My father acquired a million bullet holes,

withered like a sick flower while standing,

struck by a swift lightning in the afternoon.

I asked him why our dog licked his wounds

and spat on his white jacket.

I asked him why the parrot flying overhead

dropped bags of excreta on his forehead

and he wore his shame like a retreating wind

across his shrunken, weathered face.

He went to several wars, including the war

where our village masquerades unveiled a threat

about the looming massacre of our women;

my father was among the few brave men

who carried cassava leaves like the women

and defeated the men bearing a thousand arms.

His alignment with bravery was so deep

that there could be no cleavage for weaknesses.

My father was not breathing; he was not speaking,

though standing was quite a shrill lament.

He stared at me with eyes like stones in a river,

like the sediments of sand in a ray of light,

bloodshot, dead strawberries and dried peaches.

He grabbed a piece of white paper

and scribbled the history of his death;

your mother has a sword under her tongue,

a sharp knife, a blazing blade, a spade

white like the spiked diamonds of alluvia,

when it cuts, it’s deep and raw, that death

cuts off many deserts to arrive on time.

The fish is swimming in a murky meadow

with the fevered flourish of a flushing effect.

It’s the flint of a stone, the cinder and the salt,

scraping the outer surface of my body,

leaving me raw, wet, naked and bony,

in the cravings of the sun or the consumption of air,

in the fire, eating up the dreams of our ancestors.

In the dream, crushing the heart into blackberries,

your mother’s tongue is a caterpillar and a grasshopper

dredging every blood, emptying every intestine

into vessels meant for ghosts and spiders,

where I wear dust and sand as a survival suit.

I was a butterfly buzzing around my father,

thinking of my mother’s tongue every day.

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

(Image is a of a curious friend who lives in the Illahee Preserve in Kitsap County, Washington, USA)

with the Romanian gypsy woman

whose waist length black hair

and black lustered eyes

mesmerizes my attention.

I breathe backward.

She, of the white flowing blouse,

which can barely contain

her ample breast girth

and the silk black skirt

all wrinkled and

dirt ridden at the bottom,

directs me to cleanse all

all elements of envy

from my stained spirit.

As she pours the jet black tea,

her emancipated eyes sparkle.

R. Gerry Fabian

(Lovely Bird image provided by Christopher J Ananias)

Talking with a dead friend he informed me,

“You know. . . I never thought it would happen

the way it did. All of a sudden I couldn’t shit straight

and there was nothing they could do about it.

Even so, I kept thinking that they could right up

to the end. You can’t imagine how much I suffered—

suffered like I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy!”

“I understand!” I responded sympathetically,

wondering how it will be for me, given that

we just never know how life can turn on us

when we least expect it…

Jeffrey Zable

(Image of Ivy Green Cemetery, Charleston District, Bremerton, WA)

As I cross the river on foot

a tower disgorges a cataract

of sun streaming down its windows.

This elaboration suggests hands

of a bronze clock striking noon,

but it’s only a skyscraper full

of dogged suits and ties straining

against tottering stocks and bonds

while looking forward to lunch.

I used to work on an upper floor

but grounded myself deliberately.

You stuck with the program and earned

a retirement in comforting pastels.

All day you shop for the perfect

handbag to tote the shrunken heads

of your lifetime of small enemies.

All night you listen to jazz greats

lilting saxophones into the sky.

I street-walk the city and sigh

the sighs of seismic old age while

you brush past in taxis, grinning

as they consume their fossil fuel.

I suspect from your silent pallor

that you’re thinking about the art

in museums that your patronage

props against the dissolution

that will announce itself like cymbals

striking a lone but fatal note.

William Doreski

(Image plucked from the files of The Drifter)

no use

saying don’t

she climbs

the chair wobbles

but it is hers

the kitchen hers

the cabinet

also hers

as she reaches

for the dust-covered box –

getting down requires

all of her coordination

is a slow shake of bones

but none of my help –

on the table

she opens that box

with deliberation

reveals postcards creased letters

a photograph a medal or two –

no use saying

the past is past

it is hers not mine

and she is 83 still reaching –

and her base may tremble

but it also holds

John Grey

(Image of a future box if local slumlord gets its way)

— thanks to Joan Jobe Smith’s Moonglow Á Go-Go

Past tomorrow’s polling station and chili dog stand, this piss-poor perky protagonist, once a Sistine good girl Dorothy from next door made shitty living laboring over manual typewriters, flees her mean ex-old man who owes allegiance to Long Beach Hells Angels.

After dude broke both of my eardrums with chain-linked fists, passing stevedoreson the wharf, I wink at a Kansas sailor holding white linen crotch with humungous right hand while his other jabs an abscessed left thigh with a syringe size of Michelangelo’s javelin.

Thereafter slinking into some random transgressive but transformative titty bar named David’s, beneath banks of brilliant blacklight beacons, I try to metamorph into one belly-button sequined raw sixteen-year-old sexpot wearing soon to be beer-rotted ruby red shoes.

Gerard Sarnat

(Image is of “Puck”–a Hank fan in Bremerton, WA)