Wendy Battin

Christmas in Connecticut

Not what you think. Rain. 
The cards are all in Greek.
The man unwraps a joke in the box.
The woman unwraps

a silver man with the head of a bird.
They are so in love, the four of them,
the man the joke the woman the beaked
aluminum dream,

they laugh at the eyes, the leg, the ear,
the arm all hung in the tree.
Two headless torsos,
his and hers, twist in the branches.

See how the world is made new?
Whatever I tell you is true.

***
***

Felino A. Soriano

from Espials

7

listening is friction

a finding fathoms

important, implicit

inclusion of sound-echo

ergonomics—finding

freedom beyond inertia’s

realized fulcrum, endearing

speech speckled as with purple

dusk in the moment of night’s

whispering interpretation

8

said of implication

                                                your language infers damage

                                    to the

            oscillating demeanor exposed though its

                                                                                    foundation

thus or/with

movement

—unsurprising the fixation of sound wandering atop shadow-allegory history

80

eyes, these carvers of silhouettes

eager etchers enveloping

positional findings, these

bouquet-shape flames

ongoing emblems of light

interpreting hands of the

watcher’s walk

emblematic reach the above-

cycle serials, solid shape-

eagerness engaging

of wait and pause of examining

artistic reinventions

81

in hearing this elongated song’s

augury-language devotion (inclusion-developed, see?)

             personality characteristics

launch into lyrical laughter                  the reconvene of

self in the watching self and their

identical differences

wandering into the braid is song’s

bouquet of directions

landing

             landing

land-again pluralized pulsation

enveloping my decision to sit, participatory,

painless

82

octagonal greens of spring-tree burgeon

                         emptying conceptual interpretations of emotional clichés,       THE

blue-theory

 leaning language of elemental sadness, an already escaped fathom of plagiarized emotion

then/when, or/why

does when weight has its ankle swell into devotional algorithms of rain and pertaining flee

does

                                     the wind become a silent challenge

?

reasonable in the spectrum of hall-thin frequencies, volume and serial realizations

encouraging tonal

exacting

             tendency-space subsequent to summer of near’s infatuation

83

washed by angled intention of

morning’s frustrated wetness

grain of microscopic skin the green

of distance evokes

vocal interpretations of sound’s abstract

persuasion to understanding delving

***

***

David Howard

Cavafy's Neighbour 

 

When the moon was full he could see it in the pond.

Still, if he pulled the shutters there would be no colour, just

the memory that is language, bad language.

He could have married the younger sister with the swan’s neck.

 

Once a dress the colour of sunset. After dark she would let him

take it off. Even the god who approved could not watch.

‘If you want love to stay shut up the house, covering

the furniture with dirty sheets’ she said.

 

He didn’t care. Only later, the later that takes him into old age. 

***

***

Laura Young

***

***

Coral Carter

twobabies

time for me to be hawksilent catstill — a shuffle — a paper dropped — a sigh — 

will send them into the air — babiestwo — feraldoves — just left home — finding 

it almost too hard — taking the sun — I hope they have learned about hawks — that 

they’re a food favoured by cats — do they know this? — these twobabes from out 

of the woods — I want to give them seed but maybe it is better they learn their own 

birdy ways.

under the diosma

beside the pool

a skullscrap 

feathermess

one 

spilt

drop

glo-bead

bright


***
***

Murray Jennings

In a Café on the High Street Two Poets Reminisce . . .  

‘Just want you to know’ she said ‘how I nearly
turned up at your door with a suitcase a box of
books and LPs and a pathetic bleeding heart’.
‘Oh yes’ he said ‘but how close was that really?’
She paused for a moment and replied ‘twenty-four
hours that’s how close that’s the truth and in that
one day the sky fell on my head, my daughter sat
in my lap asked for a story and hugged me and I
imagined she might have been reading the pattern 
of bloody rips inside my skin, inscribing my story
(I’m so sorry it has to be goodbye, but I’ll come 
and visit, you know I will. I will always love you 
no matter what. I’ll be able to explain everything
when you’re older), words I’d rehearsed but no
longer could form with the tongue that even now
allows me to imagine I can taste you through my 
ridiculous self-pity and What ifs? while I read the 
letters you send me occasionally with all the news 
of your day-to-day life over all the years since we 
both wisely let go.’ ‘Oh’ he said ‘if you had turned 
up that day you must know as I do that we would 
have drunk each other under the table and died in 
an agony of guilt, screaming and competing poetry.’ 
She smiled and they clinked their coffee cups.
For just a moment the traffic outside was silent.

***
***

Laura Young

***

***

Andrew Burke

Skin Thin as Paper

One day he wrote a page
a style not his own

sex and a hint of danger
by surprise out of wedlock.

“I hate old skin,” she said.
“There’s no way out of it.”

He thought, part make-up,
part obligation: a thin map,

main character, tangible roots,
recovery, dis/loyalty. Options

blowing in the mind.

***
***

Lawrence Upton

Trombone Piece #2

the obsessing of bees with flowers
the calmness of reverse engineers
the co-ordination of gang rapists

clatter of a mess tin
someone cuddles 
the commander's genitals 
in a large soft hand

things are not connected
except by numbering and measurement

gesture relates them

we hear their operations in universal corridors

***
***

Volodymyr Bilyk

***

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