From East To West: Bicoastal Verse, Fall '08

from east to west: bicoastal verse

Table of Contents: p. 3 p. 15 p. 27 p. 33 p. 41

her pink glee mingling – poetry & art, Constance Pavliska time – various poets & photographers Best of the Net nominations – various poets & photographer Scott Davis mannequins in the window – poetry, Patrick Carrington & photography, Dave Wade Contributors

edited by PJ Nights and Ray Sweatman cover photography by Janpietruszka all works © 2008 by each individual poet and artist

from east to west: 2

bicoastal verse

poetry and art by Constance Pavliska

I Made a Salad for Dinner That Night Should a mystery present itself to view I would certainly wonder if I might wish to jump at the chance to strain the stew spraying to mist the true from the untrue shaking the holy bowl, green color sight wanting to sift the ashes from cold vault 972 separating color from breath, icy blue I can’t see what I heard, try as I might as the contents tilt precariously askew. Snaking fingers capture, quick to subdue I corralled them holding all the color tight thinking all the while what was lost through the hole of spherical calling past due the date stamped in metal in gleaming white glaring up at me, shrapnel and bamboo shrouded color that had managed to accrue a muddy mass in my holy bowl, light with no definition steaming on through and no answers simmering in the stew.

3

Constance Pavliska 1-1-1-1-1 I had a talk with the fork sparkling up my dining room table suggesting that perhaps she might want to tone it down a little in mixed company so as not to give a prong impression but she said that she liked the diamonds shooting five pointed prisms on fine crystal. Then she told me that I should be more concerned with the spoon as she was the one shooting out all the rays with her bottom up like that. I didn’t talk to my fork for six hours.

4

Constance Pavliska The light passes time in the windowhouse I needed to speak to Mrs. Ramsay she’d been so long on my mind lingering there as floating imagery that shifts with the breeze coming from the ocean holding her lighthouse tight I kicked gravel past rosebushes in bloom hailed to James rowing past in the boat I couldn’t see and there was whatshername the flower, Pollack painting on the front lawn of the seaside house where She sat rocking the boards of the porch gliding into my head, “Mrs. Ramsay, I clasped an airy hand, “I am so happy to finally meet you. I have so many questions.” “Sit child, I’ll get us some refreshing ice tea with lemon.” She was swallowed up by the house as quickly as Virginia ’s words were in my mind and just as quickly spit forth to other spaces as Mrs. Ramsay prosed her cool refreshment contained in glass volumes, tangy lemon on my lips “Thank you”, I gazed into vast eyes and thought I glimpsed in a flash all the answers that were and then they were gone, “It will be fine tomorrow” she said smiling the sea in those eyes, I knew she sounded right as she rocked, creaked, rocked; a refined even rhythm of grain on wood “But a hog’s skull swallowed your shawl?” “Hogs want things.” I swallowed the last drop offered, holding it on my tongue, to still moving moments I felt her slipping away from me even

5

Constance Pavliska as I tried to hold her in this space she faded, merged into the house to the clinking of dishes baking chicken in juices of thought wafting and children and chairs scraping to solitude urging me to look at the glass clutched in my hand, tea dregs dried and dusty cobwebbery crocheted the corners of peeling paint on the porch framed by the front door that hung from a single hinge slanted misaligned to the gaping dark mouth sucking memory that I did not have “Mrs. Ramsay, I murmured “Why have I not seen a baby crow?” floating on the salt Sprayed senses in formal wear and white caps.

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Constance Pavliska 15, 22. furred kittens fluffing pink lace panties pant and push to that crashing cataclysmic capsular space;16 and 17 that has much and some to do with the in-between where frozen temporality warms agile and eager fingers. candy coated condiments ballooning circus bosom and bush grasping that censoring catatonic webbed space; 20 and 21 that professes to be pin prick tingle touched down and done where historicality; reflects, deflects and draws the Redback spider.

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Constance Pavliska Had as a matter shoes oversized beneath the threaded coat that hangs in solitary color as faded brick forms a curval line

