Lake Helene

Lake Helene
By Julianna McCarthy



Let me tell you about the dance band
at the shore, summer nights when I was just
old enough to feel the heartache in a trumpet solo,
the plea in a smoky saxophone riff.
Young girl lonely I would swim
out beyond the drop-off to lie on the raft,
wavelets lapping against planks still
warm under my back, to listen
to the baritone crooning, “Always”
and longing, longing to keep it all; keep
the night, keep the music, keep the band from going home.

Second Honeymoon

Second Honeymoon

By Kristopher Saknussemm

You know what I miss most?
Watching you try to fold maps.
And the way you always waited
until you were in the car
to spray on your perfume.

Do you still drive out through
the oil derricks when you need
time to think? Can you still drive?
My father says he can, and he's been
dead as long as you.

And I miss the smell of your skin
when you got hot dancing—
sitting in those cane chairs
listening to that stupid parrot.
My old man comes back at night
to drink Old Crow with me.
Old man, old crow. Hah. He knows.

Come back and smell like limes
and White Shoulders perfume and we'll drink
Tanqueray and ice. Come back to me
and we'll count mirages all the way
to Mazatlan. Please. I have one arm
out the window—and one hand on the wheel.

I'm about to cross the border
in a haunted car,
with three arrests, no convictions,
and nothing to declare.

Your Family's Farm, Empty

Your Family’s Farm, Empty

"Buildings can't want."—Donald Rumsfeld

By Nick Lantz


Neither does the ax regret each tree it has bitten,
though it leans against the shed
like a drunk locked out of his own house.

The tractor doesn't moon
over the physique of its youth.
The dry birdbath makes no plans
for the future.

What can the barn recall of the day
you climbed the ladder into its loft and found
a pair of buzzard chicks
skulking among the hay bales?
Your grandfather shot them with a pistol
and kicked them out of the haymow for you
to carry to the ditch beyond the field.

Does the barn remember those shots
exploding inside it like a burst neuron?
The weight of those bodies thudding to earth?

Can the field remember your feet crossing it, the air
heavy with crickets?
Does the ditch remember the bones the coyotes
gnawed and scattered?

You stand here, where the walnut tree was felled,
one foot on the smooth disc of the stump.

The grass makes no demands on your soul.
The cow paths are as forgetful as the rain.

If it is possible,
the kennel
grown over with morning glories
is less than indifferent to silence.

Getting It Right

Getting It Right


What could it hurt to rewrite my adolescence--
for instance, say this time I kiss Anna after the Junior Prom.

as our limo drives through a night so dark I see only her lips.
The Globe can offer a correction: due to an editorial error

my football-crazed dog, Rambo, never collided with the fender
of that cruising Toyota. At fifteen, family eating pasta, let's say my father

no longer informs us he has throat cancer, there's no surgery
that steals his voice. This time Anna can arrive at my sixteenth birthday party

in a swimsuit. It wouldn't change the course of known events
for me to say we retired to the bedroom where I touched parts

of Anna's body which called to me like distant church bells.
And this time no one moves out: my brother still lives

in the basement, spinning a record twenty years long, an Eagles poster
"Live at the Gardens" nailed above his bed. My sister spends eternity

in the bathroom perfecting the art of mascara,
morning after morning her blond lashes bring a May sunrise

into our kitchen. Let Rambo score a touchdown running
a ten-yard fade. Let my father's voice call me to dinner.

The Herald can publish a new story: my parents purchase
that '89 mini-van, its tank big enough to hold 30 years of gasoline--

hands on the wheel, everyone buckled, my father leads us in song,
"The Long Road Home," and Anna too sits in the back,

her voice joining ours as she reaches for me,
her red bikini brighter than any brake light
~ Steven Coughlin

I Am Fishing for God

I Am Fishing for God


using my heart as bait.
It is just before dawn,
the slightest hint of

pink bleeds into the
night sky. I use my
pen knife to cut the

hole in my chest,
reaching behind the
pocket of my shirt.

What a tough muscle
to pull the hook through.
The heart is astonished

to be in this other world
and trembles and shivers like
a moth discovered in daylight.

I try to calm it by stroking it
by telling it that it will all be
ok, but what do I know.

The breeze picks up and chills the cavern
in my chest. It feels good to
be empty at last. I cast my heart

across the water. I cast it again
and again. Sometimes it floats on
the surface, other times it sinks

below. Something will strike at it
that I can't see. I pray
I am using the right bait.

The tough outer layers
soften in the water. The heart grows
smaller, more pliant.

It has become a beautiful
blue jewel. I begin
not to recognize it.

Was this me?
It waits. I wait.
The boat rocks

slightly in the breeze
lifted and lowered
by the tide.

~Stuart Kestenbaum

Coda

CODA
for my mother
by
Alice D’Alessio




You broke my heart, you said.
And then you died

leaving the two raw pieces in my lap,
like weeping pomegranate.

Because I tasted the seeds and knew
the underworld? Because your meadows

couldn’t hold me, and beyond the fence
I found a wilderness more tempting

than you – virtuous as a nun –
could comprehend? Was I to blame?

You loved the idea of my life: dinners for eight,
bright kids, bright flowers, filling your dreams

of domesticity. Was it wrong
to hide frayed edges as they pulled apart?

Only daughter of a lonely mother
I was doomed to disappoint

as every seed you planted escaped
your nurturing to flaunt

its own wild weedy dance.
Look, the marsh marigolds we treasured

have disappeared this spring
gobbled by deer, overrun by reed canary grass
but still the redwing blackbird sings.

Remembering

REMEMBERING

By William Stafford

When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the
stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.

Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.

Even the Dead

Even the Dead
by David Lee Garrison

Even the Dead Will Die Someday~ Miguel de Unamuno

Bury me in this graveyard,
lost among farms and forests,
where even the dead are dead;

where epitaphs can barely be read;
where the outline of a hand carved
in a slab points toward the sky

and demonstrates the faith
of all the men and women who lie
here in the hope of resurrection;

where stones record longings for
a stricken child, son killed in war,
wife or husband gone before;

where my whole life will
come down to a few true words.
At dusk, a flock of quiet birds.