Flurry*

Carol Connolly*

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:18:52 -0500

I am out of words.
The radio, set to start the day,
plays a piano’s perfect sonata,
wakes me to a silent house.
The man who composed sonatas
and played the piano here
is gone. Now
I live with quiet.
I have no music. No words.
I decide to cook,
to clang and bang
pots and pan lids
make a big noise
upset the quiet,
but what one does alone
is often so small.
In the silent pantry, I slam
through stacks of cookbooks.
I need a recipe for weeping.
I am out of words.

Jill Breckenridge*

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 08:38:44 -0500

Five children fly across
the field, wearing red,
blue, white, green, yellow
jackets and rubber boots,
stomp, then stop stomping
in the fluffy snow, white
as dove feathers, flop down
flat on their backs, waving
arms and legs into the shape
of angels, five angels that
change the world, this world
so often gone wrong, change
the world in that single act,
when only this morning,
one’s mom cried over dry toast,
one’s dad slammed down the phone,
one’s best friend punched him,
and two were haunted by nightmares,
but now, those five mornings,
happening at about the same time
in five different lives, are gone.
In their place are five angels.
They rise from their silhouettes,
and walk lightly above the snow,
and everything they encounter
today will be touched by the
possibility of winter grace.

Carol Pearce Bjorlie*

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 08:18:56 -0500

Too holy for a poem:
     Full sun;
     glitter snow pouring
     through the pines.

Elisabeth Workman*

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:36:47 -0500

Somewhere is a surface entirely
Untouched. Snow is a surface
Until it sublimes. We are somewhere
In Mumbai in a stranger parade of
Wedding excess in a snowstorm singing
About sublimating lust.

The line not a line remixes. The line
Makes lusty our unrealistic. In the line
Our bodies pressed prohibit touching. We
Are the playback singers singing about
Simultaneity simultaneously, our mouths
Open in O catching the regrets of the previous
City. Dreams of technicolor snowflakes populate
This line in this city. The line not a line is
Not eternal not warm air aloft

Not wetter. O Mumbai. We are lengthy and
Wolf-like lounging amongst mangroves.
The city rises against our longing or simply
By chance. In a sub-zero cove of suffering
Mangroves we are the cells that make up
The body of the item girl. She sings a song that
Rattles the frozen leaves that crack
The seedpods that release a squall of
Pale cabaret dancers. Her song is our
Song about the faraway howl of the moon

And the lineup of stunt doubles auditioning
For Snow White and the I that is so centric and
Forgettable in this room that should be adrift in light
Of the neighborhood and the water stains on the ceiling.

Jim Cihlar*

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 08:18:45 -0500

I.
In Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, when Garbo leaves her life in Paris behind
to return to Moscow, giving up yards of tulle
for mannish uniforms, the screen dims to a chocolatey brown
then opens slowly as if waking from a dream
on an elaborate miniature cityscape
outside the commissar’s office window,
where flakes of snow, measured, regular,
impossibly slow, fall to the beat of the projector,
its whirr and click the music of snow.

II.
In Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, after Gary Cooper’s Forgotten Man
fulfills his promise to Barbara Stanwyck’s sensationalist reporter,
and lives for a year as a man who speaks his mind,
becoming what he hates most, a power broker,
he makes the hoax real
by riding to the top of the city’s tallest building,
ready to jump off. She shows up too,
and does what she does best,
talks,
because the movie is really all about her,
and her words come at him rich and creamy,
as the heavy, inevitable snowflakes clot the searchlight beams
beyond the observation deck,
saving his life.

III.
In Val Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People, a young girl’s
imaginary friend is her father’s dead first wife, Irena.
Because no one believes her, she runs alone
through the snowy woods of a Hollywood soundstage,
as if in slow motion, and her family chases her,
but she’s gotten a head start,
and we know in movie logic
as familiar as puberty
that even with search hounds
they won’t find her in time.
When the shadows turn syrupy,
and the snowflakes cut and glimmer,
she hides under the wooden bridge
while the clop and knock
of Ichabod Crane’s horse gallops overhead.
Ann Carter, the actress who played the little girl
later said she followed Simone Simon, who as Irena
wore a chenille gown dotted with sequins,
around the set between takes
picking up these bright stars.

