Category: Poetry

thirteen ways of looking at a pelican (4 – 5)

by Louis Moreno

by shaindel beers



4.

The young man and his friends float the river
the Fourth of July
		                 Downstream are parade
sounds    neighing of horses     marching bands 
salvos of gunfire
		         
Here, there is only the river	soft lap of water
against the inner tube

			            The peace only occasionally
interrupted by an Oh shit! when a raft scuffs a rock
gets hung up on a branch

	     Miraculously, the pelicans sit still on the rocks
inspecting from ice blue eyes on either side of long beaks

		        Their heads tilt this way and that
but otherwise they are unmoved by these creatures

the only ones larger than they who float downstream
	    The young man has the odd feeling he has never
been so close to another breathing thing

He looks into the ice blue of the pelican’s eye as he floats
	    by     thinks of the day his eye drew this much
		        attention	      Hiding under the bill of his cap

eye surrounded by magenta bruise, fidgeting to the rhythm
of fluorescent light flicker 	the professor asking

	   My God, what happened?

He recalls the feel of the lie slipping out of his mouth

	    A baseball I didn’t catch

5.

We come home with the groceries, and I see
the slow V of pelicans floating over the neighborhood
try to tell if they are tracing the river.

I’ve heard they are one of the few bird species
that fly “for fun.” I wonder what that means,
try to imagine what it must feel like

to soar on thermals for up to fifteen miles
without flapping a wing, to climb the pillows
of hot air, drop down into coolness

to gain speed. This is called dynamic soaring.
I didn’t used to be so fascinated by anything
but now, I pull out my phone, try to record them.

They are immortalized as radar blips over
my neighbors’ chimney; in the background
my dog barks, my son is excited to be allowed

to run to the porch by himself. How could anything
be so effortless? I wonder what I might miss
if I were afforded their abilities, their innate sense

of measuring air temperature through their nostrils,
of spotting a single fish from sixty feet above water—
All I can imagine missing is the grey house

with its hot pink door which I drive by every day.

thirteen ways of looking at a pelican (1 – 3)

by Louis Moreno

by shaindel beers

1.

The lone pelican in the reeds
of river’s edge seemed odd.
I stopped—watched—
did nothing.

Later in the paper the story
of its broken wing,
likely caused
by flying into a wire.

That it would probably be
euthanized. When you see
a pelican alone, it usually
means something is wrong,
said the wildlife expert.

My self-doubt that kept me
from calling. Did I cause that pelican
more hours of suffering
or gift it a few more hours
of floating in the reeds,
a little while longer to bob
in the gentle current,
the coolness of water over webbed feet?

Forgive me, pelican. I also, am always alone,
also fly too recklessly for my own good.
 

2.

When I told you about the pelican—
that I thought I should have called someone.

You said, That’s your problem. You always
doubt your instincts.

As a woman, I’ve been taught to ignore
connections. The ones between myself

and the moon, the tides
internal and external.

The way the pelican and I
for an instant

were one.
 

3.

The pelicans sit on the rocks preening,
a section of concert violinists bowing

apricot bills against snow velvet down
of breast. I wonder if they can hear

the friction of their surfaces one against
the other. If there is a making of music

out of their bodies. I remember them
later when the photographer says,

When you touch yourself,
when your fingers skim

the hollow between throat and clavicle
you are telling the viewer, Oh, my skin

is so soft, don’t you wish you could
touch it?

the three-body problem

by Louis Moreno

by diane raptosh



               Solutions to the three-body problem may be of an arbitrary
complexity and are very far from being completely understood.  –Scholarpedia


i) Periodic Systems of Astronomical Interest

Like some Carica papayas, George Washington had the XXY condition. He
pointed out that he was statuesque, had no kids but rather broad hips,
a size 13 boot, and a fondness for swatches of calico. He liked to rub
and compare them, to watch them through moon-mote, to flutter and twirl
them in horseshoe orbits. He powdered his red-brown hair and tied it in
a braid down his back like a small mane. When George was elected, a
czarina reigned in Russia, a shogun lorded over Japan. Only the office
of President endures. In this case we can ignore the influence of the
light body on the other spheres. For assurance, Washington carried a
pocket sundial wherever he went. He bred hound dogs he named Tarter,
True Love, and Sweet Lips. He would spell words like blue as
blew, oil as oyl, and eie for an eye. The six white horses in Washington's
stables had their teeth brushed every morning. Washington's orders. As
can be seen, the three-body problem—its four degrees of freedom—offers
myriad options for public service.


