B.E. Kahn

Snails, Worms, and Other Losses: Ode to the Worm

Dear earthworm! Precious, yet under-
esteemed as if all the unions of all 
the worlds paid little heed to and 
less reward for your daily transports.

You ve imbibed the likes of king,
sultan, president and spread their 
wealth, redistributed their worth,
enriched us with their treasure.

Your pudgy pinkness seeps
into the soul of everything.
I weep for your dank and joyful
travels, your big heartedness.

Your silent, steady ubiquitous roam
worldwide overturns the loam.
In revolutionary cells, you toil
so that the lily need not spin.

B.E. Kahn's poems have appeared in Harrisburg Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, California Quarterly, Mad Poets Review, Bridges and other journals.Among various awards, she received first prize at the Philadelphia Writers Conference, a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Grant and a Pew Grant for Studies in The Humanities.

Mary Phelan

Snails, Worms, and Other Losses

1.     I can’t recall the number of lives I’ve taken:
flies, ants, mosquitoes extinguished with a swat,
mice destroyed by poison
the squirrel beneath my auto’s tire
the meals of meat too numerous to count.
They say even vegetables suffer at the cutting.
And then there are the taxes for every decade’s war.

2.     On the warmed soft table at my annual massage
I am grateful to the young woman 
who sculpts and soothes each muscle.  
She must know their names, which I have long forgotten.
I think of a future day upon a colder laboratory table
where students will learn to name each striated length 
and every joint and thread of all my parts. 
And other lives will live off mine.

Mary Phelan lives in St. Louis, Missouri.  She has read and written poems for many years, and has enjoyed several poetry workshops.  She works part-time with a small communications consulting firm.

C.A. Lindsay

Snails, Worms, and Other Losses

A sneaky snail
with fatal feelers
slithered slyly 
in the dark
to feed on
my Creeping Charlie,
and when I picked it up
it hid,
as it did
in daylight:
a gift from France to bestow
the New World with escargot.

Carol Ann Lindsay began her writing career on Whidbey Island, Washington, where she wrote the column Safe Sam Sez for Crosswinds, Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. She later followed a career in San Diego where she was writer for the HomeFed Outlook, writer/photographer for NOSC, editor/writer of the Forest Service Gazette, editor of The California Eccentric and editor of the League of Women Voters Voter .

Lindsay's works include short stories, human interest pieces, columns for The San Diego Union-Tribune, Escondido Times-Advocate, Poway Chieftain, Corridor News and guest columns for The Daily Californian. In 1989 Lindsay began writing poetry which has been published in literary magazines (Old Hickory Review, Möbius, Z Miscellaneous) as well as commercial (Leatherneck, Magazine of the Marines, USA Today, The Poet's Pen) publications.  She has won numerous poetry and short story awards. Beyond Katrina and Stories of Strength, books with proceeds to assist hurricane victims include her works.  

Lindsay was guest author for Lynx Eye at the LA TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS and her poetry has been part of month-long juried art/poetry exhibits at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts, the Remington Club, COAL Gallery and the East County Performing Arts Center.  She was host of Carlsbad Corner, TV programs showcasing artists and writers on KDCI, and she had been featured poet on local CNN headline news during National Poetry Month.  

Roger Jones

Snails, Worms, and Other Losses

The least of nature
calls us to close attention.

Think not of the darting dragonfly,
quick buzz of escaping mosquito,
peregrine's stoop.  Blink
and you’ll miss.

Think instead of the snail’s one-foot sliding step
across garden stone, sinuous ooze of the earthworm
threading the throat of grasses.  Nature’s languid least 
require vast contemplation, geologic
commitment, tireless focus.

As with human life 
disaster springs:  false step, unobservant
reach, thoughtless word.  Life dislocates   

but good flows upon us, like slow
sunlight of a clearing morning, orange honey
from a cold jar, fog trickling
into a mountain hollow.  We can’t catch 
the good arriving   we can 
know it’s come.

Roger Jones, a philosopher of science and writer living in Berea, Ky., is exploring various dimensions of nature in an essay collection tentatively titled Dirt and Other Essays on Natural Law and Order.

D. Antwan Stewart

Snails, Worms, and Other Losses

Each day I spin yarns around my heart.
Lulled to sleep with no body to warm 

me, not even a dint in the mattress hints
I ve missed a thousand habitual nights of coupling. 

