INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Duane Locke
Elisavietta Ritchie
Sam Cornish
Alan Britt
Shutta Crum
Joseph McNair
Geoffrey Philip
Lazlo Slomovits
Gerald Clark
Chris Lord
Coleman Barks
Marisella Veiga
Joanie Freeman
Dave Etter
Steve Barfield
scharCbear
Michael D. Long
Karyn M. Wolven
Running Cub
Silvia Scheibli
fog billows over the
troubled face of the canal;
a quilt of clouds, torn by a stand of pines, a tangle
of cumulus stuck in their needles, stretches over the hot
road rising in the east to the reeb of mallards strutting
over imaginary property lines of fulford-by-the-sea--
neighbors with new silverware and noise--down streets
with names as provisional as the ones we give ourselves,
behind houses swollen as the frayed textbooks
that line my shelves; while overhead in the frigid wind
from the west, past hassidic women, power walking,
checking each other's pulse as if they weren't going to live
forever, a kestrel circles rat snakes through the everglades,
sand skitters over the page into the next millennium,
a stream that quenched ponce's thirst, washed mud
from the hair of tequesta, pours over my crown, neck,
chest, feet--the hard portions--and into the sap of the mangrove.
SONG OF THE NARWHALS
beach umbrellas tremble from the shock of twin
blasts in the bulkheads of the ocean alley sunk
deliberately, as it heaves its stern in the air--
like the grunt of the grampus--before the forecastle
sinks off the coast of islamorada to become part
of the coral reef, a haven for dolphin and parrot fish
poking the cold gunwale, the scaffold of rock, sea
weed tightening its green noose, coiled around the
hull, around the cabin windows,
round as a balsero's necklace, or the watery eyes
of groupers caught in the nets of fishing boats
trawling into the keys before the sea gulls break
from their pattern to news of another shock, before
the hoarse atlantic, home to these whales
who begin their journey off silver bank
up to Plymouth, can begin its usual elegy
for these small boats that set out
from west end
on the cycle of waves, back and forth, ribbed
like the hero, packed to its helm
with ashanti,
ibo coromantee, the cries from underneath
like ahab's
whale or lowell's mad cry at
nantucket heard
in the ear of a conch, propped on the side of a tap-tap
on flooded streets of port-au-prince where little boys
guide their paper boats down gullies into the sea.
MANGO
hidden behind a cloister
of leaves,
guarded by wasps, the
flesh yields
the secret of pollen; peel
the skin
with your lips, the sap
trickles over
your fingers--the juice
smells strange
on your bread; suck
through the meat,
take the stone into your
mouth,
and feel the hairs tickle your tongue;
call the goats, for the
season is over.
Geoffrey Philip, Miami