Editor's
Choice Awards
Letter to Anne Frank
Spring 1997, vol. 1, no. 1
Priscilla Atkins
Dear Anne,
The first time I read your diary
I was young, like you; we walked
through autumn leaves on a sunny day,
everything crisp and clear,
every footstep, a reassurance.
Now, I know the ending:
the Gestapo at the bookcase,
the school friend's glimpse of you-
ill, dying-through the barbed
wire at
the letters to Kitty strewn on the floor
of the Secret Annex.
The knowing, coming and going,
I walk the range of your discernments,
their cool clefts and warm fusions,
the fierce light shining
into the hidden parts
tucked in folds of the body and heart.
I think of you now, a woman,
growing right along beside me,
leaning over my shoulder
as I copy passages into my book.
Here, Anne, look---one of my favorites:
I'll just let matters take their course
and concentrate on studying
and hope that everything
will be all right in the end.
Listen, my pen whispers your words,
for me, for you,
like a prayer.
Because they cut me
Fall 1997, vol. 1, no. 2
Mark Aveyard
I am bound
vertical,
here where doom
meets the sky
with a broken promise,
where the dread of kings
and the criminal's zenith
link arms like brothers
and charge eternity
like mad angels.
Because they cut me,
all my beauty has seeped
from my once-pulpy veins,
now hollow and magnifying
the mockings and mournings
reverberating up
Faces wrinkle and bend up
to witness the sporadic lifts
of the man upon me
who slumps and recoils to live,
shortly, a while.
Once, I had been proud.
I was a podium for the morning doves,
who would trill softly their songs
to the sun and falling moon,
and the final star would respond
with a final spark and die for a day.
Once, I had been happy.
I was a shelter for the young
who would trill softly their songs
to each other until the stars fell before them
and the moon covered itself
to give them darkness and a moment
that would die in the wake of Venus.
Once, I had been satisfied.
I was a summit for the traveling shepherds,
who would remark to each other
how strongly my limbs pushed their twigs
towards the sky in praise of life
and the sun, the stars, and the moon,
which at night threw a dust of light
onto my white blossoms and made them
the wings of angels.
Now, I am here because they cut me,
and this man upon me heaves his body
upward each minute. I am motionless.
They have bound my feet: Romans, Jews, and Greeks
and all whose eyes peer up to myself, and this man,
who swallows air as if snapping at phantoms
and drools his blood onto my wood.
Now, I am here because they cut me,
and a body watching below whispers ...
this man, a carpenter,
bleeds the salvation of these mockers,
these mourners: Romans, Jews, and Greeks,
and all whose eyes fall before him,
to become the art and tool his hands procure,
to endure the kind pain of the ax and file,
to liberate their souls through faith and surrender.
My wood is drying, brittle like old bread.
Soon it will crumble and disintegrate.
My friend, king, we have lived.
I, for one, am grateful for the time.
But time grates my life and yours to sand.
Our fruits have plunged to earth,
And our branches droop, brittle like thin lead.
So, seize my imperfect arms
and lift your body one final time.
Cry out to the sun and the stars and the moon.
Let veils be torn.
Let the sky turn dark.
Let us split into riddles and return.
Reconciliation
Spring 1998, vol. 2, no. 1
Randall J. VanderMey
Reconciled,
reconciled, the word
was like a piper's tune
far away, sugaring someone else's air.
While anger hardened to a hammer
in my hand, while pride
found temporary nesting in my hair
I couldn't breathe my blessing
to the wind. To be reconciled,
I thought, would make me die.
It would be tantamount to giving up
an eye. I'd have to unseam
my skin and let a stranger in.
When word of blessing, unanticipated,
slipped from the soul's keep,
it was, of sorts, an end,
making stranger friend. An end
of tit for tat, of black lists,
of nightly cauterizing flames,
of the goblin self, antique high on soul's
shelf. When love piped on these lips
there was no slipping back:
reconciliation flowed like oil
of highest worth, so rare,
so fitting homage to the maker of earth.
Diminishing Return
Fall 1998, vol. 2, no. 2
Bob Griffin
Oil boated
lazily on the surface of the water,
A color kaleidoscope in the
And dad fished. Thin as the reeds of Lenten holy crosses,
His tousled tweeds hung in anarchy around him.
Kindred to the silent sea he trolled in now, a life disguised:
Once primeval youth, movement-wild, but here unrippled
moat,
Flotsam floating about his boots,
Stale rubbish in the shoreline thatches.
I heard his lips make a smacking sound
As he settled himself down into the gray caisson of
his loneliness,
Rod in hand and spectral voices in his head.
I had come home to watch his dying and winced at what I saw,
His chest a xylophone of bones extruding
From bog-colored skin, his neck a sack of sag.
