SELECTED CONTRACT POETS
1. Lizi Gilad -- Fermentation
2. Sari Grandstaff -- Pool
3. Greg McBride -- Medevac Chopper
4. Jan Steckel -- Nightkeeper
5. Keith Chopping-- A Room In Belsize Park
6. Gillian Lynn Katz -- Adjudication
7. Dorrie Johnson -- Facing the Darkness
8. Carol Townsend -- Passage
9. Brad Bisio -- In Front of the Stone
10. Pete Mackey -- After the Fence
11. Ken Masuda -- Mennonite Girl, 1957
12. Steven Pelcman -- The Young Wife
13. Betsy Content Bogert -- Sighs
14. Susan Kornfeld -- Christchurch Earthquake Blues
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1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1
FERMENTATION
I.
A Los Angeles evening and the sun slashes the sky
to orange and pink ribbons.
Just a few blocks from the weeds
and chain link fences of Dogtown,
there’s a Venice Beach street
where palm trees lean into perfume
and money jangles like hammered bangles
on knife-thin wrists.
II.
This moment’s hot restaurant steams
the boulevard with bodies.
Two new lovers sit at a front table,
all fingers and lips, feeding on flatbreads,
spiced nuts and olives jammed with pimento.
They swirl the wine in their glasses,
smooth spinning tops,
and sip the purple burn.
III.
Outside, a passerby hands a bottle of water
to a beggar slumped against
the restaurant’s glass wall.
He turns the liquid charity over his head,
a private toast to the city, a million shattering beads.
And concrete drinks it all in: slap or shuffle
of shoes, laughter, mad dogs barking
in the distance.
~~Lizi Gilad
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2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2
POOL
Reclining in an Adirondack chair
inebriated from the sun’s ripple
I watch the lifeguard’s whistle
dangling over the concrete, chlorine blue
where goggled redheads bob
and sleek eel-teens
hula-dance off the boards
into the ice-cold water
mornings of my own lessons -
treading, stroking, shivering.
Goose-bumped and red-eyed,
we charged the waiting matadors,
who waved our open towels,
lightly tossed down flowered flip-flops,
our blue lips not yet stilled
by life’s promised heat.
~~Sari Grandstaff
Main Channel Voices
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3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3
MEDEVAC CHOPPER
Looking up, it occurs to me,
It could be
a hummingbird. The way it floats and quivers
over the clearing.
But the rotor blades blow
a storm of wind that howls the dust and pebbles,
pelts our eyes, ripples the paddy beyond.
Settling from side to side, surfing a shaft
of driven air, its blast spasms and flattens
high grass until the skids jolt onto the pad.
Now we rush as a scrum into the clamor,
bend to the force pushing at our chests,
reach into the cargo bay and find the war
delivered again to our hands, soldiers
on stretchers arrayed like logs. One leads,
one follows, hefting the load, schlepping
to the ER, which is tethered to weather
the gale, its air-stiffened walls trembling ahead.
Our sweaty hands slip round the wood handles,
the whipped air now at our backs. Wounds weep
and pool on bellies, and with each strike
of each boot, IV lines swing wild in the wind.
Off duty later, we peel away
the fatigues and closely inspect
an arm, a leg, our own shaven heads.
~~Greg McBride
first appeared in River Styx
also in Porthole (Briery Creek Press, 2012)
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4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4
NIGHTKEEPER
A dragon bites her, from creamy small of back
to hip to groin, buttock, back of plump thigh
knee, calf, ankle, heel, delectable toe.
Red scaled pain’s a phantom twitching
its nettle-spiked tail, but where’s its lair?
The spine? The brain? Abnormal cords
that twist through shrouds of spinal lining
and out bone holes down the leg?
Is it in the pinch of scar impinging,
or disc fragment compressing?
A rusty joint, or just the squeeze
of spasmed muscle? The nerve
on CT swollen to twice its normal girth?
Or in pain fibers found fewer and larger
only at post-mortem cross-section?
If she could find it, hunt it down,
she could fix it or kill it.
But a molten ghost rages through
the body’s sinister side, from L5 to toenail.
It’s made its den there for twenty years,
till it can’t be disentangled from the self.
Maybe it even lives in the brain
and only thinks it’s in the back.