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Constance Pavliska A tough old bird brought to her knees by a four year old who learned to share in prekindergarten with crayoned paper finger-up-the-noseswap-and-eat-hands-in-crotch-can’t-reach-the-waterfountain-one with fabulous etiquette covering the four going on fifteen virus spewing little mouth with precious pudgy little digits opened wide to escaping germs, worms and airbornes seeking bigger and and more diverse playgrounds. “I won’t give you my very bad cold, Aunt Connie, cough cough covered kicking the back of the car seat in the confined space of horse and buggy on rubber made virus’ mutating in the invisibility of smoke and ash inhale microbes skittering to innerspace of the inner sanctum robed as orphans looking for a home but are toy transformers wanting to play with the Raven penned by Poe long ago, a beating heart short a body visualized by Vincent Price tubed presence as his enunciation gave dimension to Poe’s wordlife as the wagon hearse lurched and creaked over cobblestone through the hand thrown pot lined streets racing from the melting wax spewing the living dead into hot soup served up with oyster crackers and candlelight wanting Ambrosia to massage his body beneath the caned chair resting on the polar bear rug as the jeweled glass eye took the secrets entered there and stole off into the the northern lights of a northern night seeking whip cream and a cherry but the bus was not running that late so I lay down on the splintery bench at the train station and sucked down the black thick smoke trailing the beast ironing up the tracks like my mom used to do on the board that was taller than me in a house I can’t remember with a green apple tree in the yard that rained green missiles when Bobby shook and ordered from the top as I ducked and bobbed as he got his when he jumped down and landed on some old rusty nail that pierced right through his boot impaling him there in some other’s front yard.

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Constance Pavliska Over tea and toast Thought seeks animal psyche and local logic, created, colored and compounded by family hands professing endearment encouragement and lament through circling cruel simpering; bruising bands. He needs to understand the untoiling of tomorrow, strives through those deep-set deadened alive eyes to slice that lifecord that strangles the blood from the sharp blade stabbed by the boned hand where buried in the bedclothes; lies. Rusted wood, rotted nails dressed in antique lace, turrets crumpling tower from painless window peeks high-pitched cackles the warped wooded floor creaks the lurking rocker; she yet seeks. Mind made mine struggles for distance, to that okay place, he’s not found where vivid voices voice vivid empty spaces and laboriously; he sees not a sound. Enters the whore comfort knows best, wigs through the stuffed birded torrent sketches and etches through sin and sinew in regret and remorse his past; he catches.

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Constance Pavliska shades hold warm a cold tear of rock unlined paths and crevass’ deep that sinks low as its sun glowers over shadow stroked shrouds of missed sage brush in dry river scented smoke as the dew-webs sparkle reaches the sweetgrass burn. seeing eyes that wild run to stars beneath my sun where the real reflects through sunflower eyes it’s earthy brown delights on airy wings as things travel and look to you who is me that squeals out the night; my hunger. the sealed door embraces the tenuous force-hinged inseparable joint, where slumbers the lion’s roar and the chord thrusting it’s key to sing on the unspoken tongue of I who is the striped word ribboned back to shades of black and white.

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Constance Pavliska What song does she sing on years and thoughts? wearing the beige woolen cloak scratching memory to a thin sheet of papyrus rolled to the scroll of stackable geometric form curving his smile in pride and embroidered handkerchiefs and tying the hands of the could combing with fine teeth brushed to a sparkle on the occasion marking the itemized list with a pink check crowning on Kings and four Jack of Hearts torn from the decks of 52 packs while response arrives in yellow arranged in orange peeled and sealed in the zest of Rachel Ray in mom’s kitchen, the best cook that she never was in plucked eyebrows and tousled bedclothes enfolded by the Nightshade glowing on two moons dangling from earlobes stretching tight across three continents squared in four by four inch glass reflecting peeling paint and paper tarred by the feathered brush on the cheek of the comedian carrying a rubber duck and pinching himself on a regular basis to ensure surety while conversing on a tin can and a string spitting out rusted words and blood from the tongue torn loose from the frozen street sign

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Constance Pavliska directing traffic along the rural way beyond flashing yellow lights and pigs squealing into the star-free night as the hounds howl at the floodlight fluorescing over the head of the bone child singing flowery lyrics to a song that she did not know.

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q There Was a Rope Frayed, Hugging it’s Tree Snug I stumbled into Fraggonard’s painting, “The Swing” losing my brush in the muted transparency, I found a linquistic string filtered through fitted scholars, un-refuted. Did he love her?—behind the brush of words that refused to part his lips as she rushed the wind oblivious, or herself absurd in swirling pink pretending, he was hushed in shadows, a green knee’d to sacred ground who told such a tale, in paint on canvas in a secluded tree-d in quieted sound where pleasure lay, away from prying mass reveals lurking eyes under her swinging blues, greens, yellows and her pink glee mingling.

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various poets

Marina Days are warm, nights cold. Moon and Sun run clear and long. Now as forever, in little salvos, the swallows come, summer-homing here again. I watch them and remember that I wrote their spirit down for you.