That huge sadness that was always most of him would soon ebb away,
Joined by morbid memories of much mischief, madness and unrest,
Still too well written in his eyes.
There would be no more furrowing inside women of the eve,
No more flowers nodding to one another in kitchen violet vases.
For me, there was no narcosis to his dying; storms squalled in my heart
As he spat his phlegm into the sand
While I wound my way drunkenly among the dunes.
Somewhat Belated
Spring 1999, vol. 3, no. 1
Barbara Smith
You have been dead for a year now, Father,
But it was only last night that I opened
Your last brown box, neatly labeled "Pics."
Some were duplicates of those in my album,
Others brittle snapshots of relatives? neighbors? friends?
Whose identities I'll never know.
But then my breathing stopped, and I held in my hand
You in your gawky teens, Aunt Amytis in her twenties,
Uncle Charlie in between.
Your hand rested on your Gothic mother's arm.
I'd recognize her anywhere, for my daughter wears her face.
Behind her stood a white-haired man
Much older than his wife.
There in the basement chill I knew,
In the marrow of my bones,
Your father, who died so soon thereafter.
I looked for the first time into his eyes
And said
Hello.
Fall 1999, vol. 3, no. 2
Nina Tassi
She already knew, her face
shadowed in silence,
watching her daughter Mary,
bud of a girl still,
unfasten, let her shift slip down,
draw the infant’s head to her breast
to suckle Jesus, lusty in his hunger;
she already knew as she smiled
at Mary’s surprised wince when the child
took the nipple with such fury, sucked so hard,
drew milk from her so fiercely, knew what lay
ahead.
Ann leaned over and lifted with gently hand
her daughter’s milky breast,
showed her how to make of it a cone
so that the child’s full lusty lips
could take in the whole swollen areola.
She knew as she saw her daughter’s hand tremble,
cradling the baby’s downy head,
eyes shut tight in bliss as he sucked,
knew even as Mary’s eyes lifted
in slow contented gesture to her mother,
their smiles wisps of love between them,
and Mary, only a young girl herself, relaxed
as the child, satisfied, tumbled back and lay
across her knees, lips parted in milky chortles,
chubby feet aloft.
The knowing had come to her
when Mary was seven,
sloe-eyed, olive skin fragrant of almonds,
a child risen from the still earth,
seedling planted surely,
quick to raise eyes love-brimmed to Ann,
who breathed in her daughter’s scent like air.
That day in the garden
as Mary leaned over the well
drawing water, dark hair falling forward,
Ann touched her child at the nape of her neck,
and across her shoulder blades,
and she felt in those small bones
the weight and burden of what lay ahead,
and seeing her daughter’s face in the water,
felt cascading over herself the waters of knowing,
yet impossible to know that forty years
separated that touch of her hand
from the moment when Mary would stand
in a pool of immense stillness,
eyes encompassing her son’s face.
Ann saw Mary standing
drowned in her son’s eyes, his face
drained of strength, mouth hanging open,
yet his eyes fixed on her,
a grown son overpassing
his shame
at being seen in naked terror
by his mother, and showing her
his unbearable pain, and
Mary his mother stands
bearing his pain as she had borne him,
bearing what he laid bare to her, and
Ann felt her daughter’s breasts
shrink and wither in sorrow
during the rough slip and slide
of his body being lowered down on ropes
to Mary where she sat, knees opened wide
to make a lap broad for receiving him,
and they laid him, bones and torn flesh,
no breath in him, yet flesh still faintly warm,
across her knees where she bent over to cover him
and pull his head to her breast to shield him,
his arms falling slack to the ground.
Ann, sensing how her daughter’s hands,
her hands on his body sorrowing over him,
would move unseeing, moving on the instincts
of a mother’s entrails, and would know
that the filthy rag knotted about him
left flaccid genitals exposed, and her hands
would move to cover Jesus in his nakedness,
not yet brought and given the shroud
of aromatic linen to wrap him in.
Ann felt Mary contemplate in stillness
the stillness of his bones
as they sank down to mingle with the earth’s bones,
and saw her daughter’s face transfixed
on the face of Jesus, closed lids sunken;
she sensed that Mary, going down herself
to earth bedrock and finding there
no surcease of suffering,
would then begin to climb,
her eyes turned inward,
bearing her son’s weight as she climbed,
unseeing, unhearing, given over to contemplation.
And, cascading over her,
Ann felt that Mary in her sorrow
would not turn to her, saying
“Mother, help me bear this.”
For Mary of a sudden would be lifted up,
her soul abundant, swollen with milk,
her eyes raised up towards glory,
and would not veer, not for an instant,
to her mother’s arms aching to embrace her.
