This equal sleep of acquitted facts
is a guarantor of crowded opinion.

Ray Succre has been writing for twelve years and has begun publishing his poetry while trying to broaden himself as a poet and parent. He is now beginning to send his work out at a more social level. He currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife, Maisy, and baby boy, Painter. He has been published in Aesthetica, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Poetry Nottingham, as well as in many other publications, both in the U.S. and abroad.

All things are empty and away, and I remember my mother said once, “Life cracks
at your side like the desert floor splitting to intake water. It takes in what it needs
but still remains dry.” So my father, he took up the night sky, responded,
“Fear and envy got us here, does nothing get us out?”

And after, my sister said what she could. “Apply a heavy coating of those words
to my hand.” Then pausing, “We’re so susceptible to other people’s opinions.”
And in the background Savannah, her arm chopping up a dusty sunbeam,
“Dragons, agons, gons … ons … sss …” And I only could hear the cracking.

American Scene 5

Beyond the flashing red light
he almost believed that there was a girl who rested,
alone in her apartment, potential frailty and whiteness.
The birds never flew in much of any direction,
so he sat, stared, and wondered if one day
she would appear, out of nowhere.

Sometimes she sat there for hours
huddled on the small iron wrought table.
She got to reading and the words
piled out onto what was waiting to take them away,
coffee, sugar, wind. It’s possible she stayed until dusk,
flipping pages. Now, she never got a second look,
but it didn’t matter, finally and vainly, however hungry,
she sat in the soundlessness of sound.

And then he’d fall asleep too.
Right there, slumped over, although later
he would consistently deny that at that moment
he was thinking the iron in our bodies was created by stars.

In the distance, she could almost see him.

Later, he lay low in his bed
sweeping the ground for lust, decay, hours.

American Scene 10

In Tennessee, if I could hold the paper thin church that flitters by the highway,
crumble and unroll it like a sheet of mistakes, I could save myself.
Useless and broken clouds, musty purple and negative blue, float,
and I can’t touch them either, slant grace into a nonbeliever.

Disconnected from geography, I find my way by the smell of books instead.
Articles change and harden into hot asphalt. Water simmers.

Trees are nouns. Their sounds are mine. I nose each page.
I smell one day. The radio hums. Bare branches cut up gray sky.

American Scene 12

A deep July was brewing, smoking up through
the dried flowers in our hair, electric blue, red.
Each moment was a wince on a memory,

imperfect. So instead, this time was this place,
and we finally said go, please don’t come back.
We spun with thin sparklers in our grown hands,

not remembering when we got them, how we became
swellings and depressions with no sharp edges.
The smoke turned, a circular fog, the month rising.

Later, we counted raindrops and age faltered.
There was this picture that nobody took,
the smoke dissipating, our hands becoming more,
my face unrecognizable, a dark spot on a dark night.

Sandra Ogle has previously had poems published in The Adirondack Review, The Paumanok Review, Little Brown Poetry, Indiana University's literary journal, and New York University's graduate journal Anamesa, among others. She received her M.A. from N.Y.U. and attended undergraduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor in the publishing industry.

That moment is
hard, immobile. But when the light

at night comes
from different directions, we have more
than one shadow: several
at our feet and one following
slightly behind as if

we were stalking ourselves. Look over your shoulder.

The lawns here are razor edged,
the skidmarks
on the sidewalk
like parentheses
whose inner thoughts have been lost
or run away,

and from where we sit, we can’t realize
how tiny they are—
the tightrope walkers,
their bodies weightless
as prayer.

Try to stop that train with your bare hands.

Kathy Davis lives in Glen Allen, VA and is the area director for a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of the arts in education. She has an MBA from Vanderbilt University and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has appeared in the North American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, storySouth and numerous other journals. Her chapbook, Holding for the Farrier is due out this summer from Finishing Line Press.

could one, in variations
on the cloister
this year all the rage.

Mom’s back at home
in the church.
what’s a man to do,
married to the kids.

one could go whatever way
one’s arm was being twisted

straight back to that place
where they named their dogs
after the drinks they had,
before they did you know what

letting her clean that up for him

2.

there is a place somewhere
for no need
to sit on your hands, all day long

to kick off shoes
in more than resignation
to tomorrow

the early protector for the mattress
was baby-blue,
spoke when you moved

your new sham,
featuring fig-leafs

Douglas A. Martin's most recent books are Branwell, a novel of the Bronte brother, and a collection of stories, They Change the Subject.  His first novel, Outline of My Lover, was named an International Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by The Forsythe Company for their multimedia dance-theater piece “Kammer/Kammer.”  He is also the author of two collections of poetry and a co-author of the haiku year.  In 2008, he will publish Last Early Poems and a lyric prose work, Your Body Figured.

