2008 Di-vêrsé-city Anthology

t-city
di-vOrse
2008
Anthology
of the
Austin International
Poetry Festival
Edited by
Anne McCrady
Co-edited by
Barbara Youngblood Carr
& Susan Stockton
Cover Photography by Benedict Young Kim
Cover Design by Glynn Monroe Irby
di-vArse'-city
Copyright @ 2008 by Austin Poets Intemational, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form
or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording
or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission of
Austin Poets International and the included writers.
Austin Poets International
2007 -2008 Board of Directors
Deborah Akers, Barbara Youngblood Carr, Lynn Brandstetter,
Ashley Kim, Cara Salling, Susan Stockton
Advisory members:
Del Cain, Natasha Marin and Agnes Meadows
Lifetime Advisory Council:
Peggy Zuleika Lynch, Byron Kocen, John Bcrry
Cover Photography by Bcnedict Young Kim
Cover designed by Glynn Monroe Irby
ISBN : 978-0-97 2601 7 -4-0
This project is funded and supported in part
by the City of Austin through the CulturalArts Division
and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts
and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts,
which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
Special thanks to AIPF supporters, members and volunteers
and to the poets who appear here
as well a.s those who participate in the festival.
Printcd in the United States of America
by Morgan Printing, Austin, Texas
AIPF Contact Information:
P. O. Box 41224
Austin, TX78704
[email protected]
Table of Contents
Night Stain
McMahon
Ken Fontenot
Karla K. Morton
Carolyn Luke Reding
Joyce Gullickson
Glynn Monroe Irby
Mary Smith Pritchard
Tony Zurlo
Linda Buckmaster
Barry Brummett
Agnes Meadows
20
Spanish Plums
Katherine Durham Oldmixon
2l
Opening a Drawer
Robert Elzy
The Fall of Words
One for Rita
A
Rare Man
How to Win the Pulitzer
Dead Fish
White and Grey Dominiques
Leaving Amarillo
Grandmother's Blue Eyes
Suncay in Yelapa
Blown Away
Bob (Mud)
breasts
Cogswell
Elizabeth Kropf
Can You See Me? I Am!
Kimberleigh
Confession
Dusk at Water's Edge
The Leaving
dizzy
Thompson
Wynne
Mark Ford
Lynn Williams
Judith Austin Mills
Robert
9
10
II
12
13
14
15
16
l8
19
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
In the Kitchen Thinking
of Sylvia Plath
Maria R. Palacios
Chapultepec Park: September 25, 1968 Dede Fox
30
32
one-dog night
Laura Telford
33
The Common House Spider
Diane McGurren
34
Love's Forge
Dr. Charles A. Stone
35
Tribute
Michael Guinn
36
Agave
M. Connell
37
The Mudslingers
John Milkereit
38
Through a Glass, Brightly
Nancy Kenney Connolly
39
West Texas Occasion
David Bart
40
Our Son the Doctor
Mary-Agnes Taylor
4l
The Zilker Kite Festival
Mary L. King
42
The Plow
Dillon McKinsey
44
Surfacing
Maryke Cramerus
45
Another Chance
Adamarie Fuller
46
Heat Wave
Margo Davis
47
Wordless
Kateryna Bochenkova
48
Rabbit's Clothing
Maria-Cristina Caputo
49
J. Todd Hawkins
50
Nancy Fierstien
52
Apogee
Marcelle Kasprowicz
54
Fingerprinting the Stars
Stephan Baley
55
Hospital Music
Graham Buchan
56
Remembering to Sing
Jack C. Ritter
57
Hoops of Steel
Frank Pool
58
Lon Morris Yearbook
Mary Riley
60
Genius Plays with a Crippled Hand
Herman Nelson
62
Alien Bar Cruiser
Donna Marie Miller
63
Woman of God
Cynthia Gail Manor
64
If There Be Trolls
JoMazzu
66
A Late Apology
Del Cain
67
Radiation on a Rainy Day
Angela Patterson
68
Excerpt from the Poet's Guide
to Metallurgy
One Mother's Clear Message
to Congress
Gardening in a Mine Field
Neil Meili
69
The Garnett Translation
David Meischen
70
Immediacy
Laura Stevenson
7l
Ink
Michele Traylor Burford
72
Boats at Sausalito
Christine
Ostraca
Cindy Huyser
76
Mosaic Paradise
Jazz Jaeschke
77
Lara Pena
78
appled hours
Ric Williams
80
In Memory of Byron Scott
Ken Jones
8l
Wendi White
82
Lima
Ximena Leon
84
Dismantling the Maniage
Ralph Hausser
86
Earl Anderson
87
Everyone Carries a Deathbed
Eran Tzelgov
88
Hearth
Bernard Mann
89
Constant Companion
Anne Schneider
90
Migration
Scott Wiggerman
92
Stillness Snatched
Brenda Nettles Riojas
93
Intensive Care
Joe Barnes
94
War Letters
Christa Pandey
96
Potato
Ren6e Rossi
98
Harvest
Carolyn Adams
99
Overflow
Debra Winegarten
100
Poetry
John Row
101
Gilbet
74
Cerros Con Torres
en Monterrey, Mexico
La
Milpa
After the Charge
of the Light Brigade
Editorial
& Artist
Bios
102
Preface
For me, poetry anthologies offer a chance to simultaneously hear
the music of dozens of individual voices. This year's AIPF
collection is that and more-an inspiring and entertaining
international concert of highs and lows, shouts and whispers, jazz
and gospel.
Subjects are as wide-ranging as perspectives. There are creative
examinations of cultural and social issues. There are personal
reflections on relationships, rites of passage, health, aging and
travel, with language deepened by allusions to art, to nature and to
faith. Some of the included poets consider big picture topics like
war and justice, while others call us to notice the tiny details of our
busy days. Using an intensely personal lens, still other poems look
into kitchens and bedrooms and back doors as they invite us to
attend memorials to presidents, musicians, writers, friends, parents
and lovers.
Best of all, these poets show us the beauty inherent in our world.
We see how even routine encounters can be spiritual experiences
and how death can be the most beautiful moment of all. That said,
these poems, like all good poetry, avoid reducing life to simple
declarations. Instead, the poets offer us vivid images that lead us to
look close, to reconsider, to question and to explore.
The poems that appear here are just a sampling of the many fine
ones submitted. I appreciate the chance to have read them all, and
look forward to meeting the authors. When I began my work as
I
editor, I saw my role as the director of a symphony of poets singing
out their dreams, desires, values, insights, experiences, metaphors
and life rhythms. That is exactly what I hope readers will find here.
It has been a pleasure to lead this delightful concert and to
occasionally sing along!
Anne McCrady
Editor,2008
The Fall Of Words
I spoke a poem
to a field
of silent grasses.
It whispered
left to right,
flittering colourfully,
like a falling autumn leaf
and landed softly
on a thousand other
dry leaves of words.
Slowly curling,
it melded
into amulch
of a death of colour,
relentless
in the hope of cultivating
a green shoot.
Bob (Mud) McMahon
Brisbane, Australia
One for Rita
I'm not going to set this poem in any particular
milieu. Rather it could be anywhere or possibly
everlnvhere. It is a time when mothers tend
to their children, foxes heave great sighs on the run,
and passion envelops the distance spring brings along.
You are perhaps ten or twenty. Your legs ache. You
possess fleeting memories of carnivals gone too soon.
It is either February or December, neither having
mattered much. A car waits in your driveway day
and night. Several giants have been calling a name
you barely recognize as your own. Nor is modesty
one of your virtues. The President is speaking.
He is talking about responsibility, which you believe
you have much of. He apologizes perfunctorily. The world,
he says, belongs to . . You know the rest already.
Once you rode horses. They died, however, in your dreams.
Once the sky was blue, but now there is no name you
can think of to fit what color the sky is. Suddenly
you begin to walk backwards. A child trips and falls.
No matter how hard you try, you can't catch her in mid-air.
And what is the significance of grace? You believe it
accounts for everything that can't be explained in
terms ofjust love. The world is bleak. The world is
glorious. You go on pursuing drowning men in every city.
You go on filling your jar of hope with yet more hope.
Ken Fontenot
Austin, Texas
10
A Rare Man
It took a rare man with an old soul.
to
see her
beauty;
a man whose heart
wandered out in the wildsbeyond the harsh, artificial glare of city
where the true colour of midnight
lights-
could still be seen...
and recognized
in her eyes...
it
A man who held the old ways
in the blood of his veins;
who could feel eternity
transcending her Romanesque curyes...
A man who communed with the Earth;
a man who, like the crickets,
could still hear the sweet song
that swept between her bare thighs
when she walked...
Karla IC Morton
Denton, Texas
ll
How to Win the Pulitzer
after 'From Uncertain to Blue' by Keith Carter
with an introduction bv Horton Foote
Any excuse to bounce
in grandfather's Model-T
unfolds into adventure
for young Foote.
