the driftwood review issue five

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The Driftwood Review Issue Five

October 2009

Editors:

Terry Allen & Dennis Barton

Cover Image by: Peter Schwartz


Poetry

6 The Pigeon’s Analysis by Heather Macpherson

7 First Sign by John Grey

8 Still Life by Sergio Ortiz

9 Breakfast by Kim Lock

10 Rust and Metal Handles by Sergio Ortiz

12-13 Sending my Daughter by Laura Sobbott Ross

to Borrow an Egg

14 Timing by Kim Lock

15 Drop by J.R. Pearson

16 The Woman who Became by Linda Ann Strang

a Prayer Flag

17 Stand by George Moore

18 Contemplating by Joseph Anthony Vega

19 Grand Coda by Heather Macpherson

20-21 The Boys at the Roller Rink by Laura Sobbott Ross

22-23 Grass Lake Sibilants by Michael Lauchlan

24 Grand River Avenue, by Ken Meisel

Detroit Riots, 1967

26 Lubricating Failed Social by Richard Fein

Interactions

27 Boy Reading to me at by Ken Meisel

the Runaway Shelter

29 At the Buffet by Karen Kelsay


30 Boson by Kim Lock

31 Aftermath by J.R. Pearson

32 Snow by Michael Lauchlan

33 The City is a Woman by Ken Meisel

34 Dark Seas by Janet Butler

36 Library Terminal by Jerry Kraft

37 A Day After the Surrealists by by George Moore

38 Thirst by J.R. Pearson

39 For the Dead by Heather Macpherson

40 Waterfront Anniversary by Jerry Kraft

42-43 45 RPMs by Nancy Williams

Art/Photography

Cover Sockets II by Peter Schwartz

11 B&W Subway Stairs by Joseph Anthony Vega

25 Bridge by Dennis Barton

28 Birds by Dennis Barton

35 Street Woman by Joseph Anthony Vega

41 Pines by Dennis Barton


Heather Macpherson

The Pigeon’s Analysis

The way earth worms

wash into the street

exposed, dank and glint

too aloof to swerve

on-coming treads.

They laze the paved

topography – a lexicon

of firma and pleasantries

unlike grubs and maggots,

those bitchy tattletales

you’d never invite to tea.


John Grey

First Sign

No walking two-foot track pattern this morning,

no raccoons, no opossums. Nor the two-print

trotting gait of fox, coyote. Nothing says

nothingness as much as blank snow,

the ground so smooth and white, so free

of gallop, lope, there never was a living thing.

Landscapes know no better than to tell the truth.

And here it is recounted by a night of falling flakes,

a morning of first cracks in gray, a distant harmless sun.

Who’ll be the first to recall all of their experiences,

reclaim their instincts from the drug of sleep,

respond to need, forgo their fear. Terrain waits

like a writers blank page, willing the story along.

A squirrel perhaps, leaping like a flurry frog. A deer

nibbling through ice. Or even I, first steps of another day,

this time with clear rent perforations, cold and windy,

chilled beyond bone, more evidence than sense.

The world is not the world until the living things take traction.

A blue bird fakes it. A crow doesn’t try. A hare it is. A hare

by a hair. A plop. A push. A pad. A claw. A mark. An indent.

A cavity. Just how the beginning likes it.


Sergio Ortiz

Still Life

She was a still-life painter, but her spectacular flowers dried and dropped their petals. She picked up the most delicate and repainted the corollas. We thought her compositions would depreciate after she passed, so we watched the bouquets, waited for the wind to blow.

winter sleet

honey bees and rue

in her pocket


Kim Lock

Breakfast

I tell myself that if I cook the egg without breaking the yolk, everything will be fine, and

my quaking legs and knotted gut will become still. I pour you a cup of coffee, knowing

that what I have to tell you will not pour out of me as smoothly as the dark liquid, that no

amount of cream or sugar will mask the bitterness of my awful truth, that what I did will

break your heart. I pass you the coffee. You pull me close and gently kiss my lips. It’s a

kiss sweeter than you’ve ever given. I slide the egg onto the buttered toast, my insides

caving in. The yolk quivers, then splits.


