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Spring 2008

Poetry

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

Flash Fiction

On Debunking Modern Art

Alex Nodopaka

Pushcart Nominees

Editors

Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Patrick Carrington

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Lynn Strongin

Winter 2008

THE NEXT SOUND YOU HEAR WILL BE SILENCE

We can no longer be deer in headlights:
Dazed          drifting
The road to clarity is long          as a boy’s thoughts on a summer day

A girl’s
Dreams
The morning of her wedding. A road

Not taken
In a car that looks like a toaster,
Lime green          but in a white room, a fever chart

At the foot
Of your bed
In the physician’s hand:           who holds your fate a candle brightening. O
wild thing, deft thing:

My poems swayed me like a branch
Bobbing
With apples          yet I could not move below the waist.

I learned to hear silence clearly during polio
& after
down the years ring
         gold
         as any wedding ring.

Winter 2006

MR. DRESSUP

Those years my peers spent playing Mr Dressup
I spent in wards white gowns

When my mother baked loaves
In nightmare they were pulled out as dead children.
Incendiary feathers swirling about the room
ash mother had to mocksweep away.
My peers played I stayed paralyzed
molding new hovels in my mind pale as the walls, dark as
our charts
not realizing
the contradiction in "Mr" Dressup, nor
the irony of death dressed up as children.

I AM A SPYGLASS

one eye peeling off the faraway the cornfield where a girl was slain
one close up
at the tinge of cyan on her wound dressing.

Abba & Mama taught me
to look straight ahead, brown bread,
in emergency, keep moving in one direction, never looking
back:
But I saw movies of Jews looking backward at their homes
in Warsaw,

Fire buckles me
Rain makes of me a looking-glass roadway:
reflecting in miniature the whole ball of wax, aflame.

"Mr Dressup" and "I am a Spyglass" come from the cycle at THE BLUE HOUSE.

Crystal

i.
Exquisite word          yet to be envied as one envies the walking woudned,
a mannequin:
Kristallnacht   Crystal Meth

Polio which caught me sixty years ago           diminishes to a minute spot
of light against dark background:
symmetrical, a crystal-like hexahedron.

Like the black child who ate jackets from South Side Chicago?
What made the boy eat three jackets? consummed by hunger for cotton?

Crystal:
elegant as a beautiful woman with heart of ice.

When I saw the  virus           it was too late to cry:
 symmetrical: small even for a virus

visible only thru an electro-microscope what changed my life:   I ingested
a speck the exact       opposite of a jacket:

a hexahedron like some crystals.

ii.

To take up the post of choirmaster at cathedral of Petsch in Southern Hungry
the composer relocated.

Gold is spun
from torn lands & pointed questions.

        I tear my land from the map     Lower residual volume on rage:
        Have I not come of age?         Paralysis gives birth to pointed
questions:
        right hand pointed  to the stars.
        Warm my shoulders with a jacket of scars
        Like the monks, I write, bright  with sunlight on my page.

 
 
Sound Rises

Estonian children's choir                        climbs the staircase
senior children'
singing Noel.

Leaf-eater resonates up from a roadway like a funeral drum.

The jacket-eating child is sick with bleeding ulcers,
Southside Chicago boy.

Stained glass colors
tense   hard    fade over the sea, like voices
thin as paper form old manuscript
well kern, ragged right
margin:
parchment with scrawl
not comfort
but my choice.

c2005 Lynn Strongin

An American poet, born NYC, I have made my home Canada for the past twenty-five years. Seven published books, two more chapbooks forthcoming next year, work in fifty-five journals (on-line and in print) in five countries. Some of these are Storie (Italy), Niedergasse, (Switzerland) Acton (summer feature, Scotland, 2006), The Argotist, Trace, Interpoetry (England, on-line) Descant, Prism International Raddle Moon, (Canada), Poetry, The American Voice, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Chicago Sunday Tribune (the States.) I also have poems in thirty anthologies. Two PEN grants, one National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing grant. I worked for British-American poet, Denise Levertov, in Berkeley during the Sixties. Poet and Editor THE SORROW PSALMS: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy Special Guest Editor, New Works Review. yosunt@shaw.ca