Fabulous Finds 1997

Fabulous Finds 1997

October 1997 Of The Month

Spring Cleaning
By: L.R. Powell

She tapped softly, I thought it naught. She tapped again and glided in. I rushed to clear away the cobwebs, embarrassed at the disarray within. I had rambled 'round in here for years with no mind to keeping things repaired. I thought it locked securely, that unused dusty door. "Who lives here?" she shyly asked with smile and knitted brow. And I, struck dumb with awe, could only shrug and nod my head. I tried to clear away debris but she only had to speak and I stumbled like a clown raising scattered clouds of dust, choking off all hope of sound and obscuring what was me. So she never heard the welcome wavering there 'twixt heart and muted mouth. Not for her, these darkened rooms. She quickly took her leave,but... her hand lingered on the doorframe as if she would have liked to know the one who lived within. As she disappeared I slowly closed the door and found that she had taken something (must have been a bit of kindness) and wiped a tiny peephole to let the sunlight in.

Copyright © 1997 L.R. Powell

Comments to author: lrpowell@hotmail.com
Cedron, Uzza, Eden
By: David Hunter Sutherland
You are the apple
the whole damn garden!
The mystical fount between Sufi and soul, 
addressing...addressing... 
the question you've asked,
go ahead, take a bite,
let its rind hard ephermeral
be heaven and hell,
let this new skin
smooth and taut over its fleshy pulp 
and porridge-like matter 
spill this paradise.

Compromise, barter, settle the dispute
with guile half-learned, 
love's half embrace,
life's clumsy ruttings 
of childish sex
is half the conjugal, half.

You are the catacomb, the succubus, the jinn,
but go ahead, take a bite,
let its opaque meal fill your gullet,  
let its fruit of apron and fig
slide down, down past 
the stomach's guilt ridden lining,
down past the lie    
of our guessing   
what's past its core to its pit.
Copyright © 1997 David Hunter Sutherland

Recursive Angel
Still Water
By: Robin Frazier
I am like water,
Whose surface you have disturbed.
You see your reflection in me-
Distorted.
You can no longer see
Below my surface.
The light bends and twists,
So you close your eyes
On the image that you see.

I am unrecognizable to you.

But in your absence,
The ripples have passed,
And I am still water again.
Copyright © 1997 Robin Frazier

Eclectic Artistry
India Dream
By: Layne Russell
Brindavan,
I'm in Brindavan.
India again.

Now I remember
how much I wanted
to return.

My feet upon the
dark earth of India,
I breathe her.

A master in bright orange gown
walks toward me.
The dark hair and eyes.

We sit on the earth,
the earth of India,
and he says,

"I am with you,
I am helping you,"
his smile as big as

Brindavan skies,
centuries, and
ten thousand hearts.

The earth,
the shining earth of India.
My hands touch down.
Copyright © 1997 Layne Russell

White Owl Web, Poetry of Layne Russell
Once More, With Feeling
By: Keith Allen Daniels
robins are nesting
in brutal appliance

caddisfly larvae
build hauberks of bone

insects observe
no moment of silence

horseshoe crabs
are impassive as stone

human debris
is sorted by pack rats

hording their trophies
in fulgurite homes

lichens develop
a hunger for plastic

devour the remnants
of packaging foam

flowers are blooming
in high mountain passes

tektites are gathered
in cairns for the dead

yetis emerge from
tunnels of glass with

Jesus their savior
new lambs to be led
Copyright © 1995 Keith Allen Daniels

Apokalyptikon
Harps and Arrows
By: David Hunter Sutherland
  In stone phallic symbol
  the celestial eye
  high on constellations, galaxies,  mirrors' dust 
  of cut nebulas
  detox in rudimentary awareness

  To paint our innate passions
  with rapacious appetites
  and desperate lives
  in chalklines of pillars and salt.

  Given in brief 
  this celestial eye of sentimental states
  watches over aspects, inclinations, 
  signs dispensing pandect and rule, 
  the dry tear, heaven-hell

  falls accountable
  as summary justice mandates
  to a single hair of cause - effect.

