Better Than Starbucks!

Advertised

 

I advertised for a lover black as a vinyl record

in a spattered jacket smelling like a

basement book. Or a jacket with

psychedelic artwork and shrink wrap I’d pierce

gently with my thumbnail. Black with

reflections white as the Apollo’s

spotlight. The needle arm rides daintily

from the outer rim to the no-man’s land

around the label. Experienced, scratchy,

it crackles like the fireplace in

the grand hall of the ski

lodge where we toast our anniversaries.

Sometime around the tenth, we no longer

feel conspicuous checking in.

By then the record’s been flipped

a hundred times. We’ve gotten careless about

sleeving it. We anticipate the notes that hiccup,

the one-syllable beefs that nag.

 

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Timothy Robbins has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978. His collection Denny’s Arbor Vitae was published in 2017. A new collection, Carrying Bodies, is coming out in 2018. He lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with his husband of twenty years.

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Star by star you add a word

the way the Earth still darkens

from the bottom up, lets you hold on

 

keep it from shedding just its light

and your fingers — you write

as if this stone was already black

 

and step by step your child-like name

pinned on to become its last breath

while you steer the lettering back home

 

leave spaces for this iron waterfall

to point from under some mountainside

at whispers that no longer move

 

smothered by braids, shoulders, kisses

that are yours, oceans, winds, mornings

blacker than this dirt and lost.

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Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by box of chalk, 2017.

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BODY SURFING

 

Standing hip deep in the sea

Is nice in itself, but the reason for being there

Is the wait for a big wave.

 

A wave rising, a sudden tower

Smooth with devouring power

But one you can launch yourself forward in tune with — and

Hurtle ecstatic, unseeing and breathless

For as long as breath can hold

Through the water and up along over and onto the sand,

Sand thick in your hair, jammed in every fold,

Scraped, battered and rolled,

Triumphant, beached, deathless.

 

For this the saint prays,

For this the artist stares open-eyed,

For this the poet lets wounds bleed unstanched,

For this: this hope of being launched,

Controlled and uncontrolled

By what can’t be withstood or denied.

 

(Or else you could duck under the wall,

Let it pass over while you count three,

Hear the boom of its crested fall,

Yourself unbroken, inactive, safe, free.)

 

The sea is always there

Whether or not you are in it

Standing hip deep in it

Waiting for the next big wave.

 

 

Robin Helweg-Larsen’s poetry is published internationally. His chapbook “Calling The Poem” is available as a free download from Snakeskin Poetry Webzine, issue 236. He is Series Editor for Sampson Low’s “Potcake Chapbooks — Form in Formless Times.”

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BEGINNING

 

A tree-frog trills in the dark, echoing lightly in the midst of waning, not adrift but stationary, a lighthouse of sound, beacon of resonance that says Whether you come this way or not, dawn is here and brightening, and a school of crickets passes through night’s full tide toward light.

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WIND’S CONSIDERATION

 

Ships creak over the land of the living, the dead.

 

The wind believes I should consider it alive and say,

See the leaves the breeze has birthed?

 

The wind’s expectation is that I believe it’s responsible for all movement,

even ships that navigate the vulgar crescent of the sparked darkness.

 

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Both these poems are from FOUR BITS — Fifty 50-Word Pieces.

 

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John L. Stanizzi’s full-length collections are Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, and High Tide-Ebb Tide. His work is widely published. His latest book, Chants, will be out this year.

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THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS OF GLORIA VANDERBILT

 

At the flea market, she bought a perfectly trussed parcel

of letters and placed them, unread, in a transparent

plastic cage she keeps like a laboratory specimen

in her studio.  She had bathed in the fragrance of

old onionskin and the scent of lovers’ touches on

the yellowed envelopes and holds them, unopened,

in trust, still binding the secrets that spill onto pages

from the heart’s blood of lovers’ murmuring pens.

 

In the graveyard of poetry anthologies, we plunder

dead scribes’ rhymes with untutored reading, wondering

why the Royal Academy let Burkes and Hares like us

visit your graves, ragpick you to breathe new life into

our archives.  But a few of us know that you wrote not

for us, but in defense of the sanctity of secret intent

to which we supply the content, suborning hidden

discontents.  A few of us collect flint, schist, mica

or even fool’s gold to pirate away your rest, leaving

one mineral kiss of emulation on your headstones.

 

In the end, all letters are bound with the twine and

caution tape of our lives, marking casements that

are not to be pried by voyeurs when they’re left behind.

Gloria left these strangers’ secrets safe in a see-through

box, mysterious even though within reach.  Like the

dead poets, she shares our gift of ambivalence, knows

the worth of the underrated strategically placed footnote.

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Pamela Sumners lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her spouse, a teenage kid, and three dogs.