From time to time,
he joins his grandparents
for the trip from Wharton
to East Columbia,
the ancestral domain.
The boy counts
forty miles
ofunpaved washboards,
winding and slicing
through cotton fields
and cattle pastures.
Car and passenger rattle
across the San Bernard
and Brazos bridges.
Grown-ups provide
bountiful conversation
of family intrigue and
prosperity, or the lack of it
a
as they cross county lines.
Horton listens and grasps
every nuance,
plots local-color drama
into sensations
for stage and screen.
Carolyn Luke Reding
Austin. Texas
t2
Dead Fish
I look into her eyes
search for signs ofrecognition.
Cataract cloudy, their depths
remind me of the Texas gulf,
a mixture of marshland
and brackish water mired
with an oily residue.
Her confused
gaze
mirrors
the ever widening impact
of starvation,
another product of neglect.
Hope has surrendered
to the red tide of summer.
Oxygen starved brain cells
flounder on the sands of memory.
I feel death's finger scratching
her arm. I reach out.
Her eyes gazeback,
scaly and cold.
Joyce Gullickson
Burnet, Texas
13
\ilhite and Grey Dominiques
from myfather's farm stories
When night comes, some chickens
go to the woodhouse, others fly
to branches ofthe barnyard apple tree.
Now and then after midnight,
the sly weasel with razor teeth,
quiet on the balls of his feet,
sneaks up along the creek,
slips under the hawthom hedge,
and climbs the bountiful chicken tree,
takes his pick among resting hens.
Every morning when leaves
are wet with dew and I start
my long walk to the schoolroom,
I look for blood feathers
in the clover bed.
Glynn Monroe Irby
Clute, Texas
t4
Leaving Amarillo
The rim of the world is red
muting into yellow
then the convexity of blue;
below day's line of embers
a cauldron filling
with night's deep gloom;
we rise above that inscrutability,
the plane's wingtip light
the first star.
Mary Smith Pritchard
Midlothian, Texas
t5
Grandmother's Blue Eyes
Grandmother's eyes mirrored the sea
and sky along Italy's Adriatic coast,
clues of migrations and legends past.
I still see her tiny body bowed, sentenced
to a wooden rocking chair, the crooked angles
of her fragile fingers reaching for my hand.
Instead of conversations,
I imagined songs
in her rhythmic language. My mind's eye
pictured the stage of Puccini and Verdi.
tight into a pony tail,
and I search for clues to all the stories buried
deep into the wrinkles of her ancient face.
I
see her gray hair pulled
Family gatherings were like Venetian carnivals,
with animated quanels about horseshoe scores,
the air heavy with oregano, garlic, and provolone.
Grandmother presided from her rocking chair,
fussing over four generations of paisano,
with occasional glances at the heavens.
Uncles, aunts, and cousins grazed till midnight
from boundless supplies of antipasto, sauces,
sausages, pastas, and chilled Chianti and beer.
For American-bred boys like me reunions
were exotic and exhilarating. But I never
grasped grandmother's old country culture.
Today I feel incomplete for my ignorance,
unable to read from Grandmother's eyes
secrets about her deepest dreams.
l6
My imagination can only fantasize why
in centuries past grandmother's ancestors
fled their homes and migrated into Italy's hills.
The Americanized Italian I learned as a boy
failed me during her lifetime. But she did
leave me with one legacy: her blue eyes.
Tony Zurlo
Arlington, Texas
t7
Suncay in Yelapa
I watched a black dog
try to catch minnows in the shallow
jungle river. A big brown
with the head of a lion walked
into the middle, drank, padded
to the other side and laid down
Sphinx-like, his snout pointed
at the afternoon sun sliding
behind the greens. They told me to step off
the path and stand in the casa doorway
while they moved cows from one tiny
pasture to another. I waited with the wife until
they finally came down shouting and waving sticks,
but still one headed out for the river and the other side.
crashing through a clothes pan
piled with laundry. The cow appeared later, lassoed
by a fisherman cowboy and quietly led
downstream. I walked to the cafe by the waterfall
for fresh orange juice and a swim. They were out
of oranges, but the water was as delicioso as salvation.
Linda Buckmaster
Belfast, Maine
18
Blown Away
When I go I will go in the fall of the year,
my Octoberness scattered in wind,
my memories blown like the nuts from a tree
to be secreted down in the ground.
When I go I will go in the wind from the North
while my friends shut their cottage doors tight.
I will swirl and I'll twirl in a tease of a sound
that you'll hear as the music of night.
I'll run out of myself like a ribbon unspooled,
taking flight with dry leaves from the lawn,
and we'll slalom on air past the face of the moon,
rolling out like the line of a song.
All my carefully husbanded pollen will blow
from my boughs as I break in the wind,
I'll dissolve in the flesh of the welcoming trees
where come May I'll begin once again.
My chaff will be stripped and swirled there and here
when the shadows show frost coming soon.
October's the most honest time of the year,
for it shows what we pay to get June.
Barry Brummett
Austin, Texas
19
Night Stain
Inspired by Michaelangelo's 'Study of Shoulders' - 1524
Ochre lines detail a tether of shoulders,
Dog "Day" for the Medici Chapel,
A knotted charcoal tribute of limbs curved across
The crumbling parchment
Signifying his obsession with form,
The endless passage of flesh
Pinpricked by moonlight and madness.
Night waits tight as an indrawn breath,
The sweat rising under his shirt,
Skin currented silently,
Restless anticipation beading his throat,
And a red wine blot illuminates one careless moment.
Entrapped by food and sin and loneliness,
The boy stirs, somnolent in gloom flicker,
Casts his vine dark eyes across the room like a net.
They share a second oflaughter,
Lips poised for entanglement,
This beautiful boy, vacant as a starless sky,
Before the charcoal coils again in linear manifestation,
Glass-bound wine colouring candle's flame.
He watches the plume of breath rising and falling,
The lash of shoulders taking shape on another anticipating page,
Muscles gathering and binding under his hand,
Fingers stained with chalk and impatience.
The glass topples, a tower of desire,
Falling like love onto an empty bed.
One careless moment.
Agnes Meadows
Stratford, Lo, UK
20
Spanish Plums
In Spain some nuns grow tiny golden plums
on a tree that leans over their wrought wall
to shade the sidewalk and passers-by
who wander from one red brick business
or metro stop, maybe Metropolitano,
to another. They cluster amid green
leaves, sheltered from Madrilefio sun,
gathering occasional bees who seek
repast in succulent flesh on surnmer
days in a land where water lies beneath
the surface rock like their smooth skins split
artless in the sisters' garden until
some young women see them waiting and one
reaches to gather breakfast for her friends.
Katherine Durham Oldmixon
Austin, Texas
2t
Opening a Drawer
Compartments separated by wooden slats
contain the envelopes, pencils, and paper clips
which hold my sanity within defined borders.
If I found no box of staples
behind the rubber bands,
I might slip through a sluice of recognition
into the person I would have been
if I weren't sitting in this chair.
A compulsive flow of
semantics
reaches back for decades.
I hang suspended from the thin tip-end
of a row of black letters, life-time long.
All my hope for some future crunches iself
down into a next possible word,
pasted on the end of the string.
The word is today,
followed by the next two right now,
immediately stumbling into right then
without looking back to count.
Each word arrives in a black coat.
When I sit down in a cafe
the last letter tips the black hat
of an accent mark.
In protest against this page,
I could choose next an inappropriate word,
say, gazelle,
to bounce like a teen-ager's mind
offthe paper veldt below,
rise gracefully over the grass again and again
and hurl itself happily
toward a watering hole of imagery.
Perhaps I'll close the drawer instead.
Robert Elzy Cogswell
Austin, Texas
22
breasts
I try to fit her breasts into a bra.
Will
she ever see her helplessness,
grasp this respect so raw,
this absence?
Will
she ever see her helplessness
or mine? Will I enter this unspoken,
this absence,
this nakedness of an old woman
or mine?
Will I enter
this unspoken
honor, these once lovely breasts,
this nakedness of an old woman
heaved onto my chest?
Honor these once lovelv breasts!
This commission
heaved onto my chest
to love without omission.
This commission:
I try to fit her breasts into a bra
to love without omission,
grasp this respect so raw.
Elizabeth Kropf
Austin, Texas
23
Can You See Me? I Am!
Can you see me?
Past the video montage of coochie shorts
Parading 3 ring circus of the media
& halter tops
Tantalized by tight tummies and shategically placed tattoos
Can you see me?
Ample breasts, thick thighs, all curves and cushion to see
Ain't nothing straight up and down, or linear about me
You look past me, through me,
Slightly intrigued by the gleam in my eye,
The lilt of my voice, or my repertoire of intellect
Generally ignoring the flame burning beneath the surface
Blind to the beauty cloaked my imperfection, but perfect
Drawn instead to precise proportions,
Barbie doll banality ignites your interest instead
Force-fed images of spatial perfection,
Bypassing internal detection
Of HEART Connections
Can you see me?