Brad Calkins

You watched them when you were little too. You sang, in a place you will never return to. You said you were flying. Later you made up a fear and turned on me. I made you miss a piece of what you're running from. I cannot be forgiven. I watch the swallows today, and I wonder whether you will ever land. ~Jim Knowles,

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time Finding What Has Been Thought Lost In Time Yes, shortly after this year's encore of that famous Times Square kiss on the anniversary of The Surrender, and on the eve of Ken Burns' film with all these previews bringing back my father as a sailorboy. And I'm just a girl waiting in the back seat of an antique car in another dream. Over there. Maybe a French farm. Where my sister is, Lord only knows. Autos from that time line the old country road young European troops in olive shooting sweaters are making their way along. One stopping at my window smiles, leans in, and asks, "Want to hug and kiss?" "No thank you," I decline, but kindly (aren't I too young?) bringing a "fair enough" expression to his face moving on. People crowd by carrying folded chairs. Something is over. My friend Norma, with hem-length chiffon neck-scarf dating her vintage dress front and back, follows her late husband, Ron, in uniform. Another older man, familiar, in his. Nearly her age, I must've suddenly grown. (Now isn't that dream time for you?) We are all walking in slow steps up out of this old-fashioned way. Something is over. Next thing I know, Norma's boy I'd promised to watch out for next door, no longer grown or sick or dead, but the twelve-ish of our grandson John is missing. I am sobbing that panic when we turned around in the packed 4-H hall at Blue Hill Fair and our young Dan was nowhere to be found... (Where can he be...Dear God, where have you gone....) when Paul comes into view popping wheelies on his junior-size bike. Where have you been! Don't you ever go off like that again! My husband turns to me from sleep, his arm warming, calming. Comforting like Johnny after worry, Paul's big eyes boy my heart, sorrying, hugging, promising. His mother will be so glad. The old gravel drive has become a road of gemstones in sections such as those found in bead shops. There --carnelian, agate, jasper, quartz. Miniature opal baseballs and other gum machine and Cracker Jack trinkets kids prize, but of precious stones as if a boy's version of heaven, once grown, then a kid again, kissed all better. His mother will be so glad. ~Patricia Ranzoni

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time Pause Curtains drag the air along a glistening net of silk ecru. Their color becomes evening torn pale on the trees when day turns her bare shoulder from the world and I am left to clutch the sweet silence of prayer, the scent of melons ripening in our Summer garden. ~Wendy Howe

Icefields

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time

Ichtor

The Watch The foggy faced wrist-watch he wore during the war to end all wars, with the expandable wristband indented his flesh, like the shrapnel scars on his chest, which he kept hidden and never mentioned, except on rare occasions to scare us children. He once told me the hands were oars pulling through the profusion of time. An heirloom passed down; hands familiar, wound and wound again, the face grown misty with stories. ~ Ken Markee

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time The Mirage Beckons Even the language tells it: "to satisfy" and "sadness" rooted on one stock, the faithful breathing back towards shadows of everything that once bent to the sun. - Jane Hirshfield, from Gravity & Angels Dust is all a rich fantasy life seems good for, nevertheless my waking dream involves a phone call, her voice, my incredulous response, her voice again saying I'll see you Christmas Eve; humming one love one heart, as she hangs up the phone. .....

Luis Estallo

You told me of how you mourned your sister and understood. And I must say among the many comforters, another poet not just any poet, you are the most believable in the crowd of those who've spoken or written to me here in the realm of the hungry ghosts. .....

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time It's the night after Christmas and pieces of poems are cycling circling, and Didion holds my attention one more time with her "On Keeping A Notebook", and I'm almost ready to get on to a new journal, larger more spacious; this period of small pages nearly done. ..... I am in the center of the dread and clocks are tick ticking down, ready to clang the signal for the old year's open gate to close, the new year's latest wave of the unanswerable. It's as if ganja butter was slipped into my daily diet, the way these swirling flurries of grand thoughts race ahead and leave me staring at the new day's blank slate. ~ Doug Knowlton

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time the heart is a river Everything empties into the ocean eventually. ~Isadore Klosinonme Outside forces formed the ultimate boundaries, not me. It was the surge that caused the flood and the drought that brought the dry season. The eddies and pools that you see here are merely the progeny of a wanton motion. What lasts is not rock, nor sky, nor water; neither reflection nor pockmarked innuendo. What lives on is only a dull sense of passing and the ancient emptiness which is home to both the systole and diastole of flowing. ~Brion Berkshire

