Carnations—Or Are They Poppies?

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock, Antioch

POPPIES AT THE PARK-AND-RIDE
—Robert Lee Haycock

The hills are green
The new year, too
I'm off the bus
Riot of poppies at the Park-and-Ride
Orange as marshmallow peanuts and as big
More to come
Carrot-y leaves among wings of yarrow
Knots of white bloom as high as my belt buckle
Everywhere
There's that red-headed girl I've loved so long
And my Sassy yellow dog
I'm home

_______________________

DRAWING A BLANK
—Robert Lee Haycock

Drawing a blank
For the life of her
Morning couldn't recall
What she'd gotten up to last night

Sand dune eyes
Morning wondered
That taste on her teeth
Banana pudding and meringue

Snarl of tule blankets
Morning pulled them up
Over her frosty shoulders
Decided she wasn't rising today

And told the insistent Sun
To go fuck himself

 Yogini Contemplating Flight

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock

CROSS STITCH HANGING
—Lelania Arlene, Sacramento

I used to feel a Tapestry, a plethora of caprice,
Something to grow on, a tale in every inch, not an "I’ll get around to".

Now I am something of a decrease, reduced to a piece,
Something you tore off and used to cover a hole in the sole of  your shoe.

If not to be whole, a real story, an object of plunder to yet fleece,
A sugar tit, a soother and toother, of succor to you and you and you.

My story was folded and I traveled as book cover, shyly creased,
I soaked in tears, as you fingered rosary comfort in familiar tattoo.

We were born again as a bonny pair of dolls, plump with generous fleece,
Secrets were told, sometimes atop a satin pillow, at others muddied, outgrew.

I once was the only adornment of the loneliest, onliest niece,
A headband, folded over in reassurance, smoothed until gleaming new.

I lined a nest of pinky mice, cradled them in colored thread, alas Mieces!
Pieces and pieces of value in relation to— with never a self to attend to.

_____________________

IN MY SIN
—Lelania Arlene

This cat named Tree broke it down like this in drag-speech,
He says he knew it was wrong when he looked and saw her teeth were framed in black like tombstones.
He said I was in my sin gal at the crossroads of the sick corner, I was in uhh breach.
I watched them all fall to black-framed teeth and blackmail, they be yeah, jones.

Not your never-mind , they chorused as they all joined each other in their sin-leech,
Until they got into their sin, over their greedy organs and missed the upright of they bones.
Then they cried for help, but I couldn’t even hear them, man, for I was yeah, outta reach
I was far from the sick corner, keeping to my own sins, yeah uhhh outta they hustle zones.

_____________________

YOUR MOTHER
—Lelania Arlene

The hips of the clouds opened up,
The deluge began.
Reflections of perception in shards,
Forgive yourselves, children,
You needn’t blame your eyes,
Your heart saw what was needed to be seen.
Your universe like a smooth stone that you put in your mouth,
You could not help yourself.
It was shiny and felt good.
Violently you dance in protest,
Then you calm and stretch before the majesty.
Hush, it is good, child,
It is not the red shoes of man.
It’s another womb.
It cannot be fought,
You can only seek to kick or nourish.
Hush, it is your mother.

 That Way Home

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock

THEY OCCASIONALLY SELL RED FLOWERS OUT
ON THE CORNER, BUT I THINK THEY’RE POPPIES,
NOT CARNATIONS

—Kevin Jones, Elk Grove
 
“Cheer up, sir, and
Buy a flower off a poor
Girl.” I would. I did.
Eliza Doolittle.
I was Henry Higgins,
Or rather George
Bernard Shaw in a
Play about them both
In a Little Theatre
Production, oh, thirty
Years ago. 

I’m sure

It was red carnations
Back then. Theatre
Wanted, they thought,
Back then, to take
Chances: fifty years
In a country barn
(Hey, my father’s got
A barn; you’ve got
Costumes! Let’s put
On a show!) Really.
And never a bad review.

Hubris is not good for
Theatre, nor anything else.
They bought an old
Bakery building, there
On the town square
There in Canton Illinois.

You could look it up.  
And we’ll do edgy theatre,
Or what would pass
For it, in central Illinois.

