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The sky comes down To the edge of bare rock And all around Filled with weather: Clouds, cool breezes, Soaring birds. At the edge of a U-shaped canyon, A stone amphitheater; Sheer, sculpted cliffs From a curved ridge of debris, Towering over a broad lumbered valley And miscellany of boulders. In the magic of bracken, grass and water, Hidden in woods dense and dark, Ponderosa, Lodgepole pines, Douglas fir, Dead-wood and downed-timber, Tree-hanging lichen flourishes. Tangled masses of green threads, Long drapes--yellow to ochre Wrought from coyote hair. The burial ground of the first people A sanctuary of bones. Whirlwinds follow gusty squalls Funnel in thunderstorms And fire from lightning strikes. The resulting conflagration Burns until the mourning ends so the dead may sleep undisturbed As winter storms And summer droughts Wash over the forest like a sea.  Stephen Barile, a Fresno, California native, was educated in public schools, and attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. He is the former chairman of the William Saroyan Society, and a long-time member of the Fresno Poet’s Association. Mr. Barile taught writing at Madera Center Community College, lives and writes in Fresno. His poems have been published extensively, including Metafore Magazine, New Plains Review, The Heartland Review, Rio Grande Review, The Packinghouse Review, Undercurrents, The Broad River Review, The San Joaquin Review, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Beginnings, Pharos, and Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets.
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Stamford poets rent one-bedroom apartments and host occasional gatherings on Friday evenings for drinks and crackers. The apartments are filled with knick-knacks—organized hoards like Time’s filing cabinet—which they must squeeze around without getting crumbs on the carpet. One can see the decades in an afghan rug with golden tassels pinned down by a mosaic coffee table and a shag-wrapped ottoman stacked with dusty Playboys resting on top or a sofa with curved oak legs and plastic-sheened cushions splotched with stains. They sip their wine and taper off from the subjects of enjambment and dying traditional forms and find footing in the immediate themes of rude cashiers and the stigma of exact change. When the third glass kicks in, they lay back and look at the ceiling, recounting when they went to a motel on Hope Street where they walked into the room and saw a pile of white towels, boiling water, and a man in a tattered apron holding an ether mask, commanding them not to make a sound—the walls of the Seabound Motel were thin. They then, doze off themselves, not knowing a poem poured out of them like a request for just one more glass of Cabernet. Sore from awkward sleeping angles, they rise from their sunken cushions in the early mornings with vague recollections of ideas they’d forgotten to write down. Matt Gillick is from Northern Virginia and is pursuing an MFA.
A NIGHT IN BUCHAREST In the third floor apartmentof a fortress-like building, from before the fall of Communist Romania, hers were the last first-hand stories I heard of pre-industrial Transylvania, through cracked dry lips a voice as staticky as the console radio in the middle of the room. Great-great-grandmother of a friend, slunk down in her favorite armchair, surrounded by fading photographs of smiling village faces, her escape from evil’s clutches could have happened yesterday for all the feeling in her narrative. Her tale moved apace from a stroll through a moonlit forest to an encounter with the piercing eyes of a black-robed creature, the strange compelling feeling that drew her closer to him to the sudden glint of the crucifix around her throat, and the other’s stumble backward that gave her the one chance to turn on her heels and run back to the safety of the well-lit tavern. "Of course, this must just sound like an old woman’s fantasies to you young people," she said. But when she was finished recounting the grisly fate of her friend, Gabriela, who, to this day, floats by her bedroom window at midnight, they were our fantasies too. UP FROM THE OCEAN The ones splashing in the ocean are no longer us. No need to even bother looking. That's sand in the folds of your skin. That's a rock pressed hard against your back. It's something called an issue that rides the breakers into shore, that rolls about in the waves, giggling and flailing, that looks like us but is not us. You won't hear them lauding the aesthetics of the perfect tan. Their dreams don't bother with five hours in this natural salon, lazily eying the pages of something from the New York Times bestseller list. The lotion on their faces is dabbed on skimpily, in those excited few seconds when their feet can barely stand still and their bodies lurch toward the magnet of the sea. It doesn't take the leisurely approach, a rub here, a massage there, into aging back and shoulder-blades. For them, a giddy topple and a mouthful of brine. For us, the nudge of a familiar thigh, an occasional warm kiss. As always there's a generation gap, twenty feet or so of golden sand. Hand in hand, a teenage couple cross it, plant footprints deep to them, but shallow to the tides.  John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in
That, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty, with work upcoming in Blueline, Chronogram and Clade Song. |
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