Poetry and Images

The Onion, Memory 

Divorced, but friends again at last,
we walk old ground together
in bright blue uncomplicated weather.
We laugh and pause
to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs,
prehistoric, crenelated, cast
between the tractor ruts in mud.

On the green, a junior Douglas Fairbanks,
swinging on the chestnut's unlit chandelier,
defies the corporation spears--
a single rank around the bole,
rusty with blood.
Green, tacky phalluses curve up, romance
A gust--the old flag blazes on its pole.

In the village bakery
the pastry babies pass
from milky slump to crusty cadaver,
from crib to coffin--without palaver.
All's over in a flash,
too silently...

Tonight the arum lilies fold
back napkins monogrammed in gold,
crisp and laundered fresh.
Those crustaceous gladioli, on the sly,
reveal the crimson flower-flesh
inside their emerald armor plate.
The uncooked herrings blink a tearful eye.
The candles palpitate.
The Oistrakhs bow and scrape
in evening dress, on Emi-tape.

Outside the trees are bending over backwards
to please the wind : the shining sword
grass flattens on its belly.
The white-thorn's frillies offer no resistance.
In the fridge, a heart-shaped jelly
strives to keep a sense of balance.

I slice up the onions. You sew up a dress.
This is the quiet echo--flesh--
white muscle on white muscle,
intimately folded skin,
finished with a satin rustle.
One button only to undo, sewn up with shabby thread.
It is the onion, memory,
that makes me cry.

Because there's everything and nothing to be said,
the clock with hands held up before its face,
stammers softly on, trying to complete a phrase--
while we, together and apart,
repeat unfinished festures got by heart.

And afterwards, I blunder with the washing on the line--
headless torsos, faceless lovers, friends of mine.

- Craig Rain

Steven Kenny

A SOUND

      Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts

and reckless reckless rats, this is this.

- from Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein

Monica Cook

'Old ocean, you are the symbol of identity: always equal to yourself. You never vary essentially and, if somewhere your waves are raging, further away, in some other zone, they are perfectly calm. You are not like man who stops in the street to watch two bulldogs snarling and biting one another's necks, but who does not stop to watch when a funeral passes; who is approachable in morning, in a black mood in the evening; who laughs today and cries tomorrow... I hail you, old ocean!' - from Maldoror, by Lautréamont

John Kenn

Kevin E. Taylor

Coral in a souvenir shop.

Lathe and plaster.

Vermouth. The roof

of an umbrella's mouth,

vacuum sacks of dandruff,

gunpowder.

Sixteenth-century German furniture.

Hot-air baloon.

Ash.

- from 'Dry Heart', in the collection Crabwise to the Hounds, by Jeramy Dodds

Tanya Miller

The moon is meant for lovers. Lovers lose

Themselves in others. Do not see themselves.

The moon does. The moon does.

The moon is not a yellow camera. It perceives

What wasn't, what undoes, what will not happen.

It's not a sharp and clicking eye of glass and hood. Just old,

Slow infinite exposure of

The negative that cannot happen.

Fear God's old eye for being shot with ice

Instead of blood. Fear its inhuman blankness

Luring lovers.

- from 'Imaginary Elegies', by Jack Spicer

Two Photographic collages by Zofia Rydet