Dear Liar is the story
Of Irish playwright
George Bernard Shaw and his
Muse/lover/leading lady
Mrs. Patrick Campbell
Told in letters. Over forty
Years. Was not difficult
To age forty years between
Act one and two: baggier pants;
Loose suspenders. You walk old.

Imagined it was not going
Well opening night, when
I noticed the local drama
Critic dozing in the front
Row. She was gone
By act two, but somehow
Shaw and his paramour
Got to the end together.

We’re not talking Lear, or Hamlet,
Or even Charlie’s Aunt here.
Play got reviewed on
The front page of
The local paper: “Not like
Normal drama.”
I was flattered. 
But ticket sales went down;
Theatre couldn’t make
The payments. Lost
The winter theatre.

You can still go visit it.
A Goodwill store now. 
Still see the sets,
Buy the costumes.

_______________________ 

Today's LittleNip:

THE KISS
—Lelania Arlene

The wet awakened the city and its scents,


I hear the kiss of tires on the licorice road.


Open the window to wildish nature,


Feel the illicit thrill of night’s last breath. 

______________________

—Medusa

—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock

Dreamer on the Shore of Dreaming

—Poems and Photos by Joyce Odam, Sacramento

ALL IS MOST DANGEROUS TO ITSELF
        (After "Empire of Dreams" by Charles Simic)
 
Wakings are paragraphs, page-turnings.
Always ‘what next’…

Wantings are hollow at both ends.
Never filled.
Like hungers.  Like answers.

Truth is like time.
Slippery. 
Hard to reach  / grasp / explain.

Let us not talk about sleep.
Let us not talk about dreams.
In this dream—

the experience is urgent—
has yet to get through to the dreamer
who will not allow the knowing.

BOUNDARIES OF NIGHT—

those divisions of unreality
when time is a trickle
down a window, like rain,
but soundless, like shadow.

I stare through the glass
and note how moisture and stillness
are the same—
as long as I do not look away

into the vertigo—that plane of being
out of scale in the mind,
or a letting-go
of free fall.

Something always claims
a position of belief
to defy the indisputable
with a laugh to disarm. 

Credibility is forfeit—
accusation always bears
more weight than innocence 
on which to base belief in belief. 

THE INDECISION OF DISTANCE
      (After “…the incision of distance”
             by Shaun T. Griffin)

. . . sweet lines of distance
river away
slow and meaningful
   
panels of air divide
and separate
into breathing areas
   
the black sky holds its
darkness—its cold
emptiness—no moon

landscapes like this
are for dreams
ever-shaping and changing
   
. . . slow and meaningful,
sweet lines of distance
that river away . . . .

THE DREAMER AND THE DREAMED
        (After "Four Panels: Nude and Seated Figure"
                                             by Matisse)

There is a slight shift
in the four panels of two nudes—
one sleeping—the other held
in the four positions of waiting,

the dream passing between them
until they reunite as one—
the dreamer
and the dream,

outside the sleep of the other,
her face in trance—
leaning against
the darkness that is the sleep.

In the fourth phase,
the dreamed one rouses—
struggling against the abrupt distortion
of the dreamer about to waken.

FIVE STANZAS FOR SLEEP

It is not so much
that sleep is mad
with its pretending death, but O
that old activity of dream
it takes me through.
All I abhor
when half-awake with my gray living,
all that my secret wile
is guilty of,
it makes me do.

I commit my thoughts
to some bizarre disgrace.
I love beyond all real participation
in that game,
with love a whimper
hushing to an ecstasy.
A strange composite
of the never-found and almost found
fills my soul with eroticism
deep as the true religion
that I yet would find.

Alone and held
in the web-like center of sensation
I feel the motion of a sound
that spirals down,
my body hypnotized
and heavy on the bed;
and what equals it
begins in me—
magnetic-senses, metaphor
of opposites that best decipher
me with what I seem.

A dark, eternal bird-Soul
whispers back from time,
finding my heaviness,
miraculous-winged in me
and lifting.
I fly that childhood dream again,
never arriving,
only the silent joy of going,
safe in the darkness
humming in my mind.

