Anny Ballardini

Truck, November Issue

2014

This November,

With a well in my self

Draining water to saints

Kierkegaard’s paradox

From Socrates’s endless testing

Rules

While looking into the black pond

For answers

__God answers

Inwardly

This November,

Appalling month

Over 100 answered

Joining mine to theirs – yours / ours

Under Saint Cecilia’s patronage

Musicians blew their horns

Organs woke many

While the girl grew ecstatic

In thinking she could

Be

This November,

Thick in air stuffed with light

In closed rooms

At night

Trying to think

When thought gets lost

In and out of self

To accommodate

Past / future events

On a ten fragmented score

This November,

Has seen mountain peaks

Kneel

Sturdy Siqueiros’s hands

Leak tears and grow roses

On Time’s façade

Ancestors chant

Interpretative Chinese lantern plants

Decorate Proust’s monumental

Writings

This November,

Talks

Of seeds and piano keys

Of herbs

Of

Of vincristine

Of

Of crashed & renewed hopes

Of the makers of Illusions

Of a Leap of Faith

This November,

Smiles down at us

With its temperate sun

Its derailed tracks

Its alarm clocked underground routine

Messages on trains and greyhound busses

Slit throats bathed in the forgiveness of popes

Sacraments soaked in the concept of

Anxiety

Brevity

This November,

Without choice

The eleventh

Set as an Acheronian stud in a cameo

The rows of windows

People dis/appear in dim streets

They dis/appear in my mail

Their white poems against the black of Truck

With my acknowledgment to my

Moving November Poets

This November,

In the life of all

Distanced in our flesh

Distracted in our oaths

Hyper-attentive

Booted steps in echoing bells

Coats / cloaks

“Anything but loss”

Pleading for the word God gives to the Just

From those milky sky-s.

This November, 

Cold at the end

In the bones

With Thanksgiving on Fb

Teas honey chestnuts

Coughing

Giving thanks:

The girl is still alive

Distant

But still alive.

© Anny Ballardini

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Lorraine Martinuik

Beadnell Creek

N   49°32.531'
W 124°45.536'

1

How time can stop. Stand still mid-passage, mid-stream. A bridge, high water, flood  where the creek curves to run north. The creek leaves the forest canopy there, where gray, where no horizon. Where the estuary, wide open. Mouth, urgent for the sea.

Bridge, cross over. Leave or return to, come to. A different time.

2

Sweetgrass smoke fused with winter. Fog closed in, shrouded a figure formed of leave-taking words pronounced for weeks, months following the news. How a death can shape things, as if all life is soft clay.

Water, flood-high swept close under the bridge. Wind, storm-force swept in from the sea, from the north, from outside the forest canopy. Effigy of clay swaddled in cedar fronds. Halted for a time there on the bridge.

3

Released, the effigy rode the creek, but not far. The outflow, even in flood, not strong enough to sweep it all the way to the estuary. Where the tide.

Freighted, the weight of clay took it under water, there where the creek curves north. Settled it, mid-stream, in the soft silt bed, to be worn away, over time, grain by grain. Over time, the creek carried the story to its mouth, where it opens to the sea.

Lorraine Martinuik ©2014

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Lorraine Martinuik

Awake

Winter storms the night awake,
rain striking glass panes a nocturne for three a.m.
a melody on the black keys
arranged for the longest night.
Though now all nights are long with wondering
how he sat, enveloped by the dark.

Late winter afternoon gathers dark
the fired imagination, how coming awake
he retraced the familiar valley roads, wondering
could he could drive through one more three a.m.,
would this be one more starless night,
might he find on a back road a key

to turning back, giving back the key
to his father's gun, taken. And sometime after dark
– exact time unknown – stopped at the edge of town [night]e
to the urgency of three a.m. [awake]
[three a.m.]
and stopped wondering.

How could I not have asked him open, I wonder
how long he had planned to take the key
without being caught. At three a.m.
patterns emerge from the dark,
in retrospect. I was not awake.
I thought his dreams were starry nights.

Rain prevents the stars tonight
nothing to navigate by, stop wondering.
How his mother carried home his ashes, awake
many nights wondering, if he had not found the key,
had not the gun to run with, into the dark.
We all question the night at three a.m.

No answers at three a.m.
nothing we can know. But imagine, night
howling like winter, time long and dark
as the distance to the North Star; wonder
how long to compose the black-key
Nocturne for Three A.M. While I, awake

wonder how he failed to exhale the dark
weight deep in the lungs, night pressed hard
against the heart. How take aim?

© Lorraine Martinuik

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Jeff Harrison

Queen Nab Masquerade

a toast to you, passed-around worrier

dark surplus water rattling around as

you're bending breathing in white grasses

skin my enthusiasm & see how pretty

it is then, a sequential enthusiasm anatomy,

layers nabbed clear & ever clearer

if in such clarity we have silence & if

in silence we have death, then in echo we

have the cradle, words don't spread to the

edges of my breath, these edges are

spattered with blowflies, our bones are

the roots of the sky, the hair of our head is

the bottom seam, is the center of the Earth,

if this cup could snow, its saucer would be

a bank, Queen Nab, faint with feeding silence,

words imprisoned on hairs slender like stakes

dark surplus water in this toast time of your guts

© Jeff Harrison

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Barry Alpert

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G

            via Paul Sharits & David Franks

This straw,

its draw.

Destroy

this drawing,

it’s Troy.

Distraught.

© Barry Alpert

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