» » » Viola Allo « « «
Sub-Saharan African Bride A few drops of your perspiration fall into the pot of plantain stew and in the evening when the family eats the world feels full.
» » » Catherine French « « «
Sacramento Deity He’s inexact. Some Octobers, the rice falls from his sleeves like spring pollen. Others, he’s stingy and irritable. Not enough offerings, not enough bowing, not enough. Then he likes to walk in full winter light among the shaky farmers and people of the streets. He softens, drapes his arms around them, dips his hands in their pockets, leaves a little something. The whisper of a thread that the finger worries. A smack on the cheek in the guise of a junebug. There’s never any shortage of amusement. Still, the water wells up in him and finally he cries like a newborn, rivers, streams, broken levies of tears. His melancholia thins to white desolation just past New Year when the rafts of swans depart. They leave, and there’s no comfort. Spring is the cure, summer his revenge when he sleeps all day in barns, shade spilling in lengths from his head. But Fall is his alone, the harvest secondary to his need for color, before death, for the rice field’s green and shine and mud-swelled river. Grain beads up like thought that can’t stop. Mostly, through everything,
"Giraffe" Finkleman's Giraffe » » » PHOTOGRAPH
he’s hidden, watching us trespass, kick up the chaff and hulls. Habitually, he takes the high view of his wild, which we’ve squared up, which we think ours.
15 poetry
for that fragrance of burn