I am the Rose of Sharon, the lily in the valley,
Calling you with aromatic essence.
I am the lioness, surrounded by cubs,
Roaring at the entry to her den
I am aurora borealis, night magic,
Beauty and indescribable phenomenon
I am the sun, moon and stars orbiting
In the celestial dance upon the pages of time
I AM THE NILE, carrying Kings and Queens to their destinies
I am the outer reaches of the universe, folding
Time within to cradle you
The spirit wind beneath your wings
I am blessed by the Mother Earth
And adored by the Father GOD
I am the heart ofyou
Without me, there is no beginning
With me, there is no end
Can you see me? I am!
Strange Fruit, aka Kimberleigh Thompson
Austin. Texas
24
Confession
I am sorry.
I know the way
you like to stand
under the stars
looking up
and crush the tiny moon
between the tips
of thumb and forefinger.
You sleep with that light
in fists at your chest:
an angry ptayer
to your insomniac dark heart.
But I couldn't help
swallowing the sky
tonight, tasting that sweet yolk
until the corners of my mouth
were constellated with light
stubborn enough
to have traveled this far
but too slow to escape
the bright invitation
of my teeth, my longing
lonely tongue.
We both miss vou.
Robert Wynne
Burleson, Texas
25
Dusk at the Water's Edge
The wind-swept cinder sunset
bounces pink and orange and deep turquoise
offthe slick, smooth surface
Dragonflies gold and green and gray
glide along like skaters over a frozen pond
dancing to the love songs of
tree frogs and cicadas and crickets,
their harmony a blend of shrill soprano
Nearby a bullfrog booms a bass accompaniment
nostrils and glazed swiveling eyes showing
just above a lumpy mat of water grass
Sticky pink lightning lashes out
and all but one wing of a neon blue skater
disappears into his unfaltering slimy smile
Mid gulp dragonfly and frog evaporate together
into an explosion of churning foam
and carnival glass green scales
Nervously the water slowly calms herself
into a slightly flawed mirror again
and the sopranos
sing on
alone
Mark Ford
Jacksonville. Texas
26
The Leaving
Her mouth a slack, black hole.
Eyes closed ineffably as clam shells
And face much younger, the years all surrendered.
A ratchet of air going in and out.
"She's Cheyne-Stoking," says the nurse eagerly.
The heart and lungs still fire. Like to say, why not?
What else can we do
After a lifetime of loving so hard?
"It's all that tennis," the nurse says now.
The heart doesn't get how to fail
Still, twelve years after our Dad's did, suddenly,
In the same bed, other side, before his awakening.
Our uncle said it exploded.
A
vase of freesias unsmelled and unseen by her
On the bedside table next to glass and spoon,
Meant to help her remember cinnamon, beauty,
And beside her weeping quietly three daughters-in rising light
gold through east curtains
nervous, teary laughter, say
-through
"Don't you
dare wait for Matt to come."
(The oldest son, gone home to miss this
The final fall.)
"lt's all right Mom. Go on-we love you."
Now heavy as boulders I, the oldest, lie down
By this warrn, still, small weight and caress
Her fond skin-like rose petals wilted
In the pressing stink of death.
Till herbreathing slows. . . and slows. . . . and. . . . .
They all cry and leave, and I
Turn her white hip, the flesh falling away,
To put on her warrn blue plaid pajama bottoms
And see a liule brown stain,
The last of her leaving.
Lynn Williams
Martindale, Texas
27
duzy
when you snap your fingers
i will remember nothing
except that august morning
at auntie's farm
when i stood on the dirt road
in the neonatal sun
calling and clapping
as i was asked not to do
for the neighbor's punk dog
who came at a feverish gallop
and just as had just been
expressly forbidden
drove then cornered nervous sheep
in her red ohio barn
i will remember nothing
except the three-legged tomcat
ten thousand kittens
fluttering chickens in the pungent coop
the sprawling unfenced cornfed yard
the city girl thrill
of imprisoning fireflies
fretfu I train-whistle sleeping
to the creaking of a pitched roof
the muffled call of bingo numbers
down an embankment of odd narrow stairs
where i stole upon dressing first
at earliest light
seeking the cheerful kitchen
and finding her alone smiling
looking down at me
in my expectancy
with moist and ancient
eyes
great auntie ernestine
who had no babes ofher own
but a minimized childhood
best forgotten
28
visiting with equal wonder
habitat of rambunctious beauty
and dizty spinning joy
that she hadnever known
a
Judtth Austln Mills
Pflugerville, Texa$
29
In The Kitchen Thinking Of Sylvia Plath
I think of you sometimes when I'm in the kitchen
ofthe house has gone to sleep.
That's when words haunt me.
Kitchen tile comes to life. Cabinets flap their one winged flap.
Open. Close. Flip. Flap. They talk
the way things talk to us poets when we wonder about life and death.
and the rest
I don't know what your kitchen was like or what things it said to you
when you decided to no longer hear its voice.
You got tired of cabinets and flapping wings
that never learned to fly and tired of the cold tile
that kissed your bare feet with the same coldness of death
your body left on your kitchen floor.
I think of you sometimes when I'm alone
and poems cook on the stove. They cook slowly
while dishes talk in the sink the usual clickity-clatter,
the sound of plates and silverware
gossiping about the intimate secrets of our mouths.
The kitchen talks lately. It talks about you.
It wonders what sorrows, what darkness
you lived in those last moments when poems brewed on your stove
until they burned
and you inhaled the fumes of incinerated words,
words that died along with you
one day in your kitchen.
My kitchen doesn't know your darkness for even when in darkness,
I see light. I seek light. My conversations and the poems I cook
have never been to that side of life
to that side of death, a side you learned too well
too early.
Still...
You breathe in the pages of your diaries
and in the leaves of poems that have grown between your fingers
30
bursting free and finally undersknding
lieht.
Yes. I think of you and I tharik you
for the poems you left scattered;
pieces I pick up, particles of time,
your personal recipe
for death.
I take your poems one by one,
kiss their wounds and give them water.
They drink from my hand. They breathe again.
They die and resurrect
in mykitchen.
Maria R Palacios
flouston, Texas
31
Chapultepec Park: September 25, 1968
Campesinos kneel like Diego Rivera's Flower Seller,
spread baskets of lilies, irises, sunflowers
fresh from the bud as the young woman
who gathers them in brown arms,
strolls through Chapultepec green,
dreams of a lover among the helado vendors,
peanut crunchers, pinwheel spinners,f tbol players.
Overhead red and yellow balloons snare
running children in their dangling strings.
She follows a winding path to a sculpture garden
where sun-warmed statues embrace in a vacuum.
An absence of sound pulls her from a flower-filled reverie.
Like a shadow, silence fills the plaza. Her eyes widen.
She catches her breath, darts through spiky bushes
to the broad Paseo de la Reformc, now so still.
No rattling gnmy cars, smoke-belching buses,
shawl-draped women with bundles and babies.
Stiff-legged soldiers goosestep in tight rows,
rifles, bayonets, bazookas against their shoulders.
At road's curve, tanks roll, mechanical monsters,
geared, devour everything in their path. She runs.
Her sandals slap the tender underside of bare feet
as she weaves in and out of razor straight lines,
blank-faced soldiers, blinded by command. Her heart
pounds like their boots. Pursued by Rivera's murals,
Revolutions, memories, mothers' tales of uniformed rapes,
she tears across the avenue, trailing ripped
lilies, bruised irises, crushed sunflowers.
Dede Fox
The Woodlands, Texas
32
one-dog night
I remember my last winter
cold and gray as steel
the snow kept coming and didn't stop
until I couldn't breathe
in front of the other
car
accidents
three
one foot
that suicidal sky that suffocates
and kills dreams
I am just a white girl from Upstate New York
no religion
no politics
my manic ideas are what get me through the day
because it's the boredom that seethes
and destroys
gets under my skin and dissolves
the meat
I am similar to myself
when I am walking
one foot in front of the other
the wind pushing me back like
a hundred disapproving mothers
my lungs and nose burn
scurry up another
hill
I will rest later
Laura Telford
Austin, Texas
33
The Common House Spider
Crouching beneath the bristles of a relentless broom,
the Common House Spider eludes me.
lf I were a spider, I would be a brown one.
Not a Brown Recluse, because they have a bad reputation,
but a small, delicate, corntnon one
of unassuming staturethe kind you'd rather dismiss
than eliminate.
At night, I would sneak in through the crack beneath the door
barely visible to the human eye
and nest in the toe of your favorite pair of slippers.
In the moming, my rhythmic climb and rappel
from lampshade to base
lampshade to base
lampshade to base
would go unnoticed.
You, in your chair, thumbing The Wall Street Journal.
Me, fingering a deathtrap.
