Salem Common On Training Day
The elm trees rise up like flames. They line the common, dwarfing the regiments and their puny flags—red and white. The soldiers are too far away to see clearly—some red blurs, some blue. Phalanxes. No one is watching. The families and children and wagons and horses in the foreground seem to pass slowly in front of the elms. In the middle distance, shadowy, a brown mass of citizens surrounds some political speaker. Everyone, save the strolling civilians and their leaping dogs, is inside the white fence that borders the common. The republic is thirty-two years old. No planes, of course, in the sky, just specks of gulls, and dirty cotton ball clouds. The elms, not yet destroyed by disease, seem like they are trying to hold back the sunset, which explodes orange at the tips of their leaves. J.D. Scrimgeour J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of two collections of poetry, The Last Miles and Territories, and two collections of nonfiction. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Columbia, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Salamander. His third book of poems, Lifting the Turtle, is coming out in November. “Salem Common” is in that collection.
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The Birds Of Morris Graves
oh - these are not the pretty painted plovers of Audubon but spirit birds of nature that seek to nest in that wounded wilderness of the inner eye maddened by the sound of machinery on logged-off mountains myths of division and separation Taoist owls in times of change moonbirds with their haunted bouquets singing in the next dimension David Jibson David Jibson grew up in western Michigan near the dunes and shores of Lake Michigan and now lives in Ann Arbor. He is retired from a 35-year career in Social Work, most recently with a Hospice agency. He is a member of the Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle and co-editor of the literary and visual arts magazine, Third Wednesday. First Love The morning breaks and the throaty cock crows at her purple light, where the eastern gate under the lingering morning star glows with haste at my chariot and my fate; when long-armed Polaris alone might steep his starry cup into my blackened sea, lift me far aloft, and promise to keep what you, my love, have kept untrained on me. But youth and I must take those burning reins, as I am half to this failing earth bound, into my feeble hands and dare to tame the darkness and those fiery, wilding manes, until I recklessly plunge headlong round and set the dry world on fire just the same. Gregory Palmerino Gregory Palmerino's poetry and essays have been published in several online and print journals. His most recent work can be found at The Asses of Parnassus and New Verse News. He writes poetry in Connecticut's Quiet Corner, where he lives with his wife and three children, and teaches English at Manchester Community College. Naranjito
Abu, dozing in a satin chemise, drifting away in a hammock knotted to her balcony, dissolves back into the green mountain-- her dreams quilting a hillside-- patchwork façades of houses. Green homes cataract down high slopes to Río de Plata. Jade, lime, mint, green papaya, sea-washed glass, the brightest green of young iguanas-- thus camouflaged, each house dematerializes. On the green checkerboard of the basketball cancha, teens playing keep-away jump for a last inside hand lay-up and then swallow themselves down into the green of beer bottles. Skateboarders jump green ramps, sailing up green staircases. La guaguita de los dulces, a van selling mazorcas, pastelitos and budín de pan fades into a green ravine, siphoning off its subsiding bullhorn song. Naranjito’s green jumping spiders boing off car windshields, landing in clerodendrum flowers. It’s quiet now inside the mountain, where they have all gone. In his green kareoque bar, Vicente holds an open jar to one ear and hears weather patterns, clouds walking the high ridges, no grind of industry or clamor of metal, just mist and things sprouting, underworld water filtering through karst, water chords tuned by cave rocks. Even the painters who wear fatigues and splash rollers into their great buckets of green, finally paint themselves into the upstairs corners of the grand houses of descendants of coffee barons and the small casitas of children of coffee pickers. They vanish. In El Cerro de Naranjito, a pueblo built by coffee, an aroma of drying and roasting beans, coffee highs and delirium tremens did not drive architects to make even one flourish, one frilled cornice or fluted balustrade. Each pueblo of this isle has its postcard plaza and cathedral, a line of Seville orange trees where men and women whisper piropos, promises scented by blossoms, haloed by bees, but not here in Naranjito. A range of mountains cradles box row buildings, the ugly gauntlet of this town. Obreros of the cafetales dreamed of endurance until Hurricane San Felipe uprooted their lives. Paint it all back into the mountainside. En la montaña, in a green maroonage, families gather at the community centre to remake the pueblo in their image, to find the cemí of these mountains. At just the right angle, in just the right light, the hill looks pixelated. Green monk parakeets fly into green walls, bruising wings and dropping feathers. Sometimes artifacts are found by visitors looking for Naranjito, a framed portrait of a mother’s lost son, a few Goya cans of petit pois, a quiet radio singing, vámonos pa’l monte, vámonos pa allá. Loretta Collins Klobah Loretta Collins Klobah is a professor of Caribbean Literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico. Her poetry collection The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2011) received the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry and was short listed for the 2012 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the Forward poetry prize series. