Disciple

BY CHING-IN CHEN

Don’t know when
it began, the vision.
One by one, I let go.

My husband calls me
a crazy wife, bad
mother, my father

won’t speak to me.
I did not return
for mother’s funeral,

not
tainting
her spirit.

Twenty years, my
gaze through the
keyhole. I

gave up meat
and pleasure, wanting
my strong stalks

in old age. Listening
to Teacher, my mind
approached

the tunnel, truth.
People say we are
bad, but I am

learning to be
better. My family
cannot see

I love others
like my blood.
We surround

the consulate in the
rain, a prayer
band against

torture, why we
outside the subway
station delivering

the truth. Newspapers,
blood in the photos.

I accept they
do not understand

I have spent
twenty years
like a patient farmer

waiting for rain.

Now it’s my turn

To take up the camera.

Posted by HeadStylist on February 3, 2009 in Magazine, Poetry  | Leave a Comment

Default

BY CAROLINE BERGER

Still
a
flare of anger

an
ache
of loss

a
phantom limb
feeling

whenever

she

reads

he

the default pronoun

striped of its
beautiful
ess
curves.

Posted by HeadStylist on February 3, 2009 in Magazine, Poetry  | 2 Comments

Dreamboat

BY KATE BERNADETTE BENEDICT

Where the bilge bled,
what the hold held,
how the stabilizers spread their cunning wings—
as Ship’s First Matrix
I was privy to all of it,
I had the Captain’s ear.
That’s why I was so pointedly wooed.
Red had done his homework, you see.
Red is not that bright
but he’s shrewd; he comes prepared.

Guest of the wedding, I accorded him access.
I ushered him aboard,
issued him a card key,
escorted him to the galley and the bridge.
Or he escorted me.
I had the time of my life, watching him levitate.
Only I could see it;
the able seamen hadn’t a clue
what cast that rosy light upon my cheek.

The ship went down that night
in the customary flames.
We watched from …

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Posted by HeadStylist on August 15, 2008 in Magazine, Poetry  | 2 Comments

Slipknots

BY MICHELLE LEE

Here and there I’ve left slipknots of selves
for dead, oaken and unmoving, yet somehow
they’ve unravelled, looping out from beneath
so many sweaters and mothballs,
those buried in brown boxes and stuffed
under stairs, ready to be sold or given
away. They tug at my neck,
a scar, a noose, a seizing in the bight.

When I stopped at a red light
she hopped out and stayed in Utah,
land of low sky and high earth
sharp with snow and pine.
If I squint, I can see the taut line of smoke
from her chimney beside the creek.
She fishes at sunset with twine, when she says
mouths are lazy and open.

Later I walked on the cape
and watched a rocket …

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Posted by HeadStylist on August 15, 2008 in Magazine, Poetry  | 1 Comment

The Hello Girls

BY KC TROMMER

Good morning. Operator.
A few hundred calls an hour. Inferno.
Red lights: incoming white lights: connected
damn thing ablaze at all hours.

9 p.m. to 2 a.m. for the new girls, stuffing cords into
machine mouths:
Schenectady 793,
Saratoga 518,
up to the Stony Creek corner payphone.
1957: there is a script. Not Yes but Surely
to the man calling Detroit collect.
The voice was to sparkle. The smile comes through.
One ring, the metal click and
slide of ten girls plugging in.

10:15 and 3:15
could never come fast enough and
if she blinked–Hold, please–
she might miss a break, pull the plug on a man
who called her sweetheart.

Posted by nnoveno on April 21, 2008 in Magazine, Poetry  | 4 Comments

Firecracker

BY S.G. FRAZIER

A row of glistening kids stood under the pool lamp, gazing through the fence links as one of the witnesses, beer coolie in hand flyswatter in the other, reported to the cops that guilty boys had scattered.

I saw them, belly first, feet slapping the sidewalk running through the breezeway. And when the cops, in their shiny tactical boots, knocked at my apartment, asking what I saw, I told them the kid’s name was Paul that he was dribbling down the breezeway when the M-80 went off in his face, that earlier in the day, over by the dumpster, the same boys were stuffing Ladyfingers in a calico’s …

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Posted by nnoveno on April 21, 2008 in Magazine, Poetry  | 3 Comments

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