Diane McGurren
Weatherford, Texas
34
Love's Forge
I'm glad you were not cast in bronze
and I not chiseled from alabaster
too rigid in our respective constitutions
to bend and trvist and mold ourselves
to one another's contours
That I could grow toward you
like stalactite to stalagmite
bending to unseen currents
and nuances
ofour calciferous natures
while our shadows fused
That we were not caught in the pincers
of time, but were able to unbraid
the fragile threads of acquaintance
and weave them into a cord of promises
stronger than Hera's golden chains
Dr. Charles A. Stone
Austin, Texas
35
Tribute
Of winter's Frost and Robert
and Whitman waltzing by.
For Baldwin bolting forward
and Anne's Frank reply.
Of Langston's hue and brilliance
and Gwendolyn's bubbling brook.
For Zora's bright resilience
and the mountain Martin took.
For Rosa's spiritual spark
and Medgar's lasting evers.
From Emily's post remarks
we move on to great endeavors.
For Edgar's night we seek
and Elliot's cool review.
Of Dante's poetic peaks
near valleys Shakespeare knew.
For all the love they shared
and all the life they gave.
We pay tribute with our words
for the souls their poetry saved.
Michael Guinn
Irving, Texas
36
Agave
sculptural beauty
thick fleshy leaves
full and firm
plump with moisture
arching upward
in serpentine form
to a scalpel point
velvety silver green
all around pale
in comparison
the gentle
admire it from a distance
and drink in its beauty
with aching admiration and desire
M. Connell
Austin, Texas
37
The Mudslingers
Stewart and Hondo are the lovers of earth
management tracked by golf carts
sparkling near high clear ground along fence
lines that clip-cut chocolate fields and dirt
roads with spin-splattered thin wheels
on planes of soaking creation driving the
chewed blades of the known down,
but below that surface,
they touch their skin, rub minerals against
their faces to become young again
beneath the undercarriage of vehicles
from chainful tractor pulls and agendas
caked amok. When the rain stops,
they begin to dance in puddles under the double
rainbow with whiskey bottles stuffed in satchels
hidden in their ballooning slickers and
turn, flow across the new light, and leap north
to convey a story ofpunching stuck goats
north across the Guadalupe River
and into the soft clay of your imagination.
John Milkereit
Houston, Texas
38
Through a Glass, Brightly
On
Board Rail Canada
Beside Ontario tracks sumac burns.
Beyond bog and beaver dam an obsession smolders
in bronzed ferns and coppered bushes.
The floor of the forest flares: on beds of scarlet moss
paprika and saffron toss their hair
and I dance to the wheels'steel tambourines.
Desire is kilometers of forest
in the stark white raiment of birches.
There stand the sinews of canoes,
flotillas with shimmering crowns of autumn gold
whose underleaves silver each stiff breeze.
Ducks own the topaz lakes.
Unscathed by saw-toothed western cliffs
scarves of fog wrap the unshaven necks of spruce and pine.
Bla0k fur flees into underbrush.
Past countless sawmills and salmon leaping
the Fraser River's in a gray-green rush--above its naked
curves hover updrafts ofdesire.
Nancy Kenney Connolly
Carrboro, North Carolina
39
West Texas Occasion
Mercury climbing to one hundred five
or the harvest of a colossal gourd
is recorded on a calendar
of twelve Alpine scenes,
Secretary's Day and Passover
marked in the same bold red.
Farmers have acceded to observing
bargain days. They reap
the superstore's perennial yield
in screen print T-shirts and white
aerobic shoes, large hands
itching for produce.
Today is the most anticipated
since the municipal egg hunt.
The gymnasium, blue with mortar board,
air full of crepe
and eager voices, indiscernible,
ready for extraordinary
days to commence.
Gold tassels shimmering
as if the whole room
might ignite for Pentecost.
David Bart
Arlington, Texas
40
Our
Son the
Doctor
17 January 1984
Your final breath of life
at Seton Central
was breathed in color
a
fierce inhalation
that flooded the face
blood, blood red
a gentle release
that froze it in hoary white
Our son took his mother's hands
and placed them on his father's eyes
The doctor took a syringe
surrealistically large
and emptied the father's bladder
Satisfied
our son the doctor
drew up a sheet
and shrouded your remains
in clean white linen
Mary-Agnes Taylor
Austin, Texas
4l
The Zilker l(ite Festival
the wild zephyr
at Zilker pilfered
hoisted kites
a
kit
of children
curried
by parents
spent
a festival
their future
soaring
in the sorting
of adult minds
finds
little relief
from scores
of ritalin
befitting
the freedom
succumb
from one's
jump run climb
find the sky
outside
a classroom
window
confined behind
the pane
of a computer
which suits
them not
a revolution revolts
to nausea
the naughty child
a haughty teacher
hunting conformity
42
stunting
the stunning
sunshine
the wine
aged
to the taste
of wild and windy minds
Maryl. King
Austin, Texas
43
The Plow
I remember plowing
on the farm
The corners were the hardest with one arm,
But Dad had taught me, with his trust,
To spin the wheel and then to thrust
Hydraulics up and down again with speed
And showed me with each conquered weed
That life is like a field to spade
Whose working yields a silvered blade
Reflecting all around its light
And giving peaceful sleep at night.
And now I live in concrete fields
Where sidewalk cracks grow meager yields
Of weeds or grass which seem sublimely
In a place unkempt, untimely,
Tryrng boldly for the sky
Unheralded by each passerby.
But I look down with fonder gaze
Remembering those farming days
Where furrows turned to polish steel
And then a strange communion feel
With weeds who've conquered man made stone
And beat the odds and fully grown,
And see myself as plow and ground
And wonder at the things I've found
And where I've come from, then till now,
And know it started on that plow.
Dillon McKinsey
Cedar Park, Texas
44
Surfacing
Crouched on the sea floor,
I push hard, thrust upward. Far above,
the surface jitters,
a glimmering disk of mercuric fluid,
trembling and swirling.
I hang suspended
under a silver ceiling
in
a
high pale luminous hall.
Long walls of mist enclose
a vast and lonely silence.
Out of sight, sickle-mouth sharks
circle, blunt torpedoes querying
electric pulses my heartbeat sends off.
Crowds of small glittery fish
spray out of my path.
Below me, moon shadows
crisscross the bleached sand
blotched with dark patches
of rippling sea fans,
the ink splashes of eggs.
A brown forest of seagrass
undulates in the distance,
streaming like the hair
of a drowned woman, coiling
and rising through the mist.
Maryke Cramerus
Houston, Texas
45
Another Chance
My orchid is bare, in hibernation,
enorrnous leathery leaves,
the only remnant of orchid life.
I cut offone withered stem
and watched a second dry
at the tip, and die.
In the forest, she would have existed
in the dappled shade ofgiant trees,
her delicate white blossoms
swaying like acrobats in the breeze.
Instead her dead blooms were strewn
across my apartment floor.
But tonight I saw a bud starting,
only an inch long,
smooth and green, reaching
for the sunny window,
life beyond four walls.
Adamarie Fuller
Houston, Texas
46
Heat Wave
Beads cling
then slip from my lip like the drops I saw
on the rim of the inert hose
as firernen brace
for
a
if my
mule-kick which never comes. Comical
house weren't just beyond their grasp.
Planed boards, overdue paint, a solid roof -my wish list for home repair
before chance
chased gasoline with a cart-wheelingmatch.
Margo Davis
Houston, Texas
47
Wordless
wordless
i speak to you
my lips are sealed
with desire
my voice
is breaking
boundaries
ofunspoken
my every touch
prints letters
on your skin
translating
all the world's languages
into a single "oy''
my every kiss
bums like a brand
its soft glow
lights an unstarred path
to terra incognita
your skin'
so soft
so yielding
so pliable
under my palms
carries
faint unnoticeable
trace of my fragrance
only hinting that
i've marked you
Kateryna Bochenkova
Austin, Texas
48
Rabbit's Clothing
I have lived
with the wolves, rough and outside, too long
and can't be civil and speak
human
anymore; and, it is fitting
that she should so come: little red riding hood,
spoiled
child
from the land where the fairy tales have broken
and the myths have shattered,
crumpled
to longer support the society's pain;
and,
she could eat you in one gulp
and curse you
in your being so small a challenge. and
so, I have two eyes
primal,lupine, opened
on the back of my neck.
and so,
in ambivalence,
where does a wolf go
to learn
to lie still like
the rabbit, until the beast
big, bad, beast-the lose interest
should
and leave.
Maria-Cristina Caputo
Austin, Texas
49
Excerpt from the Poet's Guide to Metallurgy
Gold-valued for its color,
that of clichds like sunsets
and the hair of untouchable women.
Nonetheless, traces are said to be found
in seawater and toenails; may be spun from straw
in exchange for trinkets and firstborn children.
Gallium-Notable for its low melting point:
liquefies in the human heat of palm or navel
or under breath upon the nape ofthe neck.
Used to stabilize
plutonium in the core
of early atom bombs.
