Lindsay Marianna Walker

The Josephine Game

Port Maurice, April 1796

Josephine,
By what art have you learnt how to captivate all my faculties,
to concentrate in yourself my spiritual existence—
it is witchery, dear love, which will end only with me.
To live for Josephine, that is the history of my life.


I one you on Thursdays and at both elevens, and often
around dinner time.

I two you during evacuations
and afternoons when it rains. But not on Sunday mornings
or days when ladies
play Euchre.

I three of myself while you are thinking of food,
or the army, or a hidden switchback
trail back over the mountain.

I four to hate you like a steam piston hates. Though later,
love again, and the engine block.

I five someone with your kneecaps!

I six like the woman of another, though it’s probable
most of my days aren’t spent in pursuit
of the gardener.

I seven like a cattle catcher cow-powers
down train tracks.

I eight the slump that was in the ice chest
since Labor Day weekend. I feel old
and delirious and purple.

I nine all the bubbles in a bar of soap.

I ten you with holly-hocks. I ten you
with holly-hocks. I ten you
without remedy.



Josephine in the Tower

“The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap…”
--Albert Camus


Heights frighten me, or rather, I’m afraid of myself
at heights. I know why the road chicken crossed.
It’s what puts my palms to the stove burners,
my tongue to the blade. Not a question
of danger, but a call to the edge.
The fact of the cliff. Its
simple imperative,
jump.

Marguerite Scott-Copses

No. Final Answer.

A single sun, all else was orbit;
Spanish class was the back of his neck.

He'd have done me such a favor
To grab my wild arms, to make me toss the paintbrush,

the baton, the penning-it-even-now story
I wanted to write in his name's sake.

Had he held my hands, not in love,
but in earnestness, and said, "no,"

"no.... I don't"

I might not have believed in magic,
might not have insisted I could come back

from the next in a series of sad moments,
like the one, in my room, studying for pre-cal,

while we listened to the Smiths,
and drank Italian soda,

the back of my palm casual against his knee,
and how he picked it up, placed it back

in my lap, and mumbled, eyes on the page
"I can't concentrate with you touching me."

How hard to know then, what I still
don't know now, did he ever love me?

And how I still want to disguise that line,
to say it some other way--

Alguna vez me amas?
Que el nunca me amas?

What if I'd been brave enough to ask
yes or no, plain as this poem?

What if I'd been brave enough to listen
The sun, so silent in its sky.

David Prater

The Germ! The Germ!

Love episode of a strange nature;
as usual, with badluck [sic] to meh.

- Bernard O’Dowd, writing to Walt Whitman.


i have a germ inside meh (love i have a gun
inside meh (bang i have a truth inside meh (

death i have a life inside meh (born i have
a seed inside meh (tree i have a leaf inside

meh (air i have a girl inside meh (oh i have
a heart inside meh (boom i have two germs

inside meh (blood i have a ghost inside meh
(peace i have a dream inside meh (depth i

have a charge inside meh (light i have a man
inside meh (shame i have a coup inside meh

(stop i have a breeze inside meh (chain i
have a fire inside meh (road i have a bomb

inside meh (we i have a past inside meh (no
i have a watch inside meh (yes i have a but

inside meh (worm i have a mole inside meh
(shock i have a plane inside meh (sky i have

a scene inside meh (egg i have a sun inside
meh (ah i have a you inside meh (love i have

a germ inside meh (love i have a germ!

Sherry O'Keefe

Leave it to Floyd at the County Ranch Supply Store

Because nothing changes in the back of Big R,
I come here to listen to the century-worn
floor creak each time a customer walks in,
mid-stride in ancient conversation. The merits
of a rabbit hutch, which pastures are short on salt licks,
temptations of sweet mix for a colt, bottles for orphaned lambs
Floyd’s name tag is peeling from his May-I-Help-You vest,
black marker on surgical tape, the ‘D’ no longer visible.

He sorts tomato packs, talking with a man
whose fishing hat says “Salmon, the other pink meat.”
He needs food for a rescued baby woodpecker,
and is worried it cannot see. Happens that Floyd
wrote a paper in sixth grade, he remembers
those babies are blind for thirty days. I envy that his past
is still with him today. When I was twelve I wrote a paper
about Twiggy with Jane, the girl with a dark space
in her house where all the boys went to kiss her. I sat
at the table, writing the paper for both of us.

Maybe if I had written about calla lilies
I’d understand now why nothing blooms
next to my kitchen sink. I’m reading
the bulb packaging when Floyd stops by
to help. He considers me before he tells me nothing
grows without contrast in its life. He says we all need
the night time cold, some daytime sun. Now
and then - a wind to toss our stalks.

