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poetry

a promise

Winter falls fast as
the road rises. Slow
sun has been setting
the scene for hours.

Prairie grass bows south
through barbed wire. Yellow
alone does not suffice to
describe it in this light.

It is the north wind lying
cold across the plains in the stems
kneeling, the color of ice deep inside
dry grass long before the road ices.

It is a promise, the real presence
of what is to come. And when I stop
and turn, as everything turns,
the moon, full, is what it is,

what it has been, where it will be, where it has
been from the beginning, pure cold light rising.

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Persimmon Sunday

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I find them beneath my persimmon tree.

They quickly turn to go though
I don’t feel the heart to be rough with them.
Fences are necessary, I suppose.
They can be meddlesome too.

These gentle folks pass every Sunday
to visit their boy in prison, they
only want to make a pie. I only want
to be asked first – a fence divides us.

She promises to bring me tarts
and that seems fair, and I think about
fairness and their son these days.
I am glad they go see him Sundays

and I tell them so. Their calm, courtesy
strikes me. Persimmon pie is part of her
autumn ritual, something I cannot deny
her. I don’t know, don’t need to know

how it is they got off the main road.
They are seeking the sweetness that comes
after the bitterness has ripened.
Standing under a tree none of us made

I see her boy back home years ago
hungrily eating a piece of pie. I see
her husband proud, happy, the gleam
in her eye, sweet sticky juice sliding

down the boy’s dimpled cheeks,
dark eyes aglow as he wipes his mouth
with the sleeve of a flannel shirt
and I want it to be that way again,

want sour taste expunged. Afternoon
gathers and we talk about a hard,
killing frost that makes the sweetness,
a cold harsh night that ripens

this rustic fruit. We shake hands
and I don’t look back as I return
through fields where yellow leaves,
orange, dusty, scarlet and intense

lay about me, toss around me
in the breeze that carries ladybugs
unsuspecting toward their graves,
timber standing in reverent silence

as before a judge, as if to judge.
Truly autumn is the most dramatic
of days. It is a time to remember
but it is also a time to console.

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Guest Poet – Jessica Isaacs

Belly of the Whale

It’s the belly of August,
and we’ve spent all our money
on school supplies
and school clothes
and electricity
to beat the heat,

but it could be worse,
I remind myself
as I pass
a weathered,
paint-peeling,
wood-frame house

with all the windows open,
weeds grown up to the eaves,
and twenty cloth diapers
strung out on a line –
oh yes,
it could be worse.

Tortoise

Eve stood, naked in the garden, and
closed her fist around the last soft
bit of fleshy ripe fruit, squeezing the succulent
pulp, forcing the juice of knowledge between
her fingers to drip down her wrist and
forearm to the ground God walked upon – so this
was how it was going to be? Really? An eternity
for a few mere seconds of simply wanting
to know God better? An eternity for simply aching
to see God more intimately? An eternity for breaking
just one of God’s rules, put in place to keep her
in her place, set apart, from him? The punishment
was too extreme, she knew this fully and well, but
hers was a jealous God, and she was smaller and
weaker and slower than he, yet she
would carry this new, separate Eternity
on her back forever, like a Tortoise
shouldering her world, hopeful. And when
Eternity runs out, finally, she whispered
through fruit-scented breath, surely, surely,
would he let her know him, then?

Jessica Isaacs’ poetry has been published in several journals and anthologies, most recently including Cybersoleil, Sugarmule, and Elegant Rage. “Belly of the Whale” and “Tortoise” are poems from her current book-in-progress, deep August. She has presented her poetry at the National and Regional Pop Culture / American Culture Conferences, Scissortail Creative Writing Festivals, Full Circle Bookstore, Woody Guthrie Festivals, and Howlers & Yawpers Creativity Symposiums. She is an English and Humanities Professor at Seminole State College, and makes her home in Prague, Oklahoma with her one husband, two kids, two dogs, four cats, three fish, and a variety of snails.

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September

… seeping through cracks
of summer like light
in the barn – dust beams
suspended from ground
to hay loft and beyond –
zones of maze dazzled
children zig through
waving arms, exalting,
pretending – those old
games never get old – I
don’t want to lose
the pixie of September …

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assuming (not knowing)

It is the middle of the day on this
busy Hong Kong street. Every collision
is inexplicable. It seems the whole
mass of the people is moving to one
end while every other person stands still.
Temperature rises as pressure rises
as long as the volume of whatever
contains us is constant. From collision
to collision, I am a molecule
in a fluid assuming (not knowing)
the shape of the vessel that contains it,
water making its way down to the sea,
the smallest possible constituent part
lost in thought, the river, still, moving.

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For a Walnut Tree

Taken down

Life flowing all through your limbs
little boys trying to be men

with chainsaws conquer a peaceful giant.

Like most friends you gave and required little
of us who benefited from your shade, your security,
your beauty.

They could not stand your beauty – it reminds them
of what they are not.

I wish they had even a teaspoon of grace – enough
to let living trees flourish. Can’t we settle for a tiny
compromise: leave trees alone – go your chronic way,
pat your puny self on the back and save chainsaws
for emergencies.

