FIVE POETS
Edwin Decker
Riding with the Ghost of '84
We roll along the Texas highway
You brought a harp
and played with Charlie Musselwhite.
El Paso was only a dream.
You crack the window
only slightly.
A warm, dry air,
(the desert's sigh)
fills the car with dust and cactus dander.
You say you love the desert,
you love how things survive
despite brutal heat.
I thought (but didn't say)
that the desert was just like her.
That the cancer had made a desert
of her organs, yet, still, she drank of life
Lordsburgh was only a dream
Vultures play tag
around the carcass of a deer
on the Highway 10
and I look at her.
She is resting now.
I drive on.
The wind is a fan on a stove.
I nudge her awake.
"Look at the clouds," I say pointing up.
They are black and orange
and bursting doom about a blazing sun.
There is no haven
from the swelter.
Sonora, Fredericksburg, San Antonio . . . just a memory now.
And I look at you
in the passenger seat
but you are not there.
Haven't been for twelve years.
Michaela A. Gabriel
Washing Dishes
Plates, pots, never a champagne glass,
never a delicate china bowl. The knives
have lost their edge, like me.
She drowns tender moments
in the sudsy sink, counts the things
she never knew about love:
its limited attention span and
itchy feet, the way it howls in the attic
when springs come and go unnoticed.
Around her wrinkly hands,
milky staleness: no more soap suds,
no more miniature rainbows.
Her fingers sift through water,
filtering out crumbs, kernels, questions:
How is your husband,
why don't you dye it red,
when will you go to Paris, where
has all that time gone anyway?
Pulling out the drain stopper,
she echoes its tired plop, wonders why
nobody asks if she's still breathing.
Les Kay
Night Music
The moon creeps closer to the snow-capped
peaks rough with pines. From the dark spaces
past the riverbed, I hear the hesitant call of an owl,
an omen of what will come, what will come
between us, you and I; mountain and moon.
Wind and rain crackle the poplar leaves; it is
a sounder of wild boars foraging. My chest
wheezes for breath and I tire again of this
incessant patterning of human mind. I mumble
instead that I must miss you, and by the reflections
from the cloud-chewed moon, the pinprick light
of shrouded stars, turn down the path toward home.
Lisa Price
Cut Off My Own Wart
I sip my tea
The oil from my lips
Swirls on the surface
Of the herbal fix
But what do you do
When the blood won’t stop?
Keep the pressure on it
Hold it down tight
But the second I let go
The blood starts to flow
Again
The mosquitoes keep biting
My face
They will not die
Every time I smack one down
It just flies away
I feel them in my hair
Feel a bite on my arm
But the last one was in
My head
Finger tip
Turning red
Warm
Turning purple
All I wanted to do
Was get rid of the last
Remnant of you
But the blood won’t stop
Hm, maybe smoke a cigarette?
The red drips into the ash tray
I put the cherry out
Black dry ash crunches outward
Turns muddy in the vibrant droplets
The dark gray sludge
Reminds me of the night we met
Sizzles
Caleb Puckett
Gypsy America
Forty gypsy families gather for cherry tea and
roasted lamb
Behind Bunniton's broken storefronts and stalls
And Babel's once bitten tongue bleeds brilliant
verbs
Through the slum earth of Chicago,
For the Romani code turns Roland-Taylor's concrete
sole
Into vermilion silk and brooches of Mexican gold
Here, where word is world, all know
The only one to suffer the poor articulation of
loneliness
Is that twice-silenced informant,
That twice-banished son of Christ's double-crossed
nails-
He might as well be Arnold's scholar
Or any Gadjo now
Stripped verse by verse and ring by ring
Of earthly hospitality, and cursed with a purse
Of worthless plug nickels, may he
Never bribe St. Peter's key, never budge beyond that
gate,
For his betraying brown eyes, words and wishes
Remain as unclean as any black cat crossing any
crosswalk
Or the bloody shadow
Which leaves baskets of fish uneaten and spirits
undrinkable,
But he is gone and nothing more can be done,
So tonight within the rented remnants of Bunniton's
hall
Forty gypsy families retie the knots of Babel's
tongue
and play a minor movement in an off key