No St. George of the scalpel’s
been favored by God to hack it out.
No poppies can put it to sleep for long.
No song of self-care, no meditative mantra,
no hypnotic chant or New Age cant
can touch the invisible beast hunkered
over its leg of woman, chewing,
chewing.
~~Jan Steckel
The Horizontal Poet
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5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5
A ROOM IN BELSIZE PARK
A room in Belsize Park and a Seventh Symphony –
Well there has to be something other than watching mice nibble at
Every crumb of ragged carpet.
They say the nights are drawing in , I understand, as the day paints itself by numbers, the sunset
Drains the palette. Leaving us the sleepy pallor of too-faded jeans,shrinking to fit in with each
Cough and blink between coffees and cigarettes.
A room in Belsize Park and someone’s dream caresses the dregs in the tired china tea-pot.
Sunrise over NW3 – rain and shine bursting from the panes of almost Hampstead shops.
High Noon in Camden Town – the pool tables and cold pork pies beyond the grey of Camden Lock, pot and swallow my siesta.
Evening home in Belsize Park with its saucepan’s broth curling pictures of the famous on the wall.
Like a voodoo victim I curl with them.
I would almost like to pray and pretend my cupboards are confessionals –
For sometimes wisdom creeps inside a room in Belsize Park.
~~Keith Chopping
Inclement
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6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6
ADJUDICATION
for Thyrza Lombard
In the New South Africa
the Xhosa Sangoma genuflected,
threw bones on the dusty green
carpet by the handwoven
Lesotho rug,
in the bedroom of the cottage,
the white woman’s
deathplace.
Mashinini the son of her garden worker
strangled her lifeblood
with a shoelace.
She penned checks for his uniforms
and education,
bailed his father out jail
in the Old South Africa.
In the New South Africa
the Xhosa Sangoma chanted
and prayed by the handwoven
Lesotho rug
put a curse on Mashinini
to spend the rest of his life
in prison. The white woman’s
children
paid the Sangoma
four thousand rands.
Mashinini got twenty years
in the New South Africa
for murdering his mentor
with the Lesotho woolen rug
woven with ancient
tribal hands.
~~Gillian Lynn Katz
http://gillianlynnkatz.net
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7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7
FACING THE DARKNESS
When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it…
Rain strikes, relentless.
I wait for its diminishing.
Far off
the sky breaks.
Light lances
deep-layered cloud,
glances on raindrops
falling
to puddles,
to mirror
a fractured sky
back to itself.
In the heavens
the colours of the world
arc a promise
for those who face the darkness,
their backs to the sun.
~~Dorrie Johnson
Ministers-at-Work Journal No. 85 April 2003
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8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8
PASSAGE
Mars was closer to earth that evening
than it had been in sixty thousand years.
Tethered to twin oxygen tanks,
you struggled up from the chair,
shuffled across the living room,
navigated the dining room’s
wrinkled rug ravines,
crossed through the kitchen,
out the heel-biting door,
down two steep steps,
over winter-heaved bricks
to the edge of the patio --
you, an earthbound astronaut
awestruck at the sight
of the red orb hanging low overhead--
but all I saw were the tumors
in your lungs, how on the x-rays
they looked like pinpoints of light,
like constellations in a black night,
like planets way too close.
~~Carol Townsend
The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Vol. XVII, No.2
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9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9
IN FRONT OF THIS STONE
(conversation with a father gone.)
I don’t know
what the hell I’m doing
here. I don’t know why
I keep coming back.
What do I think you’re going to do,
rise like some god-son Jesus?
It’s like both of you are gone.
Mom barely leaves her room,
goes on the back steps to smoke
in her night gown and slippers, that’s about it.
They almost shut the electricity off
last month. Don’t freak, but I’m writing
the checks and signing mom’s name. Still can’t
balance very well. Looking at the Sun
behind that Elm, it’s got to be
at least an hour now….maybe more.
Remember how you used to tell me,
Would you get yourself
a goddamn watch for chrissake.
I don’t have much use
for time. When the afternoon bell rings,
I go home. When it’s dark,
I sleep. When there’s light,
I wake. I eat when I’m hungry.
What are you doing eating cereal
at 5 o’clock? That’s not dinner food.