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry 2016, BIM, Caribbean Beat Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, The Caribbean Review of Books, Poui: The Cave Hill Literary Annual, Susumba’s Book Bag, Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters, WomanSpeak, TriQuarterly Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, Cimarron Review and Poet Lore. La Monstrua Desnuda Oiled glow of swagbelly, the dimpled pillars of her legs, calf flesh cuffing ankles, young puffed pouches of breasts-- for three hundred and forty-six years, Eugenia’s body has been admired as a prodigy of nature, in arcades of buffoons, dwarves and men of pleasure. An empire’s loaner, she crossed seas to hang temporarily in this island space. Curvature of the inflated globe of her middle-- brushed with crushed pearls, so that, back-shadowed in black, she’s lit from within. It was mercy on himself, the painter, or for the child posed nude against the table, to put in her hand a stem of black grapes from Asturias, to wrap her vulva in three leaves, and crown her with grapevines. Una niña gigante-- abnormality styled as a baroque Baco. In a room of retratos by Velázquez, I stand by Eugenia for a long time. I morph into a sculpture of Eugenia, for never in this Earth’s constant flash of images have I seen so purely and perfectly a likeness of myself— Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, born in Bárcenas, given up by her parents at El Alcázar in Madrid to marvel the royal court and dwell in its protection. She was six years old, abandoned plaything of el Rey Carlos II, himself un inválido, barely able to rule, but under whom herds of humans were carried to quemaderos, burning places of the auto-de-fé. The court ordered Juan Carreño de Miranda to paint two portraits of la monstrua, una desnuda y una vestida de gala. Eugenia stood undressed for the painter, but she didn’t yield, enfant terrible with hyperphagia. She averted red face in a cut-eye of pout and rage. Carreño de Miranda painted white dashes on her lower eyelids that will never spill over into tears. I live in the sneer of her face. Gawked at girl, phenomenal weight advertised in the press, a child displayed for royal visitors, naked Eugenia. Orphaned, how long did you live at court? How long did you live? La monstrua vestida painted in a red brocade dome of a dress, red rotunda, red bloated brass bell-- Expanding red giant-- You could pick her up by the head and ring out the hour. In each grabby, hoggish hand, she holds a red apple, quenchless hunger of the Spanish Empire embodied in one girl. One apple for Spain and one for Puerto Rico. Eugenia was the ripest apple on the tree. Carlos II had no children. Were there children at the court to pinch her and pull her around by her red hair ribbons? Weakened by Prader-Willi, if she fell asleep under a window, did someone lug her to bed? Eugenia and the dwarves will return to el Museo de Prado, but I will keep a postcard of Eugenia in my bag. I notice other women like me, and now I note people with achondroplasia, wherever I go, one hoisting a computer overhead in a hallway of the medical school, two dwarves driving mini street-sweepers, one with corn-rowed hair in a meridian on prison detail, one riding a bike, carrying across the handlebars a lead pipe for those who gape, Calle 13’s bailarina Karlita holding a tall ice cream cone. We are the big and small people of the world, Obatalá’s children, still anomalies, the freaky-freaky of sideshows. We don’t fit what is built and bargained for in this world. Eugenia is my fierce beauty and force, so I’ll claim la estética de lo feo-- my own baroque body misshapen, obese, sometimes an iron maiden of pain, something I drag, heave, roll and sway. Oiled gleam of swagbelly, the dimpled pillars of my legs, calf flesh cuffing ankles, puffed pouches of breasts-- the everyday looks, the uninvited words often said. Soy una esteticista comprometida de lo feo. Eugenia’s postcard rides in my purse, like a pocket manifesto, a red grenade. Loretta Collins Klobah Loretta Collins Klobah is a professor of Caribbean Literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico. Her poetry collection The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2011) received the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry and was short listed for the 2012 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in the Forward poetry prize series. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry 2016, BIM, Caribbean Beat Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, The Caribbean Review of Books, Poui: The Cave Hill Literary Annual, Susumba’s Book Bag, Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters, WomanSpeak, TriQuarterly Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, Cimarron Review and Poet Lore. Years Later, Frank O'Hara I was only five years old and fifteen miles away as you were leaning against that dingy john door so I came to this poem a little too young and a moment too late to do much for her except to listen eyes closed saying to myself it’s only a song. Henry Crawford Read the poem that inspired this one: The Day Lady Died, by Frank O'Hara Henry Crawford is a poet living and writing in the Washington, DC area. His work has appeared in several journals and online publications including Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Folio, Borderline Press and The Offbeat. He is a 2016 nominee for a Pushcart Prize for his poem “The City of Washington” appearing in District Lit. His first collection of poetry, American Software, is scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2017 by WordTech Communications through its imprint, CW Books. |
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