Betrayed and fallen,
lost in the country of myself,
I walk along dark water,
thin breath high in my throat,
the water softly lapping. I desire
that swimming, though
this water is my unmet fear.
I weep the edge of sleep,
dreamer on the shore of dreaming.

   
(first pub. in Nightshade, 1967)

________________________

Today's LittleNip:

LETTING GO OF DREAMING

I go toward myself in the role of dreamer. I float into
the surrealism of sleep. Moving deeper and deeper, I
am everyone I meet. The pullings behind me fail and
let go. I am my own completion, but now I am without
voice or body. I wake, weeping.

_______________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Joyce Odam for today's cuisine, and a note that this week's Seed of the Week is That Woman Selling Carnations. What do you know about her, or those customers she deals with? Send your poems, photos, and artwork about this or any other subject to kathykieth@hotmail.com/. No deadline on SOWs, though.

The TG's

If I Could Read the Writing...

—Photo by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

SWEET DREAMS

—Taylor Graham
 

The full moon’s bright as an owl’s eye

for luminous dreaming on a night

like this. Turn out your light. Ease into

sleep. A magic mountain beckons

you to journey along its winding cliff
-
edge enhanced by drop-dead views.

Far below, a river slices rock

with dream’s incredible precision

while a storm of wings gathers above.

With an eye made quiet by its

power, the eagle stares down from its

aerie. Its eye is silver-golden

moonlight. By its logic the wing-storm

transforms to clatter of moon-scree

blocking the trail ahead and behind you,

not quite slamming the dream door shut.


______________________

FAIRY TALES
—Taylor Graham

On the shoreline, a large dead bird.
Lucy came this way, a pleasant spring walk
beside the lake, before she’d disappear
into pine woods on the far dark side, and there
my dog would find her, safe as a child
in fairytale. A swan-princess feigning sleep,
rubbing her eyes, ruffing my dog about
the neck. Lucy would tell me how she’d seen
a swan floating its sweet dream offshore.
        But this transformed the morning:
on shoreline, a large dead bird, sprawled
unlovely, neck and wings unnaturally awry.
Was it taken by surprise, a gust of wind
plunging it free-falling out of sky? A heap
of feathers. Sun’s light coated it with gleam,
buried it in glisten. My dog sniffed once
in its direction, turned away. Birds are
not his business. He resumed his trail, led
me to Lucy, safe in the deep pine woods.

_____________________

A GREEN BEYOND
—Taylor Graham

I’m stirring lime juice into a slaw, mechanically,
contemplating while you sing Sweet dreams
baby a little louder than the radio, Toscanini
conducting Beethoven’s 6th, a green pastoral to
ease my heart. I wish you’d leave off singing.
I’m thinking of a history someone told me,
the green slope above an almshouse, patients
suffering from life beating their wings against
the windows. At last, each one lies under a
numbered metal marker, not a name, on a green
rise sacred as any of God’s creation. Music
beyond our words.

____________________

ON THE HILLTOP
—Taylor Graham

Up here, the woods are full
of ghosts of trees; game-trails through
the brush like a map to mysteries
rooted in the bones of people too poor
to pay for their lives. These
are the ghosts, or else it’s the fog,
mists that inhabit the hills
behind town, closer to heaven.
Sun rises first here, and sets here first
as well. l find no headstones,
the dead can’t afford a stone. Miners
moved the rocks around
and cut the trees for shoring,
for beams and shingles, and ended up
here penniless. We’re left
with the aching of place. Shall we try
to mine what sparkles
in the stars? There are an awful lot
of stars. This is how
the mysteries go on without us.    

Eye of the Quartz

—Photo by Taylor Graham

KADAMBARI DEVI
          (sister-in-law to Rabindranath Tagore)
—Tom Goff, Carmichael

You married a noble talent, but played with genius.
Girl fingertips drummed him a tabla beat; your part,
to shock into dream the handsome young abstemious
voice of East Bengal. Song like the point of the dart.
Playmates too richly dressed to romp in sand,
you capered across grand vistas of literature,
a solemn young India, yet never too grand
to distill rough laughs into raucous caricature.
Your flame licked out its crackling tongues of fun,
raged red, white, extinct, so ardent the desire.
What comes to a girl who orbits—this feminine sun—
that masculine star? Your heart pulsed blood-red fire.
Soon that fist clenched tight on one white spark of girl.
Clamped shut, the dark oyster admits no sand. No pearl. 

