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Alysse Kathleen McCanna
Pentimento
& other poems
Peter Nash
Shooting Star
& other poems
Katherine Smith
House of Cards
& other poems
David Sloan
On the Rocks
& other poems
Alexandra Smyth
Exoskeleton Blues
& other poems
John Glowney
The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds
& other poems
Andrea Jurjević O’Rourke
It Was a Large Wardrobe...
& other poems
Lisa DeSiro
Babel Tree
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Reptiles
& other poems
Michael Berkowitz
As regards the tattoo on your wrist
& other poems
Michael Brokos
Landscape without Rest
& other poems
Michael H. Lythgoe
Orpheus In Asheville
& other poems
John Wentworth
morning people
& other poems
Christopher Jelley
Double Exposure
& other poems
Catherine Dierker
dinner party
& other poems
William Doreski
Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin
& other poems
Robert Barasch
Loons
& other poems
Rande Mack
bear
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Red Bird
& other poems
Anne Graue
Sky
& other poems
Mariah Blankenship
Tub Restoration
& other poems
Paul R. Davis
Landscape
& other poems
Philip Jackey
Garage drinking after 1989
& other poems
Karen Hoy
A Naturalist in New York
& other poems
Gary Sokolow
Underworld Goddess
& other poems
Michal Mechlovitz
The Early
& other poems
Henry Graziano
Last Apple
& other poems
Stephanie L. Harper
Unvoiced
& other poems
Roger Desy
anhinga
& other poems
R. G. Evans
Hangoverman
& other poems
Frederick L. Shiels
Driving Past the Oliver House
& other poems
Richard Sime
Berry Eater
& other poems
Jennifer Popoli
Generations in a wine dark sea
& other poems
Evolve? We’ll evolve when we want to. We’re
reptiles—we decide. No mother love, no
promises—that’s the rule. Don’t get too near,
don’t think too hard, don’t think, don’t think we owe
you anything, cause we don’t. Where were you
when we hatched? God, you should have seen our shells,
one perfect world piled on another, blue
shells, green—it’s true: we made our way. To hell
with your nipples, your kindergartens, your
wedding bells, your rings—oh, we’ll show you rings.
We’ll show you claws—remember those? The more
you hurt, the more we—nothing. Go ahead, sing—
we don’t do music, don’t do memories—
why, when we’ll outlast you? We don’t do fair/
unfair. And we don’t do thermostasis.
Go ahead, cry—we’re reptiles, we don’t care.
Be admonished: of making many books there is no end.
—Ecclesiastes 12:12
For making books, you need to have a certain
appetite, a certain longing, you
need to look, to be quietly alert,
not quite earthbound. It helps to have a few
ideas, to be sure, and to know the rules,
exceptions to the rules, movement of tides.
So many books! But then, so many fools
adrift without them, mapless. Darkness hides
from light, muddle fights with meaning,
illness sleeps with ignorance—it was
ever thus, and so little time between
reckonings, just love and books to shield us
from the rough, mindless elements as we
set out for adventures on sun-drenched seas.
for Fannie Safier
Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. . . . In Syriac, the word hur is a feminine plural adjective meaning white, with the word “raisin” understood implicitly . . . not unsullied maidens or houris.
—Ibn Warraq, The Guardian, January 11, 2002
The maître d’ is sharply groomed, in tie
and tails, he greets you warmly, Welcome, sir!
We’ve been expecting you! And as you eye
the virgins at the bar, selecting, certain
of your righteous consequence, a waiter
approaches with a bright, blinding smile,
and on his fingertips, elaborately
wrought, a silver tray with something piled
beneath a silken napkin. Sir! he says,
plucking off the silk, Before we begin,
your seventy-two raisins! Let us praise
Him! With that, he vanishes in a thin
blue wisp of smoke. The virgins are gone. You
invoke your god. A low voice answers, Who?
It’s just these glasses, officer, I swear—
they’re progressives and I’m still getting used
to peering through this tube of startling clarity
amidst a blur of color—blues
like this undersea mountaintop, these reds
like bloody marys, these greens like Vermont,
like forests suddenly summer, like dead
presidents, like love—out here where we want
to be beautiful, here where it’s just me,
you, and the universe, a voice to say
that all is well, everything’s fine, you’re free
to go now, ma’am—you can be on your way.
I always stopped there, the Madonna Inn—
that pink and copper shrine on the way down
the missionary coast, along the thin
thread of mother church’s outpost towns—
San Francisco, San José, Santa Clara—
rosary beads a day’s walk from one
to the next, or now an hour by car
but still with sacramental purpose. None
of that franchise crap for me. I pulled off
the freeway, San Luís Obispo, hungry
for hot cherry pie and hot black coffee,
body and blood for a soul wrung
out and wasted. Then that one time I spotted
those kids—a boy at the men’s room door,
poised to push, his eyes fixed on a girl not
quite his age, maybe a bit older, or
a little further along in the game,
obviously the one in charge, standing there
at the women’s, stock still until she aimed
her eyes at his and whispered: Go. I dare
you. With that they were lost for good behind
those doors—or for better or for worse, who
the hell knows? I paid up and continued my
mission to Santa Bárbara—to you.
for Ellen R.
Born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, Mike Fleming set out on a long, winding path: undergraduate work at Princeton, teaching English in refugee camps in Thailand, a graduate degree from Oxford, teaching high-school mathematics in Swaziland, work as a carpenter, hospice volunteer, and college composition teacher in California, living as a writer and editor in New York, New Hampshire, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. You can see more of Fleming’s work at www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws