Verse Weekly

Late Discovery

Cornel Adam Lengyel — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:01:57 +0000

All of a sudden, strangely, our days become shorter;

Our dearest friend departs on a mysterious journey

Never to write or call again;

A spreading shadow brushes the moonlit hillside;

The silver trees turn to pewter, then to lead.

Copyright © 2009 by Cornel Adam Lengyel. All rights reserved.

From Stop, I Told The Sun, The Mandrake Press.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

Rats

M. A. Schaffner — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:01:59 +0000

Once they may have been a minor species
we viewed perhaps as incidental food,
rooted from the occasional burrow
by women searching for tubers or grubs.
Aha! they’d say, holding their find by the tail
while it squirmed like a furry toad and flashed
radiant, pin-prick eyes. Then they’d dash its brains
against a tree, and lay it in a special basket.
When the men returned meatless from the hunt,
questioning their dreams and the shaman’s prayers,
the women would laugh and show their harvest,
sometimes a dozen of the beasts: snake-tailed,
short-eared, bloody and plump to bloating. Meat.

Millennia passed as the glaciers withdrew.
On the sunswept prairies, burrows ran deep
in blind gropings for coolness and moisture.
We fled the brazen plains, thickened rivers;
priests arose among those who found the gods
in seasonal processions through the sky,
and knew which star’s arrival meant, to plant.
And what’s our history together after that—
subject, killer, vector, each in turn?

We never hunt them anymore for food;
still, one morning as I puttered through my yard
with a fork for turning compost into soil,
I saw one huddled darkly in the flowers
and knew it was the one that, late at night,
had looted the bird seed in the pantry,
shit in the kitchen, spooked the dogs awake,
and had in mind my ultimate eviction.
I speared it where it sat. I felt the tine
shatter ribs and slice its guts clean through.
It squealed and turned, and bit the fork so hard
I felt its pain’s vibrations in my hands,
my tightening grip. It bit and squealed again,
like Abel, I imagined, struck at prayer.

Copyright © 2009 by M.A. Schaffner.

All rights reserved. From Mandrake Poetry Review.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

Resurrection

Jerry H. Jenkins — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:01:18 +0000

Heat waves rise from the fields in tropic sun.

Along the dusty road the battered cars
lie in a field. These rusty skeletons
have been collected here and abandoned, far
from the emptied cities, their headlights blind as stone.
They lie unclaimed, their ownership unknown.

Skulls are piled on a table. Jawless and round,
some rest at an angle. All have eggshell cracks.
They stare into themselves, reliving the sound
of the hatchet, the crushing bar, the iron pickaxe.
Out of the grove and grave, they lie revealed,
stolid as geodes broken in the field.

The storm has receded now. The violence ebbs,
leaving a shoal of bones thrown in a tangle,
smooth and hard with the heft and weight of clubs,
in hexagons and accidental angles.
Their knurled ends are porous with honeycombs,
small cells filled with detritus, blood and loam.

Dark birds pick through the silent, polished tiers
of knob and shank and curve. Prismatic eyes
of waxy scorpions glitter and disappear
in this wilderness of jackstraw ribs and thighs.
A swell of pelvis rises as a wave
stilled in its cresting. Ribs curve up like staves.

A child meanders among a stand of trees
and stoops to pick up an object in the dust,
examines it, then gives it to her mother
who drops it back to the earth. Pity? Disgust?
The ground grows human teeth, and no one bothers
to mourn these countless anonymities.

Starlings twitter and squeak in the hot schoolyard.
Their chattering hints of what still lies inside.
Shuttered windows high in the gray walls hide
the cramped stone cells, the shackles and the barred
cell doors, the bloodstained tile. In silent air
there is a lingering presence of despair.

And there is a wall with nameless photographs,
each with a number. A woman with haunted eyes,
who lies somewhere in the bleaching cenotaph,
pleads from her photo that we realize
she was that mother whose child plucks at her sleeve.
She was alive, and she was here. Believe

these scattered ones, exhumed from the skullcapped ground.
Insistent, blind and dumb as the seasons’ turning,
they whisper of dust, and the earth’s relentless round,
and they will be heard again, urgent and burning
with what they have seen.
Like chattering birds, they will come,
full of their secrets, out of the hecatomb.

Copyright © 2009 by Jerry H. Jenkins. All rights reserved.

From Ironwood.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

In Simultaneous Rooms

Alfred Dorn — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:01:08 +0000

How many doors open, how many close

while your eye skims this “moment’s monument”?

Holed up in a slum lord’s apartment house,

an old man dies, alone, irrelevant.

Another life is pincered out of the womb,

from tropic sleep into our arctic day.

In a deluxe hotel’s Edwardian room

a widow fiercely hugs a rose bouquet

sent by a charmer half her age, with card

warbling silk words that curtain his design.

In the Sahara of a hospital ward

a bed explodes with pain like a land mine.

And meanwhile the galaxy, that spiral ear

carrying us through darkness, does not hear.

Copyright © 2009 by Alfred Dorn. All rights reserved.

From Voice From Rooms, Somers Rocks Press.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

Caravel

Wiley Clements — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:01 +0000

My worn sails are lowered, flaked, and stowed below;

this prow may lift no more to the green wave’s rocking.
Though the wind blows fresh at daybreak and the beckoning
horizon draws taut my stays, I may not go.

Survivor of a hundred storms, brought home in tow,
moored to the outermost buoy, denied dry docking,
I lie condemned by a salvage agent’s ruthless reckoning
to be hauled on shore and broken up. But even so,

my Master yet may come for me, regird my timbering,
recruit a crew of hands, renew my planks and caulking,
reglobe my running lamps, set blazoned sails to my spars;

then shall I ride again on evening’s tide, remembering
how the gale’s song goes, on deck my Master walking,
Commander of the ocean seas, the winds, the stars.

Copyright © 2009 by Wiley Clements

All rights reserved from First Things

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission

Dante Met Beatrice

Paul Christian Stevens — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:36:00 +0000

…ne l’ultimo di questi die avvenne che questa

mirabile donna apparve a me…

—Dante, La Vita Nuova, III

Dante met Beatrice, just briefly, and just twice,
Yet loved her, utterly, his whole life through:
He’d never seen her clap her hands at some idea, and laugh,
Her eyes alight, and dance for perfect joy—as I have you.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Christian Stevens. All rights reserved.

from London Poetry Review.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

The Sweet Potato Trick

Margaret Menamin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:00:40 +0000

Unhappy to the point of suicide

because “the vimmin hate me,” Ole stands

poised on the bridge’s edge when he is spied

by Sven, who takes his buddy by the hands

and pulls him back: “Don’t do it, Ole, vait a

minute and ay tell you vat you do:

Shust get yourself a nice beeg sveet potata

and put it in your pants. Girls fight for you.”

The next day Ole’s back and more depressed

when Sven approaches. “Vell, it didn’t verk.

Ay use the sveet potata you suggest

and still the vimmin treat me like a jerk.”

Then Sven steps back and eyes his friend askance:

“Damn, Ole—put it in the VRONT your pants.”

Copyright © 2009 Margaret Menamin. All rights reserved.

from The New Formalist.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

Granny in Tights

Joseph S. Salemi — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:47:10 +0000

The fastest growing section of the Internet pornography

world are sites that feature old ladies and grandmothers.
—News item

The stage names given to the ladies cast
Are chosen for their frilly, antique tone—
Names quaint and powdered, reeking of the past,
Like body talc and Champ-des-Fleurs cologne:

Lavinia or Ernestine or Zoë,
Arletta, Marguerite, or Bernadette—
Prudence, Sophie, Martha, or Aunt Chloë,
Hermione or Constance or Claudette.

Some wear girdles, half-slips, corsets, stays,
Seamed stockings, lingerie with Belgian lace—
Their hairstyles hearken back to bygone days
Of teacups, sachet bags, and saying grace.

Some are grossly overweight or plump
And others wraith-like, wizened, barely there—
All have droopy breasts and sagging rumps
With flesh as rotten as a long-ripe pear.

They do what every whore does who is paid,
But always with young men who might be sons.
They seem inured to their salacious trade,
As much as teenage chippies with firm buns.

And yet one wonders: Can it be mere cash
That drives a woman, threescore years and ten,
To let a camera crew explore her gash,
And photograph her orgy with three men?

Or is it more, perhaps? A final urge
To get back to some primal, vital source—
To seek out in a young man’s swollen verge
The deathless thing that Shaw called The Life Force?

In any case, it hardly matters now—
Our time is one where female honor’s dead,
When Grandma is a fornicating sow
And golden years are transformed into lead.

Copyright © 2009 Joseph S. Salemi. All rights reserved.

from The New Formalist.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

What Is Dream?

Jared Carter — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:31:53 +0000

What is dream, ultimately, but a testing
of darkness, a venture out into that world,
the bourne from which no traveler returns?
I heard two voices from the deep. The first,
“Is he betrayed, are night and permanence
unmoored, so that the shifting sense seems right,
and nothing stays?” The other quick to answer,
“Immense this voyage, as to the farthest star
this heading, midst the stellar silence, yet
a thousand thousand times, and still he glides
encountering nothing.” “It is well. Each dream
is but a childish step, away from all
familiarity or face. The void
that will be his eternally takes on
a pleasant guise, and seems a touch away,
almost within his grasp.” And softly said,
dear heart, how like you this? So they spoke on,
and by the dawn that broke—the even light
that came into the room—the dream dispelled,
and I was back once more amid the sound
of wakening birds and wind-beguiling trees.

Copyright © 2009 Jared Carter. All rights reserved.

from The Pennsylvania Review.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.

Oswald Spengler

Richard Moore — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:14:07 +0000

He said that mathematics was an art

and won my heart;
that cultures die; the sign of death, a Caesar—
O, what a teaser!—

and once they’re dead, stay dead. No one’s at home
in Ancient Rome,
that took grand Greece with it. And how divine a
pattern for China?

Nothing in China for TWO THOUSAND years,
decadent dears…
O yes, Tang art, then Buddhism…but then
Tao becomes Zen,

and nothing really changes, nothing’s new….
Nothing is true
everywhere all the time; everything grows,
rooted, for those

who see deeper than logic, learn to hate your
dead laws of nature.
Hey, was it Spengler speaking there, or me?
Easy to see…

I had to have thought-countries rich and strange
where I could range,
as once, among wild thoughts of our black maid,
I skipped and played,

and hoped someday to live down the disgrace
of my dead race,
as if I’d grasped the strangeness of my portion,
I, failed abortion.

Mother felt guilty. Drugs she took, the dear,
had made me queer.
But no, they gave me Spengler, made me blest
in our dead West.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Moore. All rights reserved.

From Chronicles.

Reprinted by Verse Weekly with permission.