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Spring 2008
VanBuren's picks:
Antonia Clark
Brad Johnson
Dale McLain
Roger Pfingston
Richard Rippon
John Anderson
Cristina Baptista
Cynthia Brackett-Vincent
Michael Brownstein
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Alison Eastley
Brent Fisk
David Fraser
Krikor der Hohannesian
Amy MacLennan
Lisa Markowitz
Damon McLaughlin
Micki Myers
Roger Pfingston
Heather Schimel
Rachel Stewart
Lafayette Wattles
Matt Alberhasky
Margaret Fieland
Robert Johnson
Willie Smith
Alex Nodopaka
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Patrick Carrington
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Damon McLaughlin
Spring 2008
These Poems About Noelle’s Body
I slide my hands from this book of positions.
Noelle’s undulatory hip is the elephant’s trunk
she’ll use to rip me from the earth, to balance me precariously above it
like a straw. When the lights turn down
night becomes the sound of rain on our window.
Palms brush the siding. Touch us. Touch us
they whisper to the house, and I twist into her
like a bottle into its child-proof lid
and we discern with our fingers viscera from poetry, poetry
from fascia. Some poems rise up
like leaves in April. Some lay still
to be crushed between the sheets—amber, ocher, scarlet—our bodies press.
Some sink into the mattress for eons.
Some spew from us their buds and whorls like the first garden’s
manipulating Adam and Eve. Some confetti time.
Some oxbow around the bed in wild salmon rivers
we swim over the other’s body to see, paddling hard
with the other’s flesh in our hands, breath pressed
against the ceiling like any fish seined or weired.
Some block moonlight. Others frisk us
with rhymes slanted between thighs, syntactic tongues
foraging for those who couldn’t escape those most secret places
that are eaves in which we’ve lost many, many lives.
Some backpedal, afraid of death. Others hurtle forward
like wolves loving us by moonlight. Some lower rifles at us
forgetting we are lovers, they are poems. Some offer other ablutions.
Some listen to Noelle whistle
as she comes down like hot tea on the head of a pin.
Some cover us in ash. Some sound like the ocean, others wind.
Some say nothing of their love for trees. Others drift
bedpost to bedpost, sunlit and golden-warm
but brittle to the touch. Some slumber completely. Others tremor
paroxysmically jaw to heel as though heartbroken, tunneled by wind
that chases them through earth and dream.
Damon McLaughlin and his family reside in Tucson, AZ where he teaches writing and works part-time for Adventure Coffee Roasting. When not at work, he’s at play among the various sky islands of the southwest or sitting in stunned amazement of his little daughter or desiring more time with his superior half.
His first book, Exchanging Lives, debuted in March, a good month for poetry and a good month for Golden Eagles, which are abundant this Spring.
Body Language by Alex Nodopaka
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