Thursday 30 November 2017

I Want To See A Moon With You

by Helen Bar-Lev


1.
I want to see the new moon with you
the moon that is almost invisible
so thin only a diamond could have sliced it
so wispy a slight wind could blow it away
this is a moon for women

a sliver in the heavens
an outline more brilliant that the whole itself
it supports the weight of its darkened globe
squint your eyes to see its fullness
blacker than the black that surrounds it

it is a portal for new beginnings
ancient man was pulled to it too,
recorded it on the walls of caves
carved amulets in its shape

from the beginning of history and before
women have celebrated it, worshipped it,
danced in its dimmed light
spies have applauded it

2.
I want to see a half moon with you
lit as if to conserve energy
tip it to your lips like a silver goblet,
drink in its shine

it is a sphere split in the middle
like an orange, a watermelon
suspended in its forlorn orbit
no awes for this unfortunate orb

its other half is hidden
it will spend a month
gradually being reunited with it,
its completion, its reason for being

this is an insecure moon,
doubtful of its ability to reunite
with its twin soul

we empathize with this moon
reach up to touch it
to reassure it
that it will be whole again, soon

3.
I want to see a full moon with you
surreal and sensual
a holy day moon, a mood moon,
it guides dreams and tides
this is a masculine mood

watch it rise silently,
pale to yellow to silver to white
illuminating this mountain
casting an aura around us
surrounding us with a cloak of light

attractive as an actor
it has everything in its favour
it has been praised in poems, howled to,
described in so many ways that it’s become a cliché

proud, bold, noble,
a counterpoint to the sun in the afternoon,
it commands attention,
will never bore nor be ignored

4.
I want to walk on a carpet of dew
on a mountain that looms above all discord
paint on a canvas that renders the mundane ethereal
and love eternal

I want to view
all the phases
of the moon
with you


* * * * *

© 6.2017 Helen Bar-Lev

Helen Bar-Lev was born in New York in 1942. www.helenbarlev.com  She holds a B.A. in Anthropology, has lived in Israel for 46 years and has had over 90 exhibitions of her landscape paintings, 34 of which were one-woman shows. Her poems and artwork have appeared in numerous online and print anthologies. Six poetry collections, all illustrated by Helen. She is the Amy Kitchener senior poet laureate. Helen was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2013 and is the recipient of the Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art. Helen is Assistant to the President of Voices Israel. She lives in Metulla, Israel.

Wednesday 29 November 2017

The Poem I Call My Life

by Antonia Alexandra Klimenko

                     
A woman must love herself
or who will do it for her?
All day long I have sat within
the loose walls of this poem
waiting to give birth

In this my delivery room
as thin as air
as fibrous as melons
I feel the contractions of time
ebb and flow of breath    like tides
my spirit knows no gender

In this season
I have no name
I refuse definition
I am only a traveler
and I carry my landscape with me

Tonight I am learning
to move through
slow syllables of ancient dark
like blood without a blueprint
I am learning to speak the language of trees
the alphabet of stars

Last Winter my thoughts were stillborn
They ran through invisible fields
where the unspoken words of dead men
are scattered    like rain or tears
They never learned to scream properly
with their mouths wide open

Tonight I will try again
I will close my eyes tight
I will push down hard against the sky
and I will bear myself
unreasonably luminous   and whole
like the full moon rising

In this poem   I call my life
where birth is the process
as well as the outcome
everything is possible
especially love


* * * * *

Widely published, Antonia Alexandra Klimenko's work has appeared in XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France) CounterPunch, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology,  The Rumpus, Levure Litteraire, Big Bridge, The Opiate, Strangers in Paris, Occupy Poets’ Anthology (in which she is distinguished as an American Poet), and Maintenant : Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washinton, D.C. and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is the Writer/Poet in Residence for SpokenWord Paris.