Ronald Hudson

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time Unmeasured Time Here you are, my daughter, latched on to my breast, and this slow release is sensual and good. I feel the wavy roof of your mouth, the gentle firmness of your teeth, the tug and kneading of your soft, rough tongue, the suction and the pull for sustenance. As you grow away from me, because of me, so I grow with you. I create a daughter—you, a mother. I watch you, wrapped in your skin-warm blanket, and I know this is a love some people miss. You slightly smile absorbing the details of my face— your bright blue eyes probing so much I have to close my lids. I anoint your silken head with my lips as your fingers touch my cheek. Tugging at my ears, my nose, and my lips can't cause offense. I am only occupied with you. The telephone's ringer is off, there's no work makeup to smear, and no party earrings for you to slip in your mouth. Touch me. Let me enjoy what will end too soon. This is our conversation, our interview. "No interruptions, please." Your hand at my mouth prevents a flood of words. I taste your little fingertips and cannot stop the thought as wild and red as blood: "I love you so much that I could eat you up." No one could ever love you any more. My heart beats faster, our eyes meet. Are you not afraid? You give a quickening smile that positively lingers, calming me down. I was not as close to you when you were deep inside. You are here, and I am glad.

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time Suddenly, I want to see all of you, knowing I can never take you fully in. I unwrap your blanket, seeing you have grown. I am as full of wonder now as you. Your little body, how can it contain you? The way our minds inside our heads can hold a house? You begin to eat again, unhurriedly. Your eyes close. You are on your way to sleep. Again, I'm glad. We both need rest. The work we do is hard. I think of weaning. Then, ending conversations with longwinded people. It takes a lot of effort-then, you stop, breathe, and swallow. In a while you will let go or I will pull away as gently as a mother can. ~Geraldine Cannon

Marinv

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time Time Through An Eastern Window You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies And you have been gone five months. ~Ezra Pound She pulls a mauve veil over the sun’s complexion, twilight deepens the sky. Shadows tether boats to trees guarding the river, leaves yearn to drift south. Village docks grow full with crates of silk, grain and fish. a merchant sails home. Days stretch out longer, a husband’s arms to his wife. Spring pads their earth with moss and stone gods bless the garden as the bride sleeps joined, blossom to its stem, wish to the evening starlight, soft hand to her lover's shoulder. Soon the lamp’s wick is hushed, oil keeps the glass bowl golden— tomorrow floats inside. ~Wendy Howe

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Ulisse

time Yolk Thoughts can make a forest, hide a soul. I rise, fresh, like a promise. I bed down like a fading hope. An arcane canopy of buzz blocks heavens' laughing silence. The hypertweekedness of this era. Christian Piessen

Things have gone otherwise often. I have missed things I never had. I am a tourist in my own life. I doubt I am alone. ~Jim Knowles

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time The Insomnia Motel They check in, but they don't check out. -- old advertisement for roach trap Lyin' in bed late at night sometimes I just go out of my head at night… -- Lyle Lovett, "Sleepwalking" Here's a place you hope not to check into. But you recognize it right away. The management is surly. The price, far too high. For no extra charge all your failures and inadequacies parade before you every time you lie down and the long, dark night will feel like ten. The mattresses are stained and thin. The sheets cheap sweaty nylon. On TV, nothing but cheesy violent movies or infomercials for juicers and ab machines. And the clock hands in all the dreary rooms are stuck at 3 A.M. ~Alice Persons

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Miroslav Cizmesija

various poets/photographer Scott Davis Occlusions The shadows are blue. The fence is toothed. The hands are not, in my view, touching. Flasks of perfume, of booze glow like amber. I want to smell like a million years ago. I want to swallow the occlusions without choking. Memory is never sepiatoned. I drive with my headlights on in the afternoon; I still can’t see where I’m going. The orange cones tell me where not to go but I ignore them. Sun, filtered through the deck, pinstripes the violets. Once, I drowned in a kiddie pool despite the fact that it was leaning against a wall. There’s nothing lonelier than a lone gull flying out to sea except maybe a man clinging to his guitar as if it were his penis, or a young bear lost in suburbia running across a street. That pile of trash, the shards of porcelain, the broken glass, the beams splintered, snapped in half, the sad, bared mattress? That’s where I once lived. I called those walls and windows home. Tonight, I will sleep on the drought brown lawn and dream of an abandoned library, the blue stacks as silent as a summer after all of the children are dead and gone. ~Laurel K. Dodge