Madelon Sprengnether*

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:36:52 -0500

Lying on the upper shelf, I stare at the walls and ceiling. Gray tile slanting one way, white tile the other. A smudgy line of caulk—like a finger pressed along a seam—which is not smooth, but nubbly. As if it, too, were sweating. Another skin raised and pulsing with the heat. One sits, one reclines, one hunches over herself. Women like odalisques. Slight crackling of coals, hiss of steam rising. Here, now. What you feel. Heat. Gray wall, white wall, glaze of pale flesh. Wintry wash of indoor light.

Leslie Adrienne Miller*

Thu, 6 Mar 2008 20:28:31 -0600

I try to escape from the sunlight’s stripe,
but its bright bar arrows down again
like some uninvited lover I can’t desire
because there’s just too much of his is.
The fête of erasure follows too close,
pressing its furry bodies over my hands,
my chalky knees, trying to convince me
of its ultimate sweetness, but I want
the shadow I follow with the little car
of my desk, shoving its nose at the darker
corners, mucking my toes in gloom. If avoiding
closure is the aim of a good postmodern bit,
then this pursuit of momentary chill is it.

Ed Bok Lee*

Wed, 5 Mar 2008 20:02:22 -0600

Slumped inside Hennepin County Emergency,
my eye wanders the wandering others,
each with no body to call a home at 3 AM—

Salvation shudders
blanketing hope to the music of CNN—

Sore-mouthed, wild eagle-eyed, prosthetic foot and shinplate airing itself;
a Black woman dripping red cornrows convenes
unconsciously with Jesus' mangled mullet—

The room, a marrow broth mid-December,
sweet and well beyond lust....

Or is this soulless cinderblock building
the warm, artful heart of God? And our spirits
in fact billowing a dozen white curtains?

This is the mind burning itself naked....
Meanwhile, the moon

recycles old love
through metallic ventricles;
casts shadows around

shrunken kidneys and livers....
An infant, bundled in the tattooed, AIDS-gaunt arms

of a Native woman, mewls
a dilapidated tune; reaches up
at a soft-snoring Somali girl’s sky blue head scarf—

Outside, a cloud lit
slowly wraps us in gauze.

Katrina Vandenberg*

Mon, 3 Mar 2008 20:02:16 -0600

I don’t remember what we were arguing about,
only that we were in public — in Hugo’s
on a Friday night, winter as much as it can be
in Fayetteville, and in case you haven’t been,
the red door to the cafe is below street level and
inside the heating pipes are red and exposed,
and the lights burn red as well. That night
it was so crowded it was hard to hear, so
we felt free to keep going while we waited
for a table — spiteful, vicious, everything
below the belt, the kind of fight where after a while
you have no idea what you have said
much less believe, only that you are trying
to stay afloat on your little raft of words
and not let the other party wipe you out.
But over the cackle of glasses and forks
we kept having to say What? Could you repeat that?
and You want me to cough? Even seated
at a round two-top too small to hold our plates
and the drinks we desperately wanted by then,
it did not stop. We sat in the red-checkered
red-lit din and let that argument swell and thin
like an inflating balloon, our coats
being knocked off our chairs by people
on their way out, and it wasn’t until we asked
the waitress what we owed that she said
Nothing; a stranger had paid our bill for us
and told her not to tell us until he had gone.
All the way home in the new snow —
silent, now, abashed — we wondered
who he was, if he could hear,
whether he loved or pitied us.

Freya Manfred*

Sun, 2 Mar 2008 20:01:19 -0600

Twelve white whooping cranes
their black beaks shining
float like spirits on the ice-blue lake.

And yet a bed of tears lies under me.
I cannot raise my eyes to the winter sky
as the cranes lift, one by one, and fly away.

Sharon Chmielarz*

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:33:32 -0600

From his doorstep he can see a path
where snowdrifts are less deep, like
a trail along the slope of a mountain,
where, if you rely on poles and go slow,
you could climb it.
The old man vows he’ll do it.
The old man with gray stubble on his chin.

Once he skirts the whale of a ridge,
the body that tails right up
to his house, then curls like a wave
or snarled lip, the rest will be easy.
With broomsticks, held broomhead up,
he’ll scale it, with two old brooms,
planted like poles in the snow.

He can feel the wind raw
on the back of his legs,
as if he wore gauze.
Up slope, down slope, without
friendly back-up, across the world’s
glacier to the garden shed, his base camp.
His breath huffs. His thumping heart cheers.