______________________

Today's LittleNip(s):

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
 

—Mark Twain

***

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
 

—Oscar Wilde

***

We've removed the ceiling above our dreams. There are no more impossible dreams.
 

—Jesse Jackson

______________________

Our thanks to the TG's (Taylor Graham and Tom Goff) for today's tasty fare. About his poem, Tom writes: Ever since I heard about Kadambari Devi (you've probably known of her for quite some time) and her mysterious suicide, she's drawn me in imaginatively.

The complications ensue for anyone trying to understand her from an outsider's perspective. I wrote the poem and only then learned, looking the matter up, that there is only one woman tabla player accepted into the ranks of men. And that other women who do play it can only do so within the narrowest circles: family, or the smallest and most intimate gatherings. (This from Maha Mussadaq, writing for the Tribune Express. Oddly enough, then reader comments poured in correcting, naming this or that woman tabla player. Still, probably a tough gig for women to aspire to.)

So the image of Kadambari playing tabla is all wrong, and in a way right. It's really metaphor. I have no idea how musical she was, though she was educated and an intelligent friend and critic to Tagore. Apparently, though, she is the figure most often mentioned when Tagore's enlightenment about women's issues is the subject...I see her, too, as the "playmate" she's often called.

Thanks, Tom! A note also that Trina Drotar will be starting a six-session bookbinding class at Crocker Art Museum tomorrow night; contact her at www.trinaldrotar.blogspot.com for details about this and other classes she has coming up. What poet can't use a really cool bound book?

______________________

—Medusa

North Ridge Rock

—Photo by Taylor Graham

To Smash This Night

Wall

—Photo by Katy Brown, Davis, CA

AS I GREW OLDER
—Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun—
My dream.
And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky—
The wall.
Shadow.
I am black.
I lie down in the shadow.
No longer the light of my dream before me,
Above me.
Only the thick wall.
Only the shadow.
My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!

_______________________

—Medusa

For more info on Langston Hughes, see www.poemhunter.com/langston-hughes/biography/. And go to the Webilicious red web in the green box at the right of this column for more Harlem Renaissance poets.

Also: there will be a Martin Luther King, Jr. tribute tonight at Sac. Poetry Center, 7pm. Be there!

Mysteries We Must Carry

Mike's Buddha

—Photo by D.R. Wagner, Locke, CA

—Poems by D.R. Wagner

BRINGING HOME THE STARS

She said she was going to bring
Home the stars.  Can you imagine that,
Someone bringing home the stars.
She was wearing her long stocking cap
And that night there were an awful lot of stars.

 Century Plant

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

ON THE CLIFFTOP

I lost her in the circuit.
I just kept waking up.
I started to think everywhere
Was home, trees, the middle
Of a field, my own bedroom,
The places where people were walking.

We were born in the water, weren’t we?
Everything I’ve picked up in my hands,
Lately, I have broken in one way or another.

I noticed that you had departed with the day
By the time I reached the cliff top.  There wasn’t
A note or anything.  I went to find the lady
Who lived near the Big Tree.  She knew everything.

“She’s in the circuit,” she said.  “It was like an aquarium
Up here a little while ago.  People looking in, moving
Around rocks.  Schools of them.  Some were pointing
Toward the oaks.  The fog was coming again.  People
Were out in the woods making rafts to get to the island.
Rumor has it they were going to make meth out there.
We can’t let anything like that happen.  The island
Is still a pure place.”  I walked away.  She was still talking.

I woke up again and then again.  There were brands
On the palms of my hands.  I hadn’t seen them before.
I am sure there is a chapter and verse for them somewhere.
I loaded everything I had on my back, called the dog and split.

 —Sketch by Kari Kiyono

(ON THE SUBLIME)
—D.R. Wagner, in collaboration with Luan Fauteck Makes Marks 

This is as constant as the stars we dream among.
This is beyond illusion into endless night sky.
This is channel for radical inter-galactic connection across this space.
The is particulate matter absorbed through skins and out through fingertips.
This is the web of touch that draws at supersonic speed.
This is infinitely grand conception beyond comprehension.