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best of net nominations/photographer Scott Davis in a city of paint it's my favorite painting – the one where you are one centimeter of sky stretched out between random twilight entities like a black felt-tip marker or a bright push-up stick and i am cold acaí on a child´s folding plastic dish. i am always folding and you are always shelling peanuts and i am always a washed-up jellyfish. the one where you are a token and i am a button with a red arrow connected to a plastic stick connected to a spring connected to a metal rod connected to a series of black plastic squares with paper and numbers (you are four oh oh one and i am five oh oh six) and faded photographs. it's just a painting. you're just a painting. i am simply paint. and you are a grid of curvy disjointed tropical streets in this city always dancing, always resisting blueprints, always hiding from engineers and the indifference of pen ink. here i am walking around in this city and you are buildings and you are cars and you are rugged sidewalks and the careful step of obedient feet. you are an urban arborization project and i am on the corner begging for money or just one lousy cigarette. i'm just a painting. you are simply paint. i am a telephone ringing and ringing i am always ringing and you – you are always setting pineapples against your dreams. you are always a grilled cheese cart on the beach. you are always a faded yellow line on sun-baked pavement or a seagull a bit too far from shore irritated under the hungry feathers of your subtle wingspan. it's just a painting - the one where i'm a sudden trolley on a silent beach and you're a street sign wrist watched in a city of paint. ~Courtney Campbell

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best of net nominations/photographer Scott Davis nostalgia in the early morning rain falls like tiny dervishes. i am a mobile feast; tender and lean. columns of fact masquerade as citizens, march into the dark horizon of genetic engineering and are lost, at last. god's peace keeping force sweeps the street. between the tiny explosions of moisture, the silence is stunning. the glistening perimeters of my dimensions shimmer as a thousand buses rush toward one terminal. the sidewalk is as still as an altar. in awe of this isolation, i kneel in the sanctuary of me. a candle quivers. the window is open. the blind pigs* in my basement memory roll with shining negroes, guitars, a girl on every knee and sunrise is remote. when heroin was cheap, love never died a natural death. it is 2007, somewhere between speed dating and Darwin, love burns out with upscale hiss. oh spontaneous combustion. come, put me on simmer once again. ~Gil Helmick * in the 1960's, a blind pig was one of hundreds of illegal, after hour bars in Detroit. ~previously published in The Café Review

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best of net nominations/photographer Scott Davis hotel gone man, smoking, on a balcony. custody papers, awarding heat. necktie, loosened like a plug from a fan. bulbs, break. eyes, flicker. body, idle, probably dead. so drain, someone says, the swimming pool. detective, in blood stiffened collar, drifting, seed, through a maid losing a cart to a stairwell. redrawn bathrooms where mirrors down the doppelganger heart. majesty, yours, catching a train. keeping it. an urgent blue movie loving volume the volume of muted children sleeping on cash. minor music of mangled hangers, oh maybe a maestro but instead a maker of keyholes. sir, she calls me. the screwdriver’s shadow reappears. some kid, yawning, makes off with the number on my door. ~Barton Smock

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best of net nominations/photographer Scott Davis Note to the Hyacinth Lady The last snow has been stolen from sere woods across Lackner Boulevard where I find trilliums and jack-in-the-pulpits impatient (and moss slowly eating horizontal trees limbs). Hyacinths are old news. Geese protect goslings. Lounge chairs crowd the deck along with the cleaned barbecue. Grackles have returned to reclaim the back yard cedars. The snow shovel hangs in the garage. The snow blower is stored off to the side and last fall's unfinished refinishing projects have room to sprawl where a car has so seldom been parked. I am one year closer to the hope I can retire. The kitchen needs a phoenix's touch as does the outside of the house. It's eight o'clock and the sun has yet to set. What time is it now in Afghanistan? Today in the Sunday Sun there was an article about our lost compatriots. For each death was a picture of them young on a black and white beach riding a tricycle or posing for hockey team photos. My mother will be eighty-eight this year. I grew up with her stories of the war in Slovakia. She never forgot the price of exaggerated dreams nor how people can be defined not by who or what they are but by agenda and the need to consume everything the eye can see. She says this is history again and again and again. I will retire this year. The days are warming and lengthening. The gales of November will find me prepared. ~ Helmuth Filipowitsch

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best of net nominations/photographer Scott Davis For the Russian Children at Beslan The radio intrudes with noise of sirens and mothers screaming, but we’re practiced at this and the death toll seems modest. Later, more sirens and more screams and more children in the gymnasium than first admitted and the death toll rises like warm dough in a bread bowl. While Russia bites its lip, prepares to continue a war where freedom is a nuisance, and the Chechens say, Who cares for our children when the bombs are dropping? we pause and mutter and say some prayers, then go on making supper. On the first day of school my children ate pancakes for breakfast, waited gladly for the yellow bus, and later I hear that Leo gave out candy, although he did yell at the eighth graders. Like wildebeests on Animal Planet, grazing within sight of lions gorging on the slow brother, the living are concerned with themselves. The earth is always springing forward somewhere turning green the dead ground, and birth will mostly balance death for as long as we know it, but human acts determine whether children laugh or tremble. Hand to hand and mouth to mouth in constant motion, human acts are borne everywhere on this small planet and more than supper is needed now, or gas in the car, or books returned to the library. ~David Moreau

