Dulse

by Elizabeth Barbato

what cliff. sere light
and cloud, fail heaven.
now is climbing, now
is boatened water,
wood speech, clogs
on stone, a pull, a kilt,
a lift, wool, a space:
false moss.

blindfold. sand trapped
as glass, portcullis.
too soon for falseness,
an eye. sail heretics!
a ruler, a notation, eclipse.
what mouth. slammed nail.

tailed bird. tailed spring,
flesh lexicon, a wrist,
blindfold. snails. broken,
dumb shell. curved suborn:
equivocator, mollusc.

Snow

by Jim Barron

Say nothing of the mountain, calling
in the night, growing, looming in sleep.
You can see it behind his eyes,
his weathered face never left the mountain.
He sees the snow on the summit as you shake his hand
and each night he is called back.
Soon the mountain will claim him, the cold stream,
the single diamond glint of a snowflake
in the high moonlight. The mountain does not know him.
Any more than he knows each rock
or the cloud that keeps him from the peaks.
He waits at the top of the world, breathing time slowly.
Watching the arching blue turning around him,
feeling the rocks alive to his touch.

The Book of Weeds

by Alison Brackenbury

It is like your fierce love (I am lazy)
to yearn to name each weed. You could
go crazy

Naming. Aren’t the named enough? Sow thistle
bleeds white, cinquefoil swarms yellow stars.
I whistle

As horsetails old as birds cut through my hand,
bindweed chokes roses. The nameless?
I have planned

For all good souls, a Book of Weeds, to take
the purple spires from shifted soil,
sour ache

Of crushed leaves with their briefest rosy flower,
onion-scented stems, whose bells drop
in an hour.

No, close the book. Fling down your trowel and knife.
All weeds grow one name only.
It is life.

Travelling Fair

by Maggie Butt

The shock of the impossible. It folds!
That strident, swirling, screaming metal
folds like obedient fabric, fitting lorry
like a foot within a shoe. A carousel,
a chair-swing, ghost-train, tunnel
of love, each neatly telescoped
onto the back of gaily painted truck;
so memory folds and wraps the past
its long and lovely pocketed moments.

Writ

by Catherine Chandler

“Foole,” said my Muse to me, “Looke in thy heart and write.”
— Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella

And so I searched, but all that I could see
to write about was this: a vacant room
whose occupants once held a tenancy
of woodstream orchids, where an old perfume
clings to its quiet corners, knows my key
will turn, a frequent caller to a tomb
already ransacked, sifting through debris
only a fool like me would dare exhume.
I’ve served my warrant, Muse, and I am pleased
to tell you that I’ve found the smoking gun
you always knew was there. So I have seized
it, tagged and bagged it. Now my work is done –
this evidence I can at last impart,
the delicate forensics of the heart.

Goodbye Goodness

by Jennifer Hill-Kaucher

Straight-backed among Rebel Angels
and Mere Mortals, the two volume
Oxford English Dictionary swells
behind golden seals that assume
wealth. One begins and ends on vowels,
two supplements pizzazz, each broadlooms
type below eight point, a fly’s farewell
across the pages — a black bloom.

You let her have everything else
but these leaves of words that weave
without our eyes, expand like cells
under the glass. Goodbye is shelved,
kisses goodness to dispel
every myth of what it means to leave.

The Canes

by Paul Hostovsky

After the accident, he walked with a cane
for several months. And he began to notice
the other people with canes, and to feel
a kinship with them, a strong identification
when he saw one crossing a street or waiting
for the train, the bus, the elevator — a desire
to speak to them in the language of the cane,
the language of the country of the cane,
which no one else seemed to know existed,
which he never knew existed himself until
now. But he didn’t know what to say to them,
because he didn’t know them. He only knew
what they knew. So he didn’t say anything
directly. But instead he said things to himself
in the language that was in him. And his thoughts
grew wider, as though the white canes of the blind
were clearing the way — click, sweep, click –
a separate way through the darkness home.

The Petition

by Rose Poto

Somerville, MA, ca. 1909

They came at night, but didn’t burn a cross,
those well-bred Northerners. Instead they stood
looking apologetic on the porch.
Their leader held a lantern, not a torch.

“Mi scusi, speak the English not so good,”
Maria Rosa smiled, confused. But then
they read it to her slowly. Rearing up,
she shook her fist and shouted at the men,

“Leave us alone, or I sell the house to nigger!”
It worked. They all turned whiter than they were
and never tried to mess with her again.

Or so my father says. Ashamed of her,
we tell the story with a guilty snigger,
pretending to be shocked. But at the bone
we know the secret gospel. Life’s a cup;
each sip you take is someone else’s loss.
Boo hoo. Salut. You take care of your own.

