A Poem by Richard Fein

NATURAL DESELECTION

I shot a seagull not with a bullet but with a click of the lens.

Eye to viewfinder I slowly invaded their space,
twenty gulls seriatim on a bayside rail.
The nearest ones started twitching their wings, twitched, twitched again
then spread their feathered sails and erupted into flight
to circle over the harbor waters.
Six feet between anyone of them and me
seemed the boundary between peaceful perch and panicky flight.
But not the last holdout. Lone tough bird on that rail.
Goliath versus gull, but sans slingshot.
Rather a refusal to even twitch or loosen a talon from the rail.
Five feet, four, three, finally at two a twitch,
and only at one did it launch itself stately over the bay.
But cawing loudly it dared circle me.
And then the dive, I twitched then ducked.
I shook my fist and cawed back.
Only then did that David gull weigh discretion against valor's better part.
Only then did it flee Goliath to rejoin its cautious flock.
Bold but foolish defiance, for if I had been a hungry hawk or ravenous cat,
it would have been naturally deselected
and from then on forever vacant from this bayside rail.
Which is why avian boldness is rare. Which is why any boldness is rare.
For most boldness is a mere moment's forgetting of fear.
Darwin might be smiling at his own wisdom, but I'm not.
As a nature photographer I'm unfit.
All my photos of that seagull's singular sassiness are out of focus. 

Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition A Chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison.  He has been published in many web and print journals such as Cordite, Reed, Southern Review, Roanoke Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic, Canadian Dimension, Black Swan Review, Exquisite Corpse, Foliate Oak, Morpo Review, Ken*Again Oregon East, Southern Humanities Review, Morpo, Skyline, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain Aroostook Review, Compass Rose, Whiskey Island Review, Oregon East, Bad Penny Review, Constellations, and many, many others. 

A Poem by Bill Jansen

When yellow leaves

It was that sort of serene Fall day
when you expect to encounter Vivaldi
in yellow leaves under widely spread buckeye trees
exercising his faithful dog, Giuseppe.

A youthful, alert companion retrieving a violin bow
over and over with insatiable animal happiness.

Ruefully, I remark to myself that I have no pet,
unless you count a litter of peeves.
Which denotes me, I suppose, as a trivial misanthrope
in a world of tortured confessions signed with a smiley face.

But what a cozy, gee whiz, blue sky above us today,
under which to walk aimlessly through yellow leaves.

Or pause at a cello somber pond,
a wide ditch really, brimming with paling lives.
A pair of birds, of a type I don't recognize,
sheltering on the opposite verge.

Below, there is perhaps an aquarium Pub,
a literal watering hole, which I should try.

Why not go there now, sit at a corner table,
sip a pint of fermented air,
and observe quietly a game of snooker
being played by retired carp or tipsy bluegill.

Perhaps then I can finally make a good beginning
on a poem about you, a brief stanza or two,
reconciling somehow the absurd difference in our ages,
and why your beauty should not matter to me.

Refined shadows will fall across the page
I am writing on, like dense musical notations
cast by insects striding on the wavering ceiling above me.

A darting waitress might turn on a remastered aria
performed by Caruso in his prime.

I'll try to think of a nice, tight, gee whiz ending.

But for now another flurry of yellow leaves
has reminded me that somewhere Winter's soloist
is unlimbering an icy, darker bow.

Bill Jansen lives in Forest Grove, Oregon. His works has appeared in various ezines and journals, including Cirque, Trigger Fish Review, and The Centrifugal Eye.

Three Poems by J.K. Durick

Turtles

They’re easy enough to pick up.
Grab them mid-shell and lug ‘em
across the road, like some careful
god out of your machine meddling
with fate once more. As if destiny
placed you properly for this once.

The one I picked up to save, flicked
his head from side to side and
opened his terrible mouth to snap
this way and that, flinging and
waving his feet as if he were trying
to crawl away, swimming in the air
all the way to the other side
where I set him down, away from
the cruelty of cars and kicks.

Later when I looked back from
up the road a bit, I noticed that
he had turned around and was
heading right back across the road
and he looked just as determined
and as fragile as he did before
I bent down to save him from
things that must be inevitable.
Life too often seems like that.



Crows

I’m not some roadkill attracting these crows,
but they’re ominous, nonetheless; like now –
the cawing, stiff legged walk of them,
their eyes, the certainty of it all,
their color, the color of our fears.

Perhaps it’s primal, the lesson our ancestors
absorbed in their blood with birth,
then spilled, swilled on endless battlefields;
or the explorer in us, the wanderer who
took the wrong turn in confusing woods;

or the family out on the frontier,
when their food ran lower and lower,
and they were all that was left for them;

or the suicide we found hanging
off the path to the beach that summer
weeks after he gave up his eyes to them;

or the parts the police identify
by the old logging road,
that unidentified person of pieces
we know by looking at ourselves.

