poetry on the mind

Poetry books are collecting on my nightstand & taking the place of my fiction books for the moment.

I'm in a poetry phase.

I recently acquired several additions of

The Bitter Oleander - A Magazine of Contemporary International Poetry & Fiction

and I'm enjoying them very much.

A few of my favorites from Vol. 10, No. 2, Fall 2004....

She Dreams Her Death

by Alice Pettway

She fills the bathtub with cranberries

They pile up on her belly

then pour over her edges

and slip beneath her,

crushed against the porcelain.

Their rough-tongued juice colors her back

and trickles into her navel.

It rises until she can dip her chin

down into it

and let it into the corners of her mouth.

Her stained hands flit over her face,

leaving little kiss-prints on her skin.

Hunger

by Melissa Fair

- for Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia

A poor woman climbs the stairs of a strange house

her whole life. Each year is a rented room

where furniture must be rearranged to hide the stains

of ghosts. She examines the worn edges

of everything. The threadbare rug. The door stained

by years of leaving. There are always repairs to be made.

Each night she reconstructs herself. A good black dress

and red lipstick camouflage her empty purse

and the bad teeth behind her tight smile. For the price

of a drink, someone can hold her close enough

to feel her heart beat. Some dark bird caught

in her chest. A certain man might ache to touch

that fluttering. To take an oily feather

as a souvenir. Like anything else fleeting,

sometimes a woman's desperate beauty

is her undoing. When she sees her reflection

the mirror opens its silver mouth

and swallows.

Lacuna

- an empty space or a missing part; a gap, a void.

by Robin E. Sampson

She traces the edges, sees only minus.

Examines the negative space where

she resides, self-defined by lack.

Weathered fragments peel away

from her wall, litter the ground.

She struggles

to stabilize,

then repair

the damage.

Gathers shards,

collects pigments,

attempts reconstruction.

What is missing cannot be

replaced or even reproduced.

Separation forms the patterns, the

constellations are shaped as much from

blackness as from stars. Chaos creates order.

She will learn to value ma*

*ma - negative space, from the Japanese art tradition