Todd Pederson*

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:03:45 -0600

Look, it’s snowing; snowing  here,
in Tokyo—on its
convergence
of heartbreak & these hopefully
green trees; over
sidewalks
taken with their brief,
unlikely lovers.

A whiteness arousing
Red Gate—I’m damp
with its attractive scenery, & know the way
stars
or drawn tears
repeat themselves in black
glass; how accumulation
measures my distance
from our past.

Though, I’m still
a pleasant
illustration—useless
window shopping—my autumn
hair interrupted
by snowfall
& streetlight
& each passing likeness
relit with faith in affection.

Abstracted,
I am the girl
cartoonists
& grown men fall for—
solitary, drifting
through Tokyo; beyond
railyards & teahouses,
to the absolute
tip of Japan.

Joyce Sutphen*

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:03:49 -0600

We are standing at the door after a party,
and a man I don’t know very well says that

I should write a poem about the moon
and the winter’s night, and now I wonder

what he had in mind—something about
a black branch against the white snow?

or something about the way we all hesitated
to leave that house filled with wine and

flowers to linger in the cold—the cold,
which might be what he wanted me

to write about—the cold that cracks the house
at midnight and slices through the air

like a sword slipping into its sheath,
or the sound of ice-skaters on the lake,

their blades cutting slivers of the moon
into the dark surface of the winter’s night.

Lightsey Darst*

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:03:34 -0600

Are you listening to this ocean, its wet lip? Or the neighboring field: all
that can be done has been, but I do believe my pomegranate will yield

a few sacred seeds (that silver treasure-tree), enough to alter darling you
from a terrestrial sop to the queen of shades—and do listen to that snow,

soundless in our ruined amphitheater where the usual tragic play
trundles through its second, bloodbath act, so kneel and say your steady prayers,

take tiny pills, remain a viable human. The king’s people have brought
spades and spears, the flowered ground is doubtless broken—and it dances, the thought

of building our own typhoon: a catastrophe all ours and high damage
at which we’ll laugh not cry. The daughters of the local cineaste await: fringed

with golden manmade light is Newman’s idol face, shines like ripe wheat hissing
from their mother’s scythe. Passion is a painful transformation, not kissing

your fingers to the flickering air but that flesh torn and partaken:
red cell with its hard center, rapture, whirl of those horses, & split ground aching.

Ethna McKiernan*

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:03:55 -0600

Instead of hands, we held
ropes in human chain
fastened ten feet down the line
to each man’s wrist.

When the white-outs came, snow
closed our throats and severed vision
back to camp. Then, we’d wrestle terror
worse than any avalanche.

It’s six long months
since the bush pilot dropped us
cleanly to our gear, and the folly
we’d imagined an explorer’s glory.

Today his battered Cessna’s scheduled to return.
Once home, I’ll steel-wool the fungi
off my unwashed chest
and never dream again, please God,

of the moment when the rope slackened
and the first of us was lost to wolves,
some said; though I alone carry the load
of a snow-stunned act: the letting go his cord.

James P. Lenfestey*

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:12:04 -0600

We live where city light makes time obscure.
We do not notice how bright day is,
how dark night.

One must travel half a world
for mountain priests
to catch the sun and bring it back again.
They know that if sun goes, hope goes.

Stars spin stories of our birth
and sing us holy songs,
but there's too much light between
to feed the heart.
The moon's open mouth laughs
or cries, who really knows?

Last night we danced and drank so late
the sun, stirred from its grave,
burnt off the frost that coats our hearts.
I reached to touch the hairs above your wrist.
They blossomed at your thigh.
Stars rose and fell and rose again
In the fire of your eyes.

Brett Ortler*

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:19:06 -0600

For a moment, the car floor like a wishing well.
A nickel and two quarters
under six inches, then a foot of water.
The interior displays still work
and moonlight floods through the hole
in the lake ice. The car is full of wet
and light. Enough to see plastic bottles
float like buoys, and receipts
wave in the current. More of everything pours in.
Carp swim through the high beams and scales flash
bright and orange as flint strike.
It’s past the windows. Your reflection rises to meet you,
your face and this life, merging.
It is like being born.

Charisse Gendron*

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:08:56 -0600

Cuddle into hollow or curdle it--
these are the temptations tonight,
as tallow turns to candle climbs to chord; halo me to heaven or harry me
to hero, new year. Either/or, hello, hell.

