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Fall 2007
John Amen
Kathy Babcock
Kate Benedict
Jeff Calhoun
Howard Good
Kenneth Gurney
Sarah Jordan
Lynn Levin
Alex Grant
Tim Mayo
PJ Nights
Tim Peeler
Cati Porter
Doug Ramspeck
John Repp
Bill Roberts
RL Swihart
Spencer Troxell
Kelley White
Teresa White
Mike Estabrook
David Jordan
Kelly Mandryk-Layne
Willie Smith
Matthew Rounsville
Back by popular demand:See most pages of poetry for her photos,as well as her artist's page from the summer issue.
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PJ Nights
Fall 2007
Ruth
After being a wife, a whore’s skin feels tight.
~John Updike
Every morning I walk past a fenced-in yard –
the mutt that careens face first into the chicken wire, yelping
and slathering, gives me the most admirable greeting
of the day, seeing me as he does as solid, a threat
to his natural habitat. I'm deserving of warning. Not a shadow
barely morphing the air around the you’s of this petty
circus, light blinking out and on again with my passing, so fast only
your subconscious registers a greeting. There was the night
Rabbit stood in the middle of the room – he’d forgotten
what to do with his hands, so he rested
them on his head. Shoulder blades poked from his beautiful
bare back like the wings of Icarus and I thought
they might meet the same demise when exposed to the heat
of fucking. He wanted the admiration of my mouth,
secretly believing, like all men, in a pathological ugliness
down there. Why should I not be generous? He was grateful
for the juicy gathering of clouds, obligations shattered in my hands.
God, he breathed, and immediately felt Christian guilt at dropping
Jehovah’s name so lightly into the depths of my well wishing.
Around him, he wants only people who wear church clothes
like hope. In my everyday, dirty frock of exhaustion,
I walk past a fenced-in yard. He flees in the face of the dog
who sees what he is. I urge him on, Run Rabbit, run,
hip hop.
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PJ Nights was born and raised in the wild and ravishing state of Maine, USA where she now teaches high school physics. For her, poetry is less about the concrete and more about the emotional and spiritual, about the sense of wonder
she gets from a unique image or a surprising use of language. No particular
formula works to elicit a reader's "gasps", but those quick breaths of
appreciation when a poet's intent strikes home are what she looks for in poems
and hopes to achieve with her own. She writes to keep her brain from turning to
mush, and, hopefully, to leave little bits of beauty in her wake. |
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