 —Sketch by Kari Kiyono

ORPHAN GRINDER

Well it wasn't blood, just a maze of pipes
Rusted and blistered.  The air was sweet
With iron dust.  Our skin had turned red
From battling our way through the labyrinth.

There was a kind of music made of rocks
Being crushed slowly by the aching of place.
No one should ever have been here, and yet
Here we were once again, searching for the secrets.
We were unafraid.  Death fears any rhythm.

We are in the hole that is the night.
So much of our bodies has been broken,
Parts that won’t work properly, thoughts
That have been borrowed to even allow us
To speak.  We watched as the water kept
Rising up the pipes, layer after layer.

Things we remembered:
We could withstand a lot of pain.
Memory helped us but we could not
Touch it.  We all had different names for love.
When we breathe into each other's mouth
We feel we are alive for a moment.

These rusted pipes.  The stairway,
The distant barking of the dogs.
The time we thought someone was smiling.
The complete absence of flowers.
The people praying for nothing but to be beautiful.
The fires flickering on the ends of the children's fingers.
The collections of mysteries we must carry in our hands.

________________________

Today's LittleNip:

 —D.R. Wagner, in collaboration with Luan Fauteck Makes Marks

_______________________
 

—Medusa

Where Key Street Meets Itself

—Photo by D.R. Wagner

Come In, Justin...

Rembrandt, San Juan Capistrano

—Photo by Stacie Sherman, Orangevale, CA

PALAK*
—Rhony Bhopla, Sacramento

Unfortunately, we
must
murder it:
the inevitable knife
spears
through living flesh
making a cauterizing sizzle
when the stalk is
severed.
The green, flat edges
spurt with a slice
bending
sloshing in its own wet
meadow
under the
rolling blanket
of dough, compressed
with all mother’s might.
Tel garam ho gayi?
Is the oil hot?
Ji ho gayi.
It is.
Burning to smoke
and like green paper edges
of money
singed inside layer after layer
is the purely kneaded
batter-soaked palak.
This while the smell of brackish bile,
uneaten, falls on tight lips
waiting for a bite of
strength.

(*palak = spinach)

 The Golden State, Pine Hill Preserve

—Photo by Stacie Sherman

IF THE FAUCET COULD SPEAK

it might say that too many hands twist its knobs
with such force that its gaskets loosen

it might say that it’s tired of all the goop
never cleaned from around the handles

it might say that it wants to view its reflection
in the chrome but can’t

it might say that it wants to be taller and more
forceful in its flow

it might say that the water is too hot or too cold
or perhaps the water’s just right

it might say that it’s not too old and the new model
is not as reliable, even if it saves water

it might remain silent, grateful that the old dishwasher
no longer needs to cover its mouth


—Trina L. Drotar, Sacramento

_______________________

POMEGRANATE WINE
—Trina L. Drotar

Bottles were tucked in the back of the hall closet
because, she said, they needed to be kept in the dark.
I like pomegranates, the tiny seeds that squirt and
tickle the tongue with a bit of a bite, that tangy
tartness that arrives each fall.  I’d open the closet
every day, check the bottles.  They remained
tucked away for months until I was sure they’d
been abandoned.  I don’t know how many seeds
gave their lives to be crushed and liquefied and
left to ferment in the back of our hall closet where
coats we never used and suitcases and who knows
what else resided, but that was some sweet drink.

Sierra Newt, Buttermilk Bend

—Photo by Stacie Sherman

IN GUATEMALA
—Tom Goff, Carmichael

And here you’re the central child among young children
clutched for a laughing selfie: everybody mug.
Despite that tongue you just stuck out, you could fill men
with Mayan thought fit for a cinnabar burial jug.
Even the jug-eared boy, the littlest one
cuddling you for the lens, his English poor,
divines by waters within just where’s the fun;
looks outward unused to your quivery, spritely allure.
Oh hoyden! Yet you do good things for these kids,
you’re helping build a stout irreproachable house,
of gravity like the dark-braided dark-limbed sister
you’re teaching the classic “rabbit-ears” that lids
her brother’s head. May no one stifle or douse
this boisterous silent noise. Your hands will blister:

