Unshod Quills

on the theme of Childhood

5 poems from For Coming Forth By Day

FOR BEING ANY SHAPE ONE MAY WISH

FOR NOT PERISHING AT SUNDAY LUNCH

Mother kills my joyride in the new red Opel.
Says his breath stinks. He roars off without me—

With my last stick of Juicy Fruit and a thin mint.
I drink more sweet tea, pout and wait

For my grandfather to finish banana pudding
And the story of Mother baptizing kittens.

Rescue lights race us on Raleigh Road, as red
As the car flipped in the fallow field.

Mother jumps the ditch in church heels,
Her daddy right behind.
We wait.

PSALM 43

I rustle the bulletin to make a fan;
Mother shoots me the eye, shushes.

Why cast down thine eyes?
Sweats the preacher. His chins jiggle.

Why so disturbed within,
Put hope in Him. I stare down.

Lace socks, white patent toes.
Where does hope hide?

I ask me, eye scuff marks.
I find lost keys with him.

MAKING A THIRD-GRADE SOUL
WORTHY TO MRS. MINNIE LEE LONG

Mrs. Long doesn’t like erasing.
Any mistake, I copy the page again.
Even if at the last sentence.
Even if my hand cramps.

If I erase, I need to know
That very second
The ghost of the pencil
Leaves without a tear.

Eraser shavings smell
Like forgotten socks,
Cling dingy to lined paper
Or scatter across my desk.

She holds up bad examples:
Messy math, crumpled spelling,
A hole in history.

THE PUMPKIN MAN

As I land for my father’s funeral,
My first plane ends in an orange orb:
Dawn lifts off the runway.

More poems by Ms. Woodard

MY STORY FOR THIRD GRADE
(After Mrs. Long Fixed the Spelling)

Slaying dragons requires lots of planning and practice. You must listen very carefully in dragon school. Dragons hide themselves. Sometimes they pretend to be kittens and just when you stroke their fur they snap back into dragons. But as long as you pretend they aren’t dragons they cannot eat you. That is the rule. You have to pretend hard even if your head hurts.

Other times they look like dragons, pretend to sleep outside your bedroom. I tiptoe to bed, guard against dragon thoughts. If I sleep before they creep in, I am safe until dawn.

MY DIARY, AGE SEVEN

My Diary, Age Seven

I am in a bad mood.
I get sweet. I help Daddy
fix supper. Daddy makes Mother
a pretty birthday dinner.

***

My nose bleeds at my cousin’s wedding.
I am the flower girl. The white dress is itchy
Hot. Mother pulls my head way back,
holds tight with a big wad of wet tissues.

***

My pillow has a problem.
The feathers lump up.
Mother says it’s been loved
Too much. Was her pillow too.

FAMILY ALBUM

My parents run
Through wedding rice.
She is 19. Hopes her linen suit
Makes her look mature.

***

My brother at three plugs a gap
Between holster and hips
With a bear plucked of fur.
He stuffed his nose and ears
Till Mother bribed him with guns.
His pistols drag the ground.

***

I am starched at four
In pinafore and smocking.
A hand cups my chin.
I stare where the photographer asks.

Author Biography

Catherine Woodard lives and plays basketball in New York City. She swerved to poetry in 2001 after an award-winning career in journalism. More poems about a Southern family miming Egyptian death rituals have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. She co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from The New School and is a 2011 fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a past president of Artists Space and a board member of the Poetry Society of America, working to return Poetry in Motion to NYC’s subways.  Her recently launched website can be found here.

Sons of the Silent Age
(on the theme of David Bowie)

on a rare evening not yet shot dead
my own whispered pacing fades across
the carpet through the lush echoes of
a vinyl caress to witness
another crossed out calendar box
on the kitchen wall,
a snake-line of black Sharpie
trailing behind

crumpled papers scatter and run low on heart
as somewhere in the walls symphonic voices from
old Berlin crush the soul of another son
of the silent age

too often, watering plants in the moonlight
feels like any other opaque lie
and fingers tremble over spilled ink,
inflamed pages, idiot remorse;
I can’t stand another sound
is all I hear in my rotten ears
and the last grain of time finally slips away
to reveal
the three hands of the clock gliding
in and out of life
in and out of sight
and in the heavy blink of your silken eyes
I realize I am finally tired
and I crawl to the waiting bed like
a dog into the hole where
he buried his bone
to sleep the good sleep I’ve
heard rumors of through all these silent ages

__________

Strawberry Fields Forever
(on childhood)

their house was made of brick
and the strawberries grew
in their fields like gasoline wildfire

the fields surrounded
the house on all sides, and they
went right up to the house,
built about a century
ago by strawberry farmers
now maintained by an elderly
strawberry farmer, his wife
who stared down from
the second story
window of that brick
house, and the farmer’s grown
son, who walked
around with some uncertain
handicap of the body
and mind

