For Elliott Smith
by Joe Sonnenblick
I think you are a gentle breeze now,
Maybe a fire killing children in a Bronx high rise.
Ten paces to shoot,
No gun
Just a pen in a casket
Scribbling all over rotting composition,
That unseen hand.
The trees sway at the wispiness in which you conducted a one-man symphony,
According to light you never left
A worm on a hook to catch fish,
All the fish are listening to the lamentable good qualities of L.A. and the monsters of your mind.
If you somehow see this…
We always loved you,
You did such a fantastic job.
Color of Sorrow
by Sharon Lopez Maloney
Back of my mind, muted and deep, holds treasures I have not yet spoken or claimed.
Back of his mind is a seething, bitter taste that fights with joy. Dark secrets there cannot be uttered for fear reality will crumble into nothingness but pain and anger. How can he hold onto love and hope as he is pushed down the incline of power with smiles and words of friendship betraying his senses? How can he hold to joy? How are you today? he is asked, I’m good, I’m alive and it’s a new day! He works at believing it, as he sits on the betrayals.
The remarkableness of him, who has fought to hold to his humanity, laughter and pleasure after knowing the children ripped from families, husbands and brothers slaughtered on altars of hatred born of fear, seems beyond attainability. And yet he does continue.
His chest of memories shelters in the darkest corner, in the farthest, coldest place of mind where shameful images and memories are kept, their history held, not to remind, but to honor them, to not let them fade into someone’s righteousness, to actually see those lives as holy ones.
Each section of his hidden sanctum is for different people. Each memory has its own shape and unimaginable anguish, and each persona continues on with different a song in their hearts, different passions in their loins, but continues on. He reveres their bravery and generosity.
The back of my mind does not hold the same reverberations, cannot, it holds codified histories of retold truths and outright lies. But hidden in the way back, in the shadows dark, are irrefutable horrors that cannot, should not be erased; my eyes would fall out, my limbs would break off, my hair would become as a burning center if those ghosts, who I once claimed were better than my own daddy to his face, were to be silenced.
My white woman’s duty is to remember their humiliation, to honor those ordinary people, feared by my daddy, those heroes who are willing to speak out, who know, who remember, and still are willing to embrace tomorrow and continue on; they are my ancestors too, belonging to all of us, how can we bear this shame?
Heavy Hearts
by Barbara Anna Gaiardoni
We live in a time where we are contemplating colonies on Mars and yet there are women left
lingering in this freakish state at the best psychiatric clinics , with their families suffering
ridiculously.
Some people call them battered women and reduced to slavery. Slaves to the demons of alcohol.
But the vine has no responsibility, does it?
a tall glass
of lemonade –
everything changes
Hesitate
by Sharon Lopez Mooney
i was bold, even cocky
fear never visited my bed
humility was simple one of the “virtues”
i knew my map
i was my own
i handled life with an iron hand and a velvet glove
i was smart!
Until that uninvited visitor death
Mia, 50, graceful and holding
by Sharon Lopez Mooney
A crooked gait hesitant with poise
a metal stick as accompaniment
so thin she can be tumbled with the leaves,
her smiling effort pushes through fear
and pain so familiar it needs no name
a hungry disease infests her body
from an unknown river of pathogens,
she knows no fault, knows she’s
too young but no longer
how many years she has,
the world moves in and out
of awareness, names gone
then a face flashes with recall,
grinning she uses their name
to celebrate that momentary spark,
the gentle hand of her lover
an invisible consort
on her yielding journey
to an unknown horizon
Summer is Dying
by Michael Lee Johnson
Outside, summer is dying into fall,
and blue daddy petunias sprout ears—
hear the beginning of night chills.
In their yellow window box,
they cuddle up and fear death together.
The balcony sliding door
is poorly insulated, and a cold draft
creeps into all the spare rooms.
