INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

Richard Kostelanetz
Karyn M. Bruce
Duane Locke
Lyn Lifshin
Rich Ives
Chris Lord
Anton Gojcaj
Donal Mahoney
Laszlo Slomovits
Alan Britt
A. J. Huffman
Bhisma Upreti
Ali Znaidi
Paul B. Roth
Joan Colby
Rexhep Shahu
Catherine McGuire
Michelle Bailat-Jones
April Salzano
Kufre Udeme
Jane Butler
Jennifer Burd
Peycho Kanev
Joanie Freeman
Jennifer Burd &
Laszlo Slomovits
Frederick Pollack
Fahredin Shehu
Holly Day
Serena Wilcox
Ndue Ukaj
Running Cub

Fred Wolven
Allison Grayhurst
Rose Mary Boehm
Michael D. Long
Jim Davis
Christopher Dungey
Bobbi Sinha-Morey
Jason Ryberg
Douglas Polk
Janine Canan

 

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:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
 

Submissions via e-mail:

poetfred@att.net

DEPTH OF WINTER

          Almost too deep for foal, fawn or calf, snow glows from its icy crust and the blue darkness their unsteady hoofs crack open with ease, presses against their untouched blood, bone and shadows' struggle to survive.

          Coming across such shadows, scattered in and out of rock cracks, in and out of delicate nests, you gather them into small piles until the moon, edging closer, slowing Earth down, grows these piles even larger.  Every dispute about the sun rising or setting is useless once every shadow on the planet gathered to this pile blocks everyone's view.

          You'd like to awake but you're not asleep.  You'd like to feel the difference between these shadows but only recognize their flame-edged silhouettes.  Touched by them or not, it's not knowing that's the difference, as if a stone falling through water had no real depth of its own.
 

TO BE

         First one eyelid then the other covers itself with earth until, no closer to death, both blink.  You'd like to sleep and enjoy your great great grand- father's unmotorized dreams.  You'd like to be the shadows of moths in high grasses milked goats stir with restless legs.  You'd like to be the sun and tight-rope a frayed spider web hanging from a rusty nail's too many summers.  The sun cutting angular paths across the peaks of snowdrifts rounded by a thaw's trickle.  The sun too old to be infinite, but young enough to self-consume.  The sun and all its stairless staircases angels carry on their vanishing backs.  The sun and its sizzling oceans blistering the skin off your downcast image.  The sun and its own face known only by its dying light's afterglow.


GETTING AWAY

         It comes down to sky and what color sunset fills your eyes, what flocking green birds at last light fill your silence with song, and what rivers in their unseen struggle to follow where they lead themselves enter your wayward bloodstream.

         Left on their own, your bones assembled from bits of bituminous, mica and compacted river water, straighten your spine from mud into a longing for legs.  Those your old body owned, imprisoned by pacing unlocked rooms in noisy Parisian quarters, were squeezed tighter by a drying mud's push through large cracks from its ever wet center.

          In spite of escaping on all fours, your memories wait abandoned on the doorstep you were so proud of leaving behind. 


STAGNATION

         The only one left, you keep to yourself.  Silence becomes less random and more sustained.  When not silent, it's you who make it so.

         You make it so when you hear a shaggy black and white goat resting against a broken fence muttering under its breath.  When you hear a rabbit chewing escarole while twitching canticles between its whiskers and those high-lighted shadows tucked between each tall blade of grass gone to seed.  You make it so when you hear white geese squawk while awkwardly patrolling a creek's edge well up the slope from its cascading water.  And yet, no silence is lost among these sounds whose blend is a pure octave above those noisier voices slipping between the pebbles your shoed feet keep scuffing and dragging across the ground.

         You listen but inside your own heart wait for something other than its beating to occur.  
 

Paul B. Roth, Fayetteville, New York