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poetry by Patrick Carrington, photography by Dave Wade

This Night Too Is Round And in the end it is another night of disappointment, one more carousel that revolves without incident. The barstool turned out to be a barstool, not a unicorn or Pegasus, the momentary bursts of laughter gone so fast they too could have been inventions. No one shudders at your leaving. The friends and lovers who visited you in your glass this evening, who came bright as neon and went like melting ice— they'll return tomorrow to look for your hand, in the same festival of lights. And you'll be waiting for them to come back, to choose you. It is not so strange you are continually flattered by this. It is, after all, a moment you may not remember, but know.

~first appeared in Green Hills Literary Lantern

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Patrick Carrington/Dave Wade My Favorite Tomboy Here's a slingshot I made you from mint berry branches Let's play cops and robbers in the drainage ditch at McKinley Park. Tie my hands with fishing line, poke your fingers in the small of my back and lead me with hands high through the back door of Otto's where you can try on that fur your mother wanted for Christmas. And dancing. I want to dance with you and naked mannequins in the window for the milkman to see. We'll kiss him, leave our lips on the glass and escape to your secret attic as they sleep, and kiss behind the yellow curtains where no one sees, where you can tilt your head the right way. I think I've always loved you and your sideways mouth, how you say Them's root beer barrels, ain't worth the shit they smell like. Let's race through the cemetery young, straight to Mayor Harrison's headstone near Duncan Street. Before we run, you'll do it again, you'll go and say You ain't never kept up with me. We'll piss on opposite sides of his black marble. I'll hide the gobstopper moon under your tongue, something big enough to last forever. ~first appeared in Ghoti Magazine

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Patrick Carrington/Dave Wade A Different Day's Light I have soaked you in and I hold you, like the wood of an old house holds its carpenter's sweat. You built me in the shadows of a different day's light, stained my deepest grain. But I no longer feel the work of your hands. Forgive me for forgetting the joinings, the glue and pressing of thumbs, for allowing your craft to rot like salty wreckage spit from a sea. I can't find you in me even as I creak, even as I leak from windows watching days I can't unsee. ~first appeared in Compass Rose

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Patrick Carrington/Dave Wade Inking the Road Again Tumors of sidewalk snap under my shoes. I don't listen or look left at the cancered house as I pass. But I know it's there, slumped in an easy chair of mud, pitifully dressed in maple crumbs and stains of rain like my father wore on his ginnie t. His nightly storm of chips and beer watching tv in a lazyboy. Swelling in the belly, shrinking in the groin while his neglected wife stripped skin from a biker, sucking highways out of his tattoos. Once, he gave her roses for no reason but love, cut from bushes in the yard. I know that prize garden is a graveyard now. I buried the bodies and planted the stones, groomed its misery until mower blades were the color of evening sky. I pruned vines with unpracticed hands until dry thorns couldn't break babyskin, chopped down riots of wood until the ax head wobbled and fell in the dirt with my dreams. I don't look back, won't look. I tend to myself, hit nothing now but the road. I've found my mother's double yellow line. No crossing, no u-turns. Funny how I never got there until the morning I had this fine replica of a Route 66 sign inked into my arm, right above the heart that says "Mom". ~first appeared in Frigg Magazine

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Patrick Carrington/Dave Wade The Smoke of St. Anthony’s I used my last match and lit the candle, watched smoke curl up to—where?— Her, I imagined. A vain act of love but full of sacrifice I thought, as badly as I needed a drag. And faith, as hard as days finish now without her. They end stiffer than the wood the sisters used to beat belief and the blood of Jesus out of me. Yet I come back for more. I called her name, louder than I meant to. I heard it echo in the rafters. The roof was higher than her uncle’s tobacco barn where we lit our first cigarette, where she always went to disappear as quiet as a prayer. I lit candle from candle, until the smoke was thick. I just can’t shake the hope or kick the habit, the notion she might be hiding up there, waiting for me, swinging her legs from the crossbeams.

