Mary Walker Graham (Virginia, USA): "Double"

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away…

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

originally published in Ocho #11, guest edited by Adam Fieled

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

Mark Young chapbook, Melancholy...

Mark Young chapbook, Melancholy, out from SurVision Books. 

Andrew Lundwall's full-length, Gardening at Night.

Steve Halle's suite, second full-length, Blackbirds.

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: State of Grace

for Mary Walker Graham

Grape soda bottle on the desk; wind, out of
Eleusis, shut the door. Our clothes came
off; your limbs spun like spokes. I peered
outside; it was light. New Hampshire summer
sun, four a.m. Poets to face at breakfast.
Workshops to sit through, lectures, but I
knew I’d never have you the right way
again, or any way. We’d done the thing
once we’d been meaning to do, so as I
stepped from the window, gazed at you
dozing, naked, I thought to myself, maybe
that’s what amounts to a state of grace—
you’re given something once, fully, so
that you may be satiated with it, and that’s it—

© Adam Fieled 2022

Vlad(len) Pogorelov (Rocklin, California, USA): "No. 9"

“I’ve been around the places”
So my friend says
While we are drinking wine and smoking dope
We’ve had a lot of hope
But we’ve lost it
Somewhere on the way
--Get away!
--Get away!
--Get away!
My friend Confusion
No premature conclusions
No disappointment with life
It’s only a lie
That you can get your soul drunk
Or high
She always stays sober
But she can get lost on the way
And it’s true

--My friend! How many poems have you read?
--None.
--My friend! How many poems have you done?
--None.
--My friend! How many lives have you lived?
--One.

Jimmy Page,
Johnny Cash,
Charles Bukowsky,
-ovsky, -osky,
And Karl Marx
All white but one
You know who?
Think!

My friend has moved from his chair
He is on the floor
Lying there, just lying there
Being mute,
Being deaf,
Asleep

Still, music is playing
Now, its “Fleetwood Mac”
And I’m back to the kitchen
Talking to another friend of mine.
The pigeon
The diseased bird
Who will die very soon
Maybe at night
Maybe tomorrow noon
Don’t know exactly when
Soon!

Am I multilingual?
Am I?
I can speak to the birds,
To the prostitutes,
Or even the cockroaches,
Though they never reply,
But the general rule
Always being applied:
--Baby! Get high!
--Mommy! Get high!
--Pigeons! Get high!
--Humans! Get high!
Maybe everything will be
more soft and more friendly
Maybe it will be

© Vlad(len) Pogorelov 1997

Steve Halle (Palatine, Illinois, USA): from Blackbirds

a strained female face,
beads of sweat
her concentration camp

every word spoken
aching knee on kneeler
in pillory of all
denominations are granular, if
you’ll remember

nipple peak, pique
peek sheet white, rubied

perk up shrift, elbow discomfort,
warming lubricant or mopping
up the thick aftermath

stains and burns

barely out of teens
it’s discovered.

sweat wall, cross-hatched
wicker with lipstick, grief
in darkness, a voice sounds
like half a wrinkled face

mid-mass, a bird enters
church, confused feathers
aflutter, it lingers among
rafters, while i ponder
over kneelers, among dissonant
voices of god and Other

half-memorare, naughty in uniform,
kim unfurls, reeling on dope
and nicotined, buzzing late rebuzz
rebound each mispronunciation
an obligation, a misguided
angel gilds a season with weather
severs eardrums in silence
song a frequency above, vibratto

weeping into orgasms
over risqué pages

still half-hard, a thighbite
this passion a rush
of adrenaline over impropriety

finger trace nipples in concentric
circles leaving burn
marks wanting grafts

hum, hiss, strum, click, the vic.’s
needle dum-dee-dums
beyond reach, like bedded
sins of lazy passions
Cistercian, cervical, and blossoms.

© Steve Halle 2007

Andrew Lundwall (Rockford, Illinois, USA): from Gardening at Night: All Eyes

for Melissa

shaken with all of this we have eyes
to see ahead of us no one comes to set up
always she opened the mirror very quietly
like fate the flowers continue on throughout the day

always always remember pure unsupervised stares
our breaths that other lovers view on a screen unfurl
behold the many marvels of darkness
in front of in the face of very near

© Andrew Lundwall 2008

Susan Wallack (Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, USA): "Bridge"

I know your arms & legs are cold.
In November the river shifts

slowly, silver ghost of its body
barely stirred, ice already forming.

And today, midday, I heard you moan.
Grinding bones of a steel-strapped frame.

As if you had moved, or tried to.
As if the surging light was painful.

originally published by the Toledo Review