Redemption is this space. Girl, girdle it; spin solace out of silence
out of fleece; colander the calendar with holes, callow soul, while your
hair grows. That coral chorale eastward brings a word. Higher, archer.

Here's a face in the tree's bark, a wit, a wick to weal the panic
(pornic leer from cornice).
To pray not asking, scale not skewing:
Hoof it, capricorn. Hallow horror.

Connie Wanek*

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:01:01 -0600

Thaws have taken their toll,
and once rain fell across the white hills.
The snow is half ice now,
granulated and industrial, and the men
in the yard have lost their coal teeth
and are hollow-eyed and helpless.
They’ve been loyal to the picket line
all winter, watching scabs come and go.

Old snow has layers like a canyon wall,
a season precisely recorded,
what died when: fossilized crabapples
shaken loose by a historic wind,
feathers from a lost wren.
Soon the hardest snow will become
a black mirror on the road, and the luck
of this tough old town will turn.

Thomas R. Smith*

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:10:29 -0600

for Douglas Padilla

It’s an ordinary single-story bungalow in an old working class neighborhood. Cheap holiday lights buzz in the damp, mild air of late November. Strings of multicolored bulbs define dark, geometric volumes, as though bringing forward a negative house hidden under the solid, daytime structure.
I stand over a fluorescent swirl of paint on the floor drain in my friend’s studio, scattered feathers of an escaped Firebird. . . . That building, my friend remarks, was once a factory for horse-drawn hearses. To the north is a manufacturer of prison bars; to the south, the vaporous, Gothic glow of a still-functioning casket company.
The apparatus of bondage and death has us everywhere surrounded. Some serve it while others sleep, binding and burying, while they themselves hope not to be noticed, as the field mouse hopes not to be noticed by the falling sky-talons. Yet artists go on grasping the molten tail-feathers of the Firebird taking flight, and there are these brightly hued lights strung on porches, windows and gables by the same people who are otherwise careful to call no attention to themselves. . . .

Jim Moore*

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:02:30 -0600

1

My father, how he lifted

his glass at our wedding,
and with shaking hand
welcomed love into my life.

2

Getting out of bed,

you run the bath water
and I sleep a moment longer,
dreaming of a Greek island
and flowers in a deep cavern.
Very slowly I climb down
for a closer look.

3

Driving the December road to Madison

in winter sunlight,
Bill Evans on the radio. Maybe
this is actually paradise,
you said, and on we went
from there.

4

The pine tree out my window

tells me I don’t have to be afraid
for my own death, not even,
Love, for yours.

Tim Nolan*

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:57:53 -0600

It was cold today—noticeably—
cold—enough to make someone
from here say—I remember

how cold it can get—and this
is not as cold as it can get—
but still—cold—there’s some

truth from the North—in this cold—
What will become of us?—if it
gets colder?—(it will)—and then

we hunch our shoulders—we only
take forays—out into the cold—
we try to defy the cold—we must

blame the God of Ironic Angles—
the 23½° tilt of the Earth to the Sun—
for this—cold—about to become—

this snow—I dream of—this crisp
fluorescence—this—about to be—
of the cold—it’s so—exciting!

Patricia Kirkpatrick*

Tue, 1 Jan 2008 12:12:00 -0600

Of course there were voices in the night,
visions,
and the presence of dying,
that white, fringed place.
Shallow breath, narrow entrance--
the door to death opened.
Then there were steroids
and their lack of inhibition.
There was terror. I admit it.

Just before I learned the news
I realized all you have meant to me
and I thought I had too much feeling
to continue to see and spend time with you.
Then they told me I had a brain tumor
and it had to come out. Damage had already happened.
Seizure and aura, the grey dome of the growth
or a cathedral lit at the top where the cross is. Flora wrote
so much of life we find in the funniest places.

Boundaries. Love.
Cutting and stitches.
More blood than the surgeon had ever ordered.
I knew I needed your help
for the children, the family I might have to leave.

I am writing to say I can make the changes.
I am writing to say I have been opened and closed.
I am writing to say that today when the nurse came
to change my dressing,
she glanced up and said, “Oh, look, is that snow?”
We looked out the window and saw it together,
first flakes,
those white, fringed birds
flying, the first snow of the new season.

Deborah Keenan*

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 12:07:13 -0600

Seems shorter, except when it isn’t.
Trees with yellow leaves are holding on
To those yellow leaves. They can’t help it.