ii) Without Loss of Generality, We Consider the Three-Body Problem on a Plane

                                                                         Three healthy male volunteers
in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of cameras in light-tight rooms
for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.
Researchers watched body-gleam spool through the dark. “If you see the
sheen from the surface of three bodies, you can see the whole body condition,"
states researcher Etsuko Kobayashi from Kyoto U.


iii) Three Bodies of Equal Mass Follow Each Other at Uniform Spacing

If there was a drowning in the River Rappahannock, her mother would

note how that was the third in a series, even if it was not, or how there

would be a third drowning if two had taken place within the past six years.


iv) Celestial Mechanics

Her boyfriend is the mother of her child.


v) Two Bodies Move Closely Round Each Other and Around a Third Body Far Away

The oil-black aril-covered seeds in the papaya’s core, which smack 
of nasturtiums, have contraceptive effects in adult male langur monkeys

and handpicked blue-green eyed persons . . . .

 

“The Three-Body Problem” was first published in The Prose Poem Project, Fall 2010

rugged western individualism

by Louis Moreno

by diane raptosh

A man who is his own wife gives birth to his identical twin through his belly button. For months, he thinks it’s a cyst. Fistula. Ingrown hair. A fir tree germinating in his spleen. He father-mothers this shriven boy, fine and tiny as walnut lung. With equal parts sweetmeats and a firm touch, he bathes this baby in a small green bowl—that wee, webbed blood of living kin. Nights, the man daubs his chafed nipples with tea bags and lays a wet cloth on his eyes. He tugs at the far left swirl of his mustache. He sometimes wonders out loud: Am I famished? Is this fullness? When he kisses his own hand, his wife strokes his cheek.

 

“Rugged Western Individualism” was first published in The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets (2013)

survey crew

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans

Shock was not
canvas tents strung along
the shore of Lake Superior rather than sleazy
shag-carpeted motel rooms south of Marathon
no.

Shock was not flying clear dome bell chopper
black fly and bear territory
land-on-a-dime river side
in the middle of the God-forsaken-wilderness
or God’s country depending on how you look at it
no.

Shock was not watching Roy walk pissed off
straight into the bush for a three hour no map
bush-whack straight back to camp
to roll cigarettes
and hork into a smoldering fire
no.

Not night sky infinity
pin pricks bleeding out heaven
not silent adrenaline
pregnant pause voids
not hard luck off rez boys
drunk fireside fights
no.

Shock was
axe clean cut through boot and bone and
big Dan felled like a lodgepole, you pinned
like a bug to the forest floor.

 

“Survey Crew” was first published in The Antigonish Review Issue #177

pacific chorus

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans



June hangs humid, and Spring Peepers 
call their lungs out just beyond 
the pasture fence. They are a wall 
of sound, a wave of mud dwellers 
all spit and polish in a lovestruck serenade
around the neighbour’s pond. 
  
Pacific Chorus of a thousand perfect pitch
and all for some lithe gal the next field over,
an unsuspecting young thing in a hot chase 
of the more and less suited. She’s empty bellied
and he’s thinking she’s a dish 
best served soon, riparian delight.

She waits at a meadow edge, held by voices 
vying for her and her sisters. All she needs
is a moments peace, hush 
in the dark, to consider if a mass of eggs 
between her legs 
is what she really longs for - with the moon ball 
suspending time, a woodland 
of knowing eyes, skunk cabbage 
unfolding herself, and the pond abuzz 
with fairy moth, mayfly, and water strider.

His green question lingers like eighth notes 
on the stave of her skin,

					dolce 
					delicato 
					dolchissimo 

the repetitious nature of hunger.

and so it goes

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans



A resident must ensure that no air conditioning units, laundry, flags, clothing, bedding
or other articles are hung or displayed from windows, balconies or other parts
of the building so that they are visible from outside of the building.

Let’s imagine she hauls the basket up the iron steps around back 
and hangs the socks, toe first. Next the shirts, always upside down, 
measuring out the pegs and their double duty, one shirt holding
hands with the next, grasping the next. This pattern 
of one of these things is just like the other, over and over 
along parallel lines, swung over the garden 
where strawberries promise jam in matching jars 
when she gets to it later. Pillowcase and towel flags 
celebrate morning and the sun bleached fresh they’ll share come dark.