  In love, sorrow and death
  we wander in thunder and visions 
  as another day ends in bittersweet bliss 
  and fills this heart  
  with harps and arrows.
Copyright © 1997 David Hunter Sutherland

Recursive Angel

And/Or
By: Marilyn McIntyre

And this is the way
you dream your dreams
and find castles in the air
and illusion in the mists
and your wishes are dreams
and they can be waking and sleeping
or conscious or un...
and dreams build nations, free slaves
and change war to a place of peace
and they can save you from death
or boredom
and dreams are a vision of you
and whatever your dreams are
must be...
and you can build castles in the air
and live in them
and go nowhere
or...

Copyright © 1997 Marilyn McIntyre

Comments to the author: Marilyn McIntyre

Across Montana (a cinquain)

May 1997 Of The Month
By: Lloyd Alan Fletcher

The sky
curses lightning,
burns holes around our feet;
insane, we leave the tent to trap
the storm.
Canvas
flaps, indignant
at being left alone
to wrestle nature's madness here,
the rain.
Inside
the KOA
we drip dry, shoot pool, drink
Cokes so cold they bite our fingers
like hail.
The storm
moves on at last
to mumble further East,
bombard the Dakotas; we run
outside.
The tent
out here alone
still trembles, and has leaked.
Tonight, we sleep outside beneath
that sky.
Copyright © 1995 Lloyd Alan Fletcher

Lloyd & Anne's Home Page

Indian Summer
By: Anne Johnson

Cold does not
impel the grass
to become dry, colorless,
cracking under my feet;
nor leaves to turn
flame red,
parched yellow,
or sun baked brown.

Instead
thirst, unrelenting,
brings the days down,
slowly draining
the moist green
from their cells,
leaving only dull,
dust covered evergreens;
lingering hint of
Summer's hope.

Copyright © 1996 Anne Johnson

Anne's Mystical Poetry

Woolworth Parakeets
By: William Dubie

April 1997 Of The Month

They nod, gridded against windowglass
and no wide eyes. But you behave
passively, beginning to pass
knowing you cannot save
them, as though they'd sing in your parlor
and learn the swears you'd teach.
They live anonymously here, not unlike your
countenance; still, you reach
to see what you can afford--another existence
that you could well do without,
and it without you--so you two trade silence
for subsistence, and you scout
the aisles for fragrance, razors, any other thing
to carry yourself well past remembering.

Copyright © 1996 William Dubie

From Resurrection Bingo
Two Rivers Press
Reprinted by permission of author

William Dubie's Poetry

April, 1998 Of The Month

Sunday Morning
By: Jaimes Alsop

It is this morning.
We sit across the table from each other
breakfast over
the coffee steaming in the china mugs
as you read from the magazine
and I work on the crossword puzzle
sections of the news paper spread everywhere.

You look up, smile at me
and lean across the table for a kiss,
happy for no reason but it is Sunday,
we have all day to do with as we choose.

You are so sure of me
I am afraid enough for both of us.
In my life I never imagined
a morning like this morning;
the bed unmade
me in this ragged robe
all my senses singing:
This is what we share with one another.
This is the place I keep my promises.

Copyright © 1996 Jaimes Alsop

The Alsop Review

June 1997 Of The Month

"Poe"-etic Sentiments
By: Alisha Freeman

The clock has just chimed

Nine chimes follow Westminster's melody

Their haunting ring is a welcome interlude

Breaking the monotony

Somehow they make me forget my lonliness momentarily

But the last chime slowly fades away

And again the only sound is the unrelenting tick-tock, tick-tock

Driving me to certain madness

Suddenly a breeze blows across the open window

Cooling my heated thoughts; soothing my troubled mind

How I long for such disturbances of this constant ennui

They are pleasant distractions from a mercilessly melancholy state of mind

Copyright © 1996 Alisha Freeman

Alisha's Auberg

August 1997 Of The Month

Helionaut
By: Jerry Harrison Jenkins
A fluff of thistledown upon the wind
escaped my gently grasping hand, and I
was glad. It floated off, but would descend
in distant soil where it would multiply.

I thought of how primordial drifting seed
unlocked potential life from tidal mud;
how dragonfly replaces millipede,
and streams of grass now flow where cycads stood.