Tuesday 28 November 2017

stillborn

by Antonia Alexandra Klimenko


you are always with me
even when you are not

Life's full empty room
Breath's bittersweet sigh
             
color of Nothingness
                transparent as angels
color of darkness 
                perforated with light
color of tears       
                fallen 
from the dotted blue blanket of Sky          
                   
you are always with me
even when you are not
suspended like the crescent moon
the alphabet of stars
the space untraveled
between us

as if 
inextinguishable
presence and absence
relinquish their names
surrender themselves to the Invisible

as if
       only
without holding
may we trembling  feel 
the infinite nearness 
of our immense 
aching 
              fragility                      

i marvel
at the innocence 
of your tiny unopened fists
how
butterflies  still 
fly from your lips
how mine drown   
in the drool of gurgled silence 
             
how  
even as  the umbilical cord 
untangles around my neck     
my voice     so far away
                   is trying to reach you--
buried so inexorably
in your muffled lullaby

i am always with you
even when i am not


* * * * *

"stillborn" was first published by Levure Litteraire.

Widely published, Antonia Alexandra Klimenko's work has appeared in XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France) CounterPunch, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology,  The Rumpus, Levure Litteraire, Big Bridge, The Opiate, Strangers in Paris, Occupy Poets’ Anthology (in which she is distinguished as an American Poet), and Maintenant: Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washinton, D.C. and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is the Writer/Poet in Residence for SpokenWord Paris.


Monday 27 November 2017

I Don’t Want a Lover

by Cesca Janece Waterfield


I want a buccaneer, I want
a pirate ship rocking
in gale force winds, I want
to plant my feet on deck and cry,
                                                   land ho
as the tallest mast you ever saw bends over
in spray and salt. Somebody get me
Vasco de Gama so I can say,
                                       You looking for spice?

I'm talking the kind of fellow
who just thinking about him makes me feel good,
so I think about him some more,
and on second thought keep finding him
the least resistible idea I ever had.

I want to sit with this man in a restaurant
and have absolutely no doubt we have
the dirtiest minds in the room. We'll split
that scene and climb inside a cab and I'm talking
this guy will tongue me all the way
downtown, right to the edge
of the sea. We'll stand and look out over
the water, hips facing west,
turning east, till Vasco roars up, planks groaning
with Chinese silk, Madagascan cinnamon, French caramels,
and then we’re gonna get on that heap and sail.    


* * * * *

"I Don't Want a Lover" was previously published in Cesca Janece Waterfield's first collection, Bartab (Two-Handed Engine Press, 2010). 


Sunday 26 November 2017

At the Table

by Julene Tripp Weaver


A son who listens to his mother
sits quiet at her kitchen table
in the dark, in silence, with a cup of tea.
He listens to her day talk
the minutia of a housewife.
She is surrounded by sons,
a husband.

A mother who gives her life away
talks to this son about nothing.
This one son sits still, listens,
the night air hushed around them
the dishes put away
the chores done
the other men of the house asleep
or off in the world gambling.

A son who listens to his mother
asks nothing when her tears come
quiet in the dark where it is safe
with this one son.
Not like the other sons, or certainly
the dad, who has no time to sit still,
not man-like to sit quiet
with the woman who spends her life
on them. Tears come quiet in the dark 
without question. 

This son a solid block 
of soft wood, he absorbs her grief.
He is unlike the other men
able to tear
able to sit quiet in the dark
with his womb, her womb united.

This son her gift to this family
this special seed, so different,
so un-man-like, that he walks with other
un-man-like men. His brothers and his father
demand he leave, knowing full well
their mother will suffer
her heart will break.

So they sit in her kitchen
one last time.
They sit until their tears drain, 
and he is able to say goodbye 
to her womb.
Take his womb elsewhere
create a new family
walk un-man-like into the world
forced to gamble, he will find his truth
leave his mother’s fate behind

pray she too may find her way.


* * * * *

Julene Tripp Weaver is a psychotherapist in Seattle; she worked in AIDS services for over 21 years. She has three poetry books, Truth Be Bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), No Father Can Save Her (Plain View Press, 2011), and Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2007). She is widely published in journals and anthologies. Her poems can be found online at: Anti-Heroin ChicRiverbabbleRiver & South Review, The Seattle Review of Books, HIV Here & Now; a creative nonfiction piece is published by Yellow Chair Press, In The Words of Women International 2016 Anthology. Find more of her writing at www.julenetrippweaver.com.