Sergio Ortiz

Rust and Metal Handles I live in a death house. Root rot between sugar maple and dogwood burns my toes. But I'm not sad or thirsty, I've got the wind and a little piece of sky. When it thunders I stick my bones out, wait for rain, and smile.


B&W Subway Stairs

by Joseph Anthony Vega


Laura Sobbott Ross

Sending my Daughter to Borrow an Egg

I had stopped stirring, tapped

the wooden spoon to the rim,

flour tumbled with cinnamon,

the oven set on purr. Through

the pasture, she carried home

a single egg like a glass pearl.

Whole in smooth opaqueness,

the neighbors had plucked it

from a foam cradle of a dozen,

rows now missing at least one,

like the teeth she thanked them

through before heading back,

wary of nettles and fire ants,

the silent cows, the early moon

being passed alongside her


from oak to oak to oak.

Through the same window

I’d watched her carry home

phlox and jewel beetles,

lemons from orchards, icicles

snapped off pine fence rails.

And once, a garden mole, the pink pads

of its tiny human palms turned up—

a praise for every fragile thing tended

with awe, the providence of girlhood—

egg-balanced, like tunneled light

meant to break open in the end.

At the door, her small hands

hold the egg like a wick cupped

in wind. The moon loosening

from the grasp of those high, dark branches.


Kim Lock

Timing

Five delicate, pale-blue orbs surreptitiously deposited by a mother duck nestle on dried grass and felted fluff in the midst of the delphiniums next to the front porch. I thought she had abandoned them, deciding that such proximity to dogs, cats, cars, humans, and lawn mowers carried too great a risk. I imagine the cool yolks floating in protective albumen, their DNA suspended in time, waiting for the change in temperature that sparks life and action. This morning there was an early-morning freeze. I step outside to check the eggs, fearing the worst. Suddenly, mother duck shoots out of the delphiniums, flapping, quack-ing, up, up, up toward the rising sun.


J.R. Pearson

Drop

a song forged from the bare

rhythm of the night

& you'll hear petals fall from her voice.

Follow the sound of sweat

to the roar of her breath

in your mouth. She hums

your name with her pulse lost in the dark

& a magma bleed from a Milkyway

of holes in your chest.

Hours after Geronimo walks the skyline,

silent tongue-tips feather stones

in a held breath before an Apache tracker's sunrise.

Eight legs of daybreak climb forearms

& drink a bead of sweat from wet hair

horned by your bad collar.

Cygnus opens its last luminous wing

across the sky's black mouth

& she winks at the dead air

in an eavesdropper's lust for padded vice grips.

You recite the underground alphabet

tattooed on the back of your eyelids

& think of the last honeydew

that sings in the summer sun.


Linda Ann Strang

The Woman Who Became a Prayer Flag

Man and oxygen,

you are the purest atmosphere,

twisting through valleys, holding handfuls

of fabric, hair and fervent prayer.

The earth is made of cotton:

you can fly the Himalayas like a kite,

rolling the sun

on the tip of your tongue.

Even when you settle against me,

like a low cloud, for the night,

my gown whispers the ecstasy of aviation,

through frills, into your forehead;

your hand relaxes as you fall asleep,

releasing a supplication.


George Moore

Stand

In the beginning you think nothing will ever come of this

lingering anticipation, the wait for what is real, the meaning,

if the word still holds some truth, of this living thing.

Like life were a plaque above the door of where you’ve come

or where you’re going, somehow the inside of the house

indistinguishable from the great outside,

and you want to know, simply know, what the plan is

behind the million machinations of the world, evil and good,

self-created and conflicted with your self, and one day

all this will sort itself out, become the woman or man

who was meant to be. Perhaps it already has.

Under the place you mark your name there is an invisible line

running out to the edge of the darkness, and it radiates

like a beam of light, which has no meaning and only tries

to illuminate, touching the things it encounters on its way.

This is not wisdom, nor insight, but the suspension of those.