To talk about above and below is to miss the point,
gumming our own useless rye. Without the benefit
of a wife we might eat strange things,

things that make us remember what the mind
put a stop to, abject lessons that led us along
like a reinvented anthem or breathy hymn. And so,

the juleswain has been slain, sacrificed on the tiptoe,
given three days to rise and report gifts that might be
the dream of a daughter, when the other, the maid,

sometimes seen with a lantern, has other purposes
better than his. Her smile is better, rose lips offset
by starvation. He, on the other hand, has been overfed
since June, his offal, dried and braided, will burn
a propane red, the creeping flames marching.

We know his friendly names: Fence-Post,
Gully-Lad, Stump, Ladle-Licker, Sausage-
Grabber, Bowl-Licker, Window-Peeper, Candle-
Scrounger. Advancing his reputation.

But it’s what we planned. There’s no regimen
to a strategy of doubt—why the julemaid
holds up a light, to find the bluing skin of sleep…

And as you’ve suspected, there is a manger,
with a newborn pink and off-
steaming like a boiled vegetable.

His halo is a platter:
We’re nourished by the infant mind.

Christopher Burawa's, The Small Mystery of Lapses, won the Cleveland State University First Book Competition in 2005, and his translations of contemporary Icelandic poet Jóhann Hjálmarsson won the 2005 Toad Press International Chapbook Competition. He was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2003, and a 2006 Witter Bynner Translation Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute. He most recently received a 2007 Literature Fellowship for Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently is the Literature Director and Communications Director for the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

knowing my sheep is sure to disappoint
should he see the light of day,
sure to be a sickly, mongrel sort of pet.

I keep him locked away, sneak in
at night while he sleeps, feel in
the dark for his curls, rub my palm
along the warm heave of his belly.

But what if he wakes, stares
at me with filmy eyes filled
with accusation?

One day, one sharp hoof will split the pine.

Erica Wright received her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is working on her first collection of poems and teaching at the City University of New York. She is originally from Wartrace, TN.

Alloy sun.
The sun breaks on the rocks.
Sunkist™.

I sob in my black bean soup.
The rope that parts on the tilt of dark.
The sky fills with more

lovely and bankrupt
we abscond. Come off it.
In a moment we invent the dream
to explain our jerking awake.

Root system of stars,
the elms that open their umbrellas of night.
O September, O October, O November –
You can take this job and shove it.

City of the Big Bang

A scope sun till unfurled
throat shaft
a drowned in shadow

willow camphor string
of colored lights around the yard

Of what are made the hopes
and fears of Kristy Yamaguchi?

First the wish for rain
in humidity
then rain and hail

damaging the blossoms
and fine cherry harvest
You’re undressing in the dark

You’re undressing in the shotgun light
of a Coors can
What tides await us

Sincerely, Hokusai

from Poems for Pitchers

Dear Fidel Castro

We will build our past to fit any myth.
Scouted by the Senators,
Rhapsodic as shirt sleeves.
Yellow hammer.
Yellow sickle.

History is a poor eternity.
I am thinking of the cool shaded rooms of Havana,
the opulent ruin,
Built for its own obsolescence.

Hey, Coca-cola!
Rain in the bottom of the sixth.

North Front

The orange municipal trucks back up,
dead grass, waist-high, ruffles in the parting wind
Many years in the wish of darkness.
The parade of labor spreads salt in the new streets.
Two days indoors,
My mind is the Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl,
the running game of Ole Miss.
How sweet from the shower you steam
after a haircut. The New Year
is orange. Lentils the color of money.
River-boat captain, you are beautiful
by starlight—
crumbs in your wake for the birds, and for the moths,
a winter porch-light.

Weekend in the Century

1.

The bees are waking up.
The bees are flying slowly
in the air.
I don't want to die.

The rum interior of spring.
I have taken to the streets
in my bathrobe.
Trees are popsicles

which is filled with music as
green is vigorous—stinging
is what hurts
where your hands are.

If tears are vows
I have been disabused
all this time—
Her hair smells like a spent match.

2.

Every squalor of plaster
is moss covered, which despite

in spring mists, evokes a red feeling.
Now each night is nothing

like the rest. There is a stream
of air. There is a light bulb in every window.

The neighbor's curtains have been taken down,
and the mercury is cloud's fluorescence.

Five fingers are to the State Police
as poison to the eye.

Spectacles too are their own light.
Baseball on television.

Kansas City 8 Toronto 3
Boston 3 Baltimore 1
New York 4 Seattle 9

On the east side
the avenues unfurl in order:
Lexington, Madison, Park, Fifth.

And the sky is white
over Simone Weil tonight.