Saturday 25 November 2017

Cross Street: North Shore Road

by Cesca Janece Waterfield


You're expecting repentance? Maybe you think this will be about a burden lifted, a great truth realized, cheap cigarettes and coffee in Tuesday night church basements. This is not that story.

This is about the woman who stepped outside the cab at the appointed hour, in hose that would run, on shaky skinny heels. Her lipstick had no answers. She looked up at the window and saw it already: the gaunt-limbed pack, this grant, that engagement, oh, the envy. Going up the escalator, only it ran down. The same steps over and over. (She thinks she knows it all, this woman, a wiseacre, a real stitch.)

She hated hose. Stilettos weren't her style. She figured, Why bother? When she already knew how it ends? Precisely, she answered herself. (She always answered herself.)

So she whistled to the cabbie who'd been very conveniently idling at the red light all this time.  She climbed up front and bummed a cigarette, resting her hand on his thigh. "Do you like whiskey?" she asked.

"I love whiskey," she answered herself.

She decided to call him Newman and told him to swing by her place so she could put on denim and her favorite blunt-toed leather shit-kickers. (That's boots to you girls climbing upstairs to the party.)

When she came down the steps she said, "Newman, move over. I'm driving now." She rolled down the windows and turned up Aretha. Maybe it was Joni. She smelled good. Suddenly her lipstick did have answers. In fact, it started telling dirty jokes, then opening wide like hope to laugh real hard. And loud.

She grinned and started saying things like, "my secretary," and "postgraduate," and "orgasm."

She said, "Newman, you could lose a few pounds."


* * * * *


Cross Street: North Short Road was previously published in Cesca Janece Waterfield's first collection, Bartab (Two-Handed Engine Press, 2010). 

Friday 24 November 2017

How A Baby Resembles A Head of Lettuce

by Regina O'Melveny


As I hold you on my lap
you scan the room from
left to right, right to
left, just because you can,
sweet round boy with
morning-blue eyes.
Then on to the next room
and the garden with grass
and hedge and baby
lettuces that crowd the planter
with plump roseate faces
until they bolt into stalks that yearn
for sun and moon with all
their bright yellow eyes.

We yearn for, learn the world
this way by leafy compass and
blooming arc. Unlike
the mother once
in a Grimm’s fairy tale
who craved lettuces within
an enchanted garden and
had to exchange her baby for
the theft of greens, no small offense, 
the child whom the witch
aptly named Rapunzel
(lamb’s lettuce in German).

Though I’d retell the story
as correspondence,
lettuce for baby, baby for lettuce.
We’re speaking about the pull of
fertility here and the witch
who wisely knows
how to plant a garden.
In my version there’s no high wall
forbidding entry.

The witch is a grandmother
with earth under
her fingernails, who holds
the mysteries of seed, leaf and
and milky stalk with awe, holds the hand
of the woman, her daughter with love

deep as a taproot to the earth’s core, holds
both the ripe baby and
the bountiful head of lettuce
in her lap with delight, holds
the wide, widening gaze.


Thursday 23 November 2017

GRATIA PLENA

by Beate Sigriddaughter


All prayer in the end is gratitude
without exception shells wait to be sand
as life recycles poems at my feet in purple
moist exuberance while seagulls practice solos
with wings made transparent by sunrise

yes in the morning the crows fly west
and east again at night I love that
everyone is so busy being alive heart-breaking
even the sound of water on pebbles receding
click click turning stones into music

a heron fishes precise in his hunger
he takes no more from the sea than he needs
though the lush orange and yellow maple leaves
some larger than my hand whisper there's more
and a flower flickers white behind a vine

if life has petals that large what can it
possibly not do despite the wars we conduct
or tolerate or do not speak against or not loudly
enough afraid of miracles we avoid the eyes
of all angels we try to nail down death first

rather than open hands to life the uncharted
the unfamiliar the patient courtship that begs
to listen to pray with each footfall to praise
and to believe it possible to change the world
by trailing a grateful hand in water   


* * * * *

"Gratia Plena" was first published by Hawai'i Pacific Review.

Wednesday 22 November 2017

Reasons Why The Word Crawl Has Awe In It

by Regina O'Melveny

  
At first it seems
a small move from
all fours rocking back and forth
to left arm forward
right knee
then right arm forward
left knee.

