James Finnegan

In the Wine Cellar

 

He told me he bought the house for its wine cellar,

but after dinner when we descended the stairs

I noticed cubbyholes filled with rolled-up maps

and charts, M-16s and Kalashnikovs, RPGs

and blocks of C4. He said, The walls down here

are 5-feet thick, reinforced concrete, with shaped

ceramic brick to fool ground penetrating radar.

There are over ten airshafts up to the surface,

and there’s one escape passage that runs 1500 yards

SSW and comes out on a creekbed near the highway

overpass where an SUV will be waiting.

 I said, You’re scaring me, man.

He said, A jealous darkness surrounds us.

Well then, I said, if world is ending, how about

we share a nice claret outside under the stars?

***

***

 

Sheila E. Murphy

Irrespective, the News

Is good, blood

vessels gone rogue.

The spike altered

the look of the liver spot.

Now amounts to

living with the possibility

of threat

Not trackable.

How about your life's

norms? Tell me how

the family keeps

its sure routine.

Wasn't it a fairy tale,

when we were

forced to think

that his relationship

with her would last?

He got great kids

out of it: both

residential and

therapeutic little miracles.

The hurt and

humiliation, still

a small price to pay.

***

Retiring But Not Shy

Has anybody seen my voice

-- Overheard in a dream

Obedience nestles against

straight-backed chairs and looks

directly into the eye light

of source code.

As many mea culpas as can be

inferred break into cadenzas

styled to fit the personality

of the specific dom.

Miniature suds once

blended yield

a thin soup of spine-free

ingredients.

Quirks derange the formula,

if known. Outreach (singular)

is traced. Whosoever may be served

by ritual is so served.

The deserving cavalcade

of subservient eyes is drawn

free-handlebars. The only relishing

proceeds in the direction of deflection.

***

Narration

She tells her senior

senator the specifics,

relieved of context, only

to prepare to watch

the foundation be

unearthed, much

to her feigned shock.

If ever responsibility

were to fall into her lap,

her reflex would show

proficiency in the lateral pass

and ready critique

of someone doing something.

No viable authority remains

after interaction with her

monacled disdain.

The faculty of hearing, long

eroded, finally elapses

into a dim, monotonous relief.

She has mastered the innocent

positioning of her sole question

cleansed of evident rage.

To have known her

is not to have known her

love, nor to have loved.

Her narrow dwelling forces

contact between

tiny and tall, breaks

privacy into splinters

weavable toward nothing

whole. She keeps

watch. She make contagious

grief the center of it all.


***
***

Felino A. Soriano

from Quintet Dialogues: translating introspection

splayed or togetherness, reactive these moments’ momentum

amid this sequence of song

similar to the animals’ oblong connectivity

of touch

tonal movement of arms

not knowing or also knowing

embrace is the full-wealth emblem

of turning into

the self in its fundamental purity, pulsating

causal pausing crescent appositions

as atop the calendar of days’ reaching toward themselves

                        and knowledge or knowledge!                       affirmation constant need of 

the otherness of tongue                         theirs or apparent from direction

discomfort the echo’s fading edge cannot sharpen

                                    against an angled wind and its weaving

pastime of portending

insufficient

                                                                        dialectics

—can/should/did we study the nuances of gradating prisms

                                                                                                            or

the molecules of musical camaraderie

                                    :?:

crows of a nighttime cawing conversation

a spectral speech into the silence of their esoteric notions

gauge or wing the curling sounds

erupt or condemn the figurative slowing flow of a moment’s

elasticized confirmation similar confining joy to the palm of a hand’s

untouched priority

wave the weaving of a touching question                  long beyond the answerable syllables of

singular meaning

                                                yes in the no of

finding freedom                                                                      the supposed serrations planning

the heal ahead of any furthering of fear or basic

running from the stone a silence softens

and

                        turning to the silence in its cave of cultural warmth

far from the fiction outside contains and forms into callused truths of the unchallenged

mathematics

***

***

John M. Bennett

Espejo de la Máscara del Espejo

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

p  p  orched face in

cara ,tumba viva y

lo moho in the throat

¡es puma que cae

en la playa es tu

lengua es the stri dent

si lens de tu foc o

flamífero es!  lumbre  )na

med the beady eyes the

Al y Mojada wh(  ere

yr ref lexive sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

p   p   )))heaves an ch

okes     

                        hks

...ni l’eau ni l’air...

- José María de Heredia

...vers...  

- Isidore Ducasse

***
***

Stephen Ellis

Milk Drops Turned Diamond

The names are

essential, that we

each know them,

we who sound like

cows' dreams

when we speak

(the names of favorite

flowers will do,

pollinated in the veiled

synaptic dream-

flow brought out as

the inverse of any

convenient 'present'

in which we suck

the owl's teats that

grow out of the Kali

sows that rise like

pearls charmed by

the undertow from

the sea's depths

as whitecaps

that guard the waist

of the void: How else

could it be, to have

Our Lady's pure

neurological semen

ooze up and out

and down behind

eyes that being two

still see a single

thing, the neck of

sleep broken just so

movement can

exist and make

the distance of

her heartbeat

a memory invisible

yet clearly present

enough to worship.

***

***

Murray Jennings

Midsomer Muddy

We swiped each other’s side mirrors off and scored the bodywork.

Nobody’s fault, blind corner, hedgerows, mud and snow. We both slowed

slipped, slid, stopped, got out and had a laugh on the ridge in the centre of the road.   

Jesus, this is middle earth, he said. You from round here?

No. I told him. Australia.

No kidding! Long way from home.

And you?

Middle America, man. Well, North Minnesota.

Oh I said. Pretty cold, eh? Dylan left a girl way up there.

Yeah? Dylan Thomas? I didn’t know...I’ve  just driven up from Wales...

No no! Never mind.

Okay. Wanna swap mirrors for fun? Mine’s fucked. Hertz’ll love it!

Right. Might as well. Don’t know about Avis.

Hey Aussie, you go first. My side’s muddier than yours.

We shook hands and I drove three miles to a lay-by,

climbed a stile into a field and sang softly to a black-faced ewe

who just stared at her image in the American’s mirror.

If you’re ever up on that mountain over there,

remember me to a girl so fair...

See? I said. You’re beautiful. I propped it on a fence post

so she could keep admiring herself after I’d gone.

Baaa- bye! I called as I drove away but she didn’t look up.

Who said sheep were stupid?

 

***

Tomb of the Unknown Poet

  These words, lined up

and stacked to resemble

a wobbly headstone, could

 say anything at all and

they would still mark

the final resting place of

  nobody in particular, and

someone who picked up my

  book from a trestle table

at a fete, flipped through it

 briefly and replaced it might

believe that its giveaway

 price was a dead giveaway

a life lived, a life over.

***

***