Tin-Highly
malleable, widely used, though
its use connotes worthlessness. When bent.
its crystals produce a delicate whining
known as tin cry.
A bar of tin will cry like this
over and over until it breaks.
Lead-Gray, soft, and toxic.
As a plumbing material,
it is often blamed for the fall of Rome.
Formerly used chiefly to settle disputes;
now principally as a pigment
in paint for children's toys.
Iron-So
valued by frontiersmen
that, when they left aplace,
they burned the homes they had built
to the ground
then sifted through smoky ashes,
looking for nails.
50
Barium-lnstantly reacts with air.
Left out overnight, will crumble into powder.
Apparent delicateness is deceptive:
was once put into a bean bunito
by a teenaged girl in Texas
to murder her father.
Silver-In
India, pounded into brittle leaves
and eaten as a covering for sweets. It is so thin
that if handled indelicately, it will shatter
in shards of floating lieht. It is a holy thing
to dream of breezes through the wet yellow heat
in the kitchens of Mumbai.
J. Todd Hawkins
Austin, Texas
51
One Mother's Clear Message to Congress
I do not bleed much,
I'm afraid,
as I witness the mess
that's been made
of the dreams
we were dreaming;
now a choking
throat's screaming
over turf where
his body's been laid.
I do not bleed much,
but I'm sore.
I'm wearily begging
for moremore time spent
beside him,
more chances
to guide him,
more options than
going to war.
I do not bleed much.
I do cry.
My ritual prayer
is this: "Why?"
Was each moment
spent nursing
just time spent
rehearsing
52
for moments spent
watching him die?
I do not bleed much,
but Iknow
how readily
otherbloods flow.
Nancy Fierstien
Dripping Springs, Texas
53
Apogee
Before the first winter storm
the sugar maple
has the cold-dappled cheeks
of children at play
Soon
its leaves will fall
agonize
like salmon reaching
the end of their run
What is it in an apogee
which foretells its fall
its feverish brilliance
the insufferable wealth
of its sunset colors
the snapping of its life line
Is the portent engraved
on the leafs underbelly
under its brittle skin
where I feel the welts
of a frail skeleton
Marcelle Kasprowicz
Austin, Texas
54
Fingerprinting the Stars
Light travels quickly and patiently,
leading to myths and misconceptions,
but it also gave us Roman numerals
and an ancient water clock.
A Mayan manuscript provided ancient
readings of the sky and they measured
time.
There were, and are, fools;
enter the telescope,
witchcraft,
unreasonable invasions of
islands and planets
to make into prisons for the insane,
the mathematicians,
the fires of natural elements
wanting to create new worlds,
a crowded rooftop,
a Danish genius,
starlight chilled by d.y ice. . .
A marvelous fingerprint of the stars.
Stephan Baley
Austin, Texas
55
Hospital Music
My music is piped down lonely linoleum corridors
up windy stair wells
through trunking and conduits
to be distributed, like happiness,
to the cranky bed-headjunction boxes
and fed, like a drip, through cast-offairline stethoscope headphones
into the ears of the deaf, diseased, discarded, disorientated.
Messiah, Jim Reeves, Richard Tauber, Sailing, I Will Survive.
They are frail. Long-buffeted lives
fetched up at this health service sink estate.
(The hospital, too, hangs on against inevitable closure.)
They settle their tired bones, pained organs,
and lie, memory upon memory, within their own music.
I tour the feeble wards to collect requests.
There is Big Gary, his bed expanded massively by scaffolding.
Must be Elvis, or The Lady in Red.
Bright-eyed Cecily. She knows her Verdi tells me the pizzicato strings in the Act 3 Prelude
mirror Violetta's tears.
But many, through the lost eyes of childhood,
address me as the doctor, the social worker.
Tell me of sons and daughters who do not visit.
I notice a bed become empty.
Sometimes I experiment. Schnittke, Steve Reich.
I intersperse records with poetry.
Name check the nurses.
When I refer to the time the patients look beyond time
and the staffthink of the end of their shift.
At home I also play the music I would like to die to.
Graham Buchan
London, UK
56
Remembering to Sing
If
every deaf mute fell at once
into the singing seas,
what rhyming tremolos they'd plumb
from whales and anemones!
We'd fetch their choral catch with nets
of woven unforgetfu lness,
And, to this deaf and dreamless Earth,
restore Her songs and memories.
Jack C. Ritter
Plano, Texas
57
Hoops of Steel
in memory of Paul Gentry
"Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel."
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Thirty years. I rode the mustang
to Arkansas, new shotgun, case ofbeer,
case of shells, to your parents' farm,
taking a case of bright clay pigeons
on the narow road to the far north.
I knew you first in epic argument.
Friend of friends, and we'd riposte
and parry, duck and cover, grind it out
until, like boxers wearied at the gym,
we'd call it done, and move on. Together.
From the deadly heat gas of Houston
baking the cars in the summer sun,
to a bachelor house in the Montrose,
to your leaving, and then to your return,
we'd tell each other stories, grand as Idaho.
We flung the discs with our backs to the sun
in an open field of sight. I learned the recoil
of a Russian shotgun, and we chose not to fight
over calibers or causes, or the winding cloth
of history, in our last summer's walks.
Inside the old barn, leaning against the wall,
rotted by time and the worrn, wagon wheels
rest circled by the blacksmith's hammered
metal rims; the twin tested iron rings
remain, browned and bit by rust.
They have lain together in silence
58
I, iii
since your ancient father was a boy.
Scratch the patina and find the gleam
still shining, outlasting lifetimes,
their adoption tried, hoops of steel.
Frank Pool
Austin, Texas
59
Lon Morris Yearbook
Memories hidden.
Years come and gone,
slowly turning worn pages,
characters forgotten jump out at me
and come alive.
I
see: My by-the-book English teacher
who hadn't met a sentence ending with
a preposition that she liked and didn't explain why;
My Old Testament Survey teacher whose
begetting, begotting, lectures put me to sleep except when he
hit a nerve speaking on sexual abstinence in chapel;
My absentee typing teacher who thought
that I could learn tlping by osmosis
and he was merely a grader;
My piano teacher who got dismayed
because he thought he was a tune
off
since I yawned during a lesson;
Mom a pretty older woman
with whom I had ups and downs nevertheless would
say to my father, "Mary can do that?"
Liz's cheery
face,
Abegail's mischievous twinkle
friends who were there for me
and I took for granted;
John my ex, who made me wish I had seen
a sign saying "Beware of ministerial student geeks
wearing glasses;"
60
Jenney a plain girl with great smile,
who helped Mrs. English grade my papers,
and told me she enjoyed my writings;
Jack, clean cut looking
later a homeless alcoholic
who liked Inn Morris
better than it liked him;
My photo, I am amazed
that I looked pretty, I did not
imagine I would find that;
I saw a year in which great
expectations disappointed me.
Never again will I be a nineteen-year-old
college freshman;.
There are moments when I almost think
it was a bad dream.
Except the photo of the pretty nineteen year
old girl tells me she was there.
Mary Riley
Austin, Texas
6l
Genius Plays With a Crippled Hand
A Tribute
to Django Reinhardt 1910-1953
A gypsy camp makes music into art,
Guitar to violin they master all;
This prodigy, knew praise while still quite small.
But sometimes notes blow other than the score.
One fateful night his caravan caught flame
And Django's hand was blistered to its core.
So goes the virtuoso's bid for fame.
Still, genius is not body, it is mind,
(Beethoven wrote his Ninth, he could not hear),
And Django was determined he would find
A way to make his music crisp and clear.
He made new chording for his crippled hand,
Then swung guitar hottest in the land.
Herman Nelson
Austin, Texas
62
Alien Bar Cruiser
By the light of the neon
they park themselves
against the bar
wearing signs
that read:
"low mileage,"
"not your average model,"
"satis faction guaranteed."
A sturdy chassis
built to last all night
with words tattooed
"reliable,"
"dependable" approaches.
An instinctive knowing tells me
I'd rather be stranded on the highway.
Another one pushing
plush exterior
freshens my drink,
comfortably wearing chrome hubcaps
on bad wheels.
I test drive a turbo on the dance floor
noticing bad suspension.
Closing time an automatic
with enough speed to finish the race wants my number.
I tell him I'm looking
for a standard shift with a low muffler;
he offers an oil and lube.
I fasten my seatbelt and head for home, alone.
As the sun comes up I drift off to sleep
and dream of maintenance free convertibles.
a
Donna Marie Miller
Austin, Texas
63
Woman of God
She rises in the cool of the mom
while stars are still in the sky
and dresses herself with
the armor of God
girding herself with Truth,
the breastplate of Righteousness,
the gospel ofPeace
the shield of Faith
the helmet of Salvation,
and the sword of the Spirit,
for she is a warrior priestess,
a princess of the Almighty,
a force to be reckoned with.
She anoints her household
with praise and prayer
and her loved ones call her Blessed.
