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Alameda in the Shutter-Click
By Jan Steckel
From Ballena Bay to Crab Cove, pilings, tide lines,
orange-eyed night heron, cluster of sandpipers.
Every picture laid with transparency over
an older island, when the naval base boomed, or earlier,
when beaches swarmed like Coney Island or Roman baths.
Sepia-toned beribboned hats, ankle-length skirts for the surf.
1918. 1908. 1905. Long-dead bathing beauties balance,
boating and swimming. Neptune Beach, Surf Beach Park,
Sunny Cove Baths, Terrace Bath. New-built Painted Ladies
stand house-proud. Nineteenth century: Tall ships
at Grand Street’s foot, masts poking out of the palimpsest.
Just like place-names, pure sound now, hide Spanish meanings:
“Tree-lined Avenue.” “Bay of the Whales.” Surely it’s more
than poppies, snapdragons, marinas, sunset over San Francisco.
These names: “Yacht Club,” “Mariners Square,”
“The South Shore Beach and Tennis Club,” conceal
ascending aspirations, wavelet after rising wave of immigrants
lacquering over squalid beginnings. (We’ll be Americans too,
and rich, when we live in such place names as these.)
Duck and hooded merganser, coot and grebe.
Each bird only the part you can see.
How much is underwater, paddling madly,
just to look serene for one snap of the camera?
Do they lie high or low in the water, like tall ships,
barnacled bottoms silently scraping the pier?
From South Shore lagoon to the Alameda Estuary:
gulls descend on mussel-bound rocks, seaweed-sheathed,
just as slippery before tide-tables were printed here.
Species introduced, species extinct. Landscape changes:
landfills, dredging, tunnels. Posey Tube and Webster Tube.
Park Street Bridge and High Street Bridge.
Hello and goodbye: to draw a bridge
or to photograph a drawbridge.
The poet is a camera, click, click, click.
Get shutter speed right, correct focal length,
and what was hazy leaps into the clear.
First appeared in the Alameda Sun. Winner of the 2007 Jewel
of the Bay Poetry Award. Copyright © 2007 Jan Steckel
Mejiro
by Joseph Stanton
Mejiro — a deft green stroke,
flying
or hopping from branch to branch,
tail upstruck —
is the moment's punctuation,
a comma
flickering so quick
the rest of the bright green syntax
can only wheel after,
a lost clause trying to catch up.
From A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban O’ahu
by Joseph Stanton. Copyright © 2006 by Time Being Books. Reprinted
courtesy of Time Being Press.
Flax & Brick
by Lynn Strongin
I miss backstage, being with you, the wires we nearly tripped over
The dusty
Hot light swirling
You were a racer
I was a racer:
Straight up, no chaser.
Lynn Strongin © 2007 with permission from Lynn Strongin
LOOKED ACROSS AT FLAX & BRICK
by Lynn Strongin
Looked across at flax & brick
Wasn’t it at the hospital I first looked across at flax & brick
The shovel of coal light into the incinerator.
Time as slow as bloom on old copper?
For half a year
I bore it there then bore thru darkness when above, below stairs.
Alto. The Arno: A small brace of partridge upsky, in cornices a wedge of
pigeons.
Magnesium dawn.
Sweetheart went on a shoot
My niece worked on her abs
I thought of Greek statues
Thought how the young and the old are always in competition.
The album of dawn turned over & over, speaking goodbye. Pax, Lux
vobiscum. You go. I die.
Lynn Strongin © 2007 with permission from Lynn Strongin
The Catholic in love with
suffering
by Lynn Strongin
Might
unwind the bolt of silk
winners of poetry prizes are given in Japan. Brake the sun. The galaxies
She
Sends her children to “Our Lady of the Sorrows”
School. She opens & closes their days like an ivory fan.
She could broach our mother’s Sketch Diary::
Reading “I would not want a prolonged death.” For approaching the Lord:
& go in a slow gondola toward God, that bright bead:
I am like the Catholic
loving extremes—I am a Jew
Who knows there is no
clear getting thru:
Chiaroscuoro :
Now we see Lux now God is hidden behind milk clouds.
If we row toward afterlife it is a flight
Wearing: boxing gloves put on the shelf to gather chalk
We walk
Board
Limelight blazing
Heated mist
Circles our heads & is round our feet at
The mundane wondrous glow without Absolution or Amen.
Lynn Strongin © 2007 with permission from Lynn Strongin
Moon Shadows
by SUNdog
Moon shadows on a tarred road
Muled miner's memories erode
Desert rats blink and hoard
Wait for the coming of the Lord
Moon shadows on white rock
Imagined faces look back and mock
Wolves howl their hunger's shock
As planets trace Heaven's Lock
Moon shadows divide a naught
Time cast upon a vacant lot
Warplanes force the tying of the knot
As Gods fester and rot
Moon shadows fall across city streets
Meaning fixed in time leaks
Monet silent in his grave weeps
As Harrods’s machine marks and seeks
Between the lowering sun and the rising moon
Lounge lizards invest the gloom
Real time churns culture's swoon
As men play tic-tac-toe to mark their doom
Fall out of shadow
SUNdog © 2008 with permission
Diwali
by Heather Ann Schmidt
We bathed
in jasmine oil
and I put on new silk,
the color of satsumas.
Homes filled with diyas-
firecrackers inside
our eyes.
There were drops of stars
all around you on this street
in Delhi.
We dance between
Asvina and Kartka
half love, half passion
this October morning.
Heather Ann Schmidt © 2009 with permission
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