Across The Room

A boy gasps and cries

in Spanish

for his mother.

Metal slides on metal

as the key

lime curtain

parts for the doctor.

He gives me lavender

paste and tells me to drink.

My face freezes

in disgust

and then softens as the pain

washes away, like chalk

off a sidewalk.  I sink

back, muscles relaxing.

I feel        fragile.        Uncertain

if I’m still here by God’s grace

or dumb luck and I wonder

if maybe you felt this way.

Was it the promise

of death or your unreliable body

that left you wide eyed and afraid

to go

to sleep?

Three weeks gone

and I haven’t given you a tear.

I curl into a sideways prayer

on the gurney.  Across the room

the boy wails for his mother.

Dad Survives His Third Open-Heart Surgery

Don’t worry, Dad, you’ll be

talking again soon.  I’ve watched you

breathe through tubes so many

times, but I can’t stop looking

at you like someone I don’t quite

recognize.  When did you get

so goddamn old?  Your hair stands

wild, sparse, like a balding troll

doll in its seventies.  I want to laugh

but there are so many tubes growing

out of you.  I try counting them

but I get to your face, wonder who

you are, and lose count.  The two

largest spill out of your bed

ending in clear containers, slow

drip collections of blood and piss.

If you’d died under the knife, things

would be so easy.  You’d be

the father who could never live

down his mistakes.  I’d be the son

who didn’t learn how to forgive

in time, and everyone would understand

the burden of my guilt.  I could

be brave in the face of grief.  Live

my life.  It would be an easy

easy lie.  I used to punch

the brick wall in the alley until

I couldn’t hold a pencil.  What kind of son hates

his father like that?  What kind of man

sits next to his father’s hospital bed, sees

a lifetime of Christmas guilt and Father’s

Day backhands instead of a sick

old man on life support?  Dad, why

can’t I hold your hand and tell you

not to worry?  That this won’t last?

Greg walks in, presses his cheek

to yours, holds his phone like a mirror

says, “Don’t worry Dad, you won’t

remember this,” then leaves, nodding.  I envy

his approach to shitty memories.

Somewhere inside me there’s a slow

leak.  I know there were never enough

years to begin with, and I remember

when I threw away a prayer for you

to suffer like this every day.  I’ve wasted

so much prayer, the shame smothers

me, like a desperate hug.  No one

deserves this.  Your new scar, dried

blood and surgical thread, laced

through welts of old scars, looks like

a black worm eating its way

up your chest.  I drag my fingertips

across my own stratified scars

each one a permanent reminder

that you and I will always be

you and I, and I hope—

It’ll be alright, Dad.

Try to sleep a while.

Six-String Rising

Rouge on pale cheeks, blush

coins that somehow miss

your hollow eyes, face

emaciated, face white

like porcelain, like a doll

so white I want to draw on it, paint

your real face, not this

sunken still-life of starvation

and shame, this isn’t

you, this    empty    thing

in front of me, an abandoned

Cadillac, left to rust

in a long-forgotten wheat field I

want to see your face

again, see the smile that says

yeah, this is happening as you

play slide guitar with a burning

candle in a room of screaming

women, the smell of possibility

everywhere

I want to watch you raise the dead

again, with a pick and six

strings, make them dance, John

feral things, make them

sing a three-part harmony with God, sing

a rage of life

sing a story into being, sing of life

life, goddammit

who will sing

for you?

Tim Hatch writes poetry that explores themes of abuse, fragility, and our human obligation to one another.  He earned his MFA at Cal State San Bernardino, and his poetry has appeared in East Jasmine Review, The Vehicle, Touch: The Journal of Healing, and Apeiron Review.  He teaches English at Mt. San Jacinto College, and his collection of poetry, Wild Embrace, is forthcoming from Pelekinesis Publishing Group in early 2018.

Night Fires

It is night.

Smoke curls around me,

Enveloping in it’s touch, sustaining

A soft drifting of thought,

Languid spell of memory.

I wish it were always like this,

Moonlight reaching into every corner,

Burning it raw.

My withered eyes are like

Cherry stones lamenting

Their lost sweetness,

Singing like a shadow.

Speechless.

Plums at Night

The night is plum-dark.

