Braiding

by Enriqueta Carrington

For Ruth

The right tress goes over the middle tress,
the cherry ribbon waits, I braid your hair.
Reining in your coltish energy, you hand

me barrettes, holding still to lend me your hair.
The left tress goes over the middle tress
the plait grows, a tassel of wheat in my hand.

Once in a far-off land, Mother did my hair,
and I loved the touch of her gentle hand.
It was a caress, she passed tress over tress

and as they fell into place in her hand,
I could almost purr at her touch on my hair.
Generations are braided, tress over tress

strand over strand and hand over hand.
Good silence or talk as tress covers tress,
how soft like new-spun silk, the childish hair.

Hand me the ribbon, we’re done, tress over tress.
May you some day hold such silk in your hand,
as you brush and braid a future child’s hair.

Wattle and the North Wind

by Peter Coghill

There’s moisture in the soil, but in the sun
the wattle’s flowering on a dusty wind —
first hints of spring.
That north-west wind, which barely warmed a thing
two weeks ago, will soon rescind
all winter in a day, and dun
the edges of the wheat
with air smelling of cut-grass green and heat.

And on that wind, far north in autumn now,
the leaves are falling golden at their time,
a graceful dying,
compared to early spring’s untimely drying,
betrayed in August by the sign
of gold floating on every bough.
Flowers, in a sort of treason,
with their first hints of spring in a dry season.

Cold Case

by Maryann Corbett

They’re less than clear,
*************the clues you look through,
but bode no good.
*************The bent needles.
The crystal glass.
*************Crackhead glyphs —
obscure, a script
*************in a screwball scrawl —
craze the surfaces,
*************streaking symbols
in drugged frenzy,
*************all dendrites firing.
Blinking’s no good.
*************What blurs your vision
has deeper roots:
*************The years of damage.
The sheer pain
*************you’re staring past,
stumped. But take
*************a stab at its name.

The Cymbal Player

by Martin Elster

As bows and fingers quiver strings,
as lungs and lips whip up the air,
as notes soar on great falcon wings,

one player, seated in his chair
like a finch hid in a maple tree,
as if the creature wouldn’t dare

trill out above the symphony
(perhaps in fear of being caught
by a raptor high above the lea),

begins to rise like an afterthought
amid the pianissimos
and, like a hunter’s rifle shot

as bright as ninety-nine rainbows
of overtones, he spreads, then hits
two plates together. The ether glows

like sunlight through the woods. He sits
back down. And yet the clang still rings
and darts and dances, flutters, flits

and, for the merest moment, clings,
then fades away like all brief things.

Lighthouse, with Poet Brandishing his Hat

by Rhina P. Espaillat

  — for Alfred Dorn

This is the poet posing, hat in hand,
not as a beggar may when thanks are due
to charitable strangers passing by,
but as a champion in the ring may stand
brandishing laurels; it’s a jaunty cue
the crowd responds to, raising heaven-high
the tribute of its hoarse, frenetic cry.
Behind the poet, shouldering the blue
pavilions of the air, the lighthouse peers
over the bard, as if to say, I, too,
rally the fearful, like this firebrand,
to dare the monsters born of  wordless fears.
For every passing craft I lift, like cheers,
my wreath of light above the darkened strand.

Bluffton, Ohio

by David W. Landrum

We saw the fields, heavy before the frost
had settled in, watched as the squares of grain
were cut down — chopped away, garnered and lost.

You met me in the Ohio champaign,
flat land to the horizons, vistas long;
what we both felt came fully and came strong
that autumn, in those cool October days
out on that featureless Midwestern plain
of Amish farms preserving the arcane
methods of husbandry and the old ways,
set on the land, spare, placid, unadorned.

Like grain grown up after the rain and sun,
we sensed our fullness, till it was suborned —
like fields, tawny with stubble, harvest done.

The Bigger Picture

by Ann Drysdale

You saw it on TV — the footage showed
The mighty Ozymandian overthrow,
The falling statue and the cheering crowd —
And probably believed that it was so.
But see the picture taken from above
In black and white, a single grainy still
Which irresistibly reminds one of
The early work of Cecil B De Mille.
The close-up cheering of a small élite
Was caught on careful cameras, but not
The roadblocks at the end of every street
Lest uninvited extras spoiled the shot
Of History being created there
In one small corner of an empty square.

Mechanics of the Sun

by Rick Mullin

Flywheels click and choreograph the ancient
power rained on earth in the light of heaven.
Clockwork shadows circle about the windcracked
polymer landscape.

Slung below a blanketing carbon filter,
crystals spike our gambit at resurrection.
Fast in darkness. Stereoluminescent
battle regalia

range in columns, filling the space we’ve cratered
off the grid and under the meadow skyway.
We advance our emerald swords in sheathing
particle halos.

Here the sun for centuries lit cathedrals,
warmed a population in dying cycles—
still a hidden sepia process, broken
down to its fibers,

clawing gravel railroad embankments, choking
through the burning vale of a summer morning.
Scratching nails unbury the corpus vitae.
Murderous orphans.

I Am Going Drown

by Charles Musser

I am going drown through bankrupt spring.
I am crying rat! through moldy days.
I’m a poking rib, a walking wing.