And they are watching us, even now,
cautiously, with calm certainty –
for crows landing will be
the very last thing we see.



Fishing

Been tugging on this line seems like
Forever this afternoon waiting for
a nibble to remind me why I'm here.



J. K. Durick is presently a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Literary Juice, Napalm and Novocain, Third Wednesday, and Common Ground Review.

A Poem by Tom Hatch

Tapestry

The afternoon of the new born fawn

Climbing skinny unfolded legs

Up rocky hilly pattern of weave
Wanting a leap back into the womb
Drawn possibly by Aubrey Beardsley
Umbilical cord swirls illustrated
Hoofs becoming dirty earthly
Strident with life sees the filtered light
Of the forest
The taste of mothers milk
Feeble to strength in the spring to
High summers grasses brown spotted blending
Camouflaged in the landscape of the hunting wolfs
her fear to go has turned survival stayed standing
In the dusty fibers of the tapestry my grandmother
Left me
Now on the floor next to the bed
Hearing the wolves chewing bones filled with marrow
In my to sleep every night woven from my grandmother's dreams
Wolves surrounding the frightened fawn
Still there in the morning stepping someday
Over crushed, broken, gnarled bones that
Cannot be sustained forever lying on the bedroom floor
As the fibers break down the wolves get closer to the fawn everyday

Tom Hatch paid his dues in the SoHo art scene in the 70s, 80s and 90s. He was awarded two NEA grants for sculpture back then. And taught at various colleges and universities in the NYC metro area in art including Princeton U. He is a regular at The Camel Saloon and BoySlut. He had recently published The Mind[less] Muse. He lives in CT with a few farms up and down the road works in Manhattan. His train ride to and from NYC is his solace, study and den where it all begins and ends.

A Poem on M.A. Schaffner

The Point Of Picking Berries

All for a handful of berries the walk

sidles up the mountain top on paths
beaten by boots and occasional trucks.

Hikers and cops, bicyclists and hippies,

whole families from the cities now astray
playing One Of These Things Doesn’t Belong Here.

Nothing belongs here but the berry clone –

a single shrub that seems to be thousands,
and covers acres, and which draws us in

where anything hungry could watch for us,

including this plant whose fruits seem to lead
ever farther from the trail and the homes

from which we often drive to shop for berries,

never fearing the bait or the hunger
we feed because it seems to be our own.

M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Magma, Tulane Review, Gargoyle, and The Delinquent. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19^th century.

Two Poems by Marianne Szlyk

Under Construction

Without their leaves, trees look like scaffolding.
Naked bushes become barbed wire fences.
The only colors are empty wrappers caught in the wind.

Men in masks disassemble the long-vacant house.
The front yard fills
with broken plaster and boards,
with window frames and glass.
Papers blossom like mold.



Soon

The grass will be green, first pale, then darker.

The bushes will bristle with waxy thorns,
forsythia’s yellow dots and dashes against the papery sky.

Crocuses will snap up in purple and white. Hyacinths
and lilacs will follow,
their sweetness infusing the wind.

A larger house,
one with bamboo floors, a sunken hot tub,
and walls the color of abalone flesh,
will rise from the ruins.

Marianne Szlyk is an associate professor of English at Montgomery College, Rockville as well as an associate editor at the Potomac Review. Her poems have been published in the Antigonish Review, the Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Atrium, Eos: The Creative Context, and Aberration Labyrinth. Other poems will appear in the Ishaan Literary Review and the Blue Hour Magazine.

Three Poems by Eric A. Weil

Oak Burl

A recent storm blew
a large oak limb
down on the trail.
Now I must step
over this limb, which
has a one-foot burl,
a great, warty wound,
scar of ancient oak wars,
covered, but not hidden.
I can reach halfway
around the trunk
that sacrificed this limb.
Standing at attention,
it can afford this loss
better than most.

 

Late October Soybeans

As I drive to the store,
the hairy pods dangle,
arthritic fingers
awaiting the reaper.
The once-golden field
brown and leafless,
the stalks stand
like a tangled hedgerow
of bones exhumed
from a mass grave,
and I check my list.


 
Sniper

The barred owl,
silent as a sniper
swiveling, watchful
in that sweet gum,
glides to the broken
cedar -- watchful,
swiveling --
lets me pass.

Eric A. Weil lives and teaches in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. Recent poems have appeared in The Hurricane Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and New Verse News. He has two chapbooks: A Horse at the Hirshhorn and Returning from Mars.