SONNET FOR INFINITY
What is more infinite than back seat love,
twined limbs and promises twisted and turned,
Naugahyde sticky hot, fogged glass above.
The innocence of lovers not yet burned.
Hunter’s moon illuminates their faces.
A gold passion unmatched in sunlight shines–
eyes blind in concentration– gods give grace,
luck of fools and children granted divine
intervention. Memories will give way
when night turns to day, these fools awake
and forget each vow, each word in this play.
The stage now dark, hearts begin to ache.
Thus disowns desire, love is not sublime.
More infinite than back seat love is time.
— Irene Lipshin
Published in Sacramento News & Review July 19, 2012
Shared Breathing
His dog led the way into the woods,
showing him snapped-off twigs,
proof of someone passing.
Can’t you smell it? the dog would ask.
Dogs know forest-stories.
If the man glimpsed flicks of yellow plumage
in the brush, fragments of flight,
his dog knew the bird and where it nested;
the journeys of air: where each wind
came from and all its histories.
Following his dog, he found what he was
looking for, or something different.
His dog’s alert would set him listening
for the soft tread of cougar,
tribal memory. A man has no words
for its shadow behind his eyes.
— Taylor Graham
SUNDAY
Eighteen wheeler on Highway 99 rattles along
in the slow lane, stinking of shit and loaded
with lowing cattle, pink muzzles pressed
to the perforated panels. On their way
to the house of revelations where crowded
together, they smell him before they meet him.
Bellowing out hosannas, they file up the ramp
to the end of the story—God is a man
swinging a sledgehammer, apron slick with blood.
When his shift is done, another man just like him
will step up to take his place.
— Moira Magneson
first published in Southern California Review
Genes
Stepping down from infinity,
these sequences jostle and jive
establishing the pecking order
that will create my blue-eyed, long-limbed, brilliant baby-girl
full of courage and hysteria, wisdom and wanting.
Soon enough she’ll be angry with this poem,
and me and the spectrum of mother-daughter
possibility until years later we’ll sit
on a warped park bench watching her sparkling daughter
singing out the glories of her own infinite audacity.
— Kate Wells
LET HER BE A FLOWER
Let her musk bouquet rise,
and the bee crawl into her helix,
all honeyed and pleasure.
Fill her with longing,
and sweet clover dreams.
Give her the appetite of a queen.
Let her colors show,
till night lies down in the meadow.
In August when she burns
let her blood and seed
leach into dark soil.
— Lara Gularte
2nd place poetry contest winner, empirical magazine, September 2012.
Aerialists
Perched in the startled tops
of the tallest ghost pines,
black cormorants.
How do they balance
nests of sticks in such slight
air at land’s edge?
Below, canoes and kayaks
at standstill, humans in awe
of the gruff, deep, awk,
awk, call of a cormorant
arriving at its nest
to drop fish into the throats
of long-necked, ravenous nestlings
screeching for food, three dark ones
writhing like snakes.
With binoculars and cameras
we as much a spectacle—astonished
by yet one more daring act.
–Wendy Patrice Williams
–Published in Sacramento Voices, Cold River Press
