THE THIN SCAR ON SUSAN’S RIGHT WRIST
by John McKernan
Under silver jewelry & light
Would point at a thread of moon
White shadow
High in a midnight sky
Off-white woven blue thread
In a red background
If ever she noticed me
Noticing that scar
She would whisper some thing
“A beautiful body
Deserves a gorgeous tattoo”
“At least it’s not a rusty bullet
Through a left ventricle”
“It’s me but it’s also not me”
WHY DO SOLDIERS
Carry
Brass knives
Where do they get
All those silver axes
In leather holsters
Who gave them
Buckets
And buckets
Of waterproof melanoma
And how come
Those gold pitchforks
With oak handles
Monogrammed
Sparkling in sunlight
When all it takes
Is a thick tree limb
Or a stone
The size of a small hand
To send a neighbor
A million miles away
BIRTHDAY NUMERO 47
My father died
When he was forty-seven
I still love chocolate cake
Chocolate frosting
Candles in a dark room
My name is
My father’s name
The same sound
But the silence is different
Spools of tomorrow
In green slats
Of sunlight
The letters are identical
Written in granite
PUBLIC PARK
A dog trotted over the orgasm sunbathing on a towel and lifted his right leg
The woman in the black dress walked up to the orgasm and kicked it
The professor whispered “Thank you The word for orgasm in Braille is orgasm”
Waving a shovel in the sand the child might have been screaming at an orgasm
An orgasm snored in a Dell computer box under the foot bridge to the Rose Garden
A large boy bounced the orgasm down the hill as if it were a soccer ball
When shadows of an orgasm floated past the young man’s heart he began running
An orgasm disguised as a prayer floated from the old woman’s lips
Twin orgasms pulled off their see-through bikinis and began giggling
An assortment of daylights loitered calmly Each one bearing an orgasm
The man with the propane tank & a lighter waited to become an orgasm
The orgasms hovering on the motorcycle mirrors winked twice then vanished
One idea of orgasm flew from the apple blossoms to the eye of the old deaf man
BIO
John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the USA – is now a retired comma herder / Phonics Coach after teaching for 41 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines.
Tamer Mostafa’s work has been featured in California Quarterly, The Rag Literary Magazine, Poets Espresso Review, Confrontation Literary Magazine, Stone Highway Review, and No Infinite. He was the recipient of the 2011 CSU Sacramento Bazzanella Literary Award in Creative Non-Fiction and the 2013 Lois Ann Latin Rosenburg Prize for Poetry.
Raised in New Jersey, Robert Lavett Smith has lived since 1987 in San Francisco, where for the past fifteen years he has worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional. He has studied with Charles Simic and Galway Kinnell. He is the author of several chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is Smoke in Cold Weather: A Gathering of Sonnets (Full Court Press, 2013).
R.A. Allen’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Night Train, Mantis, RHINO Poetry, Gargoyle, The Recusant (UK), and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Memphis for the humidity. More at http://poets.nyq.org/poet/raallen
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