I’ve got my money peeled. Accountants gaze
upon my shack of grave and giggle Pray!
My lead-hulled ship’s a joke, a fucking phase,

they say. By night you’ll sink, capsize by day.
Be careful of the hole. Step in the hole.
If I weren’t drunking moot, I’d make them pay!

Comes my digging after morning mole.
Comes my threnody with howls of evening.
Comes the taxman’s unborn, cricket soul.

I’m a tuna teaching whales to sing.
I am going drown through bankrupt spring.

Pier

by Stephen Payne

Beyond the waterfront parade
of small concerns, it makes its stand.
The freshly painted balustrade
puts on a brave display,
but still the suck and swell is fanned
around the stanchions, licking them away.

The understructure has a crust:
the flock effect of seagull shit,
a blanket rash of molluscs, rust
on rivet-heads and screws.
Yet even here they pretty it
with fluted columns, flighty curlicues.

Call it vain, even risible,
to dig in, for appearance sake,
against the irresistible;
it’s what I’ve come here for.
I’ll walk the pier’s full length and take
the sea air, closer to my father’s shore.

A Change of Organ

by Andrew Periale

I ask how life is after the heart
transplant surgery. “It’s just
a pump,” he says, “don’t look

for magic beans. I mean, look,
I’m grateful, but the heart
is not really where love lies, it just

moves the blood. How is it just
that a girl died because she didn’t look
both ways? No, it’s a pump.” But now her heart —

any heart — just looks wrong on a valentine.

Passion Spent

by Gail White

My heart, an old and tired cat,
surveying age’s box of toys,
will not uncurl itself for that.

Although the mice are slow and fat
and weakened by avoirdupois,
my heart, an old and tired cat,

no longer dreams of mouse or rat,
and if assailed by sudden noise
will not uncurl itself for that.

A hundred arks on Ararat,
the horses of a thousand Troys —
my heart, an old and tired cat

spurns hero’s crown and cardinal’s hat,
and whether love’s for girls or boys
will not uncurl itself for that.

In time the best champagne is flat,
at last the finest banquet cloys.
My heart, an old and tired cat,
will not uncurl itself for that.

Flyway

by Susan McLean

Wild geese trace lines that overlap and merge
like fluid cursive scrawled across the sky,
honking in concert as their paths converge.
I barely can recall being that high,
that free, that restless, merely passing through
without a plan, just some inchoate drive
to find a place I didn’t know I knew,
one that I might not ever reach alive.

At college, I hear students in the halls,
greeting each other, grouping and diverging
before the flight on which they’re outward bound.
Their raucous chatter drowns my futile calls.
But why should they change course or heed the urging
of one who’s long been tethered to the ground?

Ethics

by Geoff Page

One day, beyond the eyes of cattle,
the sad suburban quietness of the ewes,
the vegetables themselves prove sentient as well.
She hears the carrots give a sigh

when ripped too rudely from the ground;
she sees potatoes neatly sliced
shrinking from the pan;
the lettuce like a pale-green brain

is cowering from the knife.
Even the wheat she eats for breakfast
should still be waving in the west.
She hesitates to steam the rice.

In dreams, she’s on a board of nylon,
waiting to be sliced and diced.

Northern Spy

by Kevin Durkin

“That apple tree up there’s a Northern Spy,”
my uncle says, “the last one of its kind
around these parts. For apple sauce or pie,

there’s nothing better than the Northern Spy.”
His father — my grandfather — comes to mind,
the farmer who set one small parcel by

for fruit trees. When he died, the Northern Spy
was not the only heirloom left behind.
The farmhouse, fields of hay cut down to dry,

a mountain spring that feeds the Northern Spy,
and pastures where a neighbor’s cattle wind
recall the days when horses, young and spry,

would munch the windfalls from the Northern Spy.
Now one old swaybacked stallion’s all you’ll find,
kept in the barn, his sable head held high,

far from the meadow of the NorthernSpy.
He nuzzles hay; his molars slowly grind.
His eyes reflect an apple-tinted sky.

New Fruit

by Ann Drysdale

In the last knockings of the evening sun
Eve drinks Calvados. Elsewhere in her life
She has played muse and mistress, bitch and wife.
Now all that gunpoint gamesmanship is done.
She loves the garden at this time of day.
Raising her third glass up to God, she grins;
If this is her come-uppance for her sins
It’s worth a little angst along the way.
A fourth. Again the cork’s slow squeaky kiss.
If, as the liquor tempts her to believe,
The Lord has one more Adam up His sleeve
He’s going to have to take her as she is —
Out in the garden in a dressing-gown
Breathing old apples as the sun goes down.

From Sonnets from the Dark Lady

by Jennifer Reeser

 “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…”

Milord makes rare parade of his emotions.
Completing undertakings at the pew,
No braggart sagas follow his devotions;
His myths are masked, reported visions few.
Inviting me to drink but not to dance,
He sheds no tears departing from my bed.
He has one sole, uninterrupted glance.
I have for faith the sacrificed unsaid.
Many a diva gets her burning word,
Chocolate oblations brandied, blessed, hot-toddied.
I have for heat the hidden and unheard,
An incandescent, backwards disembodied,
And would — for naught and nothing — make a trade
For pageants staged within him, well-displayed.

(This poem is in the current issue of The Chimaera.)