Nothing stands in the way if one way is to stand, one move,

the one simple process of you, neither enfolding or unfolding.

But I can’t say this outright. You look past me into the night

where we have met again for coffee, a brief word, the turning

toward that you so desire. There is only your next move.


Joseph Anthony Vega

Contemplating

He lifted the glass to his lips

contemplating tomorrow,

while today was growing fainter;

he lowered the empty glass

to the bar.


Heather Macpherson

Grand Coda

What you do to your body:

demonstrate the perfect clavicle,

hide pricks between fingers

and toes. Infected, you sing orchid

songs, beg for money and sell skin

and bones; neglect bicuspids weak

and septic. You were legs –rhythmic

credulity, gestures

and movements. Now une jolie fille,

you are ersatz smile and grey iris

decayed.


Laura Sobbott Ross

The Boys at the Roller Rink

The boys at the roller rink

came from the wrong side of town.

They swallowed the oval floor

in strides that never wavered

or sent them spinning

with outstretched fingers

slippery from their own oily scalps,

body odor at least a length or two behind.

Wind in billowy polyester shirttails,

they were often called out for skating too fast,

although the wheels of their rented skates

could be readily stilled in the rim

of rubber matting. It was grace—

theirs, not ours, which made us hide

in the girls’ bathroom once an hour

when free skate became couples only.

A sweaty palmed proclamation

that stirred the mirrored ball

in the ceiling, dizzying sequins

shed across the dimmed room.


We were afraid that the boys

at the roller rink might ask us

to join them, link their pale fingers

into ours and wing us

across their roadmap of shadows,

the relentless gravity of hard surfaces,

leaving an ache beyond

any Three Dog Night song

played back to back.

Maybe we were afraid

they wouldn’t ask us anything at all.


Michael Lauchlan

Grass Lake Sibilants

A breath soughs through sedge and grass

cattail and reed. Something with hands

tousles hair, fluffs a shirt, would puff

linens and sails if lines hung over docks,

if boats plied the soft waves. None do.

I catch a bit of this hush and pull it

into lungs, into blood cells that roil

toward brain, toward muscles at rest—

a breath of listening, a lifetime making.

What if I only wait, crane-

still, breathing sound with air.

The hush which floats over the waves

makes a place of no place, a voice

of sound seeping from a hole. Always,

building comes after, building a case,

building buildings, building as music

rises toward an end. But what moves

over the reeds has no end, comes

from somewhere in Alberta (and before?)

and empties over flat Ontario farms


of tomatoes, beans, and wheat.

I take a small sip from that ocean of air,

hear a few notes of reedy opera. Once,

I heard a political argument in Persian,

missing some details (who were

the infidels, the heroes?) but I got

that it coiled through dust, blood,

and rhetoric to Detroit, to three men

shouting at one who answered in soft

bursts—the rapid counterpoint

rising in spittled pitch and

breaking finally in exhaustion.

What moves over Grass Lake has

a cadence, a pace, a few sibilant notes.

It offers its own suasion—stay, stay,

wait through sunset as I unlace

your knotted chest, poor bound one.

Breath calling breath, it names

no infidels, but pulls and sways

toward undulation without end.


Ken Meisel

Grand River Avenue, Detroit Riots, 1967

Sometimes in a young mind there are rabbits sniffing pine cones

and wet grass in the morning. The world is an aural landscape

of meditative beauty. In my young mind I’m driving with my father.

I’m not sure where in the hell we’re going. It is July, 1967.

And there is smoke billowing out of roof tops. Army vehicles,

which look like big violent bugs, churn forward down the streets.

I’m told to duck down in the station wagon. I’m told there could be

sniper fire. My young head could be blown apart like milkweed.

So I grip the back of the seat with my strong arms like I’m hugging

the side of a wall for protection. My stomach, which is full of acid

and stones, tightens. My father looks ahead as if sniffing down

a long corridor to a doorway, something golden and light.

I’m guessing he’s looking straight into Heaven, for I am Catholic,

and I can’t guess ahead to anything else. Nothing but white light.

