He looked at the young family standing there all together.
“There’s nothing physically wrong with him at all,” the doctor said without parsing words.
Phil stood there dumbfounded.
“There’s nothing wrong with him at all?” he asked.
“No,” the doctor said. His blue eyes looked down at the kitchen floor, and it looked as though the floor might swallow him whole if he did not speak. “He’s perfectly okay.”
“Then why won’t he eat? His temperature? Did we make him?— You know?” Brenda asked.
Doctor Belliard shook his head no.
“It’s like when you’re mother tells you: if you eat your vegetables you’ll live a long life!” the doctor said very sarcastic. He paused, and then said: “The boy told me he wanted to jump off his roof and kill himself.”
Phil shrugged his shoulders: “Why in the world would he do that?”
Doctor Belliard let out an exhausted breath. “So he could be with his dog up in heaven,” he told them. “So I had no choice but to tell him the truth.”
Phil looked over at his wife who was holding their son in her arms. He looked at the doctor standing in his kitchen and then out of the living room window at the ice that was starting to melt along the edges of the pond. He could still make out where the dog had fallen through. Now there was just a hole there, where it had been cut in a square to get him out; and the opal color of the sky was reflecting blue on that one small spot atop the pond, where it was shining down and holding itself there even if it were only for another second.
Mercedes Lawry
Point of Departure
under the wet song of November
dark as a blood spot,
no hovering of wing, great
sacks of gray in the sky
as all fury at stolen hope
startles the last silence
of a world where language
has escaped, where shadows
lie against the ground
like small deaths,
the cry of a lone hawk
shears the crush of silence
like the intake of breath
at the point of departure
Curious Joys
Pardon the furniture arranged to perfection,
interior mirror of calculated space
with horizontal mimicking the serene
and vertical, an anchor of self in nothing.
Guarded, she steps and sits, lifts
and exhales, measuring her accountability.
How close are the floodwaters?
Wind at window and darkness on its way.
She will not wither or plead.
Place is how her soul endures, natural disasters
kept at arm’s length with a glib phrase.
Her own caustic journey seeps across the floor.
Marking shadows, she feels a gladness,
slow transformation of the pale greens
sufficient as the hours and her own instinct to inhabit.
Use Your Words
Pause, end of pause.
Attempt at language.
Breathe shallow, breathe deep.
Disturbance, as if a page
had been torn from a book.
Ruthless, this theft
and those helping with the getaway,
those sentence demons
licking at the punctuation.
Take sound, swallow meaning.
Even if the rain is scribbling
at the window, the readers
will not look up.
Clues on the shelves,
string them together
and slip them into your bones.
Glean story from absence.
Word, no word, all words
in hazardous commotion.
A Small Bravery
The ragged wind stirs slightly.
No indication of the lost returned.
Words break apart, a uselessness of sound, then silence.
This too is the great death
mocking what we know.
Salt and roses, twigs and clay.
The headiness of a river down a mountain,
that cold water a force and loud.
What travels on the earth marks an absence.
We are elusive and might deserve forgiveness.
Whether we pause among the trees or continue
weeping into the morning.
Barbara Brooks
B Heatr
He is here again, his white van
and a butterscotch light for warnings.
He has come to see the heat pump. Yesterday
he came twice. Maybe he needed a part.
He kneels by the metal lungs
of the heat pump, doesn’t disturb
the wood thrush singing its E-OH-LAY. Or the wrens
ferrying insects to the nest in the dryer vent.
Lifting the panel, he kneels
in front, an altar of temperature.
I can’t see what he is doing,
spring leaves block my view.
He has removed the pump’s cover.
It is sitting in the drive. I didn’t see him
bring a new one, besides he is alone.
A new one is too heavy for one to carry.
It’s 2 pm, he is packing up. He gets out,
monkeys with the For Sale sign
at the end of the drive.
Puts it in his truck.
The house has been empty for a year,
its previous owners gone north.
On the deck, I listen, a yellow-throated warbler,
it will be leaving soon.
On Productivity
The Holsteins salt and pepper
spring-green grass. It’s the early
morning cud chewing, they rest
under the warming
sun.
