Jake Johnson

LIES

Curled up next to you Let swollen fingers obsess in your skin as your hair twists a lie around my eyes

Tie me in unbreakable bonds and drown me with your silent words Speak poems of infertility blessing offspring with notions of success but flick away with nails of unconcentrated thought

Barf up overused metaphorical idioms And sitting, motionless weep so that my tears must, must hold double, Your sorrow plus mine

Leave me... please, leave me. Forget it.

-Jake Johnson

SHE IS THE FIELD

She is the field that compels your rise without words Only from the look of that placid face The final glint of that smile and the over ripened pulse of those tannic lips We once stood as a shadow beneath her blooming step, but now Gleaming rival, please, do not rise just yet.

Her skin is still my wheaten terraces Glistening of grained ardor Her body lays scarred and worn with the harvests I wake to her: she must wake to you, Bearing those infertile almond seeds to your piercing glimmer:

The finer dawn that you raise for her Is a call of closer terrestrial dusk, Louder calls for her perfect loam To lose its last redolent moisture to your desert. Leave her to dry some other teeming woman.

Without a field, a farmer descends to solitary life Unab1e to know his joy of the soil's loose passion, Finding no solace in loving labor, but living in the dwindling starlight Of desolate cropland and rusted tools with splintered handles. Pain of loneliness in a vast wasteland of once rich soil.

Do not raise us from our sunless slumber I need the agrarian blood I rest with. She is resplendent again in your somber absence. And if this final passing of your fiery envy she endures, No other shall she know.

-Tony Foley

THOUGHTS ON A BEACH

Running feet like bells on sand-stained shades of cayenne pepper by echoes of what will soon be yesterday.

Twirls of salted hair click like wind chimes, wind-children whispering maybe, ifyou run fast enough, the mundane hands of life will stop clutching; maybe your fairy tales will come true.

My fairy tales are mine alone, but they're full of you.

Who are you, anyway, that my heart is a picture frame for yours? Stand still as a prison wall and let the world wash around your feet.

I feel the breeze, chilly on the side where you ought to be.

The starlight

draped across the waves reminds me of a poem I once wrote as the sun

kisses the waves with sanguine fingertips.

A small hand closes in front of the sun as the light

goes out.

-Grace Niewijk