INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Chris Lord
Joseph McNair
Karyn M. Wolven
Geoffrey Philp
Paul B. Roth
Duane Locke
Silvia Scheibli
Shutta Crum
Felino Soriano
Steve Beaulieu
Donald Hewlett
Alan Britt
Joanie Freeman
Mervyn M. Solomon
Jerry Blanton
Marilyn Churchill
Running Cub
Mukul Dahal
Alice Paris
Helen
Losse
Fred Wolven
Outside this chamber awaits a great contempt.
It is the earth I avoid, the air I exhale, the fire quenched.
There is no act of reverence reverential enough,
no simple kindness kind enough, that I am not ashamed.
I fear these words I speak each day are the recitations of a fool.
These boundaries I have defined as limits of loathing and liking,
arbitrary dictum.
These people I have chosen to love, or not, impure distillations
rarefied by formulae of my own bedevilment.
Though quickened in the purity of moment,
I hover over codices of suspicion.
I cling to ciphers with the desperation of the unloved.
What I do know is this: hidden within this callous heart
there exists a luminous other, an alchemy so chaste
that the basest metal would sing in its shriving.
IN THE HEART'S LAND
There are no laws in the land of the truly lost.
There is no vanishing point, no center, and no periphery.
Latitude and longitude run parallel
and giggle about it.
I revel in this new topography--
a place of no gravity and no horizon,
where shadows do not require a geography of memory,
and circles are rarely perfect.
In the perfume of this place, I have no pulse.
There is no me, no you, no them,
no certainty in conversion. One inch
equals the circumference of a freckled stone
or the Gulf Stream.
All points of reference have move outward
in a silent and secret diaspora. But I remain.
Nameless.
98.6 degrees was surpassed hours, or maybe eons, ago.
On a whim, birds and Sundays defy prevailing winds.
And the weather is musical
when hands are cupped.
Here cartographers once stood and muttered of dragons.
Here the heart's land lies veiled in capriciousness.
This is a country beyond manifest or map, where magnetic north
is a bogeyman's tale--
and the choreography of snowlight is both guide
and lover.
LEVIATHAN
Oh the lull of
These indigenous soundings
The great gray gulpings of air
Smooth and silverdark
A sliding into silence and past
A breathlessness
Remembered and found
And remembered again
These murmurous groupings
Circling and surfacing
A landscape of pulses and phrases
A blue endlessness
Echoing of risings and fallings
And the whispered slide
Of body against body
Beloved leviathan
Beloved waters
Shutta Crum, Ann Arbor