And there are angels, big weeping winged things caressing

the burning cars exploded down along the side streets. Some angels

genuflect. Some blow saxophones or trumpets and they throw

them down on the street loudly. And it sounds like wailing or crying,

as if all of Heaven’s gate had fallen like glass over us. Then I peek up,

see the black men running away. Man, some of them run into store

fronts with no glass remaining. And their faces are terrified ripped pieces

of rubber. And the police cars race forward after them. Fire trucks

roar down the road and blow hoses full of water all over them.

Someone calls them devils but it sure isn’t my father, for his heart

is as wobbly as a bowl of milk and he loves them. And the angels,

which are large insects with beating wings and wailing faces that resemble

sun flowers bursting apart, race and swoop down on us. And one

of them cradles the window of the car like a blanket, a large bursting mouth

of howling. And he yells at me you will be named John one day

and you will tell of the apocalypse here. And every story you tell will

be true. And bewildering. For you fear all this and it breaks your heart.


Bridge

by Dennis Barton


Richard Fein

LUBRICATING FAILED SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

It happens with either banal banter or soul searching conversations,

or anything in between.

It follows the demise of dialogue, those words not spoken after

the end of a love affair, friendship, business partnership,

or chitchat between two passing strangers.

It’s like Novocaine weighing down the tongue with all the gravity of a black hole.

It’s those tortured moments of nothing more to say,

when eye-to-eye discourse devolves into restless fidgets

and distracted eyes are desperate to gaze anywhere but face-to-face.

It’s when I’m bored-to-tears-with-you is euphemized as

I’ll-be-seeing-you-soon

and each knows the other is politely lying.


Ken Meisel

Boy, Reading to Me at the Runaway Shelter

Rain, falling across the street and a squad car

heavily thundering through it, lights lit,

sirens squealing loudly as we practice ducking

down again to dodge the bullets known to fly

around here, like rabid pieces of darkness

cut loose from the section of the city known

as Crack town, corpse town, the 5th precinct.

We’re sitting together at a table, reading.

He looks up at me, eyes small and bright,

like little birds trying to fly above the tall trees.

His thumb and his fingers carry a page

over to another one, simply, like a little wind

gently lift-nudging stuck things forward,

and he looks down again, traces his eyes

over the pictures, the words, all the news

of the world that’s given over to print. Now,

because there is an angel hovering over his

left shoulder, something alive and special

like a medicine name, or a fairy god mother,

he mouths one of the words on the page,

something that calls his vast future to him.

He tries it on his tongue again, tastes it,

forms his mouth around it, like a gold coin.

He whispers it to me, says it out loud again,

college.


Birds

by Dennis Barton


Karen Kelsay

At the Buffet

Two upper teeth protrude when he smiles. His receding hair is turning gray, the color of his almond-shaped eyes. Only the shrillest sound enters his ears, clunky eye glasses slide down his nose. He unfolds his napkin the way he was taught as a child, slowly and methodically. Over utensils, hands pause politely by the plate, his grin broadens; teeth dart out. This is his time to choose the food he eats and how many helpings fill the dish, escaping into a merry world of lemon pudding, roast beef and ice cream. There is no conversation-- only an occasional thumbs up between bites.


Kim Lock

Boson

Earlier this year, particle physicists hoped to find the hypothetical Higg’s boson under the

border between France and Switzerland in a circular, seventeen-mile-long, multi-million-

Euro tunnel filled with enormous cylindrical magnets. Detectors witnessed particles

smashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. And in that moment, Higg’s

boson—referred to by some as the god particle—would reveal itself for a millionth of a

billionth of a billionth of a second. Evidence for the boson would be found in telltale

spirals and streaks left in the detectors.

Guys, I hate to tell you this, but I could have saved you a lot of time and money; I found

the god particle this morning in a slice of kiwi fruit I held up to the light.