I picked as fast as I could
when the farmer or his
slower son spoke to my mother
or to other nearby pickers
or when the old woman
stared down
from
her window tower
watching us

but when they
were all gone
I ate berries fresh
from the dirt

no one needed
to wash those berries

they were stymied
with bugs often
enough, and were small,
but they were real
and they were raw
and juicy in the summer
sun
and I recall the sweat
of that sun falling
down on us
as we picked up
our full baskets (my
stomach also full)
and walked to the porch
of the brick house

the farmer’s son always
wore overalls, blue
jean overalls with dirt
scuffed around his
knees and ankles,
and he’d talk kindly to my
mother in a slow stilted cadence
as if he were reciting to a class
of students who might
mock him, but
we never mocked him

I knew he was just a strawberry
farmer’s son, and even then
as a child I realized
that being one was better than being
like most other men I saw in the world
—with or without the handicap

and sometimes the old
farmer was there, too

sitting on his porch
tired and talkative and
older than any man I had
ever seen in my life
and they’d take our few
dollars and we would
walk back to our car,
load the car, drive away

maybe we’d be back later
that month, or that summer,
sometimes we never
went at all
many of those summers
went by, the absent
summers, and I am glad
I have not been back since
the age of eleven
or twelve

I don’t want to see how
the old woman no
longer watched from her
window tower
or how the old man no
longer sat on his
porch in the sunlight
and I don’t want to see how
the farmer’s grown son
dealt with the banks or the funeral
homes or the land investors
or the neighbors or the
nurses at the hospital
or the whole world
crashing down
around him

I want to close my eyes
and look up from
the dirt, the rows of fire
engine red strawberries,
and see them there
all of them
and see my mother there
picking beside me
putting each strawberry into
a yellow bowl

put one
more strawberry
in my mouth;
never open my eyes
again

_________

The Night No One Went Home
(on childhood)

potshots from the gristmill
and away we go a’running

weedstalks tough like tire irons
thumping polecats skitter wild

in August, we dream of October
in October we dream of honor,
and we know a ghost is waiting

someone set fire to the gristmill
the summer after the shooting

the coupe still sits burnt out
amidst the wishing field of grain

the wind runs through that grain nightly
the moon watches with envy

children think they are alive
especially when they play dead

potshots strike the hollow oak
where we once thought of honey bees

and owl eyes in nighttime fevers;
the moon a great dying tilt-a-whirl

and this I promised to promise—
with a match left in my pocket,
I’ll wait for you come, Autumn
lest I burn it down alone

_____________________

as the sowing, the reaping
(on love)

fear oiled the mechanics of our love
and in the reproductive silence that followed, you opened
gifts a day early, wrapping falling to the floor
mingling with popcorn spilled from a paper bag
from which we each pulled greasy specks and chewed
in the quiet of October, red leaves stuck to the windowpane

the mistake too often made is giving small books
of poetry from unknown publishers from Portland
or Fort Collins or Montpellier or Louisville;
the first pages are fingered gently by each of you
a sense of wonder and worry thriving in the veins
the books are gone soon enough on trains and jets
never seen again, forgotten, unread, lost
always lamented over, wishing they formed a stack
in my study corner rather than a troubled mind

on most nights, those books were worth the trade,
other nights, though—not a page would I barter for a single
image of you against the dawn of that last day together,
pictures and pages in the fire of this heart’s eternal uncertainty;
curling black pages like their raven hair; gone gone

_______________

The Raped and the Loved
(on the theme of coffee)

the art gallery displayed photos of the raped
and the children they bore, hated, and one day
learned to love, women with long nimble weeping
fingers and toes, slender souls of nonpareil scar-tissue
that writhed and sang in a dirt-floor celebration
of militant reinvention, spring-loaded renunciation,
and the most unkind joy the godless world of man
and his guns and his machetes has ever known

they served coffee and European beer and someone ranted
midwest polemics and another of economic recoil, and many
a bitter word of oil companies retched across the room
as the ivory white smiles of the raped looked on,
their little reminders of a man’s murder-lust holding their hands
or sitting on their laps, or standing beside them, trying to help
carry the burden of the repellent world on their shoulders as the most
stunning blue light caressed the African skies behind them,
nothing at all like the disemboweled orange din hovering over our
American sprawl, where the machetes are dull, the smiles are
numb, and the raped and loved go equally unnoticed

Author Biography

James H Duncan is a New York native and is the editor of Hobo Camp Review, an online literary magazine that celebrates the traveling word. James has twice been nominated for the annual Best of the Net award and once for the Pushcart Prize for his poetry. He is the author of five collections of poetry and short stories and has appeared in dozens of print and online magazines around the world. He now resides in New York City where he works as a freelance writer and as a writer/editor at American Artist magazine, where he has published numerous articles on art history and contemporary realist painters. His website is at here.