The lovingly mortared breezeblock abode will rise.
For them, you’re forever non-Spanish,
         fine dimples and joyous eyes…

_______________________

VIEW FROM A SELVEN HILLTOP
—Tom Goff

From treetop level, all we see is leaf,
soft lobe or tough blade, tall stalks or trunks, plus long
suave waters: were they not constrained to reef
up against low mountain, distance would gong
out liquidly twisting echoes past the horizon.
What birds and animals there you’ve come to know,
I’ll never know: they’ve hid, they won’t bedizen
the selva Aztec-jeweled as Mexico.
These trees keep poisons and cures: do they have here
what tempts you to drizzle your flesh-of-the-plantain skin
with healing and danger, with untried medicine?
Once long ago, such blue-to-the-depths and clear
warm bays drew my feet in dizzy, as if from height
atop pyramid steps for lost ones short and slight.  

The Shoe, Santa Anita

—Photo by Stacie Sherman

A PAIR OF TWO
—Carol Louise Moon, Sacramento

Moss green and two shades of pink
past which two white bunnies wandered

clutching silver purses, one on each
open arm, strolling hand-in-hand,

whistling two lovely tunes
on the second day of May.

On breezy spring days my twin and I
would crouch near the garden gate.

I loved Short Bunny with sequined purple vest;
she adored Tall One with periwinkle shawl.

Let us join them.  Falling in line behind
we dance into sparkling sunbeam.


(first pub. in Updrafts, 2007)

_________________________

ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS…

says Brian.
Only the Nose knows,
says Madelyn.

The Nose knows
what it knows, Madelyn.

Well, it goes to show
when it snows
the Nose knows best—
Brian.

If the Nose knows best,
then put it to the test.
Does the Nose know
what the Shadow knows?

How do you know
what the Shadow knows, Brian?
I think you’re lyin’, Brian.

I think you’re just mad,
Madelyn, because
the Shadow knows more
than your stupid Nose knows.


—Carol Louise Moon

________________________

COOKIE CUTTER DREAMS
—Carol Louise Moon

Wasn’t it Grandma who told us
    about cookie cutter dreams—
where you go to bed with
cookie cutters near your pillow

(hopefully the plastic kind)

and you punch the air with them
so that when you fall asleep
it’s easier to dream about
Scottie dogs and daisies?

________________________

POOH BEAR ON SNOW SKIS...                   

...slides down my pajama leg,
his turquoise muffler wagging
from his little stout neck.
The light-blue flannel hillside
bespeckled with oversized
white snowflakes
is a delight to both our eyes
this January day.

I sit in my kitchen—
kettle of water boiling
warming the air of our delight.
Farther down my pant leg
I see that Pooh has turned around
facing uphill, one ski
overlapping his other.

What… tea? he shouts from below. 
With honey?

—Carol Louise Moon

_______________________

ZARIAH: THE MARCHING PROPHETESS
—Carol Louise Moon
 
Beyond the zeal of Joan of Arc marching
through echoing halls of trial and defeat;
likened to Queen Victoria in hair and
precise pronouncements of edict,
And I’ll not clean my room;

the prophetess turns on blistering heels
and retreats to pink chiffon-windowed
chambers.  Barbie-statued walls and a
portrait of a big, green affectionate ogre do
little to console this loneliest of maidens.

Falling on unmake chenille and a goose-
down pillow, the tiny maiden weeps droplets
of irreconciliation.  Why this—the heaviest
burden of all three-year-olds! The heart
has not known, nor the eye seen, the misery
in store for those made to miss
Saturday morning cartoons.

Anonymous Photo

Today's LittleNip:

JUSTIN THE HOSPTAL ORDERLY


DREAMS OF A GOOD DAY
—Kevin Jones, Elk Grove

Nobody hurts,
Nobody dies,
And nobody
Wets the bed.

_______________________

Our thanks to today's contributors! About her poem, Rhony Bhopla writes: Here is a poem called "Palak" which means spinach in Punjabi.  It is inspired by "Ode to Tomatoes" by Pablo Neruda.  It was read recently at Sac. Poetry Center for the International Poetry class with Frank Graham. And about his LittleNip, Kevin Jones writes: 

Was a hospital orderly once upon a time.  Would knock on patient’s doors:

“Hi, I’m here to take your blood pressure.”

