Some poems

A Saintly Wind Tunnel
- Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Our small and cramped spaces on earth are as
full of flowering orchids in full conflagration

as are those magnetic fields around planets vast enough
for whole fleets of spaceships to be lost in for
light years on their static way to

Paradise

This is meant as a sober treatise on our
glorious mortality as it sits within us just getting
comfy in our big easy chair when it suddenly has to leave

to go on to the cold outer ports and warm inner sanctums
of as yet unexperienced expectations

But how shall we get there unless joy take us in its
nets and subterfuges its ramps and volatile elevators its
sips from the secret glass that sits on God’s windowsill?

The place we’ve never left even for a moment
try as we might deny it as we try
the silken esplanade freeway to it given us at birth

without fail no matter how we scowl and carry on
if we have breath and heartbeat

and notice the shifting changes of temperature
against our sculpted surfaces within and without

though even that’s not necessary in the incessant
wind tunnel of divine light


The Tunesmith
- Matthew Shane O'Neill

See the fiddle hollowed ancient hourglass
Her hair draped over right eye to hide
Charged, taught, fired countenance modeled lass
Pint stands guard to side.

Unaware ears are being hypnotized
By tunes packed in back pocket
Her own mind truly mesmerized
Tune turning key to soul's locket.

Nimble quick fingers flying, marking
Old heartwood ebony with flawless precision
Bow touches steel strings with soundboard resounding
Wound tight as drawstring of Orion.

A reel meanders its way through smoky clamorous pub
While disregarding rowdies hoist stout beer
And those to The Tunesmith they dub
From airs bring forth unsalty tear.


Or Thorns Compose So Rich a Crown
- Eric Pankey

The greens — kingfisher, fern, cut shoot, mineral — constellate amid the understory.
Nicked with new wood, the crab and cherry relinquish the cold for the hard knot-work of blossoming.
Wild's ways less a text than ever. A gnarled language abandoned long ago. Holy week:
The dead-fall and leaf-fall clutter the path by which one might proceed. A far-off dog bark
And the scrupulous whistle of a mourning dove's wings foretell the coming travail.

Rain-light, but no rain above the watershed, rain-light giving way to night,
Night to a critique of night, propped up on a crutch of twin cedars.
For now, numb to contrition, to a fanfare's affirmation, I attend to the critique's hypnosis.
Last year's palm fronds are burned to render this year's ashes,
Ashes by which the marked are cleansed and the cleansed marked.

I stripped back the bark, and the green wood — raw, pierced by my thumbnail — smelled of mint,
Of the recollection of mint — faint, crisp, invasive like mint itself taking root where it will —
And thus the mint (truly a mere suggestion of a scent) seemed more cause than consequence.
Those who expect the miraculous, I've come to learn, find it. Those who don't are sometimes surprised.
I sensed other essences — cinder, anise, noon's tin-edge heat — but the green wood smelled of mint.

There in the gaps and makeshift rigging of a conjunction — the accounting of and and and,
The narrative of therefore, the detour of however — is no cure, but merely a mind at work,
Saying what it can say within the confines of its strictures, on the worn path of its habits.
I cannot corroborate the execution and demise nor the reported anomalies at the grave.
Or, I could continue, offer another story made of only the versions' contradictions.