“Works and Services” includes highways, sidewalks, boulevards, boulevard
crossings, transit bays, street lighting, wiring, water distribution systems,
fire hydrant systems, sewage collection and disposal systems, drainage collection
and disposal systems and such other infrastructure or systems as may be provided
within the City from time to time.

Let’s say we’re with him in the drive shed tinkering, oil under his nails 
and it won’t wash out. He’s staked the tomatoes, harvest is heavy 
this year. His brother’s coming to take steers from their mothers 
and move them up the east field, their wet noses meet him at the fence 
each morning he puts down alfalfa. They question his intent,
but no use working himself up when the south gate needs mending
and cherries are due for spray. Each day has work enough of its own. 

The Noise Control Bylaw regulates or prohibits the making of
objectionable noise within the City of Kelowna that may disturb the quiet or
enjoyment of other individuals. Objectionable noises include playing radios
and stereos at high volume, or keeping animals or birds which by their noise
unduly disturbs the surrounding neighbourhood.

Let’s picture Sunday afternoon and they’re all there, blankets 
spread on the grass, boy cousins playing stick ball, girls all whispers 
and giggles. He looks at her sitting across from him, remembers
how she planted whips in the fields alongside the men. How her mouth 
is a rose opening, her legs summer gold and capable of carrying them 
well through winter. He bites into his pie, Macintosh, cinnamon,
pastry flakes on his tongue, the flavour of what the land gives
and what it withholds. She leans over, her finger to his mouth 
returns to hers. A taste of him and the pie, that sweetness 
taken in, as she will welcome his body 
in, their harvest in a small house 
by the side of a gravel road.

“Parcel” means any lot, block, or other area in which land is held or into
which land is subdivided, but does not include a Highway.
“Subdivide" or "Subdivision" means:
(a) the division of land into two or more Parcels whether by plan, apt
descriptive words, 
or otherwise;
(b) the consolidation of Parcels into one Parcel by plan; or
(c) the creation of a Highway or a portion of a Highway by plan.

We’ll end it here, say nothing of yellow excavators, fallow fields, 
a sign crudely taped to their white front door. We’ll downplay entirely 
asbestos removals and shattered foundations. We certainly won’t mention 
the grandson’s salvage operation, his pickup and flat bed trailer 
with the old drive shed loaded high, a land barge 
floating long down the lane way, dust clouds in waves,
the field of ripening alfalfa. 


Portions of text taken from the City of Kelowna Civic Bylaws, “intended
to keep Kelowna clean, healthy and safe. City Council enacts bylaws that are
created, interpreted and administered by a number of City divisions and departments.
Bylaw Services promotes, facilitates and enforces general compliance with bylaws
that pertain to the health, safety and welfare of the community.” 
(http://www.kelowna.ca/CM/page1329.aspx)

vineyard

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans

To walk a vineyard’s long line,
the thrumming rhyme
of post and wire, post and wire,
post and wire. Gnarled stumps
of last year’s growth pruned back hard
to four thin arms, how
everything waits
from the ground up.
Rivers of stone hand gathered
and laid down row by row by row
to warm the waking roots,
this pause, this expectancy,
this too is a prayer.

icebergs near twillingate

by Louis Moreno

by edward harkness

From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, enroute
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.

ancestry

by Louis Moreno

by edward harkness

I’ve spent entire days lost in the warehouses
of dust, searching the archives, imagining my ancestors
boarding ships for America, leaving the coal mines
of Cornwall, only to end in Wright County, Iowa,
in an untended graveyard wedged between a corn field
and the Union Pacific line, their stones toppled,
their names scrubbed by a hundred fifty winters
to an indecipherable blur.

I leave them in their moldering beds to stroll the garden,
drawn by a rufous hummingbird needling the feeder,
his head a burst of copper in the angled morning light.
I love how he bobs among the squash blossoms,
barging into one yellow mansion, then another,
insatiable, as I am, at times, impatient to say
the unsayable, wondering what difference it makes
to the purple finches bickering in the laurel hedge.

I go out again at dusk. He’s still there, levitating,
hovering among the beans, seeking a droplet
from each white beaker. Then he’s gone,
leaving me with my ancestors and their beards,
bonnets and gold time pieces. Farms failed.
Over in Illinois, the Averys upped stakes,
arriving by train at Puget Sound, dumbstruck by the girth
of doug firs and hemlocks bejeweled by April rain.