Pathetic Fallacy

by Ray Liversidge

The evening sky is bruised and bloodied. Stars
Prepare to collapse, cars ready for bed.
While the rotary hoist recoils from the coming dark,
The lawnmower sleeps soundly in the garden shed.
Street lights consider retiring for the night
As the house braces itself against the cold.
The fence leans and whispers to the lawn to be quiet,
Wires hum lullabies from telegraph poles.
Inside, a fist unclenches to clutch at a breast;
Outside, a cloud threatens the moon.
He says he hates it when she’s obmutescent,
Yet swears her words won’t end this poem.
As love is not undone by acts of violence,
The night is not reclaimed with vows of silence.

Couplets for a Young Carpenter

by Austin MacRae

Swinging a ball-peen in that early year,
you incorrectly chose the hemisphere-

shaped head to drive a rusty nail clean through
a board. Persistence left your finger blue.

Hammering out these lines, now twenty-eight,
I sense you in my hands and hesitate:

a touch of you remains, still pounding out
your future awkwardly, without a doubt,

in thrall to the hammer’s momentary thunder.
And oh, my wide-eyed builder, how we blunder

through it, improvising as we go —
persistently, blow by glancing blow.

Stone

by Susan McLean

Offered bread,
I asked for a stone.
The stone was good,
but I ate alone.

I took my bows
in a hail of rocks
and built my house
of stumbling blocks.

But its walls are aligned
so true and tight
that they keep the wind
out, day and night.

Thermal

by Alison Brackenbury

Sulis Minerva, they found your stone head
In Bath, where my daughter drove me today,
Half-Roman, half-Celt. Do not lecture. Instead
We wade through blue pools from the sulphurous spring
In a bubble of freedom, my fifty-fourth birthday,
In rooftop baths, by the gulls’ wavering.

How hard she works, my dark Grecian daughter,
Hands clenched on the wheel, quick glint of her rings,
Marriage, new job. How heavily water
Oiled by the sulphur, smoothes each winter limb.
Roman pipes pump to a Celtic languor.
By rose-red chimneys, I rise and swim.

Sulis Minerva, they took both your names
Into the dark which I fear will come back.
When you rose into daylight, girls’ eyes shone the same
With shivering shoulders which longed for the south.
With rough hair of weed, eyes sunken and black,
Water, not word, wash us warm through your mouth.

Baucis and Philemon

by Margaret Menamin

I believe I know how it will be
with you and me:
Coming silent one day through the wood
where last you stood,
I will stop, remembering, and see
a newsprung tree.

It will be as if it had been planned:
Where then you stand
I will stop, remembering, and see
a wild young tree
tall and straight among the others, and
put forth my hand.

As I touch your greenness, some strange thing
will leap and sing
within the hardening fibers of my hand.
So we will stand,
season on season, summer after spring,
remembering.

At the Fosse

by John Milbury-Steen

They threaten me that death is very fine,
total meditation, action done,
brilliant recusal, with all conflict gone,
the book all closed, to balance line by line,
down in the dessication of the bone,
down in the accountancy of stone,

but if that’s true, remind me of the rub,
that Homo mortus semper stultus boob,
having escaped the hubbub and the tube,
action past, to dream him back in robe,
is now so sapped of energy and verb
he must imbibe a round at Blood Ditch Pub.

That desperate fueling on the telling day
tells me more than what he’s fueled to say.

fall of the serpent

by JB Mulligan

The serpent writes in the book of the leaves,
snakeskin pages of the fall, its slow story:
how the invisible, like a wind within the body,
a breath beneath the air the lung-bellows heaves
into and out of itself, can move whatever lives
to freeze at the rustle, the taut skin uneasily
surrounding the clenched heart, the slick, queasy
terror that coils over and squeezes what it loves
while the snake glides by, its erotic tongue
probing the worldly scents, tenderly and quick
in its attentions, cherishing the various tastes,
each for its own moment, along the long
journey through untold stories to a dark
suddenness, to the last fall of all bright beasts.

Conestoga Bark

by Timothy Murphy

My mate feathers the spindled wheel
to right our tipsy bark,
luffing to windward as we heel
rail under in the dark.

Where boys are brown and salt air sweet,
seafarers find no rest
but wake aground in the waving wheat
that runs forever west.

Sensitive Skin

by Amy Nawrocki

The universe has banished us;
fragile gauze hair on tiny forearms
succumbs to renegade heat waves
and celestial currents, which now and again
sabotage our bones, flaking and peeling skin
like pastry dough. Until we forgo
our ambulant nomad ways, return
to fur, or learn to play possum, our doom
will find us roasted and sagging.
                                                 Or perhaps
we should find our treeness, wear thick bark
and leaves that canopy over necks.
With years symmetrically bubbling
out of a center trunk, each milestone
would bear another ring of flesh
to shield away the hemisphere’s burley snarl.

Medea’s Lullaby

by Janice D. Soderling

The blue wind blows with its blind eye.
The blue star blinks in the soft sky.
Blowing and blinking and sleeping.

The blue moon shines on the cold blade.
The blue blade blows on the new-made.
Shining and blowing and sleeping.

Who knows where blue winds will blow now.
Only your mother. And blue blade.
Sleep little child. Sleep little child.

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