Heat waves
begin
to shimmer
the pavement
as I drive
to evaluate
Ms. Smith.
Drop by drop, the cows’ udders swell.
Milk bags sway between their legs.
Time to enter the milking shed. Each tag read,
logged into the record, the day’s production
tallied.
Daily, a computer
calculates
my quota,
need
twenty-eight
visits.
Number 50 is dropping off,
probably due to age. An old milk cow
isn’t much good for anything
except dog food.
William Greenway
Chagrin Falls, Memorial Day
If there were no dead
we would create them,
we-walking-by-the-river-named-
for-failure, hands full of each
other, custard, balloons, see them
before us stratified, water pouring over
a blessing too late, watch steps down
slick rock, every second maybe an edge.
Chagrin falls, yes, but does it
rise again, like spray, like
plasma shuddering free, and like winter
breath into night sky, does it gell
in cold space? Lovers add
a germ that flies a comet's tail,
and a yolk begins to pulse in endless dark,
iambic, like a heart of hope and fear.
A Feeling’s Like a Face
A feeling’s like a face
that fades with time from the mind
and memory can’t replace
the frame of empty space
where a lover’s eyes once shined,
and a feeling’s like a face.
We remember every place
where face and feeling chimed
but memory can’t replace
the first nor final fierce embrace
when soul and body twined
for a feeling’s like a face
that other, later loves erase
what once was so defined
and memory can’t replace
what time and loneliness deface
when love and loveliness decline,
for a feeling’s like a face
that memory can’t replace.
Blind Hearing Ear Dog
I try, by pat and paw, to translate
siren shriek, smoke alarm, warning
jingle of the ice cream truck,
but all he really wants to hear
is what I get unwanted all the time:
aren’t you cute, what a sweetie,
though how would I convey such pap?
Rub of fur, nip, lick, or nuzzle?
Just because I can’t see what he sees—
colors, the ray-shot ocean depths,
maybe even angels—
he feels superior.
But deaf as a whole range-line of fence posts,
he’ll never know what I hear:
strange words that sift down from other worlds,
bat squeak, hawk whistle, mouse rustle,
the scrape and lisp of fallen leaves,
and the sudden sounds of hidden things
like the flap and whisper of white wings.
On Buying a Watch Online for My Birthday
I’ve tried to live with the digitals,
those cyber soldiers who claim
to be advancing, goose-stepping
toward some future place,
but really standing still, mute
beefeaters at the palace gate.
I prefer hands
moving almost imperceptibly,
creeping up on whatever’s waiting.
An illusion, sure, but not so
abstract, not ciphers beamed
by satellite,
but figures on a real road
(albeit round) you get to trail
on the way to what
lies ahead, where
the movement on your wrist,
literal or analogous,
will continue without you,
morphing or marching
moment to moment,
surviving your cells
and the ticking of your doomed heart
toward some zenith, high noon
or midnight
that tolls to tell,
your time is now.
Late Show, All Hallows
The whole problem of life is to become transparent to transcendence.
—Karlfield Durckheim
On almost every channel
someone is weeping,
about a mother, a sister, a wife,
a life, a cancer.
Is there no other fear on tonight
outside of ourselves?
Let’s see: murder. Gangsters. Crime
scene. Intervention. Murder.
Not even monsters, Godzillas
frozen at the bottom of the world
that thaw when something radioactive
tumbles off a ship, blows up,
slips off a sandy shore
into a black lagoon.
No mad doctor whipping up
something nasty with a teaspoon
of toxicity, a dash of lightning,
a soupçon of rotting flesh.
Okay, just more metaphors
for the human condition, I get it.
Too bad we can’t project a little better,
get whatever gnaws away at our innards
out, give it a gentle face, show it on
some screen other than the strung-up,
wrinkled bedsheet of our lives.
Or flip to The Transparency Channel
showing what might be on the other side,
or at least could have been if we’d sprung
for the higher tier, instead of
reruns of series seven of
What We’ve Settled For,
starring Fur and Fangs,
wearing the masks of our reflections.
Sean Forbes
Haiku
Winters in Southside Jamaica, Queens
1
My grandmother praised
the deep silence of winter:
drug deals forced indoors.