William, Josie and the new baby, Birdy, trundled toward
a logging camp near Bremerton, bouncing in a wagon
to the end of a mud-gummed road. Might they not have
passed thickets of wild rose? Might they not have seen
those same flashes of copper, startled by the furious
whir of hundreds of rufous hummers, themselves
migrants from Mexico? I want to think so.
I want to think Josie, exhausted from the journey,

said to her baby, Look, sweetheart, at all the wildflowers,
as their buckboard came within hearing
of the rasp of whipsaws, the scream of a steam whistle
and the crash of a felled cedar in this, their new home.

something has been reading the fireroots

by Louis Moreno

by brenda hillman



        —aw aw: crows’ eyebrows… 
The termites have hastily married—soon  
they’ll drop veined wings—  till their vows 
                          are outside!  In the woods,
a shaman moment… tries a cure:
pleiades of sun,   a thrush  [Catharus guttatus] 
     brings spots to you, a seedful anarchist—

              The magicks are merging.
 Lambs swell in the bellies of the ewes;
the great dead approach,
       famished for winter berries…
     What is the enigma 
you carry halfway to equinox, 
your soul feeling his own princely skin
               in the back seat?

Origins of expression— in the caves, 
the fury of nations, 
the handmade stars of lovers’ cries,
     the abstract stroke—; stop telling us 
        what to do, Indo-European languages!
everything has been eating the fireroots, 
    its fluffy hatchlings scratch along— 
it says to itself:
we are on loan from a seamless realm
   —in the pledge, dot-dot,
   —in the syllable of the clause 
              (You’re just making that up)
Am not. 	(Are too.)
Am not.

 

“Something Has Been Reading the Fireroots” was first published in Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire, Wesleyan University Press, 2013

practical water

by Louis Moreno

by brenda hillman



What does it mean to live a moral life

It is nearly impossible to think about this

We went down to the creek
The sides were filled 
    with tiny watery activities

The mind was split & mended
Each perception divided into more

& there were in the hearts of the water molecules
    little branches perpendicular to thought

Had lobbied the Congress but it was dead
Had written to the Committee on Understanding
Had written to the middle  
    middle of the middle
    class but it was drinking
Had voted in cafes with shoplifters &
    beekeepers stirring tea made of water
    hitched to the green arc

An ethics occurs at the edge 
of what we know

The creek goes underground about here
     
The spirits offer us a world of origins    
Owl takes its call from the drawer of the sky



Unusually warm global warming day out

A tiny droplet shines 
    on a leaf & there your creek is found
   
It has borrowed something to
    link itself to others

We carry ourselves through the days in code
DNA like Raskolnikov’s staircase neither
    good nor bad in itself

Lower frequencies are the mind
What happened to the creek 
    is what happened
    to the sentence in the twentieth century 
It got social underground

You should make yourself uncomfortable 
If not you who

Thrush comes out from the cottony 
   coyote bush glink-a-glink 
           chunk  drink 
   trrrrrr
   turns a golden eyebrow to the ground

We run past the plant that smells like taco sauce

Recite words for water 
    weeter wader weetar vatn
    watn voda 
[insert all languages here]

Poor Rimbaud didn’t know how to live 
    but knew how to act
Red-legged frog in the pond sounds like him



Uncomfortable & say a spell: 
blossom knit & heel affix
fiddle fern in the neck of the sun

It’s hard to be water
    to fall from faucets with fangs
    to lie under trawlers as horizons 
    but you must

Your species can’t say it
You have to do spells & tag them
     
Uncomfortable & act like you mean it
    
Go to the world
Where is it
Go there

 

“Practical Water” was previously published in Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press, 2009)

misanthropy

by Louis Moreno

by robert wrigley

— for Paul
 

The only words that exist here
are mine. Well, mine and Paul’s,
who carved his name and a date
twelve years ago in this log
by the fire ring. Let me revise:
the only words that are spoken here
are mine, though they are infrequent.

Unless I am mistaken, all I’ve said
aloud today is “Good morning”
to a cedar waxwing, and “Thank you”
to the wind, for blowing the horde
of mosquitoes away for a while.
Also “Shit,” when I dropped my spoon
in the dirt at breakfast this morning.

