Ariana Writes Mary Oliver

That cottonwood grove full of fawns, some curled in the high
grass, tawny circles with white spots in a funnel
of sleep and vulnerability, some giving the lie
to pathos in their efforts to crawl for shelter; that tunnel
under my dreams where fear always waits to turn
the mundane to the terrible--these form my constant sense
of departure. Even in the first person vortex, the churn
where memories keep reinventing themselves, I tense
at the sound of my own lies. Thus I fly
the grove in hopes the doe will return. I wake
to the hurt world and feign indifference. Why,
in all the green sadness religion would take
for granted, would the carnivores remain at bay
when these spots turn to blood in light of day?


Ed Writes Dylan Thomas

When the river turns opaque
and its mirror dies too,
how many clouds will lose
their charm for the boys of spring
who lost their fear in the greening thunder?
When the girls turn fair
and their songs improve,
how many birds will sound the alarm
for the boys of spring who lost
their hearts in the whirling rain?
When the air turns chill
and its scent turns blue,
how many stars will it cost the night
for the boys of spring who lost their youth
in the failing light?
When the sun turns moon
and the mood turns too,
how many deaths will spell the truth
for the boys of spring who lost their minds
to their lewd intentions?
When the river turns opaque, how many,
oh, how many mirrors will it take?

Jimmy Writes Jim Harrison

You approach on the highway,
the crows fly up. You look in the rearview,
the crows fly back. Road kill works that way
and it probably should. What would you expect?
Our sleek machines load their larders
with sluggish bunnies. Urban to rural,
we move between our appointments
with an ease attainable only in this
most perfect of worlds.
You think I’m being ironic?
Why would I tease you about this?
There’s a huge sadness
behind it all that makes no allowances
for the play between good and evil.
What the crows find interesting
is painfully simple.
Say what you will, they’ll still
fly up when you pass, then
in lieu of the wreckage you’ve left,
they’ll settle again.

Melanie Writes Ann Sexton

New snow piled on old snow
turns to old snow under more new snow.
Thus the winter goes.
Leave the house and track some bold
new tracks out into more of the same.
Enter the commerce of the coffee shop,
and mark in every face you meet
the color of the day.
Converse if you’ve a mind for it.
“Stark enough for you?” or
“Thinking of moving away?”
But more likely you’ll sit by yourself
and observe the dogs tied
to a bike rack outside. No bikes,
just dogs. Big dogs with lots of fur.
They look back as if they haven’t seen
the likes of you before. One stands up
for a better view then sits back down
when he sees that you’re nothing new.


Jamie Writes Billy Collins

Much of the world has put
a cell phone to its head.
Walking in the woods,
standing in line at the super market,
alone in a restaurant, these damaged goods
chat like there's no tomorrow,
and maybe there isn't.
Maybe this is the new Russian roulette
with nothing but empty chambers.
The insistence in the voices
is too strong to let them go
from the past to the future.
They stand on street corners,
muttering like true schizophrenics,
pausing to punch their hands
occasionally and stare into a blue glow
while they wait for the voices
in their heads to die down
into the silence they dread.


Casey Writes Shel Silverstein

When the big bad world
comes blowing down
the door, some little girl
might call it by
another name: say mine
or kitty or clown.
When all the world
she’d ever want might lie
just beyond the length of her arm,
she’d reach until her arm was longer
and Mr. Happy Candy Pig
rolled a giant peach
into her hand. She’d say,
“Let’s make it snappy,”
to the clouds that block the sun. She’d say,
“Why, thank you” to the sun itself,
“You’re welcome” to the moon,
and when the stars came out to play
she’d drift away with them down the plum-
colored sky. And in her dreams the girl
would call the wild world home.
“Good world! Good world.”

Mercury

Mercury

Hush-a-bye

These fish that surround me like icons
on the blue battlements,
they are a risk I have never been willing to take.
Gorgeous feathers all look alike to the Jamaican girl there,
carrying a list from her auntie
into a northern climate.

don’t you cry.

One orchid
one jar of Katydids
one broken mirror
two limes
one skull
six periods
two large spiders (male and female).

Go to sleep you little baby.

As a child, I carried fillings of mercury around inside of my head.
Mother would call and call, but I could only hear the train in my ears,
moving down its tunnel of blood toward the dark heart
my father gave me in his pain.

