Better Than Starbucks!

Sunday Roasts

 

I remember sitting with you

not too long ago

London Fields, Summer,

everyone was hurrying out of the rain

while we sat still under your umbrella

taking turns as shelter delegate

after the roast

 

it wasn't long ago

I was talking about something, anything

we perused the book shop

you picked out Leonard Cohen

we made a concrete plan about

moving to Paris

then fell apart with laughter

​

you brought the Autumn

just by smiling

your iris, an auburn cochleate

under the alphabet of lightning

​

Richard Weston

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Venice in Your Eyes

(for Franca)

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the way they´re lowering his coffin

looks so careful, far from final,

as if he was just testing

the old wooden boards leading down-

stairs to the gondolas

 

selling ice-cream to cool-looking Germans

giving his soul to this strange wailing sect

made him look like a fish

out of the waters of the old Italian town

down by the lagoon

​

while they´re chanting on about

the protection of angels, the kingdom

being as imminent as

‘this poor sinner´s death’

I´m discovering new depths of emotions

behind your black widow´s veil

 

deeper than the shallow surface

of public mourning

deeper than the memories of

your shared exiled life

deep-sea blue in your beautiful sadness

transcending the masquerades and the masks of death

 

which you know well enough,

those Venetian blinds for the soul,

the Masque of the Red Death,

the Mask of the Black or White Death,

all changing into

the Masque of Sudden Death

 

hiding, all of them, the despair

of the heart

and the beauty of the soul

till we have briskly crossed the water,

walked across the dove-littered square

and are standing at the altar

to discover the true gold

behind the cross.

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Acknowledgement: first published in Big Pond Rumours (Canada), editor: Sharon Berg.

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Frank Joussen is a German teacher and writer. His publications include two selections of his poetry, one of them being a bilingual collaboration with Romanian poet Ana Cicio. He has edited two international anthologies of poetry/fiction in India. His poems and short stories have also been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies in G.B., Ireland, Germany, Romania, Malta, the U.S.A., Canada, India, Thailand, China and have been translated into German, Romanian, Hindi and Chinese.

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Solon's Drone
    
Call no man happy until he is dead —Solon  

Rather than try to join the diligent honeybees
who toiled away on the pink tipped flowers
to store grains into the pollen baskets on their hind legs
while thrusting their shimmering reddish brown proboscises
and sucking the golden liquid from the innards of the blooms
the idle drone bee was glad to feast on their royal jelly
before he lifted up to fertilize a virgin queen on the wing.  

 

And though he did succeed in mating with a monarch
the other bees still resented him for having emptied their honeycombs
and before he could gorge more on their precious bee bread
the whole swarm of bees came streaming into the straw skep  
to condemn the parasitic bee by stinging him without pity.         

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Previously published in the Deltona Howl Magazine.

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Anum Sattar studies English at Ohio's College of Wooster. Her poems have been  widely published. A Vonna Hicks Award winner, she frequently reads out her work at Brooklyn Poets in New York City.  

 

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SITTING FOR RAOUL 

​

Amid dangerous clutter, a scatter of wet tarps,

glass bottles and bent frames, I sit on a rickety throne

in black leather jacket, left hand clamped

on an ancient armrest, the other welded to a daybook

bought in Venice—Moses posed by Michelangelo—

until my legs locked under go numb as marble.

​

Raoul dances before me, sways with the weight

of a large wooden palette built by a shipwright,

its iron disc countering his wrist strain.

Not allowed to turn, smile or open my mouth,

let alone twitch a look at the northern facing window

or up at the half-occluded skylight, by which

a noon-day winter gray looks through dirt,

I return his piercing gaze. Often he ignores me.

​

In the first stage, he under-paints a ghost’s drawing

of my face, burnt umber, sallow orange and ochre scrawled

on an easel where my nose melts like tallow.

We pause for pizza and Cokes, then my Rembrandt does

as his idol did four centuries ago—

smears fresh medium mixed that very morning

to cover my shadow, slurries varnish and linseed oil

thinned by eggs into which he works the colors.

 

At the finish my arms deliquesce like beached combers,

my legs are stumps. Below the hairline lightning flashes

blue and green, my forehead a scarp in the Flemish muck,

a darkling cliff shining in the sun. He kept it a few months

then used the canvas for someone else. So much for fame.

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MICHAEL SALCMAN's poems have appearred in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, 2007), nominated for The Poets' Prize, The Enemy of Good is Better (Orchises, 2011), Poetry in Medicine, (Persea Books, 2015), and A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press (2016). His web site is www.salcman.com or Necessary Speech.