She goes out
ministering to the weak and weary,
and bearing their sorrows
with patience and strength,
clothing them with the love of God
and feeding them the Good News.
Her voice is as the Songs of the Psalms,
enlightening all who hear,
for on her lips are wisdom and kindness,
tempered with the tenderness
only a woman can bestow.
Even as the Sun retires
she works to attire her household
with the spoils of her labor,
the meat of her sacrifice.
and the stars shine
on the sweat of her brow.
Behold, the night grows old
with her watch by candle light,
64
as her household rests
in the shadow of her virtue.
Who is like her,
this Woman of God,
that all the Heavens should smile
at her going out and coming in,
that the sun and stars
should revere her,
that she should be the envy of diamonds and pearls?
She is a Daughter of Abraham,
Lily of the Valley,
humble servant of the Most High.
Cynthia Gail Manor
Austin, Texas
65
If There Be Trolls
Only a crust of moon is left
The last bite-the buttery edge
The most delicious
I have taken much more than my share
Of a cold Spring night
I tuck my hands into my breast
And retreat
I am not a part of middle night as I have always wished to be
The darters are and the creepers are
And I must defer to their advantage
As they hold presence to the deeper end of the day
The portion that drives men inside else they make mischief continually
As for me I like to live plain, salt my own beets
If in a weakness I fall into a brief trust
Even a mingling cannot be coveted and must be ushered away
Lest it press onerous upon the heart
But tonight
A slow cup will make a fine lover
And the trolls may go safe into the shadows
Of a butterv moon
Jo Mazzu
Austin, Texas
66
A Late Apology
The poet touched me with
fond memory of a father loved
now gone with whom I had
harsh words years before.
Unexamined pain of youth
rushed out in haste neither
appropriate nor timely.
I didn't understand my nervous,
unstoppable need to tell.
Remorse and time passed painfully,
broke through to forty years
ofanger stored under the pressure
of youthful righteousness and affront
that exploded and proved
that I didn't have to be twenty-three
to be an idiot.
Del Cain
Saginaw, Texas
67
Radiation on a Rainy Day
Lazy summer rain kisses pavement
as I walk from car to gantry.
I know where shade on any other day
will have wandered by the time I leave.
Enslaved in the ritual. I brave the rain
to enter a room bathed in shadows.
Soft lights, gentle music, and hard science await
with a table on rails and monstrous equipment.
Today's technicians position my body carefully,
referencing doctor's orders.
They retreat behind thick walls, watching and listening.
Exposed, I cannot hide. I must lie very, very still.
The gantry responds with alien grace to computer programs
tailored to my body, my shape, my former privacy.
Abuzzer warns of piercing rays and I lie very, very still,
imagining the day when I can leave and stay away.
Free at last until tomorrow I chuckle at people
hurrying through cold rain to my exit.
Last year I'd have sported an umbrella, knowing
hair would wilt despite ample gel and spray.
A smile shines behind my eyes because velvet fuzz
has grown into baby fine softness, half an inch long.
Too short to style, this is a different kind of freedom.
No need to hurry or worry about umbrellas today.
Instead, I slip through the falling sky towards my car,
naked face upturned, defiance and acceptance
dancing through my thoughts.
A moment of optimism catches me and, with moisture in my
eyes, I finally sense a glimpse of sunshine to come.
Angela Patterson
Austin, Texas
68
Gardening in the Mine Field
An errant tap root
a triggering device
quicklyjuice
a careless carrot
can
tapping
The forco of a cabbage growing
may result in coleslaw fireworks
and the blood ofbeets
barely distinguishable
from that of surall boys
with hoes
Neil Meili
Austin, Texas
69
The Garnett Translation
Snowflakes drop like rose petals
flowering Napoleon's armies, Moscow saved
by burning, Russia protected by its shroud of cold.
You've fallen in love with Natasha Rostov
in the pages of the British translation, Tolstoy's Russia
rendered in the voice of Austen and Bront€
brisk as your glass of lemonade. A splash
of sunlight grazes your hand beside the glass,
edges a rich tracery of veins, pale watercolor hue
of blood too visible on the back of a hand otherwise
so smooth. Natasha Rostov is smooth and cool
and silky, pale as the sheer white curtains
at the window where Grandma sits knitting,
hands flecked with brown, skin loosened
by age, translucent, networked with veins.
She knits, unslowed, smooth and practiced
invisibly in her veins
and yours. You retum to a landscape ineducibly
as the pulse that beats
Russian, a voice British as afternoon tea,
surrender to daydreams of Natasha and the Rostovs,
French epaulettes against a field of snow.
David Meischen
Austin, Texas
70
Immediacy
I've missed being the moment, the snow-flake,
the child who does not judge.
Tears dismantle us, tipping their hats in silence.
I open the husk ofa tear to know its desire, reach
into a fathomless geometry
toward the horizon of compassion.
I know the glass-blown shimmer of a tear
and wade a while through its bright needles. To smile
within a sob: a perfect pitch of yin in yang,
yang inside of yin.
Laura Stevenson
Austin, Texas
7l
Ink
When Suzuki said
the mind
is a chalkboard waiting
to be erased every day,
I bought it -the primacy,
purity
of white on black,
numbers, nouns and verbs
daily washed away,
the smell of chalk - no worries.
Then I see the biker's tattooed back
in line at the Stop n' Go.
He's in for a couple of nights
with Trina from two doors down.
Snakes ooze up from his pelvis,
crushed at the feet of Our Lady of Guadalupe;
his right shoulder, now a tombstone, says R.I.P. Devon,
and on his left,
a bosomy woman preens.
His freedom, his complexity
his tattoo testimony,
fleshed out for anyone to see,
are memorialized in red, blue
and penal institution green.
Hey, Sanitized mind,
designed to delete,
today,
be the biker's inked up back
etched with longings and loves and snakes
72
and the dead and the
living and the holy moving
forward at free will
never forgetting.
Michele Traylor Burford
Rowlett, Texas
73
Boats at Sausalito
She's an escape into nature:
Wind Dancer
Moon Dancer
Morning Star
Southern Breeze
Water Music
Despedida.
She's wild, she's joy:
Razzledash
Celebrate
Jolie
Fullawind
Viva
Aeolian Harp.
She's adventure and freedom:
Discovery
My Liberty
Great Escape
Take Me Along
Magic's Mistress.
She's a lover:
Another Lady
My Pleasure
Seaducer
Knotty Girl.
She's a place to relax:
Comfortably Numb
Dream's Reach
Sea Cradle
Beautiful Dreamer
Meander.
She's a lot of work:
Due Diligence
Builder's Risk.
74
But she's worth it:
Dick's Last Resort
Best Friend
All's Well.
Christine Gilbert
Austin, Texas
75
Ostraca
My memories of you
are like torn scraps
of a paper map
littering the landscape.
Sure there is
a whole to read,
I pluck pieces
from the scatter in the grass,
but the edges
don't match.
In an afternoon,
I gather a basket
full of fragments,
stained and soft,
almost dissolving
to the touch.
Would that these shards were
more suitable
to archaeology, fixed
and permanent,
inscribed in a known
if ancient tongue.
Cindy Huyser
Austin, Texas
76
Mosaic Paradise
Slivers of beauty abound,
lighting up when the eye finds them
like pieces of stained glass
or perhaps textured textile remnants
or shiny bands of precious metals
or jewel-tone gemstone chips.
Initating lines separate these beauties,
running through what could have been
full surround view of pristine wholeness,
instead chopped up into bits scattered
and landing in random patterns
like some cheap tabletop mosaic.
But the beauty persists, even fragmented,
and with a little practice, the eye learns
to discern desirable content
and ignore all that muck in between
so that the willing mind perceives
paradise pervading urban sprawl.
Jazz Jaeschke
Austin, Texas
77
Cerros con Torres en Monterrey, Mexico
By the end ofthat Sunday,
The hot early-summer day done,
I asked my Tio to take me for a walk
Up to the top of the cerco with all the radio towers.
I was already winded
By the time we reached the start of the cerro road.
Breathing heavily I looked up
At the tree-covered rock walls
Wondering what I would feel like 5kms later.
We climbed up curving, gutted, and neglected roads.
Deep grooves were gouged
Down the middle of the concrete
From years ofheavy trucks
Winding their way up to the towers.
I sweated, grunted, and panted
Thinking my heart was going to explode
Like my father's had done six months before.
"Daddy, I feel you close by. I will see you again,
But not yet."
My Tio far ahead of me,
Still able to get air into
44-year old lungs blackened
From smoking a pack of cigarettes a day
Since he was 20 shouted.
"Come on! It's only two more curyes to the towers!"
I looked down and watched my feet;
One foot in front of the other;
Walking over broken concrete;
I saw trash littering the rocky shoulders,
Felt the ever increasing, sharp, upward angles of the road,
78
(For eight more curves not two)
And the bum in my legs.
At last we reached the top and rested
On a black, rubber, hang-glider platform.
