Venus
A Rose Poem Instead
by John Grey
I don’t stop to think
why I write about the rose
when you’re beside me.
Stigma and anther and filament
roll off the tongue
like I’m naming the planets
in the sky.
Perhaps, it’s because
the flower is baggageless,
has no history
other than its blossoming.
No wounding glances
in the libration of that corolla.
The pistil, even when plucked,
does not cry out.
The calyx will not sing its darkness
even in the roughest wind.
The stamen has no memory
of all the hurts,
all the disappointments
in the one who leans into
its murmuring petals,
sniffs its sprigs of scent.
So even though I love you,
the poem is for the flower.
Even when I pluck it,
condemn its radiance
to a few days in a vase
echoing your beauty
before succumbing to
a slow rootless death,
the words still go with it
and not with you.
You will continue to be
the unwritten poem,
the invisible lines
on every sheet of blank white paper
I lay before my imagination.
Meanwhile, a garden full
of crimson blooms
flutters with what
I really want to say to you.
Unfazed by Light
by Amy J Burbage
Pieces of moon chipped away, scattered. Your coated chest rises and
falls.
Unfazed by the light, no sounds invade, you
sleep.
You stay lean and strong.
A taped up, tough cast keeps you in the know. Conversation skips and sputters like my old car in the yard.
Relied upon to keep up hope
we’ll stay going.
Your skin and bones operate
a doctor’s touch.
Your eyes don’t see, your tongue doesn’t taste. I feel,
I feel like I owe
myself an explanation
why I lay on the table again.
You woke up hungry.
I scrambled your eggs with bits of cheese and nuked your bacon.
Your cigarette smoke hung around my neck. I cleaned up our plates.
You left the house dissatisfied.
I’m too fat, you say.
The corner of the street shrinks.
I catch you pat her on her ass,
before,
you both even see me.
I walk away
and make the opposite corner before it shrinks.
I stand in the dark in front of the bathroom mirror. The black doesn’t judge my face.
The light snaps on,
You call me loco,
You have to do your business, so go back to bed.
Men
made in a Roman’s eye,
mechanized to lie,
to women who struggle
too late to realize
there are acidic breaks
in such marble men.
I signed the papers.
Your eyes cut me.
We found new corners to wait on.
The painting on the wall is mine.
The funky chairs I got on sale.
I ate six cookies and laughed.
I bought a new bed.
A spring had popped through the old one, on your side.
Unfazed by the light,
no sounds invade,
the moon rolled over and woke up as the sun. Now I can sleep.
Portals
by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Gertrude's
by John Laue
A pretty woman plays trombone,
punching the air with the paper clip slide.
Two guitarists riff rhythmically
over a drummer’s staccato explosions
and thumps from a stand-up bass.
Sometimes one or two horns sally forth,
fashion variations on the standards
that the group plays for jamming.
Now they sashay into a walking blues
They walk, and they walk, and they talk
to us through their instruments:
the tenor sax speaks Coleman Hawkins,
the lead guitar Larry Coryell;
the bass reincarnates Eddie Safranski.
i notice a woman sitting at the audience front
wearing orange pantaloons and hugging
everyone who comes to her table.
She looks ecstatic, proudly glowing.
I notice she’s connected to the bass player.
Another woman sips beers at my back,
young, with shorts and gorgeous legs.
Several times she walks in front of me,
snaps pictures of the band.
I catch her eye and know we both approve
of the group’s Satin Doll.
Then they segue into Willow Weep for Me,
an up-tempo Summertime and another blues
that I’ll bet is in B flat because
the tenor player runs with it.
I love this place called Gertrude’s
after Gertrude Stein
with costume Thursdays every week
wild as wild can be.
I wonder if the waitresses are lesbians.
Is one a modern Alice B. Toklas?
Now the band plays Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue,
then Watermelon Man
with fishhorn (soprano sax) soloing,
then giving way to clarinet.
The stop-and-go rhythms intoxicate me;
I rock following the beats,
joyous in this sonic heaven.
Just as when I played my sax
in California sessions such as this,
I feel connected to everyone here
tapping their feet and swaying
while traffic on the street outside
flows with existential music
punctuated by occasional motorcycle blasts;
and the ocean fifty yards away
contributes rhythms that shake the air
of this open second floor club.
I entertain a fantasy that everyone has rhythms,
everyone and everything we’re part of,
then realize it’s more than a fantasy
as the great heart of the universe beats on.