3. Epithalamium

School bus yellow my teeth
hurt. Everyone is getting ready:
the Lakers are out in six,
July is rose like the ocean,
the mountains are golden like
Suzanne Lucci's daytime Emmy.

It is an amber morning:
bees to their hive, rum
to their bottle, trombones
to their dusky voice.

Even the bride is playing
Pick Six. Grime on the sill,
song in my heart:

California, California,
O California, California.
California, O California,
California, California.

The Mingulay Boat Song

Abrupt and foxglove. The wind scales back.
Dragonflies sprout from bow
to gunnel; bluebottles pour from every seam.

The body pierced by a small hole,
or the lampshade, invents you.
Speaking of the Hebrides,

a schooner like a dark smudge on a dark
sea hauls to windward.
The way you wring the ropes of your hair.

The way a deserted village spoils
on its hinges. The way sheep
graze among the cobblestones.

A larynx stems its chords.
Coax, wrack and sigh, threshing of sun—
And the door, to the wind, blown in.

Batting Cleanup for the Los Angeles Dodgers

That same old feeling,
a pop song.
Sky choral.
Difficult what slow
it is. I grind
my teeth in my sleep.

It is wrong
to want to punt
the child that wails
in the night. I remind
myself, it is wrong
to want

We are out of doors
goes the sales pitch
for spring
like the Home Depot.

Soft blue trees stain
the edges of the afternoon.

Conviction Want

Each day is everything
like the rest
By threes undoes us.

Thrush eve’s thunder,
surf of traffic from the west
Side Highway.

Seashore machine
By sevens, by threes.
The high metallic whine

of katydids or a neighbor’s
air conditioner.
This hammer heart

Snow white, bone white,
cloud white, stone white
Empathy is divisive.

Ryan Murphy is the author of Down with the Ship from Otis Books / Seismicity Editions as well as the chapbooks The Gales, Ocean Park, and On Violet Street. He has received awards from Chelsea Magazine and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art as well as a grant from The Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City.

Poems courtesy of the author and Otis Books.

Bridget Cross chats with Ryan Murphy.

What they knew when they painted her was
history: Judith:

She gave herself away. That night.
She used her education, looks and wealth

My body meant nothing to me.
I was quiet with you. The unmade bed.

to behead a man. The war.
What they painted when they knew her was

themselves:
Artemesia’s father was an artist too –
calling art inside her – brushes, oil, rags.

You said you only liked my mouth open

And she’d been raped. Different, of course.
Victim. Not
Judith. Hair between her fingers. Teeth.

giving head.

Before her, Caravaggio knew beauty.
Chiaroscuro. Gold bracelets. Velvet.

You said I was more beautiful
without my clothes.

Judith. Breast-white light outshines
any motive. His blade holds her.

I did not take pleasure in the power.
Yours or mine.

But they didn’t know her story.
I don’t know theirs.

You tasted bitter. I bit my tongue.

Jennifer S. Flescher holds an MFA in poetry from Lesley University, and an MSJ from Northwestern University. Her poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, The New Hampshire Review, Frigid Ember and The Boston Globe, with a poem nominated for the 2006 Best New Poets anthology from Meridian Magazine. Her non-fiction publications include The Boston Globe, The Concord Journal, The Boston Tab, ACBJ, and Agni-Online, with work forthcoming in Jubilat, Perihelion and The Harvard Review.

the invasion bombs will leave only wood splinters
and bone splinters

the wood holds more
closely the city's pulse

less mindful of what's missing

*

today in Queens the trees
were alone again

in their grids
stretching

above the power lines
but happy too because branches

tear the sky
into more pieces than a roof

*

over the side of the Hell's Gate bridge
water and wind fight
about how to raise
their children

skinny like a back alley
the moon makes reckless
ports of them all

& each one
with an angry name like
a branch snapping

Having just lost her chimney—sweep job to the stars,
Flaxie sighs and rings her ears—she's coming off dope
and unhappy—too much soot, pouches of diamonds
and secrets, someone's remains untold to journals,
that's what made ugly options work for Flaxie. That,
and the fact she can't get sick—she's a fairy.
She know electricians who've watched women move
their bottoms more than fix a socket. Blackened fingers
shook for each pencil skirt that wound their way. Flaxie
Char remembers the First Shower after one left,
sockets shorted as she reached for a towel, wasn't
it beautiful? I've been this close to death, she thought
dramatically, holding her spent finger to her chest.
All that purple and impulse—what discos should be,
or tombs.

