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Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013

Page 9

by Sixfold


  straight-off-the-sea wind.

  and the list read

  Bing Bing Bailey Bailey

  Bing Bing Bailey.

  It always amused my sister and I—

  seven days of warden shift

  in a rhythmic, onomatopoeic

  can’t-help-itself-but-be-a song.

  Bing Bing Bailey Bailey

  Bing Bong Bailey.

  We hurried along the hall

  and sang it to you, giggling,

  at the entrance to Flat 4,

  where you were

  officially sheltered

  from live-alone danger,

  but independent

  with your own front door

  and wardens, on duty,

  at your every red-cord-pulled call.

  Bing Bing Bailey Bailey . . .

  don’t finish it . . .

  leave the song hanging

  in our grandchildhoods

  among the sandcastles.

  Gary Sokolow

  Underworld Goddess

  Our eyes made contact through a slow drizzle

  I bore through her soul, leaned face to face

  Weeks later, other disturbances, broken bird wing,

  The final descending.

  Over past park benches the drunks gather, laugh

  With breath of whiskey,

  One lost in the gutter, the Captain they all call him

  Ass in air, face down.

  It was ten years ago they found me three days endlessly

  Riding the trains,

  Mother lighting her candles believing in small places,

  Her dreams of the crisp uniforms,

  Men under a hot morning sun,

  Mailmen,

  All of us, mailmen, delivering sliver thin notices

  Final foreclosures like razors,

  Petite bottles of French lavender water

  For the lonely,

  The dirty fingers waiting upon bare-breasted women

  To burst through brown paper magazines.

  It was in a book we first discovered the goddess every

  Autumn stolen to the underworld,

  We were children, the family beatings made him

  Crazier than me,

  We dug through piles of dirt, the shards of glass

  In his broken backyard,

  Down and down, we dug through earth toward

  Our goddess,

  Uncovering worms, scared and writhing on late

  October afternoons,

  Pliant worms below, and above us the stone face

  Of a soon to be fading sun.

  late evening fumes

  at 4 am, it was treasure hunt, channel 9

  3 jack in the boxes, 3 crazy contestants,

  one winner, who got to pick the prize

  one box to choose out of fifty, sixty

  boxes of various shapes, sizes, colors, and bows

  and that was the show, the remaining time

  left to the torture of contestants, the chosen box’s

  contents slowly revealed, and for the record

  I don’t remember how I came upon the magic

  of the nail polish,

  bottles snuck from piles of dirty clothes and

  missing homework of my sister’s room

  smashed into paper bags

  saturation

  covered with plastic bag

  maximum inhalation

  every night through high school

  and I was always the straight kid

  never drank

  never smoked

  glue sniffer

  most antisocial form of user known, they say

  notch above pedophiles

  and those nights lit with the glow of the tubes

  inside the old black & white tvs as I watched

  the odd couple, mary tyler moore, the saint,

  sleep not so much coming as the haze descending

  to awaken 4 am the jack straight out the box.

  Any Monday Morning

  Often it is how it all begins

  the coldest day of the year

  a man on 9th avenue walking

  in nothing but a sweater,

  arm around a basketball,

  smoke from a cigarette,

  and how by nightfall

  the newest associate of a law firm

  will admire herself in a bar mirror,

  enjoy the buzz of happiness

  co-workers buying the next round,

  and how by morning the soldiers in full gear,

  rifles poised, will have hit the beach,

  crash like waves, like kindergartners pushing

  and shoving their way from schoolyard

  into school, insects climbing screens,

  and how it may be 1987,

  the man in the tightfitting uniform testifies

  for the twenty-third day in a row how

  incapable we are of comprehending

  the deals made, the true costs of our comforts,

  so the arms are sold, our bastard propped up

  for one more rigged election.

  the whitecaps violent,

  the insects hit windshields,

  beyond distant hills corporations have grown

  enormous, force trees out of the landscape,

  windblown seeds with nowhere to land,

  the soldiers inch toward targets,

  the children move beyond rainbows,

  push against something dark and unknowable,

  and this the way any Monday morning goes,

  the man on Ninth Avenue with the basketball

  fleeing his girlfriend’s apartment

  with whatever he could find,

  the cold seeping through his sweater,

  and smokeless by his side the last cigarette.

  Elegy

  Unknown hard

  bop jazz

  soprano

  sax

  runs

  feel

  to loose

  to be

  Coltrane

  on the

  radio

  a

  long day’s

  desk job’s

  end

  not any life

  a life more

  fragile

  than

  ever

  my heart

  and time

  past, time

  wasted

  and time

  spinning

  and

  at the

  center

  a man

  in

  the

  ground

  is

  truth

  no

  other

  way

  but

  shovels

  of tears

  and

  in the

  moment

  a

  bird

  moved

  by

  the

  pretty

  day

  to

  sing

  to the

  shovel’s

  rhythm

  to the

  dirt’s

  falling

  the pine coffin

  innocence

  was ours

  was

  everything

  yet

  only words

  like stones

  as

  a

  man

  in

  the

  ground

  whom

  you

  love

  is

  truth

  Michal Mechlovitz

  The Early

  Wind, sharp, dis-

            tilled, washrag gray, hissing

       at the shutters, a big

                      body with a small

  voice, its over-

               tones smashing the early buds, the
ir cracked

       faces, their violent,

            lolling needles for

                      tongues puncture

  December. False

            intimacy, the chill

                 pushes their wide mouths open

            and brittle. There was

                                a night when the heat

            was broken and the windows

       stuck- we couldn’t

                      close them, and you

                    brought me cold blossoms

       that we kept in the bedroom, cold

                      blossoms that we kept in the bedroom.

