Judy Katz

FOR THE RECORD

After the funeral, Peggy sent a note.

She’d heard you “made your get-away” –

as if you’d thrown a few things in a bag

and off to the next world.  But she didn’t see

our father rocking those last hours

in the corner of the bedroom.

Or Aaron and me marooned on the bed

with you.  She must not have heard about

the visiting nurse we knew ten days

and trusted more than medicine or blood,

the one who said hearing is the last sense to go

and we believed her, and spoke to you

like midwives at a birth: Relax, we said

to your laboring body. It’s okay.

What can I say – it’s trouble

getting in and trouble getting out.

I’ve seen it both ways.

Is this where I tell you? Sometimes

your absence is a brightly lit field

I am lying in, back against the earth,

afternoon sun warming my face.

Sometimes the wide open space of you gone

is all it takes to let the whole world in.

Bethany Johns

POEM

The sun hammers down

the soft copper

of your back

and when you spread your arms

it plays its glory

on your crucifix

against the beach

All this salt

banned from the fields,

crept from tables,

wept by those capable,

reaches its promised land

The water parts

then closes, like your eyes

against nothing but pleasure

or pain

If it weren’t for you

in my every periphery

this coastal peace

of mind and time

would be, for the moment,

enough

but even the waves

come back for more,

to shuffle by, stunned,

to adore you

Peg Peoples

STYLISH

Sometimes, I cannot get close enough

to the numinous- the bumble bee’s

burly body, its singular freedom

to the red clover, its rose color hovering

plein air only centimeters above

the darker green.  How could I touch

the proboscis curved and elongated

just enough to allow it entry to a nectar

otherwise unknown to any other

species of bees.  How I’d like to feel

the thrust of air that knowledge

leaves, or the boat barely more

than a tub riding the blue-green waves

of the Atlantic in a Homer painting –

hills forming on the sea, the fish

landed and whiter than the whole sky.

How to be desired by nature, to have

the lake glissading over the soft curves

of our shoulders, the tumescent lift

and loft of its summer waves – buoyant

is what we’d say: the air, the sky, the warm

heat, even though the moss hanging

from the cypress feels like death

and strangle as the river boat churns

its motor through the thick water

that harbors snakes and eels and slick

skinned things I have feared would touch

my skin.  It’s true, we lean towards

death – as if it were beauty or the beginning

of a knowledge we otherwise couldn’t

have.  Even here, over the black tar

and the pressurized walls of cement buildings

where lights flash and the high windows

throw off their disks of copper light – Atlas

playing the world – I am thinking,

far below the girders, the steel cables laid down

like lace work beneath the city, below the

tunnels and city rats with their matted hair and love

for sewage, I will be there, farther and deeper down,

below the sense and sensibility of it all.  I will be

what everything is in the beginning – leaving

behind the fine silk of a flowered dress taken in

by the design of a few orchids with their stylish tongues.

Aaron Smith

LITTLE FIRE

Start with the pain in your side no one can identify: catch, cramp
little fire beneath the skin, not even the young doctor whose hands

are the prettiest brown in the box can tell what is pressed to your side.
Put the bracelet that heals, its little blue faces around your wrist,

       the gems

your friend held to your chest saying: not this, but this: lapis maybe,
tiger-eye maybe, the black one you had to have when it twirled in

             your palm.

Remember hands in church anointing the sick with the oil
that your mother kept for the preacher in the pulpit's dark stomach.

See the carpet where she spilled oil, crying, blotting the white
of the backing soda: Please make it clean again, but it stained, and today

pain at your waist to pick you up like a figure skater and throw you
and sometimes you hear whispers you want to believe are leaves,

don't leave, you catch yourself saying, and can't tell anyone, nobody,
no matter how close this stranger is, how like home his skin smells

waiting behind him in the subway line for your pass, change,
the part of yourself you always give away.

Suzanne Parker

The Fishing Boat Boy

His face is as smudged now as the name

of the person whose tomb we rocked against

circled by a hush of hilltop and overgrown graves

where his touch rustled like the wind in wheat

and talk like stones broke the perfect mirror

of silence, each ripple outwards shivering.

From the bay, fog washed up, swallowed

the whole world, and, marooned in the center

of the bone yard, I calculated the distance

to experience, thinking already

of what to tell how far to reach out, around

and down on him.  Slick with heat and sweat,

we were two rude angels let from their marble leases

and, newly flesh, we rode to shake the dead.

Elaine Sexton

Over My Head

I mean literally upstairs on the 9^th floor

they make things, manufacturing caskets

I imagine, ghoulishly sorting out sketches

at their desks. The long rolling bolts

cross floor boards all day, stock piled

body containers. After hours

Korean workers join me and Latino

young men from the mailroom in the cage

of our service elevator. The Irish operator

draws the lever that locks us

together. We descend past the backsides

of business, discarded layouts, trashed

prototypes, coated wires and waste

plastic dumped from the 5^th floor

Uniform & Supply, from the 4^th floor

Human Hair Wigs, and the ground floor

new tenants, the toy business in town

for the trade fair once a year, grownup men

dressed as action figures, their doughy creations

made for kids, nothing so distant from life

as the Mylar-pink masks in their plate glass display.

Julia Cole