Banjo Bathos

Flaxie-I'm in, I'm out, I miss my friend. I'm scared
to death and without your wings, who comes to visit?
You've felt the lone out here, the trees still whistle your
Momma's songs—Susannah, Dinah and the like, always
those girls crying or cleaning. I'm needle pointing
a pillow. One pillow...who are we kidding?
I've a bedload ready for the taking. I'm on
creeping purple vines this month, last month was moths.
I've the dream again, the boy with the football head-
spongy and floppy and all over the place. You-
you and her—supposed to do something, but his cheeks
got red and redder and you let him go. We don't know
where, but you hopped over the rocks in someone's garden.
Just come out here, will you? I've got a flue for your
magic touch.

The Organ Recipe

She was more or less alive when she was nine,
her father stopped carving soapstone figures to begin
etching the insides of spent lights. His patterns were
like icing, and soon he stopped coming up to eat.
After he chewed a light bulb, the doctors said his throat
looked like an etching but red, lacy. Gone from
the ambulance, he disappeared. When Flaxie mentioned
her father, she saw all the children in the world
behind her mother's graying eyes. I know, he told
me a long time ago. Flaxie wakes every day to something on her tongue—a violet
then a robin's egg, but today she pulled a piece
of sand-washed glass. With Icarus in the family line,
he'll crash down any day, oblivious. Fairies don't
dissipate.

It Sure Is

A tutu would have really covered her ass
better than this ridiculous toga, but who
was she to argue with a queen diva in a
Roman phase? She tugs her sheet, snaps her cochlea,
rocks inside for a moment like the Boardwalk
Ferris wheel. Unpleasant, she thinks, urps something pink
into her cup. Mother, this sure is something else.
She hates wizarding lingo, but hates even more her
spinning ears. Flaxie cracked her gum and fell—balance
only an option without wings. Her mother sat
in a chair once she heard the screaming whenever
she cooked. Vegetable lives—Flaxie snorted. In this
world, no one makes it without losing it, voices,
insides coming out. She knows hers are starting
to work.

M. Quickmon Willis believes, “There are no losses! Even the manure of life can make the dandiest fertilizer. Language, like all gifts, is a stewardship from The Creator to Whom I must give an account.” After a 17 year European hiatus he returned from Munich in July 2004 to work on an MFA in poetry at Queens University of Charlotte. Currently he resides in coastal N.C. where, as a descendent of shore whalers and Lumbee Indian farmers, he was raised before moving abroad.

And you, the skeptic, hopes
for a constellation of consolation.

The star watches you, inquires:
are you manmade? Divine? You

are singular. The star stands in
for many, crudely drawn and condemned

to representation, a practice in decline,
a practice you do not condone.

Comfort the star.
Assure the star of company.

Tell the star you’re sure
it won’t go home alone.

Patricia Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). Seyburn's first book won the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have been published in New England Review, Quarterly West, The Paris Review, Seneca Review, Field, Phoebe, Passages North, Poetry East and Bellingham Review, among others. She teaches at California State University, Long Beach, and is co-editor of Pool.

They call scientists to confirm that the universe expands at a constant rate,
taking into account (per our request) that the atmosphere may one day envelop
the moon. Nurses enter, carrying trays of wood shavings, sharpened pencils,
and graph paper. Dormant tongues as doctors draw and observe, ensure
each axis is labeled and the same length. They show us the results –
two darkened diagonal lines, one sloping upward, the other downward.
The shaded areas and erasures represent variation. In the corner, his lungs
expand the plastic bag taut, but any change will be negligible
at first. We agree to call the chaplain most efficient with words.

Jason Fraley works at an investment firm in West Virginia and is pursing his M.B.A. His wife and cat see him occasionally. He has appeared or is forthcoming in Redactions, Confluence, Words on Walls, Pebble Lake Review, Stirring, The Salt River Review, and elsewhere.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” asked my uncle, but all I could see were the rafters. Someone had climbed up and scrawled Ibid. It was amateur boxing night at the curling rink in Melanson, and I was flat on my back three feet above the hog line. My uncle had entered me as a sixteen-year-old flyweight, having read in the Herald that a Complete Young Person’s Dictionary of Mammals was up for grabs. I was excused from cub-scouts on the pretense of catching Trevor Esposito in his last game in goal for the Badgers. The gash above my eye was thus blamed on a slapshot that Trev had just barely parried over the boards, a grand tale of pure athleticism that we quietly rehearsed in the emergency room; we had stopped at Canadian Tire to pick up a puck. We drove in silence most of the way home, until great placental raindrops began slapping the windshield right around Berwick. My uncle switched on the windshield wipers and said “The first thing you need to know about aardvarks is that they are the most secretive of all mammals.”

Graeme Bezanson is from Nova Scotia, the historic home of T.C. Haliburton and games played on ice. He is the editor of coldfrontmag.com and works with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. He lives in Brooklyn.