At the top of the peak I walked up
earlier, I said “Yes,” peculiarly affirming
the sweat and rigor of the walk. Also the view.
On the way down, entering the trees again,
I saw a bear’s excavation at the base
of a slope of scree and started singing,
for some reason, “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

Because I love places without people,
some people conclude I do not love them.
That I prefer the company of trees.
But by tomorrow, the third day of near wordlessness,
I will be a garrulous fool, addressing the lake
and greeting a single small, white cloud
like an old and very dear friend passing through.

That night I’ll speak my praise to the fire
and say a few poems by heart to the dark.
Then, as the flames begin to settle to coals,
I’ll speak to Paul himself, almost as though
he were here with me, and promise him,
though I disapprove of what he has done,
that I’ll get his name, at least, into a poem.

written in a journal, while sitting on a rock, in the frank church river of no return, august, 2008

by Louis Moreno

by robert wrigley

Very early gray-lit morning. I’m shivering
in my boxers, barefoot in sparse high country grass,
pissing, when I see on the lake’s opposite shore,
a solitary wolf, making its way wherever it is
it’s going, half an hour or so before sunrise.
It may be that it senses my shivering before it sees me,
or hears the spatter of my piss, but now there is no doubt
I am something it would rather not see nor especially be seen by.
It picks up its pace and moves back into the trees.
It stops now and then to be sure I haven’t moved,
then at last breaks into an actual run, and disappears
among boulders along an ancient glacier’s terminal moraine.
I do not ordinarily rise so early to relieve myself,
but through the tent flap I could see mist rising
from the cold surface of the lake, still
and dimpled everywhere by feeding trout.
They were feeding, and still are, on mosquitoes,
which are now everywhere on me and likewise feeding,
but I’m still standing here, shivering, knowing
when the sun comes out it will awaken the wind,
and the wind will ruck the surface of the water
to a thousand tiny, soundless waves, and knowing also
that if I stay where I am, motionless, I might yet see
the wolf again, though I do not, and at last
I do a kind of spasmodic dance to shake away
the mosquitoes, and head back to my tent,
when I note, along the way, the massive canine tracks
of a wolf all around the fire ring, all across
the worn campsite ground to within no more
than a foot from the head of my tent
and around the tents of my still-sleeping compatriots too,
which I will point out to them when they awaken,
after I’ve put on my clothes and built the morning fire,
after I’ve lowered the food bags from the tree limb
we hoisted them to last night, and brewed
a pot of coffee, and sat myself on rock,
and slathered bug dope abundantly over
all my exposed flesh, as I wait for the sun to rise,
for the wind to roughen the surface of the lake,
for them to join me here, where I will point out the tracks
and tell them, in great detail, what it is I have seen.

country mice

by Louis Moreno

by amber dawn

crickets, monarchs, paints and sparrows
frenchman river, sweet grass sky holds still
out here everything stops
for the wind

— “everything holds still for the wind,” Leah Horlick
 

We find each other
in the cosmopolitan squint, polished
concrete, smoked chrome rooms.
She’s hard to peg at first
lace dress chic, prosecco cocktail
starry in her hand. She’s been
chin-upped by the west. Tested
by an incomprehensible horizon
and passed, but for her pose and bend.
For the wind

that sweeps the wide-open
motherland has left her
with a slant stance, sideways
as corn bowed to a storm.
I too am made
from orchard and axe, crop
and scythe, harvest born
humble earth miles and years
behind me. It’s all rock
out here. Everything stops

making sense in the seam
of mountains and million
dollar condos, high-rise residential
more density, more gravel, more glass, more.
Where I come from elevators
are for nursing homes or sawmills.
She sees the soiled knees of my jeans
knows I kneel to a once-was prayer
late waterways, bygone wells
forgotten river. Sweet grass sky holds still

during these vigils, holds space
for choked swamp, cedar stump
tributaries split from the ocean
Vancouver’s bloodstone—step forward.
My home is a backwards stamp, like hers.
parched-lawn green, forever level.
Now we find each other turned by urban obstacles.
The far-removed markers we share and seek
chokecherries, ink caps, chorus frogs, golden yarrow
crickets, monarchs, paints and sparrows

 