If the days weren’t so filled with birds  
quick-beat flapping, I may have forgotten the quieter 

tenor of fish leaping, flopping mid-air at sea, how 
this is the way in which surviving the dead becomes an act

of unkindness. Nodding politely to the woman
carrying her child on hip, I must admit the world does, 

indeed, continue to revolve: the moon 
cycles and tides excavate rubble, washes it

ashore, I know, just as I know dinner for two 
is too much dinner for one. Half the equation is missing

though my memory of you survives:
you sunning yourself those afternoons hoping 

if you perspired the toxins would scatter like a flock of crows. 
This is how I like to remember you

not the mattress worn smooth, nor the dishes filling the cabinet
with dust. But the sun ravaging you with light,

those birds lost somewhere in your body’s cast shadow.

D. Antwan Stewart received his M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry. He is author of a chapbook, The Terribly Beautiful (Main Street Rag, 2006).

Lesley Wheeler

Midden of Dreams

Every mat and pane and desk is sticky 
with ash from my son’s passage.  Sweat, yogurt,
spit, hair.  A shrine remains on the stairs: beer 
caps, pens, one meditative Lego man.

Near here, a house-framer’s son found a coin, 
Spanish, dated 1782.  
Little else survives.  Stains in the soil. Hand-
wrought nails, bottle glass, a thimble, buttons.

My sleepless toddler draws me in to his 
slow time.  Our contrasting speed blurs his face.
I rested like this with my grandmother 
once, fearing to touch the blue avenues 

that pulsed on her hands.  His bones ache to grow.  
Tonight I will dream of fixing my glasses,
fingers deft, eyes keen again, seeing 
what vanishes, what lingers for years, what matters.  

Lesley Wheeler's poems appear in AGNI, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a co-editor of Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv with Moira Richards and Rosemary Starace (forthcoming from Red Hen Press), and she teaches at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

Margo Berdeshevsky

Midden of Dreams

                                            Her death came forth   

fresh from the camellias       no one knew when 

she entered their breath       What they said of 

her was smoke and satin       weighted in song 

What they thought was woman       imperious for 

Rilke and cigarettes       hoping hard for 

her wicker chair in the       wild field, longing 

dazed to be kissed senseless,      saddle-bagged with 

poverty’s skirt and tie,      her paradigm 

the garret artist in a      forties dressing gown 

pale pages, petals’       lyric waste lay 

grey in her room with      the fallen white 

lady-flowers old with      their spill she will 

not now arrange them       among the ash, 

not wash the dirty dish        its word stays un-

written on her table       to the dawn where 

early death came kissing      young, he was kissing 

her, kissing smoke       and satin down 

                                                      (for Maureen)  

Margo Berdeshevsky lives in Paris. Her new book, But A Passage In Wilderness, will be published by The Sheep Meadow Press in November, 2007. Four Pushcart nominations, The Poetry Society of America's Robert H.Winner Award, Chelsea Poetry Award, Kalliope's Sue Saniel Elkind Award, places in the Ann Stanford & the Pablo Neruda awards, Border's Books/ Honolulu Magazine Grand Prize for Fiction. Her works are published & forthcoming in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Agni, New Letters, Runes, Poetry International, Nimrod, Chelsea, ACM, Traffic East, Kalliope, and others. Vagrant, a poetic novel, & an illustrated collection of short-shorts Beautiful Soon Enough, wait at the gate.

Jacquelyn Malone

Midden of Dreams

  ~Sarah Siddons, Drury Lane performance of Macbeth, 1785

The closer she came to the footlights,
the more shadowed the sockets of her eyes,
the starker their gleam. The Lady’s voice
stabbed, with a breath between each foreboding
word, croaking the fatal entrance of Duncan.
The audience fizzed with volts that stood
their hair, the women shorting out   fainting,
galvanized by evil enacted as a spell.

Applause was not success, she knew. The play
required a foil: foolish to the seasoned husband,
a cold coquette, a flirt in love.  Just kill the king,
my Own. Oh la, what is there to fear?

But her body   dark, potent, bold   trumped
the subtle, and she buried her reverie beside
everyday hurts, slights, indignities,
in a midden of dreams, where it waited,
almost hidden, in her restless, electric mind.

Jacquelyn Malone has published numerous poems in journals such as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Sou'wester. She has been a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship grant.

