SELECTIONS FROM WINTER 1997

 

ANSELM HOLLO

Your Turn

Dewdrop ode sweet licks
In jokey code Eat air!
Lose track of nights & days dear melody
Fly me to Mejico? no no

No reruns hands hair snow
That's all we have for you today but to-
Morrow, Grace! Sweet rain
Oaks bees old shoes & watches

Frogs will green again!
Energy roil waves rock
Bright naked sun haze music play
In this old Pothole City of a brain

Vapors will brim light up slow pensive look
Make neurons dance in World Muse Impulse Book

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MICHAEL PRICE

Flame

The way it goes in the country,
is my decision; to become alight
and smolder in her hands, barnside,
where the slash is burned. Out there
in the smoke, in the sand—the desert
is a plain of answers gotten by
going through it at night—the stars,
having died twelve years ago,
by their blazing reach appear
just long enough to want love
again. I go back to badlands, find:
car, her, light, dark, hand.

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DALE SMITH

San Francisco Thanksgiving

The syrupy purr of Mike's
Impala's engine opened up
down narrow SF streets
late Thanksgiving high on Whiskey

In Nob Hill he met a gal
who ran away from him
while I ate pizza starved drunk
and in a sudden rain against the car

He kicked the trash can down
we drove away licking greasy paper plates
at pure chaotic mercy to our varied states

Somehow home the dawn
turned quietly and I left
on my bike for my house in the awful Haight

We've been good friends since
but now we're so far away
it's hard to hear his voice wishing me
a happy holiday from Colorado

Which seems colorless buried
under so much snow
-12 degrees and falling
colder the further on we go

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LESLIE DAVIS

Blue Iris

Left behind
the things to keep are

in a vase with sea glass

Irises
and
Blue

Need some kind of
ritual
a relic
to fall back on
make a dent

(three times around a chair
clockwise
to remove a curse)

Candles or a lantern
blue
it's there in your hand
the bougainvillea
she's trading it
for
tumbleweed

& cactus

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TOM CLARK

Prolepsis

Melodious liquid warble in the plum

Tree tells the sinking year how to feel

Its recession into grief as if a thorn

Poked a nester in an old wounded heart

Of stone from which slowly drips recognition

All breathing human passion far above

These days atonal as white noise

Through bare branches cotton clouds drift by

Last yellowed leaves catch lone rays of sun

Going down into the motherless ocean

A light plane buzzes off toward brown hills

As shade drops over the next urban plot

To prepare the air for what the dead don't know

How swiftly we are coming to join them

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