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A sixteen-foot blowfish stuck her spiny yellow claws into my arm
Then planted her fuschia balloon lips on my chest

The shiny seven-foot dolphin offered a smoke.

Through gray-green dune grass and sprays of cold salt
I had plunged, faithless, into the sea.

Called down,
Away from the anesthesia of oxygen,
To breathe through water and call it home.

My virgin voyage to Poesy

Where nobody has a mother.

I’ve burdened my son with this now.
He misses strides, kisses the silence,
twists himself into a wretched mess.

A guest in his own body,
he is uncomfortable with the gaze
of strangers.

Too young to be so cautious,
too innocent to grapple with the whims
of that body gone haywire,

he stands at the edge of a narrow morning,
hoping that what is his prison
will someday be his palace.

“Daddy,” he said, “what disguise
do you wear to fool yourself?” or

“Can you taste on your tongue
the slow way mountains move?”

 

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Anthony DiFiore has been writing poetry for thirty years. For the last several years he has been writing poems about Tourette’s and the Bible. Currently, he manages a thrift store that uses its profits to aid abused women and their children.

We sit in an airless room surrounded by windows
Blue-black sky, towering neighbors
Wheelchair heaven.

You describe your dream:
Recurring images of chemo-stallions racing across your night sky
Towing starched lines that abruptly plunge to earth.

Lilacs hang daintily on the shower-rings of
New age transfusions,
Shamelessly spilling the scent of spring.

You take an old picture frame,
Plucked from the attic of your mind
And work to bring it all together.
It doesn’t fit.

Smell the lilacs
Feel the power of the stallion’s haunches
See the blue, blue sky without interpretation.

Enjoy this day, this view.
It is all you.

 

The piano chord most adjacent to the inexpressible is the
one that dissolves into flocks of flying birds

The tree as it moves through the breeze most
adjacent to conducting the sonorous
filaments of the air stands as tall as a
doorman to an entranceway to the eternal mysteries

The desert most adjacent to spiritual enlightenment is the
one whose dunes yesterday don’t resemble its
dunes today and whose dunes today
have slopes and dips totally ocean-like and unlike any of its
dunes tomorrow

The rain is finally falling after a month of drought
little earth-lips opening to drink in each drop
and the song each water-drinking element sings
resembles the chorus of an ancient opera sung among
cataclysmic rocks above tumultuous seas

There are no people in this poem
they are either asleep or haven’t been born yet
but the sound in the landscape most adjacent to the
deep heartfelt human voice
is the night-cricket seeming to long for a mate wherever
it may happen to hear its lament repeated
incessantly but melodiously through the dark

So like us
in catastrophe or anti-catastrophe
calling out to space from our centrifugal loneliness
with a voice most adjacent to the
silent nuzzling feeler to feeler of ants meeting from
opposite directions
and lights beaming from north and south and brightly
blending somewhere over the
Arctic in a purple and scarlet shivering aurora borealis
whose ripples are most adjacent to the
music of the spheres hanging down into the
visible from the invisible heavens whose
radiant flowing draperies curving through the folding air
they are

 

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Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore was born in 1940 in Oakland, California. His first book of poems, Dawn Visions, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, San Francisco, in 1964. He became a Muslim/Sufi in 1970, performed the Hajj in 1972, and lived in Morocco, Spain, Algeria and Nigeria. In 1996 he published The Ramadan Sonnets, and in 2001 a new book of poems, The Blind Beekeeper.

I wanted to talk jive.
I wanted to be funky
like the white boy who sang
psychedelic slang
& give birth
to a new dance trend
called disco.

I wanted to be
a kaleidoscope
big as an afro-shaped-globe,
spinning my own tempo
under black light dust.
I’d be a lava-lamp chick
— stone-cold bumping
my have-mercy hips—
& do the hustle
in mommy’s platform heels.

I wanted to be cool.
I wanted to cruise
with my own fly-dude
& steer
the turntable wheels.
We’d groove
What’s Going On?
in daddy’s brown El Camino,
pose mean gangsta leans
in neon-fur-smothered-bucket-seats,
& watch

Lucy’s Sky Diamonds
dangle & dance
like brilliant erotic dice.

 

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Penny Dickerson is a 1988 graduate of Temple University where she earned a B.A. degree in Journalism and is currently a M.F.A. candidate in the Lesley University Creative Writing Program (Low Residency) in Cambridge, Mass. (Graduation: January 2005). She has additionally taken a continuing education poetry writing course at University of the Arts under the tutelage of Donna Wolf-Palacio and was once a “Suppose an Eye” participant at the Kelly Writer’s House and looks forward to her parenting scheduling and graduate school time to allowing her to come back. Previous poetry works and journalism have been published in the anthology, Azure and Amber, the Florida Times-Union and her poem, “A Conscious Statement” won first place winner in the Ritz Theatre’s poetry contest in Jacksonville, Florida. Penny will serve as Poet-in-Residence at Andrew Jackson Elementary School (K-8), this fall as a final graduation interdisciplinary project.

Aunt Ginny is up in her Cessna
Navigating circles and dips
Swooping in the sun

Uncle Jack is on the porch
Smoking dope and thinking
This getting old’s a bitch
When you’re sick

He faces the sky and
Looks for Aunt Ginny
They had a tough winter with his cancer
And weather so bad she couldn’t fly

But it’s spring now
And things are good
Uncle Jack rocks
Smokes dope
And plans
Thinking:
The sun is strong
The flowers are sweet
Maybe I’ll eat lunch today
If that’s stronger than the chemo

He rocks
And watches
While his beautiful white hair
Dead at the root
Blows off his head
Strand by strand
Sprinkling new flowers like snow

Up in the sky
Aunt Ginny does another loop de loop

 

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Sandy Crimmins has been published in a variety of print and electronic journals, including American Writing, City Primeval, femmesoul, Isosceles, and Hysteria. Her work appears in the anthologies Meridian Bound, The Eternal Now, and Pagan’s Muse. She is also a spoken word artist, performing her work with musicians, dancers, and fire-eaters.