  Lumen

  She wore a whisper

  of a dress

  an old pattern, but

  transparent

  like a cerebral daydream

  of modesty

  and when I opened

  the shutter

  of the bedroom in which

  she danced

  the exposure

  of her legs

  was the ambient light, and

  my camera

  the buffer

  between us

  as she held

  spilling threads

  in her thumbnails

  the details

  were phantoms

  of ugliness between the non

  living frames until

  the hem

  of her skirts

  became wet

  with acid

  and in lavender

  pixels she fell

  away

  “You are

  really beautiful . . .

  Do you think

  you’re really beautiful?”

  Horrible Aubade

  With cupped hands

  you search behind my collarbone,

  dipping a crackling song under

  the ladder of ribcage.

  I come three times this way.

  Undraped, I shuffle

  off my pigment. The cut

  shine that swabs my smile

  with disinfectant,

  I have no augmentation now

  for laughter, no

  aloe to chew

  on for it’s healing

  properties, and we fold

  into a night slice.

  We use specialized shadows of our voices.

  There is a hum about this skin

  lit room deeper than my radio wires

  are used to picking up.

  Daemons of melodies singe the walls

  at the crooked corners,

                         floor to ceiling.

                 It is the alcohol

  swab, the antiseptic, time

  capsule of pain, that we dig up

  in stale backyards

  I wake before you,

  count my pigments, shuffle

  them again

  and fold the clothes from off the floor.

  Mi querido, I will sing you to sleep each night

  Hidden behind your negative space,

  what do you find in her glowing hand?

  A tone of white not from this century and

  a foreign crease in the paper of his skyscape

  What do you find in her glowing hand

  that cradled all her misplaced children?

  A foreign crease in the paper of his skyscape

  folded over by wind, and a bottle of tequila

  And what was the cradle for those misplaced children?

  Those tiresome winged ones that cried and knew no comfort?

  The folds in the wind and tequila sighed lullabies

  that invoked nightmares worse than not sleeping at all

  And those tired monsters never did learn comfort

  but knew the geometry of a perfect sized grave

  and how to measure the weight of a nightmare too heavy

  before any of those winged ones learned to sing

  The geometry of a perfect sized grave is

  a tone of white not from this century and

  before those droopy eyed winged ones learned to sing

  they were hidden behind your negative space

  Quick to Dark

                                The thinnest

                                               line is the blood

                 line and I taste

                                            it on your tongue.

       Darkness is in the repetition

                      of paint

                                       strokes, in seagulls

                            scraping

                                 the top

                                             of Brooklyn, with their crying, empty

       gullets, I could

            

                    blacken your eyes with

                        my hair, I could

                                                                        lap up

                                                               the ocean really

                                             quickly. I’m

       sorry I keep swiping at your eyes. The tapping noise

                                                         was nothing, just

                                                                                   a child

                                                    on the beach beating two bones

            together. I’d dispute it

       if you wanted, see, I       love you          and I’m desperate

                                                          to know

                                                             where your lines break.

  Henry Graziano

  Last Apple

  Dawn lures her each morning

  where she stands barefoot

  on the splintered deck.

  Steaming cup warming

  her hands. A brown fleece

  blanket wrapped about her when the chill

  demands. She watches

  southern tree line of box elders and mulberries

  bird sewn in summer’s end

  along the unused track of the

  old county lane.

  Grown to eat the sun. Deer

  track from the west

  to mill about the base of the

  crab apple tree apart from and older

  than the tree line,

  trunk leaning north. For this season

  out of the reach of the scrub tree

  shade. Almost horizontal

  base for the upward reaching boughs

  growing back to the light.

  In spring, she smiles at the does balancing on hindquarters

  reaching up for the flowers

  or later tiny green bulbs,

  front hooves running

  in t
he air. Fawns

  bounding between sun and shade.

  Far from the starving of winter

  Now, one boney limb stabs back north in October’s wind,

  an odd compass needle bobbing beyond the shade.

  Bits of twigs standing out.

  Static arm hair.

  Leaves long fallen

  from beneath the final fruit,

  a dull maroon dab

  absent this morning her waiting ends.

  Before the groundhog begins

  its daily search for windfall and the

  deer return this evening,

  she hurries inside for her long stored cache

  and throws several apples under

  the tree to keep herself from starving.

  Behind the Winds

  November wind spins the tire swing from the unmoving firth of an oak branch. Grass has overgrown the gravel drive of the abandoned house. Covering the doors and windows on the lower floors, silvered plywood has begun warping. Deeper than the whispering of tall grass in the wind, the swing rope eats away the bark of the limb.

  Outside Altoona, eastbound I-80, gouges in the snow lead from the shoulder to the crumpled road sign—Iowa City 98 miles. Yellow plastic emergency tape secures the cab, already blown over with snow. The driver would have had to climb out of his door like a submariner must emerge from a conning tower.

  Along the bike trail at 7 am. A rabbit warms itself in the new sun edging into the opening of hedge branches. Night frost evaporating from its coat.

  Sunset on the patio of Caribou overlooking the UHAUL sign—the light for ‘A’ has burned out.

  In his garden, an old man turns his soil. Jamming a boot to the edge of the garden fork. Across one row and back, blackening the earth. Remnants of pepper plants, hoed and buried. Chopped tomato vines turned into the widening plot. He cannot dig deep enough. The earth does not feel the scar.

  Sunday morning, a young woman enters the door of the coffee shop at 7 am. She wipes at her eyes smearing the muddied mascara. Patterned flats grind sidewalk salt into tile as she approaches the counter, orders coffee, pulls some bills from her coat pocket. She props her chin on the cup, warming her hands. Outside against the piles of snow, cars line up in the drive-thru, stop, and drive on.

 

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