~first appeared in Concho River Review

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Patrick Carrington/Dave Wade

Searching for Things to Worship Sorting through fluttering debris of thick boyhood days, tangle of jungle browned with our absence, I remember how you cupped water at Cedar Creek, your hands a chalice. And flowers you planted near the bank to make it your church, somewhere to sit in the greening comfort of a private prayer. A place one might see God and not be surprised. ~first appeared in The Aurorean

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Patrick Carrington/Dave Wade Waltzing Above Pepino’s Marble We moved a special way in the cemetery— in three-quarter time, knees bending like Strauss had a hand in the mourning racket, as if his baton allowed us to glide and lessen the weight on my grandfather’s chest. Sundays at Holy Name we grieved his passing, grandma’s only god who slept as he came, arm in arm with old goumbares. They landed in misfitted caps tight like thorns, in pants too short for legs that had broken free of nails. Those white streaks on his black stone were born that day, she said, when he cried at the torch as they powdered him for lice like an insect, like the flies that swarmed impoverished streets he left behind. When he died, she dusted the poison off and embossed his purity on rock they shipped to liberty like him, from his hometown quarry. She met it at a dock in Red Hook, made certain only men whose names had proper vowels handled its dignity. Distant relatives she thought, who knew the gentle steps of honor. My grandmother taught me to walk without touching the ground when we danced. She drew the Venetians at night, and Al di la made a wobbling boy her beau from Napoli courting with flowers and wine, the ironing board her wedding altar.

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Roses for you, Stacia, she heard as we waltzed through the slanted lights of the old country in a Brooklyn parlor. Float, your shoes are air, she said. Spread your arms and be a man of grace who does not tread on the hearts of angels. Fly like they do, above, with them. Their lives are closed wounds. Let them heal. ~first appeared in Eclectica

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featured Poets Constance Pavliska lives in Old

Town, Maine with her family. She is the proud mother of two married daughters and enjoys her dogs and gardening. She is a recent BFA and BA graduate of the University of Maine. Constance feels that as painter and poet that both language forms seem to urge the other onward with the poetry articulating the subject matter and the paint working to create rhythm and emotion until some point where it is no longer clear where one begins and the other one ends.

Patrick Carrington

is the author of Hard Blessings (MSR Publishing, 2008), Thirst (Codhill, 2007), and Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006), and winner of New Delta Review's 2008 Matt Clark Prize and Yemassee's Pocataligo Contest in poetry. His poems are forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, West Branch, The Bellingham Review, American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and other journals. He teaches creative writing in New Jersey and serves as the poetry editor of Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com).

featured photographers

Scott Davis is a self-taught scenic, landscape, wedding and portrait photographer. Scott was born and raised in Biddeford, Maine and now resides in Topsham, Maine with his wife. After graduating high school Scott joined the US Navy which enabled him to travel all over the world to places such as Japan, Singapore, the Middle East, Australia, Barcelona, the US Virgin Islands, and many others. During his 4 years in the US Navy many of Scott’s photographs were published in his Navy ship’s yearbook. After serving a 4 year term in the US Navy Scott chose to move back to Maine and study photography in college. At the current time Scott works a full time job and pursues his passion of photography part time. See more of Scott’s work at Davis Photography, (www.yessy.com/davisphotography).

Dave Wade’s

fine art work is exhibited internationally and is a blend of art and commerce including portraits and architectural photos, landscape and lifestyle, product and commercial, magazines and books. He is the photographer and co-publisher of The World of the Trapp Family, the life story of the legendary family who inspired The Sound of Music. View his work at David Wade Photography (www.davewadephoto.com/index.html). Special projects include photo essays on “The Working Waterfront” (Widgery Wharf, Portland Maine’s Oldest Continually Working Wharf) and “Japanese Oddities” (says Dave, “I lived In Japan for twelve years. You see things...”).

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time poets

Brion Berkshire

is indeed a bio–organism. At least part wolf and holy spider— (mostly brown and somewhat recluse)—and his singular, insular life is spent hanging by a thread.

Geraldine Cannon holds an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville. Cannon has won the John Ciardi Award, the Kenneth Patchen Award, and the Raymond L. Barnes Award for Excellence in Poetry. Cannon, who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, in the rural town of Salem, South Carolina, now resides with her husband and their two children at the other end of the mountain range in the beautiful, rural town of Fort Kent, Maine. She enjoys teaching various types of writing and literature courses as an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing for the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

Wendy Howe

is an English teacher and free lance writer who lives with her life partner and teenage stepdaughter in Southern California.

Jim Knowles grew up in Maine and lives in the Wilmington Forest in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Mipoesia's Best of Cafe Cafe series and in the air at open mics.