What futures are unfolding in my mind,
that I should seek the brightest solar flare,
leaving earth and mankind far behind
to soar on winds of gravitation where,
at some consuming perihelion,
I flower in the garden of the sun?

Copyright © 1996 Jerry H. Jenkins

Helionaut originally appeared in Pirate Writings
Reprinted by permission of author

Byzantium

Mollified Heights

September 1997 Of The Month

By: Mary Lowry

I have used the wind to get me through,
and over boundaries others build to hold
barren ground where nothing ever grew
of colors raging arrogant and bold.

I have paid for courage of a fool,
riding clouds and going where they will,
falling downward often, as a rule,
while reaching for another, even still.

At some sane point beyond my exit goal
of setting tethered rainbow endings free,
I may have to stop and count the toll
from attitudes and altitudes of me.

Copyright © 1996 Mary Lowry

Poetic Express

A Smaller Moment
By: Rich Howard

commanding a fine view
i shuffle through all the reasons
not to speak
even though i am alone

a useless pursuit
when the weight
of a thousand arguments
i know i'd lose
has settled thick and ugly
on my tongue

but sometimes there is no more reason to speak
than there is to live
and maybe that's why i'm standing here
on a cliff high above the river
until the moments become reasons
shifting with each daub of cottonwood
riding lightly across my face

Copyright © 1995 Rich Howard

Articulata

In at the Deep End

February 1997 Of The Month

By: Peter Howard

This is the nearest we can come
To Transcendental Communion with Eternity.

First: Resolution, the will to leap into the unknown.
Second: Conversion of that will to action.
Many fail here, turn back at the brink
Or find their toes cling to the Earth like a mother.

Third requires Transition from this World.
The Time between leaving Earth
And achieving Otherness is both
Timeless and never-ending.

Fourth is Transformation:
Rebirth in a different World.
Limbs have different uses to be learned,
Gravity works in an esoteric way,
Senses of sight and sound have different meanings.

Fifth is Forgetfulness - this is Deceptive
And the errant novice who drinks
Too deep of these waters
May remain here forever.

Sixth is realisation:
The sudden certainty of the Rightness of Up
And the desperate scramble to attain it.

Seventh is the Return.
The embrace of the mundane,
The celebration of air,
The joy of solidity,
The smell of chlorine in your nostrils,
The echoes, the hard edge of the swimming pool.

Copyright © 1996 Peter Howard

from Low Probability of Racoons
Reprinted by permission of author

Peter Howard's Poetry

Cinnamon Bread

March 1997 Of The Month
By: Rosa S. Clement

I think of you
while making this bread.
The ingredients in the bowl,
the thoughts in my mind,
blending in perfect amounts
with fond movements...

The dough, adhering to my hands,
being part of me, is like feeling you,
without wanting to be free,
concentrating my thoughts
on this romantic work
that now lies dormant,
in a ritual of waiting.

The raising, then the baking,
brings scents of cinnamon spreading,
trespassing the last crumb,
filling the house for days,
but comes to me
like your presence that I feel
following my paths,
keeping me company,
inviting me to breathe you deeply.

Copyright © 1996 Rosa S. Clement

Amazonian Mists

Peak Into Mine Mind

January 1997 Of The Month
By: Jessica Garver

am thinking of you constantly.
the string of thoughts waves not in my mind
but across indifferent airs,
spider webbing close to catch you unawares.
to shock you and bite deeply,
contagious is this disease.
i want you
i want to crack your shell and unzip my beautified one
i want to shatter your life and squeeze mine inside
steel legged animalistic i come for you

pretense of dignity
of social style
of wantonness lashed away...

sliding from my silky exterior by
needle thin straps.
i love you
i love you more harshly than my body betraying pleasure
i love you till my mind snaps nonsense sarcastically by beating heart
crystalline silver i sneak to you,
on my strained collapsing limbs i distance past barriers far.
needing you to need me
i open myself,
extracting your desires...
the widows promise is crisp indeed.

Copyright © 1995 Jessica Garver

Ramblings of a Hopeless Dreamer