Corey Mesler

Out Near the Chemical Plant

Out near the chemical plant,
where my father worked his whole life,
there are fields of corn, glistening,
green and yellow, full of life.
The sun catches stalks and they dance.
There is also a black fungus called ergot.
It is poisonous and hallucinogenic.
No one is blaming the chemical plant.
Now my father is gone and
the plant lives on, pumping out its
heady interfusions, creating God knows what,
in secret, after dark, with towers
of flame high above the Schlenk flasks,
and acid baths, and burettes, and alembics,
and men in white coats and badges,
who pledge their nights to experiment,
to the Company, to the very human belief
that there is better living through chemistry.

Jeff Crandall

Jugular Ghazal

It isn’t when, where or why, but how I kill you.
Slingshot. Capgun. Reuger. Venom. Pow. I kill you.

Bible? Quran? Talmud? Book of Hours? Book of Days?
In my black robe, holier-than-thou, I kill you.

Such a lovely veil: Obey, Honor and Love.
With this unbroken vow I kill you.

Eat, eat. Flesh for the table flensed from the bone.
Fog within the abattoir thickens. Like a sow I kill you.

Don’t worry. Your death is merely play. It’s all stage
blood and applause. With a bow I kill you.

Seriously, my heart has never known this depth of joy, of
belonging, of self. Love, love, my love: now I kill you.




Losing Oz

“After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, . . .”


As if wracked by a great quake
(I am a china doll), the shifting
of tectonic plates (I fall, I fall)
the city rang like a bell.
Organ pipes and chandeliers of glass
cracked. A page tore, spilling out
the soft vowels of the buildings,
its ices and pomades,
its lithe green cats.

*

I’ve never learned to lion,
never been maned. (They mate for life.)
You struck my face, killing
all the cloudy little doves.
The fritterers, the flouncies
died inside. I remain
a coward inside my growl.
When you clenched your fist.
When the walls frowned.
When the cobalt candlestick
fell from its shelf.
When the door jamb rattled at the slam.
When my skull thrummed.
When the marrow shifted.
When the cobalt candlestick
rolled across the floor.
When you hissed and spit.
This is it.
When I sat with my hands, with my face.

*

Come to me wizard of loveliness,
come, witch of refusal,
with your faerie wing,
your harp that sings,
your black nails and
pails of black water.
I am your dousable flame,
your night-mist rake.
I am the listlessness
conjured by your very breath.
Dangle my strings.
Dance in your fine shoes,
your fine, heirloom shoes.
Tease the reeling moon and toss away
the brook’s moonlit cackle.
Her wounds are not our wounds.

*

Gnarled knuckle of the apple’s root
has popped even this brick up.
I stumble. Do you remember, once
upon another time, downtown, outside
a jazz bar: there were so many roads
heading off in every direction on the spin
of a compass—who could choose?
Roads that ended in carnivals, in lands where men
had two heads and women spoke
in tongues of fire. You chose gold
and we ran through fields of corn—
all the cornrow teeth chattering and chuckling.
We were sick with the joy of it,
gasping the laughter of our thick air. No one told us
no one in Oz is mortal.

*

In a land of emerald and adamant
the dark resilience
of a rubber gasket
is precious indeed.

*

Meteors, I believe, have done similar damage
to the moon. My feet
scrape through the shards of these streets.
(They cut him into tiny pieces
and threw him in the well.
But each piece remained alive.
He’s there still.)

Every door is hinged.
Every pot has bubbled over.
Every child has stopped crying.

And crows and crows are everywhere.
And what they’re enjoying is viscous and red.
And what they’re saying is: Yes,
this is our hour.
I am a coward.

*

Wind over the roofs, over the fields
weed-wild. All the lollipops dissolved in rain.
A stink of molasses blows through.
The roadsign said Somewhere or
Elsewhere or Stay here and I thanked him,
walking south
by southwest, I think. Pumpkins
ripen in the window boxes,
tightening their vines.
Every house is painted blue.
The road has ended at this.
I have only these brown shoes.

*

Home was never a gray farmhouse,
a pig sty full of pig shit,
a horse’s piss, a prig of a woman
on a bicycle killing my dog.
Home was a human puzzle. Four arms
entwined, a whirlwind
lifting a feather bed, a naked

waltz across the floorboards, fireplace
mad with colored paper and lighter fluid.
Home was where the hearth was,
where the heart—
where the hear—
the he—home was
O—
Me.
Here . . .

*

We have spilled our share of wine and wax,
plundered the rainbow’s cache of gold.
I have only these two worn shoes,
the stub-end of a broomstick.

Ryan W. Bradley

Everywhere I Look is Pornography

I can't show you--
but outside something's happening,
out the window right now,
it's like an emergency
it's vibrant
it's not at all
like getting drunk with your in-laws
or puking on the lawn
in the morning,
it's more like naked women
in the sunlight, dancing,
but that's not it.



Death is Driving this Car

Oh baby,
you said -- oh baby
death is on your tail
like a license plate,

death is stuck
on you
like tread
on a tire.

Oh baby oh,

I said,
it's your turn
to drive.