J.R. Pearson Aftermath Nothing holds you like an open tomb snowing tulips over your dead brother. Hair a frozen blaze. Your sister speaks and you think: Now there's a voice that's been kicked in the chest. Later, when you're gunshot broke in a trigger-lit wake his face falls thru you like opened vein's wish on a perfect blade. You wonder why everyday the desert pulls heat thru bleached ribs; sun twists life from the sand & why his eyes always looked like a tipped over eight. He said once he had a voodoo double- helix written in a wave of bone. Said he'd burn himself down just to watch the faces rise thru flames. In a waking dream he tells you the sky is a tear in La Brea tar so blow a sideways kiss to infinity & fly into everlasting ice like a crossed up skin bird.


Michael Lauchlan

Snow

What creature flails like an old man?

You find Moceri struggling, lost

in a drifted alley and bring him home

while the blizzard blows. Small, frail,

good humored but soft on details

and documents, he has no ID

and no idea where he lives. After soup

and dry socks, the story spills out.

Daughters grown, a son in jail,

he lives in a downtown flop.

We start into the white, silent city.

―This depression,‖ he tells me,

as I swerve through rutted streets,

―is tougher than the last. Then

you could get help. We were all

in the same crappy boat.‖ Ice tears

at my muffler as I bounce across lanes.

When he is delivered to a sour room

behind a well-chewed door, I emerge

to blow steam into the bright gloom

and compose a story for you—

of Moceri warm and safe at home.

I'll skip the way the street curls its lip

as he passes, the way the glass shakes

in his one window as the wind

slides in. But you know already

the thin fabric of our skin,

the threadbare coat we clutch

against every winter to come.


Ken Meisel

The City is a Woman

Said the man on Forest Avenue.

He was holding his brown bag

Of fortune & his eyes were salt.

Do you know she loves the body

Of a man even though he’s beat

Her? All this as the gulls rose up

Over the black chimney towers

And the trucks stomped & rolled

Into the Eastern Market district.

To love a woman, I think, is to

Try out for size what it is to be

A swollen watermelon. The heart

Is full of redness and dark seeds.

There are stories & dark truths.

Murder and mayhem and a laughter

That is really a strange card game.

We take our chances when we

Love someone until the end of it.

The heart of a city, this one, is full

Of coughing & dead radiators,

And men whose time is a lottery.

The women in it grow dark & mute

And hum songs to hanging laundry

That is never fully cleaned off.

The children in it are leaving it.

We must remember that the city

Is a woman, he said.


Janet Butler

Dark seas

The sound is faint, but grows

with silence.

A swish of silk as waters

froth and ruffle moon bleached shores,

white sands that hem a sea heavy with summer.

Its warm waters cool to a late night freshness

black skies another sea washing distant shores

that wait us.


Street Woman

by Joseph Anthony Vega


Jerry Kraft

Library Terminal

In the library, at the keyboard next to mine,

he typed intensely. Beneath his desk, a boy

of four or five crawled, clearly bored.

In an idle moment, I glanced at his screen.

His email began: I’m married, too.

Would love to meet. Adventurous. Can we

find a time? You seem to understand.

And I looked away, embarrassed at my

intrusion. Now hearing only the tap of keys,

the child pleaded, ―Can we go now, Daddy?‖

More unheard sentences were sent to the screen,

the whole creation a furrowed brow,

then less insistent tapping, while the voices

in my own head would not be quieted.

They whispered of another day,

of need and sorrow and shame,

having known his place, having

written such words, having risked

too much, and with every step

a downward spiral to catastrophe,

all to that tapping of keys, passion

and need, and as I felt myself being

swallowed again by the hungry screen

he signed off, stood, and took the boy’s hand,

perhaps off to some Little League game,

and then dinner at home, mundane chat.

The blank screen a dilated iris, staring

back into my silence. He quickly left,

but I stayed there. Hum of the machine.

Remembering and repeating

never again. Never again.


George Moore

A Day After the Surrealists

There is so much the world could have been

if only the words might have jumped off the page

and become someone, a girl with long braids,

a man with one leg, a woman interested

only in her children.

But the last was not surreal in the sense

that even today this is possible,

like seeing the things science will make ahead of time

through the mad visions of the marginalized,

whose children are their wildest dream.