Poet Stephen Caratzas on the theme of “Red Shoes.”

Paris: The City of Lights; Amsterdam: The City of Red Lights

I’ve been thrown out of better countries
let me tell you – and you know what they
say about the French? It’s pretty true.

I mean this guy nearly had an aneurysm all
because when I was buying my ticket for
the Eiffel Tower (they sell them by levels,

you know, how high up you want to go, etc.)
I say: “All zee way to zee top!” And for
emphasis I open my eyes wide and strike

an Emile Zola kind of pose. Fucker threw me
out. But I digress. Now Amsterdam – there’s
my city, and a city just made for people like

me: crude, sexually er, curious, shall we say,
liberal, free-thinking. Hey, I’m okay with two
women want to get it on together – so long

as they allow a buncha guys to watch, that is.
They have everything there and they flaunt it.
Recollect a fine young woman, called herself

Monique (in quotes). My GOD, she murdered
me without half trying. And that was before
I even set foot in her room! I’m walking by, see,

with a goodly lump of nice hashish in foil in my
right-hand pocket, minding my own affairs,
checking out the sights if you catch my

drift, and there she was! Sitting in her window
on this high-backed bar stool kinda thing backwards!
and munching on peanut M&Ms with a bored pout

that almost made me cry. She takes one look
at my face all lit up like a pinball machine and
knows she’s made her bundle for the night.

So, we negotiate a price, set the timer, the
whole routine and while she’s getting ready
she’s asking me where in America am I from,

do I like baseball, etc. etc. and then she goes:
“Who are you weeth?” Who am I with? And
a little confused I say Baby, I’m with you!

“No, no,” she laughs – beautiful laugh – “Who are
you traveling weeth?” Oh, that – I’m here solo:
museums, hash, pot, museums, that’s about it.

“Isn’t that a leetle boring?” She makes that
pout again. And steps out of her scuffed red
pumps. And I say: “Oh, no, not anymore.”

Author Biography

Stephen Caratzas is a writer, musician, and visual artist living in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Gregory Crosby, formerly of Las Vegas and presently of New York, on beasts, lipstick and transportation.

B.

– on beasts

Beauty still kills me; what can I say?
You die from a fall only the once.
They say I have no concept of time,
but I can count the lengths I’ve gone to:
five fingers, twenty-thousand fathoms.
I’m the one God forgot to invent,
so you had to do the dirty work.
I am heavier than any chain,
& I’m still slouching, but not toward
anyplace except the hollow heart
of grief, the original House of Pain.
They say she was sorry, that she loved
me, in her way. You could hear it in her
scream, I guess. Love can make a Beast of a man.
Of a beast, love can only make sense:
a mind, clear, above a wounded yowl.

GC

Lipstick Traces

-on lipstick

Whenever I think of lipstick, I think
of Marlene Dietrich, shot in the back,
at the end of Destry Rides Again,
& falling forward into Jimmy’s Stewart’s
embrace, she wipes the red from her mouth
with the back of her hand & dies into
one, pure, unpainted kiss. I always wish
he would grab her wrist, & fasten his
mouth against her scarlet (even in black
& white, Marlene’s lips burn redder
than all the memories of roses)
& smear her all over his decency,
his cheeks, flushed with it, kissing her as if
her blood soaked his sleeves, the bullet hole
black beneath her heart; not just the powder,
the echo, of a blank from a prop pistol,
somewhere in Hollywood, 1939.

GC

The Greatest Journey Begins With the Smallest Misstep

– on transportation

The iceberg just couldn’t wait to meet us.
Oh the humanity, that quavering voice
as hydrogen blossomed bouquets of ash.
The guardrail, twisted, a toothless grin
in a flash. Cartoon plume of smoke, midair,
as the engine sang tra la, the bridge is out.
Wings afire, like a little prayer
to Icarus. Head over handlebars
for your love, we barely cleared the fountain.
Soon we’ll writhe as our atoms scatter:
yet another transporter malfunction.
Somewhere in time, someone still stands above
a dying horse, gun out. It’s true, you know:
getting there is half the fun. So start walking.

GC

Author Biography

Gregory Crosby’s work has previously appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, Rattle, Ophelia Street, Poem, Jacket, Pearl,  and The South Carolina Review, among others. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. Prior to that, he was an art critic in Las Vegas, Nevada (which still works as an icebreaker at parties).