Cheryl Snell

Perfect Strangers

How easy it was then,
walking toward the lighthouse
through the shadow of ruptured walls
on sea-washed wooden pillars.
The starless night sprinkled salt
in your hair, and the light
seemed miles away. An empty tower
stood watch over water
that had only moved four hundred feet
in forty years,
but the sweep of beams
dragged it closer. An illusion, of course,
but we rushed forward into it,
eager to believe. The light
revealed our faces briefly,
and I remember we were laughing
as we slid in and out of the fog.
We didn’t know we were practicing absence.
We were still perfect strangers to loss.

š

Blind Date

This one takes me to a restaurant 
where we sit cross-legged on the floor
and eat with our hands. Long-line Spanx

sausages my flesh, and my eyelashes,
sooty with science, bat a thousand.
 
We go to a film afterward. He whispers
subtitles in the dark, even though English

is my first language, not his.

At Starbucks, he tells me
what his last three lovers did wrong,
how his mother suffocates him,
why the concept of marriage is so over.

It’s the lazy girl’s way of killing herself, I say.

I watch his pupils dilate, Adam’s apple moving

in his throat like an animal. Oh, this one’s

gonna love me like a cough drop, I think.

I uncross my legs, and smile real slow.

Cheryl Snell’s books include a novel, Shiva’s Arms, and four collections of poetry: Flower Half Blown, Epithalamion, Samsara, and the forthcoming Prisoner’s Dilemma. She serves as book reviews editor for Alsop Review, and blogs at http://shivasarms.blogspot.com and http://snellsisters.blogspot.com

David LaBounty

Cavity 

there were tumors and lies

and they had to carve up his wife

they had to

remove her left breast

and before it was removed

he tried to imagine

what she would look like

after, after she stepped out

of the shower tiptoeing naked

to the bedroom with drops

of water beading on her body

middle aged and full

and all he could see

was a black hole over her heart

obscuring the place

where their marriage used to be.

š

Something About True Nature

jogging,

it's you and the dog

and you are both vaguely overweight

and the dog is pulling you down

the sidewalk as you

plod along in your discount-store

running shoes like an ancient Clydesdale

and coming towards you

is another jogger and she

is tall and slim and lithe

and she has a heart monitor

wrapped around her arm and her

stride is perfect and

disciplined and

this is how it's always been.

there has always been

someone smarter

and stronger and

more desirable

and this plodding

along has something

to do with desire,

with wanting to be some object of desire.

the lithe woman approaches.

you spy her pale

and unblemished face

as you both make room

on the sidewalk for each other

and it's at that point

you drop your gaze

and turn your face away.

Paul McDonald is Senior Lecturer in English and American studies at the University of Wolverhampton, England, where he runs the Creative and Professional Writing Programme. His most recent books are, Fiction from the Furnace: A Hundred Years of Black Country Writing (2002), The Student Guide to Philip Roth (2003), and the novels, Surviving Sting (2001), Kiss Me Softly, Amy Turtle (2004) and Do I Love You? His latest poetry collection is Catch a Falling Tortoise (2007).

Peter Declan Guy

Happiness Writes White

I realize, that at some point,
I may have said I loved you.
It was all a great misunderstanding.
Love is a commodity you’ll appreciate,
No more mysterious that a Freeman’s Catalogue.

I may have compared your eyes
To the icecaps of a wintered moon,
Your dreams to the poetry of wolves,
But love, ah, let us not delude ourselves.
Where do the words come from, what is their power?

Bodies sashay, holding scared against one another,
The younger couples do a slow two-step, snatches of a song,
You know I’ll always be your slave, till I’m buried, buried in my grave
Oh honey, bring it to me, bring your sweet loving, bring it on home to me.

Words mark such truth as we can bear to reveal,
A primal hurt, we dream of midevening, crossing the prairies,
An old hotel room or my hand on the door, discerning only
The languorous retractions of your body, like stars crashing into a sea
Drawn free with the crowns of anguished desire. 

Peter Declan Guy is a senior researcher at the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, Dublin. He is completing his PhD on psychoanalysis and the modern Irish text and has been publishing in a number of different periodicals from Ireland, the UK, Canada and the US; two books of his poetry have been published and he is currently working on a novel provisionally titled 'White Plains Crossing'.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Murray Shugars

OXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

Noughts & crosses, my tulpa, knots and losses.
Hold your fabricated and fine head high.
I say no one knows the price. No one knows
how long you've waited in the shadows of tall pines,
listening to the wind-trembling needles,
those thin-whispered secrets of long gone youth
and the lost dogs of innocence.

No wind, no blind breath touches your fallen beaus,
those deep-eyed and thin-cheeked lads
gathered at the crossroad. They open
their mouths in the silent sex of surprise,
the frozen O of death. They suck vacuums of night.
They suck dirt. They will always be true and sure and
under your boot soles.

Wait for them, if you must.
They wait for you.

š

Jasper County, Indiana  

There will be still water and then
a breeze strumming the surface,
and we will see scores of sandhill cranes
lifting and settling in the distance.

The swollen, springmelt creek
sways its girlish hips, you will say,
and caresses the stubble of last year's habitat.

Here, under a stand of pines,
you will ask to use the binoculars
so you can see their red crowns,
their gray plumage brushed with rust,
their bustle-feathered rumps.

You will feel the pinched wind
that ripples the water and catches
the shrill, tumbling crane-song.
You will watch the birds
wheeling in harmonies of three or more.

Those long-necked figures,
you will say,
dance beyond our knowing.
Their wings beat with music
we will never hear but only see
in the simple things of the spirit,
the last rites of snow
melting into the wetland.

There will be still water and then
a breeze.

š

Booby Traps

The whole platoon's drinking San Miguel and Red Horse
beer with bar girls in Olongapo. Doc Sloan says he's gonna marry
a pretty Filipina named Sheri. Lance Corporal Kukowski
slugs the Aussie sailor who paid Rhonda's bar-fine,
ten dollars to the mama-san for the evening. The girls think
I'm clairvoyant because I read their palms and tell them
what anyone can see. You've had a rough life and children.
You want a man who'll take care of you.

Earlier, patrolling the jungle, we found a punji pit on the trail,
bamboo spikes covered with feces.
Private Walsh emptied both barrels at a monkey,
swore he saw a Filipino with a blow gun,
felt a dart whisper past his ear.

Now, we sit at a back table in Johnny-O's
with girls whose brothers shine our boots today,
steal them tonight, and sell them tomorrow.
This isn't earth, Mooney says. It's fucking Mars.
The girls watch me with their tea-brown eyes,
lingering at my table, pressing their palms together like Madonnas.
You have a long life-line. And here's the line that smiles.
Your children will have a good father. You'll have a good husband.

They want to buy me drinks and give me pesos, but I won't let them
take me home. Last month a young Marine—
leaving his girlfriend's place—grinned down the barrel of a pistol.
Burnt gunpowder lingered in the air above his body.
The MPs killed a mongrel licking blood from his mouth.

In my dreams, the kid takes my hand and says,
The belly of the trail's under your nails.