I breathed slow and steady
Watching majestic Monterrey far below
Busily merge from daylight to evening.
I wanted to sprout wings and swoop
Down the cerro's side upon the
Unsuspecting, human, traffic-j ammed city below.
Instead, I perched on the edge of the platform,
Like the gargoyles do outside church,
Just watching from on high.
Lara Pena
Katy, Texas
79
appled hours
how he forgets to show her
when his sorrow shifts
when today drifts
already gone
in the same
slipping
away
a past curling
from a knife
that cuts
into us
like
a long
appled hour
Ric Williams
Austin, Texas
80
In Memory of Byron Scott
Austin Music Legend, RIP
I reach across the miles to you
The last time we speak
Your Mother's will-your daily pills
I sense you need a break.
You ship an envelope to me
The last handwriting I see
I call and call-no answer there
Until the news fills my ear
All instruments agree-silence
Your brilliance-loss-no sense.
I reach across the years to you
The last time we jam
Our
joint
songs-our spirits' strong
You make me better than I am.
I play the ancient tapes we made
What's left ofwhat we shared.
I cry and cry-no answer there
Your life force fills my ear
All
instruments agree-silence
Your brillianceloss-no sense.
I reach across the worlds to you
The next time we meet
Your body gone-truly alone
Death is an evil cheat.
Your friends left on this Earth
The place of all our births
Vow to find an answer there
Our love for you fills our ears
But all instruments agree-silence
Is now what's left us here.
Ken Jones
Houston, Texas
8l
La Milpa
There is no living
without
amilpa-
each home must have one.
Beside mud brick walls
the corn rises
green leaves glistening
with the night's rain.
Spread in supplication
toward the sun
they mime the prayers
of their planter
"Give us this day
to feed our children
to work the earth
to flourish beneath
sleeping volcanoes
like fire trees do
our branches tipped
with brilliant blooms."
And sometimes
the harvest is goodthe rain and sun
fall gently.
And sometimes
the harvest is poorscorched or rotted.
But either way
the corn stalks are soon
bent to the ground
and the tendrils
of tomorrow's beans
take hold
82
like rising hope
like small children
climbing and tumbling
over the backs
of another season gone.
Wendi White
Austin, Texas
Note: A milpa is a subsistence corn plot common in Central
Atnerica.
83
Lima
I could see the city lights from the plane,
constantly expanding,
swallowing the
deep dark surroundings.
I touch base
I feel home again,
gravity center and early stage.
A child with no shoes stares at me,
while I load the bags into the old white car,
scratched by lines of a stopped up time.
A timid tiny calloused hand extends
touching me without
any touch.
I forgot about this. I forget.
The misery. The silent outcry.
The cab gets in motion
old buildings amid a dim halo
seem to say hello
and I involuntarily reply.
The solitary streets anticipate
the arrival of the garbage man.
Far ahead, the bright lights and noise,
the fine dresses with their sham smiles and shiny cars.
Suddenly, among the crowd I can see myself,
walking down the street laughing,
new jeans, a fruited martini in hand.
My heart beats strongly,
I can barely breathe as I
pass right by me and stare at
my own empty eyes.
Millions of mosquitoes are attracted to
84
an isolated lamp
in the darkness of the night.
The car stops,
the dizziness fades away.
She's waiting for me at the door.
The shy light from the street can't hide
that welcoming smile.
Ximena Leon
Austin, Texas
85
Dismantling the Marriage
First, bring in a marriage counselor.
Later comes true dismantling:
divorce attorneys, dividing up the spoils,
friends with trucks and SUVs, carting
offthe half that goes with
she who was your wife.
Weeks and weeks ofjoumeys to the
Goodwill dock until the house looks like
a Buddhist monastery, bald occupant
seen by three-year-olds on tricycles.
Even so, coming up with things: books
and photographs more hers than yours,
cotton underbriefs from behind a
chest of drawers that leave you
feeling creepy at their touch.
Finally, the place emptied, as sweeping
out, the last detritus of a life together.
You look for souvenirs, something
you can carry from the wreck. But it's
only trash, dumped and left behind
as you drive a familiar street one last time.
Ralph Hausser
Austin, Texas
86
After the Charge of the Light Brigade
Glorious war! How we have praised your brave martial spirit.
But never in time, always too late,
we feel the horrors you bring:
bitter cold, months without tents, and rains,
heaven's tears of despair.
The corn is gone, there is no more hay, starved ponies
pierced dead by the wind.
The valley is covered with dead horses,
and they're starving in Sebastopol.
The shoals of wounded add drops to the flood
of the agony of cholera's clutch.
No blankets for warmth, no coats to wear,
the boots have no soles-have no souls.
Souls in their shrouds, locked tightly in vaults,
are covered with pleasure and gold
for fur-coated, pot-bellied leaders back home
bemoaning the ungrateful poor.
The valley reeks ofdead horses,
and they're starving in Sebastopol.
Earl Anderson
Tahlequah, Oklahoma
87
Everyone Carries a Deathbed
Everyone carries a deathbed inside
Sometimes splitting open like a hatchling
Staining one's shirt
Sometimes giving root in the heart
To a poisonous flower and popping out ofthe eyes
Like a pair of tulips
Sometimes like a fast train within
Running along
The length and width
Of one's love
And sometimes, like a little girl
Shattering within
Shards and shards puncture the flesh,
Becoming very fine needles
Bleeding one's days into nights,
And sometimes at night
Her lips revive the death within
And he rises towards her
Carrying within his terrible secret
And he rises
Towards his room
And she's
Gone.
Eran Tzelgov
Beersheva, Israel
88
Hearth
The kindled flames licked and lapped
at the crackling axe-hewn oaken wood
and sang their metaphors
more easily, effortlessly,
than anypoet
ever could.
Bernard Mann
Austin, Texas
89
Constant Companion
Numbness covered her on brittle nights
in rural southem Arkansas, stretched
head to toe like a stingy blanket
on a mattress stuffed with corn husks.
Numbness later smoothed the road
that led from farm to city, hummed
ballads in her ears, as boys became men
on bloody fields in France.
Numbness overtook her there, across
state lines in Texarkana, allowed
her eyes to close for night shift cat naps
at the ammunition factory.
Numbness witnessed her wedding
in Houston's co-cathedral, soothed
the jitteryjangles that stalked her
to the Bayou City.
Numbness wrapped fine fingers
around her heart, each month
her blood instead of lullabies
flowed warm in an empty nursery.
Numbness finally answered the phone
with a message from the agency, received
news she thought would never come,
the arrivalof a daughter, Anne.
Numbness grasped her hand,
stifffrom sewing, helped her write
checks funded for private schools,
piano lessons, brand-new Barbie dolls.
Numbness said goodbyes, moved her
from the city, west, out past
90
coastal rice fanns, re-invented
home in a tiny place called Fulshear.
Numbness walked like a friend with her
from cemetery to country house,
tucked her in from head to toe
on a mattress stuffed with memories.
Anne Schneider
Kerrville, Texas
9l
Migration
A flux of frenetic unrest.
hundreds of cedar waxwings,
in and out ofoaks,
dodge, twirl, whir,
loop, plunge again,
impelled by a force
that seems beyond their nature.
Hints of color flash bytails tipped with yellow,
wings spotted with redbut in the maelstrom's aftermath,
everything's encrusted
with juniper berries'
deep blue hue.
Scott Wiggerman
Austin, Texas
92
Stillness Snatched
Out the window,
a black canvas painted with red neon signs;
head lights and outside distractions speed by.
Stillness snatched.
Inside,
a latte flavored with orange extract, empties;
warmth finds cold with ending sips.
Voices behind the counter, brewing and frothing.
Stillness snatched.
Your roars and thunder left behind,
await me at home.
I sit a minute longer with Carl Sandburg.
his Chicago, his Fog, his Grass,
companions this evening
of stillness snatched.
Brenda Nettles Riojas
Harlingen, Texas
93
Intensive Care
The nurses, inured to death,
were kind but brisk,
reciting condolences
worn smooth by practice
as they unplugged the gauges
that plotted her end
with useless precision
and dimmed the lights
so that her final rictus
looked more a restful smile
than a strangled animal's
last snarl for air.
She possessed a grit
if not a grace in life,
a tenacity of love
that leapt to violence
when its objects
refused to comprehend
the mercy of her rage.
She feared the world
for us, its freedoms,
flights from safety,
ambitions bold as thev
were bound to fail.
She watched helpless
fell into ourselves.
griefs
beyond
our
as we
94
her consolation,
our fears obscured
by the sfratagems
of children grown
to unlikely middle age.
Her ferocity flickered
to petulance and then
the bleak cheerfulness
of the harmless old.
There were calls to make,
a burial plot to scout,
the grisly business
of co{fins and claims.
We hesitated, waiting
for someone to say
how peaceful she looked.
Someone did.
It might have been me.
Joe Bnrnes
Houston, Texas
95
War Letters
What was the faith that held you both in place?