Ann knew this as a mother knows,
by the sudden sharp suck deep inside her,
telling her that she would be left empty,
stopped in the midst of heart’s gesture,
to stay on the earth, close to its smells,
sorrowing, sorrowing in silence grown immense.
Order of Worship—Arthropoda
Spring 2000, vol. 4, no. 1
Jennifer Sterling
The hymns of the locusts brushed by me,
hoarse praises on hot air
raised up, then splintered on a dry breeze.
I prayed with cicadas
lifted up my palms with the mantis.
We lifted up our songs on wings and sent them over
the warm night.
We deafened ourselves with psalms of longing and
desire.
By August the song had died,
dried into a rasping shell of the old self left
behind,
into a thin and skittering benediction,
a silent exoskeleton
still grasping when set upon a banging limb,
perfectly preserved
in the image of the soul’s most recent death.
We were laboring and raw
and could not crawl back into the old ways
even through our most evident wounds.
Is it glory or terror
that the thing we thought must surely hold us
together
is now so small and so easily crushed?
It still looks so much like us.
Another summer night we gather
none of us the creature of the year before.
We lift up songs on still bent wet and fragile
wings
send them over the warm night.
A resurrected chorus, we sing now with voice
restored
sursum sursum
sursum corda.
Elizabeth and Mary
Fall 2000, vol. 4, no. 2
Nina Tassi
After the first shining moment,
the moment of rapturous recognition,
when Mary and Elizabeth at sight of
each other burst into words that soared
above their ordinary ken, Mary settled in.
And the small house filled with light.
Theirs was a time of shimmering quiet.
Sometimes Mary walked out to the desert
and sang as she set about gathering flowers.
Sometimes, in the kitchen kneading bread,
the women exclaimed at the boisterous kick
of Elizabeth’s babe that sent an apron flying.
Elizabeth, heavy now with child, carried
water from the well to the sunny bench where
Mary sat and bent over her to wash her hair,
then rubbed in fragrant oils and brushed
her hair till it lay shining about her face.
Zechariah kept apart: these were women’s ways.
So they passed three months. On the last day
they rose at dawn, embraced, then Mary left.
Elizabeth stood by the well, watching her go,
watching Mary’s still-slender figure diminish
and finally disappear into the distant hills.
On the horizon, only the rising sun was left.
Unaccountably then, Elizabeth felt a heaving
within her; she was overtaken by an upsurge of
incomprehensible grief. Shudders shook her body,
nearly toppling her. She gripped the well’s edge
to steady herself.
Zechariah, rushing over, held
tightly to her, beside himself in his wife’s grief.
Elizabeth at length was brought back by the babe
in her womb.
Recalling that her time was near, she
grew calm and went inside to straighten Mary’s
room.
Smoothing the coverlet, she soothed her shaking
hands.
She thought at first to freshen the flower jar, but
instead lay down to rest in her dear cousin’s
place.
Cocteau’s Dream
Spring 2001, vol. 5, no. 1
John Davis Pilkey
Deep within a forest's shady side,
The secret of my magic stays the same—
The glove, the key, the mirror, horse to ride
And cold Diana's diamond-hearted flame.
I tend my roses elegant enough
Beneath a sun that visits me by day
But still my bestial flesh and coat is rough
And visitors who watch me never stay.
Enchantment rings their dinner hour at seven
With hands that reach and candlewicks that smoke;
But when I'd speak the words that promise heaven,
Their eyes avoid mine and spirits choke.
Listen,
now, and hear this silver chime
And watch the fog roll in from evening's breath,
Enjoy the spell of everpresent
rhyme
But understand how Beast adheres to death.
The blessing that I seek eludes me still
Through cold enchantment's merciless oppression;
And so I must remain the Beast until
A gentle lady breaks it with confession.
Deep within a forest's shady side
The secret of my magic stays the same
And deep within my bestial coat I hide
A mystery of future's hidden flame.
My Friend, This Sun
Fall 2001, vol. 5, no. 2
Janell
Moon
My hair turns grey but grows
curlier,
thicker.
Her hair ages thinning, yellowed.
It's
something we don't discuss.
We
sit on the bench in the sun.
Time spreads our hips.
We
spread our feet a bit for ease.
We
wear comfortable shoes
and double socks for warmth.
We were friends when our
children
broke
their ankles
turning
somersaults
on
yellow flowered hillsides.
We were together when as
adult children
they
came home
disappointed no one loved them
like
their momma did and
no one eased their way.
Life tore at them
and
caught them unprepared.
We
helped each other
help them out again
to
heartache, love
and revved up cars so
we
could enjoy this sun.