Doug Knowlton is the owner of The Village Bookshop, in Bradenton, Florida's Village of the Arts. After a few other "careers," the longest involving twenty years in mental health social work, and his last job working for the state as case manager for disabled adults in Manatee County, he is finally living the dream in paradise. "Books, writing and gardening are prime passions." Knowlton is the past president of the Artists Guild of Manatee, and after thirty some years of boards and committees he's glad he only has to sit in from time to time these days. "It is worrisome right now to have everything tied up in property, books, and two tropical gardens, we could be out on the street in a flash, like our friends who traverse the shop's neighborhood, from Salvation Army to Jobs, etc. But in spite of the rough economic times we hope to survive and thrive. It is a comfort to be a part of a community of artists where the motto is we're-all-in-this-together." Knowlton grew up in Huntington, Long Island, and lived in six states before settling in Florida. He has published several books of poetry, and anticipates his latest, The Native Hue of Resolution, will be at the press before the end of 2008. His bookshop's poets & writers group will participate in a

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community response to the 100 portraits of the homeless by Elayn Leopold, with an opening exhibition in November, 2009.

Ken Markee lives and works on the Maine coast. His poems have appeared or are inpress in Cider Press Review, Oleander Review, Rhymes for Adults, 14 by 14, From East To West, and SNReview.

Alice Persons of Westbrook is the editor and publisher of Moon Pie Press (www.moonpiepress.com) She has published three chapbooks. Her passions include volunteering for animal welfare organizations, and catering to her 5 cats and hound dog.

Mixed blood Yankee, Patricia Smith Ranzoni, writes from one of the subsistence farms of her youth. Her unschooled poetry, published across the country and abroad, documents the folk ways of her coastal, upriver and inland people, descendants of earliest settlers and natives in what became Maine. Books: From Puckerbrush Press, CLAIMING (1995) and SETTLING (2000); from Sheltering Pines Press, ONLY HUMAN ~ Poems from the Atlantic Flyway (2005); and forthcoming from Pudding House’s invitational GOLD series, PATRICIA RANZONI ~ GREATEST HITS, 12 Significant Poems. She is one of the poets featured in Poetry in Maine—Words from the Frontier (poetryinmaine.org).

Photos by photographers in the “time” feature are from Dreamstime.com. best of the net nominations

Courtney J. Campbell was born in Michigan but has lived in South America since 2001. Currently she lives in Brazil where she teaches English in a Binational Center and is a graduate student at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Her research centers on the causes of the spread of the English language in the Northeastern Region of Brazil. Her poetry and essays can be found in print and electronic publications as well as on her MySpace blog.

Laurel K. Dodge lives and writes in northeast Ohio.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch was born in Germany.

He emigrated to Ontario, Canada, into the heart of Mennonite country where he remained to be heavily influenced by that German/agrarian/urban melting pot. He has a BA in English and Geography, and is married with flown children. In 1999, he discovered a poetry community at the Atlantic Unbound. H returned to a long-neglected interest, made friends, traveled the world with poets and wrote poems. He has one thin self-published chapbook written for a trip to New Orleans the summer before Katrina. Now retired, he is passionate about music, travel, photography and that insanity called language.

Gil Helmick graduated with Honors and Distinction in English from the California State University in Sonoma, California in 1976. During the early 1980s, Gil wrote was published in small California anthologies and performed upwards to forty public readings. In March of 1985, Gil decided to pursue fiction and flew to Paraguay and Brazil. Gil completed two novels, The Accomplice and Wounded Angels . Twenty years eclipsed his writing as Ani, his wife, and he built, operated and sold a business. As of February of 2007, Gil returned to writing exclusively. Those years included residing in Mexico, New Orleans, Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia. Gil currently resides on an island of the coast of Maine. During 2007, he completed a collection of poetry, Wounded by Zen.

David Moreau lives in Wayne, Maine with his wife, son and daughter. He works in Lewiston with adults who are developmentally disabled. For years now he has considered sex, death, and baseball to be the three greatest subjects worthy of poetry. David's second chapbook, You Can Still Go To Hell...and Other Truths About Being A Helping Professional, published in spring 2007, struck a chord with readers (and Writer's Almanac listeners) all over the world, and hundreds of copies of the book have been sold. He is also the author of Children are Ugly Little Monsters (But You Have to Love Them Anyway) and Sex, Death, and Basebball.

Barton Smock is 31 years old and lives in Columbus, Ohio. He works two jobs, can hold three children, is sure his one wife is the one, and hopes he doesn't have to tell you to read William Stafford. He has been published, sporadically, online most recently at Arsenic Lobster and Merge Poetry.

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