Then I see how all
at once the world careens
open, as hands and knees
on this rare earth,
you lurch forward
risk everything
for the unknown
that offers itself to your
exuberance.

But what really holds me
in awe is your buoyancy
even after you face-plant
or belly-flop.
You wail, but you’re up
and at it again
soon after. Go, go, go!

I even drop down
to play with you
and find that leading with
hands on earth
rather than walking feet first,
propels me toward
amazement.
I begin to understand
why kneeling and prostration
enliven prayer.

Left arm forward
right knee
then right arm forward
left knee.
Palms pressed down
again and again


to all that is sacred
beneath us.


Tuesday 21 November 2017

I want to run back

by Joani Reese


I want to run back and back and back, to cup my palms beneath every falling possibility, to unbreak the broken, to teach joy instead of sorrow, love instead of rage, but I can't do that, not today, not ever. I hear a helpless child's wail fall from the sky, tumble down like water that will not stop to cleanse nor sate.


* * * * *

"I want to run back" was first published on Facebook.


Monday 20 November 2017

FALL
Giving Thanks

by Connie James


Silent we sit on the earth

Faced to the wind, thinking,
now the air will cleanse us,
our bones are bending to it
we are alive

Life is in everything and everyone
it is even in the mystery of light that gives us vision
and the dark that gives us rest

Though age comes to the body,
one does not become old
for by the act of giving thanks we are healthy

Brave hearts that try to connect us to each other
plant the treasure that is ready to be enlightened by all that love,
loving souls keeping us living inside and outside through eternity

Blessed be those who give thanks for all that is provided
and remember that the heart is the seat of life


* * * * *

Connie James was raised in the mid-west as well as in Southern California, where she met her husband Bob. They moved to Eugene Oregon in 1955, when Bob got a professorship in the art department at the University of Oregon. Connie raised five children, has helped raise grandchildren, been a docent at local museums, and has been active in her local synagogue. A lover and supporter of art, music, and literature for decades, Connie kept her own work relatively hidden until 2016. At the age of 88 she was published for the first time in May 2016, in the literary magazine “The Elephant”, with her poem “Shekhinah Speaks”. Connie continues to explore her poetic talents, proving to us all that one is never too old to be a poet.

Connie James, being computer illiterate, had this poem submitted for her by her deceased daughter's best friend Amy Ballard Rich.


Sunday 19 November 2017

One Jar of Honey

by Jane Yolen


“'One jar of honey to all the gods, one jar of honey to
the Mistress of the Labyrinth'—clay tablet, Knossos

Here in the Denmark of the year,
where bees move like sleep, like death,
their fruit coagulating in the hive,
we bring storied honey
to the Mistress of the Labyrinth.

Honey is the key unlocking mysteries.
Honey is the sweet disguise.
It paints the lips of the dead.
It is the soft fall of footstep
around the circled path,

The Mistress smiles on our offer,
taking the jar in sweetened hands.
Her tongue snakes out for a taste.
Her praises to the hive
keep us alive in the end of the year.

Little bees lie mostly still in their winter,
wings burring like a snore.
We walk the labyrinth out of solstice
heading toward another spring,
leaving the bitter cold behind.             


* * * * *
                                                             
Jane Yolen, author of 360+ books (actual number) including 8 books of adult poetry. Much of her work is for young readers, but she has a number of novels, essay collections, and pedagogical books for adult as well. www.janeyolen.com


Saturday 18 November 2017

Labyrinth

by Jane Yolen


Dance the maze,
They tell me.
Trace the goddess steps.

Yet there seems
no pattern, no floor.
All is chaos:

A tangle of webs,
twists of threads,
history’s clots.

Stone beneath,
Stone above,
I sink into the grey.

But as I dance,
unspooled life winds
about my spindle.

Now I see the path.
One foot after another,
Till labyrinth reveals.

Then I dance home
to the center of self
and out again.                             


* * * * *


Jane Yolen is the author of 360+ books (actual number) including 8 books of adult poetry. Much of her work is for young readers, but she has a number of novels, essay collections, and pedagogical books for adult as well. www.janeyolen.com