“Oh, good morning, Doctor.”

“No a doctor.  Just an orderly.”

“Come in, Justin.”

______________________

—Medusa, noting that there is a new album on Medusa's Facebook page, thanks to Annie Menebroker: Poets at the Shine. Check it out!

Kevin Jones, who is NOT in his orderly uniform...

Poet-Exiles

Angels Among Us

—Photos by Katy Brown, Davis, CA

—Poems by B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA

CITY SPARROWS

Here we are poet-
exiles, gnomes
or vagrants migrating
with a seasoned
destiny like sparrows
but with no one
in your specter
to take you in,
perhaps people think
we are curious
a bit eccentric
like hesitant words
in muffled speech
and language,
perhaps another poor poet
in the Americas
will recognize me
through his glasses
jumping over hills
or at intersections
of the winding sky.

____________________

WHITMAN AND I

You managed to arrive
early in my life
while budding ideals
surfaced along two Coasts
in subterranean joys
as I climbed up to dive
in a flow of oceans
having traveled
cross-country
having cut short
all circuits
to my becoming a poet
surrounded by birds and fauna,
Walt, nothing is foreign
to us, neither springs or
waterfalls nor language
of alembic alphabets
cools our tongues.

 Wolf Moon Rising

SILENCE, EVERYWHERE

Sheltered
by the silence
behind trees' first light
of a wintry vacation
maps our hours out
on a park bench,
I'm slowly drawing
pictorial sketches
from haiku
when red ink
falls on the hands
by my melancholy watch
brushing away
odd-and-end thoughts
as suddenly as photographs
in music as a cat
crawls under a park bench
with a frozen numbness
alarmed by the voice
of the poet I hear
in my spirit
Dylan Thomas
reading "Under Milk Wood"
wanting only to drink
at the local pub
as familiar faces
run from the cooling breeze
of the fountains.

____________________

A RUNAWAY'S CALL

Would you mind leaving
me off at the bus stop
in San Francisco
a runaway needs to make a call
back east
who has run out of bread
and grief
in a cavernous dawn
bone-tired
yet happy by practicing sax
half the day with shadows
in silences of musical directions
with a winter's pawned jacket
covered with memory echoes
and new riffs
of angel-winged spring.

 They Also Serve

ARTHUR RIMBAUD
(1854-1891)

Touch me
with your ephemeral spirit
of an exiled acceptance,
jostle me, Arthur
with your travel passport
under Africa's blazing sun,
grant me words
that move me with wonder
to share your secret language,
gently forgive me
from your open shirtsleeves
with no self-doubt
between your hands,
Remember me, Rimbaud
when my words are printed
on city graffiti walls,
whisper to us
across rented rooms
in the rainbow underground,
heal me
from your wounds
in the house of a friend.

_____________________

ART'S REPORTAGE

Life is an agenda
full of charades
whether played
on soprano sax
or jazz fiddle
drawing ink portraits
it's a mind-bender
in the middle
of the road
on back alleys
or city hallways
in front of jams
traffic or music,
against a mountain
of winter storms
or in an avalanche
of sunshine
by paper flying cranes.

 White Horse

ELVIS LEFT THE WORLD

Hey, man on a roll
here is an eightieth high-five
to you, brother Elvis
still near my light shade
of my animated dawn
on our January 8th birthdays
so life won't be cruel
to us,
rock on through the night air
reaching us in invisible breath
from the hands
of first-light recognition.

______________________

Today's LittleNip:

A WAY TO GO

A tapestry of red rugs
pointed from a blinding light
to a poet's secret language
we exist waiting
for understanding
as a verse suddenly
suddenly fills a watching eye
grateful to be astonished
by emerging spaces
of a fragment of a universe
in gestures of trembling
yielding a collection
of sheltered nature.

_____________________

—Medusa, thanking today's contributors and noting that there are a heckuva lot of readings in our area today—scroll down to the blue board (under the green board) at the right for all the details! Please note also that today is the deadline for the next issue of WTF! See rattlesnakepress.com/wtf.html for submission guidelines.

Guarding Left-overs