Ruth Knafo Setton

Midden of Dreams

Laughing behind his veil, gold chains 
binding throat and wrists, rings
circling each finger, he rises 
like the python from his basket, 
unwinding his six-foot speckled 
length into each curve 
of the charmer’s song. 

His chest gleams, blinds, and I strain to touch 
but the veil lifts and he slashes me
with a forked tongue. Down to Six   easy 
to Five    desert wind licks my lips, 
his kohl-lined eyes narrow   my Greek dancer,
my Tut   Skin Four, and only three more to go.   
The square yawns with me, late sun throws

dust into eye-slits and mouth-holes. Why 
are we here with the orange juggler? Listening
to the storyteller’s voice bruised with charcoal, 
tomatoes and rust? Look! From the balcony, 
people cheer against the rose-setting sky.
Ah! He tears off the Third Veil   
tears burn my sweat, 

burn his eyes. Don t look at me that way! shrieks 
a woman while her boys fight over a cone of sugar. 
I close my eyes but the howl of Skin Two 
rips the lids apart. His nipples aim at me, his teeth bite our past.
And now he dances on serpent skins, a little boy  
lashed by the whip, crying out, slowing
down, stumbling   wait!

The square halts: between sun and moon, 
rose-set and black-rise, his dance and my promise 
to never, to always   oh, don’t! please 
don’t peel off Skin One 
Gold rings and chains scatter like heads. 
The crowd screams in delight, and he giggles 
and points out every bleeding bit 

of flesh, every scar and whipping 
like the baby he is   remember when he wet 
his bed? the dragon who crept 
under the sheet? the girl who left?
Behind him, the charmer winds a snake
around his throat. Above him, tourists 
order mint tea. Boys climb a pyramid 

of oranges. He comes to me, 
eyes so shy and teeth blue-white, 
and holds out his palm 
sticky with paste and licorice,
moon map of wadis, craters,  
all we saw and did and forgot   
my little Tut, when will you stop
dragging me back? 

Born in Morocco, Ruth Knafo Setton is the author of the novel, The Road to Fez. Her fiction amd poetry have been widely published in anthologies and journals. The recipient of many literary awards, she is Writer-in-Residence at Lehigh University, where she is presently working on a new novel and a collection of poetry. www.ruthknafosetton.com

Amy Schrader

Midden of Dreams

If packrat-you and mollusk-me play house
or nest, what story will our strata tell
the gentle / rabid archaeologist?
Of course, it’s hard to say. Say bone, say shell,

say lithic flake. Strike flint to slab, make fire.
Grind stone, nose-to-the. Broken incisor.
We’re chipped & struck. You rake. You sugar-pie.
What meals cannot be captured here?

Sucked marrow, licked our chops. Our visceral
whiskers. Organs housed in a pretty pot
thrown on the wheel. Thrown on the heap, humble
sherd. With chiseled notes. We’re not Imhotep,

we re catacombs. Bring ibis, rams for Thoth.
We’re divine dreams–Dream Ostraca –we’re wrath.

Amy Schrader is Co-Publisher and Poetry Editor of Cranky Literary Journal. She has an MFA from the University of Washington, and lives in Seattle with her husband and giant goldfish, not necessarily in that order.

Richard Spilman

Midden of Dreams

The streets shine in the rain, first since May, 
and a passing car crackles like a skillet 
brought from the kitchen into the yard. 
The words we fleshed have paled to civil 
exchanges on the phone.              
                                      Yet when I crawl  
into bed tonight, I will sleep on the half  
you left me, and waking find the pillow 
between my legs. The drought is over, 
they say.
                 Before you left, we tilled 
the lawn, seeded and set out sacking for 
rains that never came. Now that things 
are green again, I haven't the strength.  
I want bare earth, cacti, words that cover 
the heart's fecundity like a bed of rock.

Richard Spilman recently won the New American Press chapbook prize for Suspension, which was published in October. He lives and teaches in Wichita, Kansas.

Chris Wilson

Midden of Dreams

or reliquary 
wing 
bones tracing 
the fragile stuff 
in which they were clad
in debris that doesn't
disappear 
the hidden world 
that dreams us.

Chris Wilson lives and works atop what was once the Emeryville shellmound, a massive midden on the east shore of San Francisco Bay.