Pity the boy who sharpens his heart
with a machine.

I would like to walk away and leave sawboys
to their bloodlust, but destroying trees
destroys us all – the shared life is the only life
we have – otherwise we are only broken limbs
cut off from our roots worthy of little except microbes
that refuse to yield – we are made for worms – this
I learned sitting in the shade of a walnut tree
sixty feet high and growing.

Murder, by any other name, is murder.
To our shame, the boy who kills thrives
in our consumptive society.

I am of two minds: part of me wants his saw
to splinter in process, the vengeance
of wounded wood stake him to the ground
as a horde of angry walnuts thunder down
beating him, torturing him senseless.

Revenge is sweet.

But revenge never satisfies, and even when death
comes without justification, at least the memory
of living well, hard and upright in the joy of life
remains – this I learned sitting in the shade
of a walnut tree sixty feet high and growing.

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Guest Poet: Benjamin Myers

Benjamin Myers is a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry and the author of two books: Lapse Americana (NYQ Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems are forthcoming in, or have recently appeared in, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Nimrod, Salamander, DMQ, Measure, Tar River Poetry, and other journals. Online, he has been featured on Verse Daily and Everyday Poems, as well as on the blog for 32 Poems. He frequently reviews contemporary poetry for World Literature Today and teaches literature and writing at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he is the Crouch-Mathis Associate Professor of Literature.

Mannequins

All our most incessant mythology suggests
they are on the move
when we aren’t
looking.

Without turning
we know
the crowds
of the faceless–
pastel polo-shirts,
white shorts,
hair a plastic suggestion–
are massing like an army
of the dead
slowly behind us

because we have seen
it in the late-night
movies we record
our dreams in.

They are a silent mob,
an underwater forest
of carnivorous plants,
inching their way toward
hapless swimmers.

You know this and are careful
not to linger
in department stores
as the last lights shudder out.

But flat on your back at night,
staring eight feet below
your ordinary ceiling,
you know also what it is
to be them:
immobilized
in the window and gazing
across a busy avenue,
while on the opposite shore
your would-be lover stands
behind the plate glass, looking
helplessly back across
the flesh-filled street.

from Lapse Americana, (NYQ Books, 2013)

Bad Harvest

The roving combine crews have moved on north to Kansas,
their hulking green machines wobbling on flatbed trailers.

With little rain comes little wheat, the fields left like a dog
shaved for mange. Mornings, I sit on the porch with the paper

until the heat drives me inside. Last year there was this pretty
cashier at the Dollar General, her face round and nice, but the meth

sucked her inside out bit by bit over the year, so that
by harvest she was old paper from a wasp’s nest. I’m thinking

about things that don’t turn out right: it’s like William Henry Harrison,
who won the “common man” with log cabin-shaped bottles

of hard cider and a reputation in war; science may tell
us his long speech in the rain and cold had nothing

to do with the pneumonia that killed him 30 days
into his term, but what does science know about disappointment?

When I was almost through with college, I crossed a lake
so red you would think only the Pentecostals could have dreamed it,

and lived for a week on the other side, painting my uncle’s cabin,
refreshing the white of the trim and railings. Working under

hot glare, I would run into the murky red lake, feet slurping
through leaf rot and mud. Then one day it rained and I sat

on the porch reading Hemingway under clear plastic
sheeting. I was 23 and engaged, dumb as a bull frog,

eating chili from a can and making margaritas
from limeade and cheap tequila. I thought

I was writing a novel. Evenings I would watch the trotline
bobbers nodding into the darkness and each morning

wake beneath mosquito netting on the porch. I actually thought
I was writing a novel. Thank God it didn’t turn out that way.

from Lapse Americana, (NYQ Books, 2013)

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Pine Cones

It could be that morning rain
drops covering a brave bird
chirping in the walnut tree
next door are reason enough
to celebrate a closeness felt.

Thunder and light and passing time
are nothing if not minstrels
dancing before a king and all
the paupers count themselves
fortunate to pause their duties
and glimpse into the great hall
where even royalty bows to song.

It could be that sand and surf
and mountain pines trailing
toward happiness are the strings
plucked by the lucky few
who crave awareness, peace
found in pine cones fallen.

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seeing is believing

it’s like yo’ eyesight like yo’ eyes says
a guy walking the other way, and I
know he is not talking to me but I
have not yet disentangled conversation
from the physical proximity of bodies
and I find myself thinking nothing
I know is like your eyes
                                               someone shouts something
I cannot understand from a passing car and I know
it is nothing personal but it pierces my dreaming
and I am still trying to make it out when I pass a guy
in a hazmat suit fishing under the Clarence Darrow
Memorial Bridge while birds I can not identify
occupy high-rise houses made for purple martins
with their voices
                                a tiny yellow bird pursues
a brown one four times his size that does not think
to turn which gives me one more reason
to wonder what would happen if
                                                              still,
it is plain to see there is nothing
like your eyes and no reason
to try to make out what anyone is
saying when everyone is talking
to someone who is not here
                                                     you
see what I’m saying?

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