J.R. Pearson

Thirst

Granddad always said Indian kids don't sing for fear of cobras & your mom sure ain't got no venom till that unquenchable thirst holds her hostage for a deeper shade of burn. Jack whiskey & shots of two X sheepdip don't got no handle on that; said he'd seen her turn night satin side out then put a blind eye in the bottom of a bottle, watching stars warp & shiggle. Told myself the man was commode hug & tore up inside, didn't know up from no down even after a contusion of aspens drank his blood and a vacant sky evaporated thoughts like state-fair fireworks. Swear I seen him go. Two years later she pulled dusk down like a midnight shade over a golden-haired confession. Day sloughed a skin moon. Her eyes all chipped ruby. Shattered pearls rolled over cheekbones, she looked at me like a sunflower waffled reverse in a convex mirror, sliced & bigger by the second. Swore she held a bead of dew or the whites of my eyes in her hair, looked in her face & saw me: boy with straw locks & no heartbeat. She spoke with the smell of fresh cut leaves bleeding from a liquid sieve under her tongue; another attempt to kill autumn footprints from her forehead once and for all-- Then, someone took the words out of her mouth & put them in the voice of a jackal, she says: thirst don't take no for no answer. Where'd you put my drink.


Heather Macpherson

For the dead

who settle open-eyed

with winsome smiles

who yield to the constraint

of air; gossips through bygone

specks of sand and muck, un-

aware of pebbles between

fingers and toes or tree roots

teasing the femur;

who creep and crawl

under floorboards,

eavesdrop on moths

flittering near halogen

bulbs, chat of enigmas

revealing rudimentary truth

about kick the can and flashlight murder.

There is something I need to tell you:

wake up wake up wake up!

The moon is out it’s time to sing,

time to play; nourish your hunger

with backyard rituals and stray

from ordinary games.


Jerry Kraft

WATERFRONT ANNIVERSARY

Taste of hot clam nectar, thrush of wings,

gulls stealing tourist-tossed French fries.

Metal tables along the wall provide space

for young couples who can barely afford

their shared fish and chips. We are older

now, watch the slow-moving ferry ply

its regular way across the Sound, sigh

to one other, recalling our last time here,

weighted by solemn freight, a slow wake

spreading wide from that passage. We

return to mark a simple sentence finally said,

―I'm still in love with you.‖ Even after years

of separation, even then we heard the splash.

Now years later, we’ve seen how the world spins

on such a simple declaration; how love so long

unsaid becomes an ocean's voice, tide and current.

We mark another year of our being; we sip the broth,

these smells and sounds, our private tidings to savor;

taste how long time is, how briefly on the tongue;

how a ripple of love becomes the fathomless deep.

Our hands entwined, we see the distant horizon,

one true thing said, and how the waves never still.


Pines

by Dennis Barton


Nancy Williams

45 RPMs

New kids, from Philadelphia, intrude.

We summer lakers, Detroiters, form

a clique around the needle that grazes

the black hills of the latest Motown

rock and roll. We’re in the groove.

Phonographs, records, are us.

We dance our plush green lawn

into a floor of stomped twirls. Strolls

and twists blast into chicken flaps.

Monkeys, jerks, and hand jives.

Dance craze, at the hop. Show-offs,

us. Arrogant, them, these new kids

who hug the water’s edge like imaginary

gymnasium walls. As if they know it all.

But their eyes, glued wide, betray them.

Hah! So we thought. One sculls away

then back on slapped waves of music,

a Pennsylvania beat of 45s.


Stacks of mashed potatoes and raves,

dancing in the streets. A trove, this

rock and roll, an equalizer. It spins, lifts

and spins, mixing east coast and west

into the Midwest, night into day, dark

into the hands of light, as we all dance.

Heads droop, eyes shut. The sun finally

wearies of its watch. Some day-birds

have already trilled themselves to sleep,

others, even night-birds, loudly object

to our racket or fly off. Remorse has

yet to spin in its own deep groove.

the driftwood review issue five

Documents

heather macpherson

joseph anthony vega

kim lock

sergio ortiz

street woman

peter schwartz

ken meisel detroit riots

george moore