Horses hang in the depths of sleep,

Haunches gleaming blue-black as

Dripping dusky fruit,

Skin enticing touch,

Misted by the press of my thumb.

I want to bite right down

To the hard grooved core,

Flesh dense as

Blood in lungs,

Pulse of the heart

Throbbing to be licked,

Thirst and murmur and desire

Rolling the tongue as the

Horse’s eyes

Turn to their whites in

Fright.

Wide and open as a cage

In the belly of the night,

Asking: ‘Do I dare?’

Natalie Crick, from the UK, has poetry published or forthcoming in a range of magazines including Interpreters House, The Penwood  Review, Ink in Thirds, Rust and Moth and The Chiron Review. This year her poem, ‘Sunday School’ was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Scenes from a Marriage

I wed the one

most like myself—

my mirror image,

washed and trimmed.

No one could fault

the rightness of it—

how he grinned,

close-shaven—

how I matched him,

beard and heart.

Each day I clipped

the captured shell—

sometimes to win it,

sometimes to give

it back. He was hard

to know beyond

appearances—

what you saw was

what you got,

a dandy dressed

in lacy white.

I indulged his whims—

it pleased us both.

Until it didn’t.

You know the rest—

the long haul, the rocks,

the wreck.

A voyage better

not begun, but one

that made me.

I learned what

I was and wasn’t—

and kept my own

counsel at the end.

Domain

Two ravens fly in tandem,

so close they almost collide.

They swoop and glide against

the vault of heaven, full

of backlit, biblical clouds,

plying the wind as the sky

darkens. There’s a storm

aloft, clouds bruised blue,

swollen to the north—

while here the sun plays

with shadows, like ravens

play with air, teasing it

and each other in this dance

where neither quite touch.

You watch. Your heart

wants to open, you know

this much. Before

your world snaps shut,

you would call out,

hover, let the gale

sail you away.

Cynthia Anderson lives in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Her poetry collections include In the Mojave, Desert Dweller, Shared Visions I and II, Mythic Rockscapes: Barker Dam Trail, and Mythic Rockscapes: Hidden Valley. She frequently collaborates with her husband, photographer Bill Dahl. Cynthia co-edited the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens. www.cynthiaandersonpoet.com

Remainder

You left me a lucky street to work in,

this historic district with pro forma

moss between shifted brick.

Movement without looking:

where memory folds

into the architecture both of

cinder-block and hours.

Each in ten years of day is

a transparent pane tinted

with your filament..

I pass through the neighborhood park

often under the footbridge

with its reliefs, its mice, its mass of birds.

moving on two places,

foot on brick and years.

You are every bird

under the bridge,

their hauntings of noise,

and the flock when it moves.

If I could pluck one out in midflight,

grasp it biting and slapping me

I might stop replacing vision

with memory for a moment,

see the street as feral and elusive

as the beginning, distracted with

scrapings in the dormer.

I lingered once for

hours past midnight;

when crickets retook

their human voices

to talk among themselves

Borrachera

1.

The Datura opens here.

It’s easy to love

all those names;

dhatur, dhattura,

white thorn-apple,

moonflower, locoweed in Los Angeles,

kanak and unmatt,

toloache, datura-

blanca, burundanga and

borrachero, and to

say each one

as long as it will stay in the mouth.

I’ve been a little drunk myself

even before I swallowed

(jimson-weed and Jamestown weed, as well)

the sharp seeds;

just spoke them slowly, like chewing.

2

On the lawn, a

shoot’s slow roar of growth

has become a tree,

spread uncurling

branches hung with flowers.

They tangled every jogger through Sunset Junction.

Long blossoms,

bell shapes of

oblique white,

their day-color.

It’s a “tree”, it’s a “flower,”

one when it’s not the other, a

bell when not a flower,

a plant and

also (I read) medicine, and poison, and more.

There’s a name for all of it.

.

At night it isn’t a tree or flower..

Stalk and verdure vanish in the dark.

The flowers lose their bodies

in a mass of white fire,

phosphorescence

alight midair

3.

And now day.

I set datura here,

as if it were a shoot

and this paper a lawn,

set by the gate for emphasis.

The flowering of the page.

It can’t keep still.

