considering:
a topography by children
a blue pink white hopscotch chalk destination
beneath a summer night’s dusty elms

(is the cup equal to the broth
or is the broth forever poison
to whatever pretends to contain it…)

Howie Good

1
Pilots called them Flying Coffins. He scanned the dingy sky. The war had just started. Tourists listened in a daze to a cunning old woman who had outlived all her children.

2
His heart started going like an antiaircraft gun, a spy caught leaving coded messages. Dusk seemed to fall by 2 p.m. Reporters interviewed mothers with dead children in their arms. The wind from the heights acquired a touch of red. Look out the window, the caller said, summer is over.

3
The purpose of night and rain eluded him. Taxis ran on charcoal gas. The commissar’s highway was open in only one direction. A wino, after begging some change, asked what time was sunset. He shook his head. The road signs were blackened and twisted and not in a language he could understand.

Leonard Gontarek

My father takes me out of school early.
I’m 9. Mother is dead.
He lets me drive.

Leonard Gontarek

Mouthing the wind that falls
into the trees and behind the trees.
So good to be home.
Clouds break up like small planes. The cardinals and bluebirds at home.

My feet up on God’s coffee table,
setting down my drink without a cocktail napkin.
What Gontarek would do.
Grandmother in her wedding gown, softly: You are such an angel.

Moths going for the light like a dessert table.

KJ Hays

The man on the moon
used the 9-12 seconds
of oxygen nestled in
his blood for dancing
after the lifeline that
kept him tethered to
our precious capsule
dissolved in the void.

With the pulse melody ceasing
in the man’s body, we gazed out
into the dark atmospheric hush
to watch his convulsions please
our hypothesis about what kinds
of music one might hear up here.

We may need needles in space.

Scott Hightower

The figure standing and raising a sword
between Babylon and the return

to Jerusalem was St. Michael,
protector of Abraham’s people;

Justice; Michael, field commander
of the army of “the one true God.”

*

In 1909, New York City
commissioned Frederick MacMonnies,

one of America’s most prominent
sculptors, to design a fountain

for the entry park of City Hall.
A monumental statue

was to rise heroically from
the center of a great stone basin.

It was to be the grandest ever
sculpted by an American;

to be carved from the largest
single block of marble hewn

since the days of Michaelangelo.
Many were disappointed

when CIVIC VIRTUE victoriously
rising over corruption actually

emerged as a stocky, naked
man with a sword cocked

over one of his marble shoulders.
He appears to have extricated

himself from the archaic clutches
of two wily sirens. Granted

venereal disease is a historic
urban hygiene issue. In 1941,

the much maligned monument
––so carefully carved

by the Piccirilli Brothers
(Feirrucio, Attilio, Furio,

Orazio, Masanielo, and Getulio)
of the Bronx––was banished

to Kew Gardens, Queens.
Recently, there have been

heated arguments as to whether
or not the neglected

monument should be lifted
from its odd destiny of disrepair.

Scott Hightower

It is the morning of May 8th;
Madame Lavoisier has just been
orphaned. Within a few more minutes
she, likewise, will be widowed;

the guillotine, oddly taking the name
of a man who did not invent it.

May 8th, thus invests itself,
not in the talent of one
of Jacques-Louis David’s
death warrants,
but in one set of his details,
which, today, beyond heroic,
feels meaningful and human:

a full white dress, a soft, luminous mass,
a cascade of curls, the elegant pale blue
bow and sash, and the oddly
prophetic red velvet table cloth.
The felicity of the shoe buckle and—
like a fine glass instrument in
a laboratory––the black silk stocking
covering Lavoisier’s extended leg
take on a luster from hues around them.

With a quill scratch,
Aristotle’s essences give way
to the emerging periodic table.

An example of what to do
with knowledge
if, indeed, it is the stuff
that actually makes us human.

In the next five years, the orderly
radiance will dissimulate
into the cruel fragrance of ideals!

The noble privilege of cataloging observations
will succumb to the emerging urgency
of the next elemental question,
“Who bears witness to the shimmering
unreason of this most deplorable single casualty?”

“Never forget; never forgive,” the dark
precision of the glinting tooth of class
and counter-class spell bounds.
The familiar weapon once used
for attack drops. “There
is no defense.”

Where is the beauty that hallowed
Death has erased so quickly
with the tip of his wing?

Scott Hightower

(Paved Paradise, John Kelly, 2009)

The first television program put
into re-runs was “The Lone Ranger.”
-a Snapple bottle top

A frame. Two keyboards, a bass,
a dulcimer, and five guitars
set the stage for “Dagmar Onassis.”
Kiss. Kiss. What? Has it been
sixteen years? What does
it matter that the roses upstage
on the grand piano are red?

If you have been asked
to wear the dream,
what difference does it matter
if the dress is white or blue
and the shoes shine red? We park
the day’s carousel
and heed whatever
falls out and captivates.

With ghosts—Damia? Hutch?
Jacques Brel? Judy
Garland?––shimmering
somewhere nearby–the evening
nears its end: John Kelly’s guitars
and Joni Mitchell’s plaintive
melodies about longing, sex,
our Frankenstein technologies,
science’s tunnel vision.
Tunnel vision.

The wingless moon floats
beyond the encapsulating
spotlight, and each one
in the theater must find
each’s own way home.

Michelle Lin

They are beginning to spot
like over-ripened fruit
She holds them over her cup,
folding in the smoke like fine linen

With their fingers splayed,
they are lotus flowers,
pale white and reaching over
sweating kitchen pots
for a napkin

Sometimes at night,
I watch her sort laundry by the bed,
her hands like silver fish darting
in and under waves of clothes

Peter Waldor

If one runs out
of food up here
a blue flower
can be eaten for weeks,
but another blue flower is deadly.
There is a difference
between them
I have forgotten.