2
No summer drive-bys
or innocent neighbors lost
to dull black semis.
3
We live on a block
of ten row houses, can hear
every goddamn sound.
4
Eight in the morning.
My boots should crunch snow instead
of pink topped crack vials.
5
Hey, yo, curly top!
You gotta sister? Bet she’ll
gimme some fine trim.
6
Grandma prays for me
to fail the ghetto before
puberty begins.
7
Damon approaches
me. Asks if I want to make
a large roll of cash.
8
Christmas Eve. Best friend
shot dead. Closed casket. Barely
a face left on him.
9
Morning, purple sky.
Two drug dealers escort Mom
to the train station.
10
Damon slams me up
against a brick wall. Whispers
he likes boys my size.
11
Boy, you betta get
your hide home. Your Grandmama
worried sick ‘bout you.
12
Grandma delivers
plates of ackee and codfish
to every drug house.
13
Spark of a fired gun
in cold night air. Damon holds
my trembling right hand.
14
Grandpa spends every
winter with his lover in
Providencia.
15
Neighbors wonder why
we’ve never been robbed, even
though Grandpa’s not here.
16
Undercover cop
busts Damon. Twenty to life,
that’s the word at church.
17
She dreams he takes his
woman to secret islands
deep beneath the sea.
18
Grandma holds a lunch.
Tells neighbors to befriend those
kids they fear the most.
19
The blare of sirens,
helicopter high above.
Sounds I heard all night.
David Oestreich
Upon Finding a Dead Turkey
Brother, you are fallen, wrecked, but
worth your weight in sparrows
to the flies
that thrill your final flight
toward wickerwork of quill and bone.
Shrouded now by Queen Anne’s Lace,
the shade of vultures
wreathes your head
(beaded red and blue in death as life).
Your chestnut fan and soot brown maille
hang limp, askew,
and trailing remnants
of a wing suggest coyote’s tracks.
Who was ever grateful for you that is not
grateful now?
And who will
note your loss but has not found you yet?
Or who will say one prayer for us?
Beacon at Marblehead, Ohio
Beneath the lamp room; past the wires,
the cans of kerosene; past steps still bearing
whale-oil stains; outside the weathered door
and window pane; beyond the brick and stucco—
upon the relic shore (where no plaq
ue frames
a tidy paragraph) I kneel and read the bank
of histories, written in shell ridges and the raised
veins of once green leaves, now bound in sediment.
By these light marks, set in this limestone shelf
before the engineer carved his first blocks,
my gaze may reach beyond this rocky coast,
these bare islands, to the obscurity of ages.
After the Fact
Something was wrong—that gear
was missing and I was out back of the barn
where we keep the plow blade and the stuffed
manatee that sings Kissimmee, Kissimmee
come on and kiss-a-me when you pull
the lever on its back—anyway I’d gone out there
because without that gear your love would
never come back around and pulling
that lever is no fun without you—
I was one big reminiscence of Kissimmee
ransacking bags of old clothes, cake toppers,
programs from the symphony, and pictures of you
the night of your solo up in Toledo—weird
where you’d go after that—never saying
bonne nuit when you left to remind me
the night is a lady or waking me up when
you came home—just sleeping in street clothes
out in the old Lay-Z-boy—that’s back here too
under a pile of aquariums, beer cans, and bath towels—
a motel for anoles like the ones we kept finding
on the wall in our room that night in Kissimmee—
but that gear wouldn’t be under all that old crap—
and now I’m starting to cry because I’m starting to think
that the gear isn’t there and you’ll never come back
much less will you kiss-a-me or ever remind me
that men mistook mammals for mermaids and
soon I’ll be blubbering my grizzled chin flapping
like a manatee’s mandible mouthing the words
to some stupid song only tourists have heard
down in Kissimmee baby oh kiss-a-me baby oh baby
what happened in Kissimmee?
Just Another Blueeyed Boy
Who’d left the windows open that night?
Thirty-one degrees that darkest hour
and frost on all the picture frames. At dawn,
the chill of vodka shouted as loudly as it had
before we stalked sullenly to bed.