Poetry – Page 4 – Novus Literary and Arts Journal

Gathering

Written by Francis Flavin. Posted in Poetry.

They talk of lavender love gardens

And epiphany in the peas.

Hunter-gatherers all,

Making new connections

With old principles and new friends.

Shoshone and Paiutes mainly,

Led to Ga-Du-Gi gardening

By an Eastern Cherokee.

There are visions of course.

We Whites like them set out on paper

To justify our involvement,

And the government funding.

The Native people don’t trust paper much.

We don’t discuss why.

We know why.

“Hoopsters” they laughingly call themselves,

With visions of hoop houses

Springing up like pinion-juniper

Across the high desert.

We write this down under goals and objectives,

And try to fit them into a Spirit Wheel.

Yet, we share enough of our own spirit

To bond with the unstated fears,

The unrealized dreams.

Outside the fresh air heightens our senses.

We have our own Wheel now,

Too ephemeral to discuss,

Lest it vanish in harsh realities.

Decades come and go,

But the Earth abides;

Ready to nurture and sustain

Those attuned to her rhythm and needs.

We are getting there.

Butte

Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.

My brother bolt-cuts a hole through the mesh

over the Family Dollar dumpster in Butte.

I lower myself through. Dull light mumbles

from the car-emptied lot, slumping

on day-old donuts, moldy seed bread,

a bulk bag of oats the rats have chewed through.

I hand up the bread. I hand up the donuts.

I hand up the tub of yogurt someone

bought, opened, tasted, and returned.

I go shoulder-deep through the yolk-crusted bags,

reaching––maybe fruit, maybe meat.

After awhile you can name what you feel.

Groping wet shapes with the tips of your fingers.

Lifting them up to your brother.

Southern Cross

Written by Diane Thiel. Posted in Poetry.

It wasn’t what drew me there,

but when I saw the Southern Cross

that year, visible all night down under,

turning with the hour,

it took me home, to my childhood

when I didn’t quite realize

what had risen

just above the horizon,

but I knew enough to know

I could keep that starry kite

if even for a little while

up above the boundary line.

I didn’t know it then, how special

the sighting was, my place in the world

far south enough to see it,

my hometown floating on the edge.

People looked right at the cross

and didn’t seem to notice

it was there

before it dipped below again.

Almost like a secret, that made it mine.

It was something I could turn to,

away from all the trouble,

and call my own.

Digging Out (for Richard Kirkwood)

Written by Jerry Krajnak. Posted in Poetry.

January

Split oak and hickory watch with stored disappointment

from under the pole barn’s rusted tin

as a year dawns too warm, uneventful.

A resurrected black and white cat

over an empty bowl shoots accusing eyes

after skipping me three nights. I atone

with milk and meat that he consumes

not with the ferocity my conscience demands,

but with dainty leisure and frequent licks

of those genteel paws I’ve seen him use

to snap the necks of doves.

Unforgiven, I watch him stroll toward the shedf

or a nap or for dessert, moving with casual indifference.

Patchy snow holds the slightest trace of his passing

destined for erasure by day’s brief sun

or for a new storm to fill.

February

Determined, I start in. I recall

as a boy that strain of muscle battling

sparkling snow so cold it squeaks under foot.

Years and miles of drifted white

distance me from that first ache.

But comforting heft of snow being moved

returns me to the white that is touching

white touching white down the hill

and around a curve in this new state

toward a road I cannot yet see.

Bend, slide, hoist, pivot,

sling the whiteness wherever—mantra

of flesh. Cold air brushes my face

as I muscle slowly forward composing

mental lists: Red wine, juice for Chance,

jugs of water, toilet paper and pasta

and beans, cracked corn for the squawking ducks

with pond ice slowly closing in, worry

over frayed wires in the well house,

electric heater running.

The cat reappears on the trail behind me.

A redbird on a bare limb watches both of us.

Bend, slide, hoist, pivot,

toss more snow, sink the blade again

into its heart, assess progress, feel warmth

on my back from slanting sun and cat’s eyes.

My eyes follow twin black lines from pole

to pole as they strain and disappear

around a last curve reaching for the road

one might almost believe lies waiting.

The Molecular Level

Written by Andre Peltier. Posted in Poetry.

With crutches and ropes,

her brothers helped her

scale the steeple of

Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge.

Swinging past the clock,

like from flying trapeze,

this nameless woman

reached the cross

and rang the lone bell.

Around the corner,

on Rue Sophie-Germain,

named for that jilted

mathematician,

you sat drinking your coffee,

drinking in the atmosphere,

replying to emails,

checking your account.

I watched her swing

from the steeple as you

studied Archimedes,

Fermat’s Last Theorem,

the royalist Cauchy.

I wasted time staring at her

flight, and you read

Recherches sur la Theorie des Surfaces

Elastiques.

I glanced back.

Our eyes met again as

if never before.

The chemical bond strengthened

and true.

A heteronuclear connection.

Atom upon atom,

we exist in the same moment.

We exist in the same

infinite life.

Neither created nor

destroyed,

our love is elastic.

We learn of the melting

Blackfoot Glacier

and Schrodinger’s equation.

The magnetics of our

molecular bond attracting us

again… again.

Suddenly, the ropes break,

the crutches fall

to the asphalt below.

The nameless woman

Lands with motionless

broken neck.

Inconnue on the police report,

like Sophie Germain on

The Eiffel Tower.

Le Figaro

suggested her right arm

was replaced by the scales

and toes of a chicken,

shrunken in her sleeve,

reaching for her crutch.

It was never proven

nor was that on the official

report.

You laughed it off on the

surface and on

the molecular level.

The Low Passions

Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.

The Lord came down because God wasn’t enough.

He lies on sodden cardboard behind bushes

in the churchyard. Wrapped in faded red. A sleeping bag

he found or traded for. Dark stains like clouds

before a downpour. The stone wall beside him rising,

always rising, the edges of stone going blunt

where the choirboy climbs. He opens his mouth,

but nothing goes in and nothing comes out.

Like the sideshow man who long ago lost

his right testicle to the crossbar of a Huffy.

He peddles the leftover pain. The stitches clipped

a week later by his father, the fiberglass bathtub

running with color, the puffy new scar,

the crooked look of the pitted half-sack.

He tells me you only need one nut, and I want

to believe him. I want to believe he can still

get it up. I want to believe he has daughters, sons,

a grandchild on the way, a wife at home

in a blue apron baking. But why this day-old bread

from the dumpster, this stash of hollow bottles

in the buckthorn, this wrinkled can of Pabst?

The Lord came down because God wasn’t enough.

Because the childless man draws the bathwater

and cries. Because the choirboy never sings

as he climbs. Because the bread has all molded

and the mouths are all open. Open to the clotting air.

Homeless, anything helps. Anything. Anything you can

spare. God bless you, God bless you, God bless. God,

Lord God, God God, good God, good Lord very good God.