No snow pants in any store. But I shop
Rarely.
No kid I know skates for miles on a frozen creek.
No kid I know wears two pairs of mittens
While skating with joy to the edge of exhaustion.

Painters seem to be less accomplished at painting
Snow. Perhaps they do not want to learn how.

I mean oil paintings.

Children on my city street do not build
Homes of snow. Seem incapable of
Architectural brilliance. Perhaps I live
In the wrong neighborhood.

That’s what’s new about winter. What’s old
Is my hatred of the cold, what’s old is my fear
As I drive my old car through city streets
While other drivers careen past me thinking it’s July.
My unhappiness with winter is old, tarnished,
Tedious, rampant, boring. Crossing Howling
Wind Bridge my friend tries to comfort me.
Even he knows I was supposed to move
Elsewhere many many many years ago.
His words get caught in my scarf, or knocked
Senseless by the sleet, but his love for me
Always brings summer to my heart.

Elizabeth Weir*

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:56:32 -0600

Our snowman wears a yellow scarf and a red bucket fez.
Charcoal chunks curve in a smile, jaunty nose, a corner
of broken brick. His black bung eyes shine in morning sun,
twig arms uplifted, one mittened in gray, one in pink.

Our snowman wears time like a worn out jacket. Doubt
settles in every crystal. Teeth scatter at his feet; he lists
towards uncertainty. Red fez falls. One stick arm slips
from its socket. The other gestures at a vacant sky.

Margaret Hasse*

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:33:57 -0600

The grey bucket of morning
proves small to carry the heart.
A big heart sends its pulse
through a woman too sad
to shovel her sidewalk.
Something keeps hurting,
a sliver slipping deeper than skin.
The tongue feels around
the enclosure of its mouth
The spavined heart
tries to find footing
in a narrow ravine of thought.
Heart says to its own mind:
take a new direction,
the track you’re on dead-ends.
The horizon is available
only from a distance.
West of the Missouri River
range land rolls out
an area of minuses:
cold to the minus zero.
Under the tin roof of sky,
settlements sparse,
landscape spare as bones.
Snow drifts deep and hard.
A herd of pronghorn move
like a wave on a white sea.
Save our ship, the heart bleeps,
dit-dit-dit, dah dah dah,
dit-dit-dit.
Who else is out there
and in danger?
How can we rescue each other?
I want to reach someone,
I want a message back.

Wang Ping*

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:32:48 -0600

What more can you say
Nomad daughter of glaciers?
City has bleached the sun from
Your face, 18 years old
With a freckled nose, pearly teeth
Hides of yak, barley, sandy wind
Knees stiff from scrubbing toilets
What dreams keep you
Alive on the marble floor?

Drunken tourists and their nightingales
Money is the moon on Lhasa’s holy streets
In Beijing a storm drops 36 tons
Of dust upon the city of concrete
Nomad daughter from the Black River
What more can you say?
The wetland is becoming a desert
Home for rats, carcass of yaks

The hot tea you brought to my room--salted
Yellow butter floating from a distant factory
“It’s fake but tastes okay.
The real is gone, like snowcaps.”

Wind, breath, naked river beds
At dusk, a boy on motorcycle
Comes home with his last herd
Nomad daughter from the Sacred Lake
What dreams keep you going
In the glass cage of illusion?

Before the clouds
Cabs, trucks, mobs of fortune seekers
Behind the clouds
Patola Palace absent of its Buddha

Your ancestors are on the road
Nomad daughter from the Blue Treasure Plateau
Wooden gloves and padded knees
Long prostrations into the thin air
Their cry of never-perish ghosts
Calling you to keep the lamp burning, burning

And you shout to me across the street
“Sister, please find me a rich husband in America.”

Philip Dacey*

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:45:24 -0600

The February ‘06 blizzard, record-
breaking inches. I quit counting cars
stuck in the street: New York should import
Minnesota drivers for heavy storms.

Mother to child poking around in snowpile:
“Ava, if there’s a bird in there, it’s dead.”
Walkers out in force, but lots slipped and fell
(me, too). An invasion of Central Park by sleds.

Snow blown down facades: Manhattan avalanche.
Dogs find few spots to leave their calling cards.
Slogged to Lincoln Center just to catch
it stormbound--all that nature, all that art.

Overheard exchange: “I love this weather.” “Are you
being sarcastic?” “No, I really do.”