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
and pleasure and suffering
by John Sweet and we are not de
chirico and these
passing days are only small
acts of desperation
this brilliant late afternoon sunlight down
empty october streets,
over empty october parking lots and
without warmth,
without illusion,
and all distances heavy with silence
all silence weighted down with meaning
run from one burning
building to another, from your
childhood to your future, and forget
all the reasons you had for being afraid
forget the bleeding horse dying by
his pool of water
forget magritte
gave us questions when all we
wanted was the truth
offered nothing but uncertainty
when we knew that beauty was the
only drug worth crawling for
left us air to breathe when
nothing but gold would save us
Recent collections include Appoximate Wilderness
(Flutter Press),
and Bastard Faith (Scars Publications). A limited
edition chapbook, Heathen Tongue,
should be out soon from
Kendra Steiner Editions.
John Sweett © 2018 with permission
fate
by John Sweet
woke up sweating from a
dream i couldn't
remember
woke up paralyzed w/ fear
on a dead-end street
heard the rain and
smelled the approach of spring and
couldn't move beyond the
obvious greed of crucifixion
knew at the moment that there was
nothing in this life but to
hurt others berfore getting hurt myself
knew it to be true for
all of us
listened w/out comfort to
the steady grind of my heart
Recent collections include Appoximate Wilderness
(Flutter Press),
and Bastard Faith (Scars Publications). A limited
edition chapbook, Heathen Tongue,
should be out soon from
Kendra Steiner Editions.
John Sweett © 2018 with permission
the image but not
the idea
by John Sweet
moving east through six a.m.
tunnels of rain, november, december,
age of desperate ghosts, this woman w/
the pale scars keeps slipping pills
between yr lips, keeps speaking in a
language he doesn't quite understand
only 10,000 miles to the coast
only the ghost of frida kahlo
to light the way
sister asleep in the back seat and he
misses the exit and then the
one after that, and these faded plastic
wreaths w/ their tilted wooden crosses
on the side of the highway
this first grey light of day
thinks let me keep my name
thinks let the suicides all
take someone else's
starts with love and then
burns his way down to the
ghostwhite bones
Recent collections include Appoximate Wilderness
(Flutter Press),
and Bastard Faith (Scars Publications). A limited
edition chapbook, Heathen Tongue,
should be out soon from
Kendra Steiner Editions.
John Sweett © 2018 with permission
or beauty, which i would only ever offer to the queen of open wounds
by John Sweet
river choked with ice in the dark and
all of the stars left nameless
venus low over the hills, brilliant and sinking and
it's true that nothing you or i say will ever matter and
it's true that nothing you or i do will ever
change the world
it's the taste of blood as we whisper in
curtained rooms, and it's the futility of defiance as we
scream ourselves hoarse against frozen windows
it's the end of january in the last year we will
be together, and we stand naked at the water's edge
hold tight to each other like the future depends on it
and it does of course but
whatever future there is will arrive with or without us
whatever past we had will be remembered by no one
after all the lies i've told you, here we are
suddenly at the truth
Recent collections include Appoximate Wilderness
(Flutter Press),
and Bastard Faith (Scars Publications). A limited
edition chapbook, Heathen Tongue,
should be out soon from
Kendra Steiner Editions.
John Sweett © 2018 with permission
On Patrol
By Emily Strauss
at 0200 he still patrols the perimeter
of the back yard along the fence line
still watches for movement in the shadows-
a stray form, a dog, the neighbor's light
suddenly shining from their bathroom
onto the lawn, he creeps past the hedge
feet placed so as not to crack any twigs,
his eyes roving over the cold grill,
overturned deck chairs, he keeps moving
alert for small noises, catching
a scent of skunk or a late-night dryer-
the field clear now he slides in the patio
door, across the carpet, back upstairs
to their bed, the night light comforting
as he slips under the worn camo blanket
stiff-kneed, white hairs on the pillow.
With Permission from Emily Staruss 2019
A Slice of Heaven
By Emily Strauss
A sliver of heaven like a thin moon
poised over the sea, the view
back down the canyon, a fraction
of glistening blue ocean thousands
of feet below as the road labors up.
I glimpse a slice of blue water
as the road twists back on itself
climbing to the top and at the crest
the sea now hidden below the folds
of mountains, I only think I
remember waves, cliffs, brilliant sun
with pelicans. Up here under calm
madrone trees the green air seems
close, not some distant white fog and
surf, a pure view of the round earth
on a horizon uncluttered by leaves.
Up here the wind is tangled in branches
but down there it blew free across
the whole Pacific, touching my cheek
in a way no other being ever does.
With Permission from Emily Staruss 2019
The Coiled Serpent
By Emily Strauss
A coiled serpent's hood in a Cairo street market,
black and gold, sways with the toneless flute
of an old man as it hisses out of a rush
basket that crackles as its scales rub past-
the captive snake a pity to watch, more pathetic
than the seller of fake scrolls to tourists
who step carefully through the narrow path
between piles of shriveled dates, Chinese urns
cheap cotton shirts, grilled goat innards
their eyes avoiding the snake charmer
with his wispy white beard and his serpent,
fed mice dangled in front of it after the flute
falls silent, after the tourists turn their heads.
With Permission from Emily Staruss 2019
Tone Poem
Jean Sibelius: Kullervo (1892): based on the Finnish Epic Kalevala
By Emily Strauss
The music: a single long movement:
the listener imagines a romantic sequence
or a scene from an epic myth.
It explores a state of mind, a mood
suggested by water colors in the notes,
not the music itself but impressions:
as if into a core of tears, a winter
storm with a ship entering port- tones
painted in sepia, pictures drawn in notes
pulling us into ancient Finland
full of strong sea men, and women
with cold hands smelling of fish. We can
feel the wind blowing, freezing salt spray
off the ocean, hear oars piercing
the waves while the music
rises and falls. We recall this primeval tale
of longing and hard work as the orchestra
grows silent.
Walking home we draw our capes close
on the boulevard.
With Permission from Emily Staruss 2019 |