With daily bomb attacks at home
that drove you to the basement day and night,
except when snowstorms gave you some reprieve,
because the strafers couldn't see while God laid down
a whirl of white, much to the younger ones'delight
who-with
no school-took sleds and skis
and used the bombing pause-though briefin'44, the sixth year of that horrid war.
And you in training, drafted late-four children left behindfatigued regime's replenished for spent
resources-able younger men consumednow filling boots with any whole-in-body men,
in spite of glasses, rheumatism, two left hands,
who were to train in shooting, marching
soaking wet in ice and mud of winter thaws
on meager rations, quarters packed and spare,
fresh laundry dreamed, the daily bread
and soup gripped tight with freezing claws.
And yet in every letter like a life-affirming sip
ofholy blood the quotes you sent each other,
field and home in daily mails, though often not received
until the train tracks were repaired
and postal centers rescued from attacks,
or through a comrade coming near.
Your lives disrupted to the core
a second time in two short years,
yet in your letters little fear,
though grasp of life as precious gift
and daily thanks for one new daythe bombs came
close-but we were
spared.
Those quotes from daily readings of your cherished
Ldsungsbuch-
96
two Bible verses and perhaps a hymn-were oblates for the soul.
They kept you going through the bitter days of loss,
uncertainty, the cross of want while hosting extra refugees
who too had lost their homes to bombs
in other towns, had to be fed with what you had:
potatoes, garden fruits, a feast ofhalfa chicken egg.
And through it all God's word was all you had.
Grateful and blessed for one more meal, a night of sleep,
a hasty letter from surviving family,
the children's music, weather cheeks.
God spared you for another day, another task,
another role writ large for both of you to play.
Christa Pandey
Austin, Texas
97
Potato
I pulled a large weed growing through the mint marigold.
The tuber surprised me
growing in the composted scraps,
white and bare as a bald head with strands of earth stuck to it
while my son played a sonatina in the house,
and I remembered the woman who screamed as she labored
in the hospital where he was bom
as if she were dying,
how I took the epidural to ease my childbirth, my remorse
at having taken the easy way
but, still, I have this scar across my abdomen
from my son playing a sonatina as if it were a bird
singing through the walls. They all scream like that,the nurses said.
After my mother died, my father played a recording of a loon,
low and sonorous, over and over. The loon,
Its eyes red, always mourning.
Yet, how perfect this potato with three eyes and tubers
growing around it. How perfect is the compost of memory,
dark, teeming, in its soul-raking of
birth, death, the transit of time between.
The metronome paces the sonatina's eighth notes
and I once screamed for morphine, screamed to make it easier,
as another woman screamed because she wanted the pain,
because pain, she believed would puriry.
I re-plant this potato, thankful for a world
that brings me scraps of eggshell and caterpillar,
classical sonatinas under perfectly formed fingers,
and flight of the coffrmon loon under a northern sun,
the loon so named for its clumsiness on land,
And the potato, so white,
so earthly, so unexpected.
Ren6e Rossi
Dallas. Texas
98
Harvest
As dry leaves fall,
drift to their final destinations,
let the body be laid down.
As forest caverns fall quiet
in their ordered stillness,
let the breath recede in silence.
As sunlight passes over hollows of the earth
where no hours measure loss,
let the hands be at rest.
As dusk comes to claim
what is promised in covenant,
let final words be spoken.
As stars in their velvet boxes
write a last farewell to the twilight,
let the body be given over.
As a field of grass is cleaved by the wind,
in halves equal and pliant,
let the skin be parted.
As rivers withdraw in their season,
let the pathways to the heart
be moved aside.
As the harvest is gathered from the fields,
as increase is offered in grace,
let the best be taken.
And as dawn warms the earth,
to burn with the fires of ardor,
let the body rise.
Carolyn Adams
IIouston, Texas
99
Overflow
A bastion of boxes
Lies flat
Beckoning.
I pack three bookcase shelves,
Place books lovingly side-by-side
To await their new home.
I am fine, really,
Until I tackle the coffee table shelf
And pack the memorial book,
The one I placed in sheet protectors for posterity
Luminaries' letters sent after Mom died.
I resist the temptation to peek
Thumbing through for the Anne Richards' letter I know dwells there
Now that she, too, is gone.
What prompts me to get my parents' wedding album next,
I'll never know.
Staring back at me are the ancestors -- all dead -- except Dad.
I place the album next to the memorial book
In the half-empty box
And burst into tears.
I'm stuck
I don't know what else to put in next.
No wonder I can't fit in anything else.
It's already fullOf memories.
Debra Winegarten
Austin. Texas
100
Poetry
a black, white, yellow and red thing,
A love, hate, mad and mellow thing,
An "I've got to break out of the middle of my head and
tell the world I'm not dead" thing,
A "Let's cut the bull and tell it exactly how it is" thing,
An "I need to caress that woman with words" thing,
An "I've never told anyone how I feel" thing,
It's a way down deep thing,
It's an odd thing,
It's a god thing,
It's a flesh and spirit thing,
It's a "What can I do" thing,
An understanding you thing
It's an "I am of value thing" thing
A freedom thing,
A truth thing,
A word thing,
And in the beginning...
Poetry, it's
John Row
Bures, Su, UK
101
Editorial Staff
Anne McCrady, Editor
This year's guest editor, Anne McCrady, has been a part of AIPF for
several years. A frequentjudge and critic, Anne's poetry and prose
appears in literary journals, market publications and anthologies. Her first
poetry collection, Along Greathouse Road,won the 2003 Poetry Society
of Texas Edwin M. Eakin Manuscript Award. Her recent poetry chapbook,
Under a Blameless Moon, was the national winner of the 2007 Pudding
House Chapbook Competition. Anne has also published a contemporary
parable giftbook called Kevin and the Seven Prayers, as well as an audio
CD version of her first book. Also a gifted storyteller and inspirational
speaker, Anne is the founder and principle of InSpiritry,. an endeavor to
Put Words to Workfor the Greater Good and is a councilor for the Poetry
Society of Texas. Anne lives in the piney woods of East Texas with her
husband, Mike. More information about her work is available at her
website, lnSpiritry.com.
Barbara Youngblood Carr, Assistant Editor
Native-bom Texan, Barbara Youngblood Carr is a poet/humorisU
storyteller/musician/editor. She has authored twelve books of poetry, prose
and short stories about her Native American ancestry and her Texas
upbringing, seven partially funded by the City of Austin Arts Commission.
Active in the Austin poetry community, Barbara has been a board member
of Austin Poets International, Inc. for sixteen years, is the editor for ,{
Galary of Verse and Dreamers Three Press, and serves as host of Borderson-the-Word poetry venue. She was a2007 finalist for the Violet Crown
Award sponsored by the Writers League of Texas for her 2006 Ancestor
Series book, Following in Ancestral Footsteps. Barbara has been
published on three continents and is the National Poet Laureate for the
Military Order of the Purple Heart. She can be reached via email at
[email protected]. Barbara's many years of experience in selecting
poems for di-v6rse'-city has been invaluable.
Susan Stockton, Editorial Assistant
Susan Stockton is a poet, student, web-designer and preschool teacher in
is her second year to assist with di-vdrse'-city. ^Stre is also the
2008 AIPF Festival Director, having made her debut at AIPF 2005. Since
then, her work has been featured in The Chronicle, Round Top Anthologt,
The Rio Review, Inks Lake Magazine and other publications including
Austin. This
102
di-verse-city 2006. Susan is an executive committee member of Austin
Poetry Society. At Austin Community College she is a creative writing
student and has served as president of the creative writing club, as well
as student editor for its literary joumal The Rio Review. Susan is manied
to Eric Stockton and they have three children Saxon, Victoria and Phyllis.
Susan's technical help in developing this anthology was essential.
Cover
Artists
Benedict Young Kim, PhotograPher
Benedict Kim is by training, soon to be an arqhitect, upon completion of
licensing exams and experience. By heart, he is a designer, interested in
form, space, light, acoustics, and composition. He engages in photography
every once in a while on a whim or by assignment, but mostly enjoys how
the camera captures light and the inherent beauty and composition of
nature and the world around him. His plans are to eventually be a master
of design at all scales with the laws of nature and physics as his guide to
create a whole experience, not just a piece of static work.
Glynn Monroe lrby, Cover Design
Glynn Monroe Irby has marketed and displayed photographic art in
galleries, homes and offices. He is a member of the American Society of
Interior Desigrers, has a B.A. in History from the University of Texas and
has also studied at the University of Houston and Edinburgh University in
Scotland. As a poet, Irby has been published in several magazines and
anthologies and is an invited poet at poetry venues throughout Texas.
Glynn is a member of the Galveston Poets' Roundtable, The Poetry
Society ofTexas and has been named one ofthe coastal "Bards ofthe
Bayou." A sampling of his photography is on display at his company
website: www.irbyshome.com/gmiGraphics.htm.
103
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