“Country Mice” was previously published in Where the Words End and My Body Begins (Arsenal Pulp Press, Spring 2015)

roots dancing

by Louis Moreno

by susan mccaslin



You could say roots
             squidged as they are
between dark heaps of soil
             shivering and soaked
don’t dance
                          but you’d be wrong

for in that dry, wet
                          wondering dark
they curiously minuet
                          drawing near                and apart
wiggle-stepping             spreading
                                       corkscrewing    around stones

weaving lateral-vertical designs
             criss-crossing
                                                    turning	
delving, snaking
                                                                                                          spiraling wide
clasping and unclasping 
hands
                                                    in the dark ground


Roots are chords
                                                     (cords)             fluent thrummings
drawing water
                                                    from dance’s core

while trees                                 their lanky siblings
                                                                                             thrust themselves skyward

Yes, you’d be wrong
                                                    about roots 
                                                                               not dancing
simply sitting shivering                                                                 and soaked
                                                    between dark clods of soil
hunching together

                                                    immobile

the apt black of crow flight

by Louis Moreno

by ted jean

Crow stumbles into
the open air
after a rough night
of bad rabbit
road kill
and concussive
ice storm
out of the east.

His yawp is forced,
at first, the usual
rehearsal of unrepentance,
that bends toward bliss
as he approaches the arc
of the frozen river.

 

“The Apt Black of Crow Flight” is from Crow Sonnets.

crow

by Louis Moreno

by ted jean



Marsha throws on her jacket,
jumps the fence where it is bent

          the december field is bare

she stalks the erstwhile rye
beside the dogwood brush and hazelnut

          pheasants startle the ditches

stubble and mud require care,
to get precisely nowhere

          our girl bestrides the only stump

field Marsha: cows astonished,
the crow crowd loud with scandal

way off, the lights of Ashland
rise on the solstice

circles she back, black, to the dark house

 

“Crow” is from Crow Sonnets.

hwy 38 along the umpqua near rainrock

by Louis Moreno

by ted jean

High crow and low crow
ply the light above the river,
rising and falling against the neon backdrop alder.

One seems the shadow of the other,
disjunct in their dithering
as a fish with its refraction on a riffled pond.

Are they husband and wife crow?
Where do they go?
Some farcical mission, doubtless,
as they are, after all, crows.

We are driving upriver the opposite way,
Amy staring off into the spruce shadow
and sunlight strobe, possibly deep in thought.
Or not. We will never know.

 

“Hwy 38 Along the Umpqua Near Rainrock” is from Crow Sonnets.

a cockeyed optimism

by Louis Moreno

by judith skillman



I’ve risen like the day moon
into a sky entirely azure. I’m a venture,
the angels will invest in me.

Little by little I trained myself
on  wine—now I can put away
half a bottle. I’ll fill the gaps
in all your conversations. Nothing
stagnant will grow, no rest marks,
no space between notes of this allegro.

I’ve no room for any silence
except the one I make when I pick up
my needles to knit—when
from the circular needles 
Joseph’s coat grows in cabled stitches
you’ll wear when winter freezes
the machines idling now between
chops at gratuitous trees, those 
that keep sun from infecting rooftops.

I’ve risen like Jesus from the dead
and no one can hold me down,
not the stone, nor the women who’d nag
a Roman soldier till he caved. 

                                    I’ll limp
along beside you, lenticular as a cloud,
undeniable as a mountain, and you
won’t know what hit you—whether
it happened in Prague or Paris,
Venice or Rome, only that love’s
an old woman with a tear in her eye
from laughing, and death’s a cliché
holding its sides, ribs broken, the whole
carapace crumbling like the Parthenon
when time was at its best

and still had a chance to affect 
what I built sidewise in order for you
to learn to lean—but nobly, akin to the tower 
of Pisa, into your own shadows.

in praise of staying married

by Louis Moreno

by kelli russell agodon

In perfect middleness,
in the winter of waxwings
and imperfect feathers, lost

friends—
we are not leaving
our nest. Like others

who aren’t entwined
in the honeysuckle, in the blackberry
vines, we stay knotted.

Like clouds refusing to be part
of the mushroom, we rained.
We loved our curves

and our appetite
for showers. Don’t get me wrong,
our mistakes have flooded

the valley, flooded
our blue farmhouse until
the living room was underwater.