My friend stretches her back
and
pushes out her stomach,
arches.
I yawn
and
stretch with her.
I sit and think of pine
trees and green grass
She
dreams peppermint.
Our
hormones bounce. We hot flash.
We
let our tummies go. We don't care.
We are round like
water-smoothed stones.
We
use babushkas to cover our heads
from
the wind
and
sing when silver breezes come.
We smile. We rock.
We're
together.
We're
changing seasons.
We sit on the bench in the sun.
Woman As Art
Spring 2002, vol. 6, no. 1
Lorraine Tolliver
That public sculpture
known as a living, walking woman,
that practical outer product
which lounges over there
with the name of Julie, Linda, Sharon,
fares best as a simple, unadorned piece of art:
nose, eyes, chin—generic;
chest, arms, hands—unnoticeable;
sex flags unfurled.
She can be a masterpiece of plain form,
cosmetic flash shunned,
ornamental sparkle dimmed,
dramatic posturing subdued
so that subtle nuances
dance forward
to reveal her many-sided surprises.
Just now, notice, an angle of dare
which burns the air with defiance,
rippling out as far as can be followed.
Then may come a solid stance of sure idea
to stun all wavering lines of doubt.
Next perhaps thick, sticky passion will writhe and
coil
into the cracks of indecision and glue them
solidly.
Sometimes, thin hope can quiver
its pale thread across her breast and vibrate with
light.
All these dynamic changes
nudge forward past the stolid figure,
gleam out in quick sketch
from the corners of a woman
and then slide, fluid,
back into the whole
while another part of her moves to the front.
An undecorated face and figure,
holding still, uncolored,
does not block
the brilliant show of the woman,
etching reality second by second.
The Bowl Below
Fall 2002, vol. 6, no. 2
Kake
Huck
She carries in a bowl of her sin.
Wait. I can't—
She carries a bowl of sin.
Wait. That's not right.
Try describing the bowl.
The bowl is blue Roman glass.
Near the lip a bubble—
brown or gold—
a blister of faith—
small broken glints
catch light
sparking the oil as she bends
as she kneels
her eyes aligned with golden skin.
She draws the robe over ...
No. Wait. Not yet.
She bends, kneels on
cold stone, bowl between
hands, pain in her side—
holding Egyptian cotton she—
No. This is a mistake.
holding her hair,
she lets the bowl shiver—
a rippling miniature sea
below her clouding eyes and
there, just there
a world in that moment—
smelling sweat, oil, myrrh, she
touches, touches . . .
Wait. How can I say this?
Just tell us what she senses.
Hair slick with oil,
she traces long bones
in his feet, feeling
through strands of what is her own
feeling through what is her own
His flesh now moist
from the bowl of her sin.
Odyssey
Spring 2003, vol. 7, no. 1
M. Getchell
Your plane must be taking
off about now.
The
note you left said I might have to throw
Out
the milk. But the wine you placed on
My
porch was honeyed clover.
With
Hadjidakis as backdrop,
I
slice the onion you left,
Add
bay laurel to the sauté,
Garlic
to the lamb.
Following
your recipe,
I
have cut chives from your garden,
Beheading
purple asterisks of bloom.
After
dinner I shall read
Durrell or Kazantkakis.
In
a Levantine café, you sit staring
At
your glass, aching, heavy-lidded.
You
wonder if your Tidewater
Lawn
needs cutting or watering,
If
the magnolia leaves have fallen yet:
Parched,
brown. You order Retsina;
Bouioukia music plays.
Someone
dances on a tabletop.
The
caryatids keep their stance,
Hold
earthquakes in fragile balance.
Somewhere
on the Peloponnesus a boy is
Chasing
a girl around a black and gold vase,
Chitons fluttering to Dionysian flute tunes.
But
it is white light of Sounion that will
Transfigure
you, toward Persephone,
Aegean
ambiguity. At any moment,
Statues
might move; icons may shift.
A
goatherd could emerge from behind
A
rock, feet cloven.
You
journey on cutting edge of risk;
My
pilgrimage is inward. I remain
In
my Tidewater kitchen, ensconced
In
green reverie. Herbs from your garden
Burn in my pan like incense.
Friends 911
Fall 2003, vol. 7, no. 2
Ken Gaertner
They fell
as through a vaguely remembered dream,
unconscious of direction,
the structure of space,
incomprehensible in the chaos:
their freed souls,
like the feathers of pigeons
in far flung barns,
floated gingerly in the sun blotting gloom.
Did God, blinded,
search for Himself
in that loud moment?
Did the Christian wheelchair fling
itself upon the commotion,
in a clattering tantrum?
Was its clatter discernible,
Was it necessary that it be discernible?