Tonight I’ll make rice and bean burritos
and steam some broccoli for us, if I can get
her to eat. That’s a decent dinner, right?
There’s plenty of room for your beer now
in the fridge. What does it matter anyway?
We’re all going to die.
I don’t mean to imply
that I told you so. It doesn’t make me feel
any better. You were right; math is important.
That doesn’t help either.
I hear your headstone words when I’m not here:
If There’s Nothing New Under the Sun,
Go Above the Sun
~~ Brad Bisio
Innisfree Poetry Journal
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10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10-10
AFTER THE FENCE
It took days with a crowbar in his hands
Swung full force, one rotted board at a time
Taking the brunt of the steel and splintering
Or breaking loose of the old post, a doorway
Flung open toward the abandoned pasture
With each board removed, then wrenching each post
Loose from the ground and its shadow with it,
Post by post rising with him as he rose
With his grip under the nails the boards
Had hung from and let it fall at his feet.
He let the fire take care of the rest,
The wood turning to cinders and ash
That found updrafts with the smoke and spun
On currents away from him or discovered
His sweat and became a graying second skin
Over his bared back and arms as he shoveled
Dirt into the postholes that darkened under
Him as they filled, until his shadow lay
Flat upon the surface he had made
Whole, and he had nothing more to do. Time
And the ceaseless spread of grass and weeds would fill
In where the fence had stood and the land would
Seem as if it had never been broken.
He would have what he had decided on –
This clear view, this piece of earth he was letting go.
~~ Pete Mackey
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11-11-11-11-11-11-11-11-11-11-11-11
MENNONITE GIRL, 1957
She always wore a dress one size too large
that covered all except her hands and feet.
And only wisps of golden hair escaped
the simple cap perched neatly on her head.
Destined to be a farmer’s wife, she sat
in classes of irrelevant history.
And rarely did she ever speak a word,
my neighbor in sophomore biology.
She left school at the legal age, sixteen,
a man to wed and family to start.
To live in this world, yet apart.
~~ Ken Masuda
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12-12-12-12-12-12-12-12-12-12-12-12
THE YOUNG WIFE
She has lived the last year
With the scent of death
Walking her husband at 23
Shaving his face
Watching him sit on the toilet
Holding onto flimsy paper
As a child holds onto
A security blanket
Afraid in the dark
Then taking his stooped body
Wrapped in blue terrycloth
Back to bed
His frail fingers
Picking at loose threads
With the confused ease
Of children pulling wilted flowers
In a forgotten field.
In runs her three-year-old son
Searching for his reflection
In Daddy's colorless eyes
And all the while
From the bedroom's hidden corner
She rubs her own thighs
With fingers that sneak away
From the dying
To vacation on layers of skin
Only he would have known
And as she takes out his shirt
To wear and rub
His old sweat against her breasts,
Remembers how easy it was
To be a wife.
~~Steven Pelcman
The Windsor Review
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13-13-13-13-13-13-13-13-13-13-13-13
sighs
he sighs for the 36,947th time.
she can't help keeping track—
she was always good with numbers.
he freezes mid-motion whenever she asks
if he'll help with the latest fix—
a bandage here, an ache, there.
he clenches half-fists to his side.
she hates the way they're able
to punch out her air without effort.
his sighs pierce her like razored icicles.
she purses her lips—tight as superglue—
so he can't hear her scream.
she recalls a hazy glimmer
of better days, when his touches
were like sparks from angel's wings
madonna tears fall unbidden.
she tells him she'll have to write a poem—
his silence speaks in his place.
he's a good man—he loves her.
but sometimes, she wants to shake him—hard—
and put him back the way he was.
the poem feels like a betrayal.
~~betsy content bogert
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14-14-14-14-14-14-14-14-14-14-14-14
CHRISTCHURCH EARTHQUAKE BLUES
June is a damp rag–
the east in gray folds,
ocean heavy and limp.
I’ve had enough
liquefacted sun,
hills that can’t stay up.
Love no longer grasps
me in the salty riptide
of its outflung arm,
just mutters like brittle letters
rustling in a jar.
I wish I were a filled envelope,
addressed to the khaki water
and turquoise sky of La Boca.
I want a black-eyed man
in a splendid white shirt,
lean as a knife, lethal as tango.
~~Susan Kornfeld
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