Praise the trees and chairs
we climbed to stay dry,
not the wings

that might have brought us here,
but the round bellies
of birds hopping through

puddles, not beautiful,
but full, complete
with their berry-stained beaks.

lilacs

by Louis Moreno

by kathleen flenniken

As though we could string pearls into a necklace

of only good moments, between knots of waxed

string. Tonight, a month after the last lilac bloomed,

I finally noticed, and no hothouse could make the bushes

flower again late, early, whatever you call the period

after you’ve lost everything. Still, cells replicate,

shed skin is replaced. We are not who we were.

I’d seen the lilacs, gone through the motions

of breathing in, swirled the scent in the goblet

of my brain but I wasn’t listening until

this evening, after the first warm day in June

when I considered how fine a bunch of lilacs

would be, enough to fill my arms, to hide my face

in their tender, sweet nostalgia for ordinary life.

1960s tv

by Louis Moreno

by kathleen flenniken

Blue beacon of the evening, formulaic, reassuring, half-witted, half-
cocked. We half-watched the clock to gauge our excitement, passive
as our heroes bounded toward danger—

then the ads for Geritol, Noxzema, Salems, and Kools. No danger
of changing channels—the TV was half
a room away, NBC and CBS our only choices. The best shows were past

our bedtime anyway. We passed
our happy childhoods lit by a flickering screen as dangerous
as quicksand, as a girl with a palm-sized gun, as Simon Bar Sinister in half-

hour predicaments. Now we half-believe that fictional past. Danger, Will Robinson.

from a classroom

by Louis Moreno

by kathleen flenniken

— after Richard Shelton
 

Thirty-two students stare in rows.
In their private minds
pink dahlias bloom, swans fan their wings,
a dog barks behind a barbed-wire fence.
No one raises a hand or answers the question.

Thirty-two pink dahlias bloom in rows.
Students raise a barbed-wire fence.
No one questions the barking dog.
Swans stare behind their fans.

A dahlia stares. Pink hands
fence private minds. Questions
raise their rows of wings.
The swans answer thirty-two.

A pink dahlia answers a barbed-wire stare.
No one raises the question.
Thirty-two students bloom
behind their wings.

lessons from you, father

by Louis Moreno

by patricia wixon

It was July when you closed the front door
carrying your fishing rod and creel, angled hat
banded with dry flies, eager to fly to the mountain
lakes. Soon you’d be edging your way out in waders
so glazed with fish oil they could stand alone.

That night you’d fight to stay alive, not burned
and broken like your copilot, but in shock as your
organs consumed each other. You told the medic
what to give each child. For me, your bamboo pole
but it had already turned to ash.

In those childhood years, you’d bring home a creel
of cutthroat and fry their pink skins crisp.
Sometimes we’d peel sheets of sunburn from your
back, work to sunset in our Victory Garden,
help save tin foil wrappers for the War.

Now I cast a fly at a glint between the rocks, hear
your lessons as I watch the shadows, feel when
a strike sends line singing, feed, wind back a steady
take up. Leaves floating on the water collapse
like ash, linger, then slip beneath the surface.

juxtaposition

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

— for Kevin Miller
 

Ice in a riverbed: a word
In your mouth: each remembers

The other. Your joy only
One reflection: the way grease

From a boy’s palm darkens
A page. Each time perishable

Freight thunders by, he feels
Hopeful: The girl he’ll leave

Flexes her calves deliberately
Every rung up a picker’s ladder

In Coup’s orchard by the river.
How can anyone make a living

Of departures: when crossing
The line can mean nothing

But distance, a vanishing point
Beyond which light won’t enter?

I mean when the river’s iced over
Horses, a few then hundreds,

Surge across: like one current
Over another: liquid and solid.

Come spring, quick thaw spells out
Sacrament: Or is that sacrifice?

 

“Juxtaposition” first appeared in Poetry International.

bird city

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

— for Jacob Green
 

Where sweetness is
The only nourishment.
Not a peaceable kingdom
For there is conflict here,
There is pain. But the bad
Inevitably are punished,
The good inevitably blessed.
Their stories, I suppose,
Have a storybook quality:
Peopled not with angels,
Not with true birds either
But rather creatures gifted
With a human fluency
And feathers apt as hands.
The magpie tending bar
Can wipe away troubles;
A seagull begging change
Is not really as down
On his feathery luck
As he’d have you believe;
Osprey redirect the flow
Of traffic for a parade.
Vendors give away candy
Shaped like children
And rich as ice cream.
Along these avenues
To the imagination,
The stacks of nests rise
Like columns of smoke
From ancient sacrifice,
Where any misery is given
The promise of flight
And where any broken
Wing may heal.