When you wake

I’ll never get used to my orbital lenses where only the center is clear
and everything else falls away.
In the dream my girl was eating chocolates—
no, she was eating the cooked hearts of chickens
one after another.

you will see

The musak beside this escalator is playing a tune the Irish learned from whales
before the great slaughter.
Are these your lamps, O poets, fueled by blubber and blood?

After the priest had finished with her, she went into the garden behind the rectory
and filled her mouth with red clay.

All the pretty little ponies.

A Separate Life

You're not here,
not in the sky
nor ground nor water,
not even the fire.
So what do I do?
I hold the cat instead of you.
I hold this black ball of a cat,
which, at the moment, doesn't
particularly want to be held.
There's something in this cat
that reminds me of you--
not in its heat nor gaze nor touch,
soft as that might be,
but more its manner
of living a separate life
next to the one that I have
here.

You're not here
though the river is
and the tree
and the fly that drinks
across my wrist
and the stone that shapes the water
that shapes the stone.
And the ashes that relinquish their DNA
have spoken in their small, small voices
that you're not here.

The shadow is a significant other
as is the frozen breath
as is the wind
beneath the door to our bedroom
because, even as weak clues
to the spirit, they are here
and you're not.

A Target

Don’t call me that other name,
that time-warp you folded me into
with your Movie-Tone death.

The stress lines in black and white, the crackle of speakers:
These brave lads aren’t coming home.

Near its source in eastern Turkey, the Euphrates appears to run uphill
where a bloody Kurdish child tries to eat the orange
I have given her in the rubble of her home.

When I awake above the Atlantic, my wife is gone, so I walk the isle
whispering her name above the hiss of engines until the door to the cockpit
opens and I see her there under the arm of the pilot.

Dear Mother,

He talks in his sleep and prays to your god he never believed in.
Last night he told a man he called Lucas to step down from the tractor and fight.
This morning after we made love he corrected my grammar again.

She got the rug with royal blue crosses framed in tan
that they bought at the covered market in Ankara.
He got the samovar
that they found in the shops of Erzurum
with an airman from the American missal base.
How much is that in real money?

The camera pans back from a fogged, green mountaintop,
and the music builds as he holds her there dying on eight wide-screen TVs
up against the wall
of a Target.

Across the aisle, more screens with talking heads:

Those who seek their other in pornography
may find their lives as viable as the tumor
behind the ear to which they hold their cell.

Sight Unseen

Beneath the swing set she fed
her little brother a toadstool.
Not to be saved by the reflection in her patent
leather shoes,
not to be caught up by the angels
flapping on a neighbor's clothesline,
not to be recollected through the green lense
of a Kool-Aid pitcher,
carried by a mother long dead,
she denied her innocence then and there.
O child,
O bloody cut healed then picked then healed then picked,
O storms who drive their winds harder in the night,
take her sight unseen,
orphan that she is,
into the witch's cottage.

And so the brother
sits alone on a log
in the park
knowing that something is coming
through the gastropod of his inner ear:
the spring on a screen door
slammed in the last century,
the crunch of a tadpole (still alive)
fed through the claws of a crawfish,
the whine of a child's pet ferret
crushed on a road in a D.C. suburb.

You there in the toll booth,
a fly is on the tube to your oxygen tank.
You there on the seat of that toilet
six miles above the earth,
hurry up, a child is at the door.
You there in the corner of that elevator
where a fight has broken out,
is that a tooth beneath your foot?

You there.
You.
There.

Before the Gander

I didn't wake up with a large pod by my bed.
On that road to Damascus, I didn't spot a UFO,
but a somehow pleasant hum fills me, as though
life weren't all that bad after all, as though dead
birds hadn't accumulated under my windows. Or
am I just imagining this interlude from these, of late,
patriotic mites scribbling on the blank slate
of my sleep, conducting their erotic wars
in my dried up snot and tears. Big and happy,
I’m a vegetable cultivated by a commander
of intergalactic tramps who records my snappy
come-backs for posterity. Before the gander
came this program shaped like a golden egg,
and monogrammed along its helix: GREG.

Wildlife Management

Bees and clover winter in the sad facts
that pepper sleeping children with doubt. Never
walk under a blossoming tree unless the act’s
reflected somewhere—a pool, the eyes of your
dog, a compact mirror. You’ve probably seen
the way geese lose formation as soon as you hear
their distant voices. Do you think they mean
to hint at suicide? Have you considered a career
in Wildlife Management? As long as you’re
down here on your knees, you might as well take
a good look at the grass. Is that a tear
or is it dew? Does it really make
any difference where the water came
from when the reflections are the same?