On heavy roots, it manages

escapes,

slips from its plot to

bud and flourish,

burn, wilt, always

elsewhere.

I have it right

beside the front gate;

all mine,

offering nothing.

A flower flowers;

here is beauty, take some.

I have been a little maddened–

sat under it for a night and then another

to put my arms around fire, for.

some wider kind of having.

That’s no way of having anything:

This grasping was a failure.

I repeated it every time I spoke the name

hoping I could shape  flora

with sound in the hollow of my throat.

It came to be better taken in

to chew the leaves,

swallow hard-edged seeds.

My spine in an upward twist

blood like fire down a hall,

glowing with it.

An assignation:

the datura has me by the flesh,

It does what it wants with me.

Andrew Aulino began spending time in with San Bernadino, Riverside, and Irvine during his early years in the Southwestern United States. He became familiar Inland Empire during many trips spent crossing California with family.  He expanded this familiarity living in Los Angeles, where he retains personal ties. He currently lives in Sacramento.

I Walk Along

To get to Benito Juarez Elementary, I walked over

South Hill, often with Jason and Eric and Tracy and Lauren

and once Jennifer who tattled on me for hitching a ride

On my sister’s banana-seater.  Drivers must have

Seen my sister struggling up the hill with my added weight,

And how the kids cheered us as we roared down to the light

On Sunkist, and all those adults let us go.  In class

We had been learning bicycle safety so that one day

I could ride my silver Roddy—upon which I’d dashed

The river, leapt the dust trails, skidded up and down Virginia

Avenue—but Jennifer and Mrs. Ruble were not impressed,

And two hundred fifty times I had to write, I will not ride

On the back of my sister’s bicycle, the pencil slower to push

Than uphill pedals, the limp of my cursive taking its dull toll.

Golden Poppies

The nova in your middle holds your flares

Stark against the deadest Iowan greens.

As a child I feared imprisonment for

Plucking you, one more star in Hollywood

Beyond my boyish grasp.

And now you’re here,

Ascending in the new place I call home,

Rooting my spinning galaxy in used

Ruts, the very lanes my dreams would orbit

And unfurl, shining through the dark matter

Of wishing, of wasting, of failing those

California Summers and Wisconsin

Winters, of losing my way as I lost

The scent of oranges, the ocean’s rush,

And how I had been divinely ignored.

Golden Poppies (4)

In this summer’s drench

you were lost:

the dawn of your brain

never outreaching the water-grass

Horizon, and there are no stars,

then, to trace

back to California,

the constellation of my memory

Unfurling a golden age

blazing as the stroke

of your hot petals,

a golden hole burnt

In Iowa’s green sea, calmly

folding me in its constant wave.

Curiosity Kitten

Lauren and Spring

were the queens we’d show

off for on our bikes;

the season for guessing

Women was ripe.  Jason

kissed Tracy before

the whole class,

and Bart groped Kathy

In the back, and Eric sniggered

over a poem where the speaker

put his wintered hand

on a comforting pussy—

We were at love’s mouse-hole,

hoping for that mystery

to peek its nose

so we could claw

It and make it a feast:

we couldn’t name

what made Misty’s body

or Jeanie’s smile so

Delicious, but if we stilled

that ball of string,

it might be mastered,

like a sparrow spiked—

That flying thing,

what’s it like to peal those feathers,

to touch those scaled feet,

to taste that weird beak?

Walking up a Hill

Jason, Tracy, Lauren, and I gathered pebbles

From the steep side to toss over the wire mesh

Atop South Hill and onto the north-bound Five

Traffic.  We didn’t know a penny-weight could,

Like love, smash a shield, or a pea-sized stone

Wreck a life, like a lack of understanding.

We wanted some sound, some gravity.

We must have looked like we were celebrating

As we lunged at the sky to lob our stones over the grill,

Until a driver came around, cracked his window,

Get home, before I call the cops, and

Jason and Lauren took off like shots,

While Tracy and I walked, wondering

How long we’d be in prison.

Some of Jared Pearce’s poems have recently been or will soon be shared in Nixes Mate, DIAGRAM, Infinity Ink, Otoliths, MUSE, and J Journal.  He grew up in Anaheim, California, now lives in Iowa, and misses the ocean and the mountains.