INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

Lyn Lifshin
Richard Kostelanetz
Karyn M. Bruce
Duane Locke
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Laszlo Slomovits
Kufre Udeme
Michael Lewis-Beck
A. J. Huffman
Nugent Karhu
Fred Wolven
Shutta Crum
Fatmir Terziu
Steven Gulvezan
Kyle Hemmings
Adeeko Ibukun
Chris Cialdella
Paul B. Roth
Fahredin Shehu
Chris Lord
Dike Okoro
Jennifer Burd
Alisa Velaj
Joanie Freeman
Jeton Kelmendi
Richard Luftig
Dzekashu MacViban
Mike Berger
Al Ortolani
Ndue Ukaj
Alan Britt

Jennifer Burd &
Laszlo Slomovits
Diane Giardi
Running Cub
 

Ann Arbor Review

is an independent

International Journal & ezine

Copyright (c) 2013 Silver Grey Fox
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
------------------------------------------------


staff:
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
 

Submissions via e-mail:

poetfred@att.net

OUT HERE

       Owasco's shore reaches so far out this winter that only crystallized webs of hollow ice where shallow water used to be stretch their bubble filled and wafer-thin bodies between black and sulphur colored rock.  The crunching echo of your footsteps of fins against the sides of these rocks sounds awkward.

       Perched on your shoulder, wind whispering in your ear the same notes you once heard a white throated sparrow call to its mate in western Maine convinces you the one you await has returned even though you're not the kind of person who'd necessarily notice shadows on snow without apparent sunlight.  Eventually you accept how no one's returned and yet suffer the words used to understand it.

      Grown older than you remember, you prick yourself and the little that's left of your blood spilling into gutters down the hilly roads of your childhood dissolves in a clear glass of water on the nightstand along with your grandfather's false teeth.  Your lips without speaking quiver the way a knife hits its target at the thought.

      You keep to yourself, your blood lullabied to sleep by the silence.



MIDNIGHT BLUE

      After snowy headlights blotch the hotel lobby's ignored fica, fern and spider plant shadows, and its elevator goes up before coming down, noise filled streets are muffled by slush swirling round the mushy hubs of the warm bus ride home at whose last stop you forgot to get off.

      Since sight itself has become a sort of blindness, when you do get off, you walk as far and as fast as you can without once looking where you're going.  So embarrassed are you for missing what you never had. 

       Later that night you're discovered where the aqua tint of snow around your head sunk in a snowbank's deep bootprint resembles the halo your long walk home had you hoping you would find.



AN EMPTINESS

       You cannot empty your emptiness enough.  Becoming cattle stuffing grass in your mouth after drought ending rains might be one way.  Ambling around on all fours, content to stand, except to sleep or feel that it's about to rain, might move you to some more brilliant kind of ignorance.  Who really knows?  Although enclosures may confound you and open spaces tend to lose you, other hands trying to soothes your feelings sting with flashes off the sharpness of their butcher knives.  So, what's the difference?

       Along, mesmerized by your own skin that comes back to your after covering the soft notes oboes back-stroke over string passages in Mahler's 4th, you forget it no longer fits and so hangs in baggy wrinkles from your cheekbones and over each hand trying to gesture the way a dolphin's dorsal fin cleaves to the edge of each creating and falling wave.

       You try recalling your name before you existed, before headless you wiggled in your own hands, but cannot.  The emptier you feel the more fulfilled everything around you becomes.  Walls are walked through, waters upon, and the sky in your heart opening up a new portal in your bloodstream overflows with tall laughter the way summer's spreading yucca blossoms white.

Paul B. Roth, Fayetteville, New York