 

“Bird City” first appeared in The Colorado Review.

remembering precious landscape, but with an elegy in mind

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

Nevertheless the front yard, even the hawthorn,
flourished. Various roses built a windbreak,
all the catalpa petals splayed themselves open
and pollen splotched the limbs in gold profusion.

Suppose a woman lived there, a young wife,
her tanned arms dappled from whitewashing,
beautifying the wagon-wheel fence assembled
out of last century’s rumbling west for a better life.

Say years later, while kneeling in her rose and iris bed,
she happened to gaze toward the east forty
and witness the men in her family, at a distance,
circling and swinging their long-handled shovels.

They could’ve been mistaken, a hundred years earlier,
for threshers slapping chaff from the harvest.
They were in fact clubbing a wounded badger,
winnowing its blood into the furrows of stubble.

Now suppose that the iris have grown
wooden, their blues and lavenders blackened.
Razed down to the quick, her roses
promise to return. Prolific. Invasive.

 

“Remembering Precious Landscape, but with an Elegy in Mind” was first published in Elegy in the Passive Voice.

the venison book

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

1. Dressing

Once a practice handed down,
sticking its throat now frowned

upon by most sportsmen. Blood
will take care of itself. Just aft
of the breastbone with a blade
three whetted inches or more,

cut and continue as if unzipping
the abdomen which splits open
like a satchel packed neatly
with the contents of a lifetime.

From the unexpected profile
of a liver came Roman prophecy.
Imagine your own portents.
To empty the cavity with ease,

you may tip the carcass downhill.
Take care though not to nick any offal.
Into the next tiny room, carve a portal
when servicing the lungs, the heart

which loves to spoil if left intact.
Sever arteries and windpipe. Remove.
Let the buck’s antlers alone,
they’ll work as handles later

or tie a rope over the skull’s base,
a half-hitch around the snout.
Now get your rope or chain out,
hoist over a nearby branch or rafter.

Like a lover’s stockings, the hide
tugs off. No need for a knife.
Missed point to call this woods-
dressing undressing, instead of

hog-dressing, rough-dressing,
to gut, disembowel, eviscerate.
At last you may separate
the liceless cape and head

from the body if you wish
or saw the crown off its skull.

 

2. Deconstructing

With sinews and veins stripped
naked of such supple buckskin,

with a hatchet or cleaver,
split sternum, lengthwise,
in two. Pelvic girdle likewise.
Call this the H-bone and crack it

smack-dab down the center
to invent your own alphabet
for dialogue between the dead
and living. What does a blade

whisper to flesh but appetite?
Along a line envisioning the spine,
a hacksaw answers. Other bones
prove easy, especially the hinges

where hooves are defined
from each limb’s articulation.
With dead weight, the gantry
squawks. Never you mind

any sound but your own deliberate
breath. Quarter what remains
into shoulders, saddle, haunches.
Identify the use and cut of each:

neck and chuck, flank and shank,
the meaning drained away returns.
Next, wrap each with foil tight
for flavor then paper against frost.

Cold or salt or smoke cures most
kinds of impermanence for a time.
Treat with an iota of respect.
Collect what you’ve broken apart

and spoken into being. On thick white
butcher’s paper, mark your name.

 

“The Venison Book” was first published in A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood.

egg poems: an english languacultural history of china

by Louis Moreno

by changming yuan

1/ Ancient China

They used to drink tea
Wear silk
Eat from china
Think in terms of zen
And practice Confucianism

Only—is it true?

.

2/ Semi-Colonial China

Wearing cheongsam
These poor coolies arrived here
On sampans
Always ready to kowtow
To a tycoon
Who lived in Shangri-La
Eating dim sum
Drinking oolong
Playing mahjong
Gambling in a casino every day
Though reluctant to give cumshaw

.

3/ Mandarin China

Led by dao
A yin
Running dog
Wearing qipao
Is fighting against a yang
Paper tiger
With wushu
After getting brainwashed
Through maotai
Like a taikongnaut
At a fengshui spot
Dominated by qi

 

A word (or person) with a Chinese origin living in the West is often called an “egg,” which is white-skinned but yellow-hearted.