Elegant Thorn Review

Two Poems: David Chorlton

2007-05-28T19:06:00.000-07:00

Rain Meditation

On days of slow rain the house
shrinks a little, its rooms
hold their occupants with a more
than usual gentleness,
and its windows shiver in their frames
without sunlight. Grey absorbs
all thoughts while the radio
emits what warmth there is
along with a stream
of songs in Spanish. The hummingbird,
flicker, and two cactus wrens
come to the offerings
suspended from a porch beam,
each bringing its flash
of color from the wild. Water slips
from the overhang
to pool among the dormant stems
of plants in winter,
and then sink into darkness
that runs deep in the ground
where the future depends
on resources available
for those who will take our places
at the glass, on a day like this,
listening to the minutes
dripping through the clock.

* * * * *

In the Middle of Nowhere

A picture on the television screen shows fields
with a forlorn path winding between them

and trees heavy with afternoon sun
where the announcer states

a casino will be built in the middle of nowhere
as if a roll of the dice will turn

land into a place. Some nowheres
stretch between horizons and exist

only in the dizzy memories
of those who went there by mistake, or sought

a corridor to the future through
a wide expanse of thorns and thirst. Some

are grassland, others are brush.
Weapons are tested in the middle of nowhere

because they can’t destroy what doesn’t exist.
Armies practice warfare there

and become invisible. Land speed records
are set where there is nowhere to arrive when the fuel

runs out. Empty spaces rest
uneasy on the curvature of Earth. A province

of sand blows away in a storm. A continent of ice
is melting into history, to be mentioned on the page

that lists whatever disappeared for want
of being recognized for what it is.

~ David Chorlton lives in balmy Phoenix, AZ. This is his first appearance In Elegant Thorn.

Three Poems: Margaret James

2007-05-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

not yet named

I will not feed him beef,
nor chicken, though I've made no friends
in that family. We mothers worry so,
it is no wonder she worries.

But I refuse to feed him beef
because I once had a summer friend
who became winter sausages
and I do not eat my friends
nor feed them to hungry relatives.

But, yes, I agree to teach him the Bible,
and make his pillow God.
He will hear the parables of Jesus
our fish will multiply in the form of broccoli and sweet potatoes.
I will show how we should share bread
and sit back and watch our baskets overflow.

I will show him Krishna, the dark haired flautist,
I will teach him how Radha longs,
the painful joy of Mirabai
and how, if you stay up all night chanting,
the light will come in one form or another.

I will teach him how to bow deep in prayer
five times a day, so unlike those heathens
who only rarely think of God.
We will lift our hands and cry “Allahu Akbar”!
and know there is only God.

We will sit with Him at the dinner table,
carry Him in our pockets to school
and uncover Him in the smallest
sugar ant.

I will instruct him how to sit still
to find silence…
how to love everyone,
because they are yourself
and never eat your friends.

But all this planning is for nothing.
She'll return from Las Vegas like Jesus
rises each Easter. And if not,
she'd never leave her son to such a radical life,
though she really likes the sound
of pillows stuffed with God.

* * * * *

Outside of the Garden

It is because I can't stray so far from home.
Even now I know God is in the garden saying,
“where are you? Why have you hidden from me?”

But I haven't hidden, I've just covered myself in absence.
It is a bitter/sweet apple, this city life.

On rainy nights the garden beckons with the call of the wind
but in the morning the children's voices cry louder
for breakfast.

I bit the fruit, fell into another warm body,
wailed in the pain of birth.
Yet still he calls to me from the garden
wanting me naked and in the Presence again.

He is looking for me
and I will not stray too far from home.

* * * * *

Testament

I always return
to see how God has been coming through me.
Here, he is a dream of arrows;
there, he is the slingshot and the giant.

I am always waiting for the one to come
with the ring:
the reminder of why I've been sitting so long,
the reassurance that we will be reunited.

His Name is the thing that makes rocks float.
He says it isn't his power, we are the magicians
traveling his galaxies.

He watches in awe while we pray
and learn to walk across the water.

~ Margaret James (Metta) is a frequent contributer to ETR. You can read more of her poems at her Zaadz blog.

Two Poems: Tim J Brennan

2007-05-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

Fifty White Stones

blue sky blends
into somber fog,
a soon-darkness
that will drop the ground
a little lower

and if i am to be translated
like this winged she creature,
she of bending back and black
wings, if i am ever to be
as permanent, let it be here
in this northern field
where i have stopped
among fifty white stones, long & flat;
being here is less like surrender

fifty years will do this to a person looking
for signs, looking for any reason that having been
can be as lasting

* * * * *

Deciduous

we heal, simply, others,
like leaves resting next to a bare tree stripped
naked by seasons, naked like we all are
at birth

workmen took rest here, next
to this tree, a hundred years ago;
their sweat still lingers in the air.
Down-river the bridge they built
still stands. the same names carved
in its railings as in their granite headstones

*

we heal, simply, our children,
like some kind of morality play. We
put leaves, like tiny boats, into cold water,
watch in mystery as they float away
like so many emigrants

*

we heal, simply, ourselves,
and in the silence near our death, we hear
our own hearts beating
as quietly as falling leaves

~ Tim J Brennan is from southeastern Minnesota. His poetry has appeared in The Elegant Thorn Review, Shampoo, The Rose and the Thorn, Main Channel Voices, The Green Blade, and is forthcoming in River Walk Journal. He is frequent contributer here.

Flash Fiction: Lorena Smith

2007-04-29T19:31:00.000-07:00

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

The first time I thought about rebellion was in a Sunday School Class. The teacher was telling us about John the Baptist and immediately my 8 year old imagination was captured by this figure. In my minds eye he was dressed in black leather, eating locusts (which I thought was a kind of bread), camping out in the desert and telling people to shape up or feel the wrath of God. He was a cooooool dude. Later after I heard that locusts were like grasshoppers and he was really wearing camel skin (furry and smelly) my interest waned a little bit. But my fascination with rebels continued. I was always drawn to them, in books and in cinema. I rejected James Dean (too wishy-washy - he didn’t even have a cause!), fell in love with all the boys of the Outsiders and longed for the day when I too could get a tattoo and piercing to prove my rebellion

High school of course was like the hot bed of rebellion. Everyone was rebelling. Piercing practically dripped from every lip, eyebrow and tongue. Tattoos flowered like a poppy field in bloom. The uniformity of our rebellion resulted in conformity like never before. I found myself annoyed and disgusted by this whole-hearted show of fitting in while trying to stick out. Where had all the rebels gone?

And then I met Maria. I literally bumped into her on a flight of stairs. I was running down them, she was walking slowly up them with a cane and a bag of groceries precariously balanced. I rounded a corner and my black leather jacket flew open and swept the bag of groceries straight out of her arms and onto the floor. I opened my eyes wide in horror and looked up at the kindly eyes looking back at me. Even with my not so imposing height at 5’2” she was much shorter than me and had to peer up. Her back was bent with osteoporosis and she wore very sensible shoes. Not my picture of a rebel at all. More a picture of my grandma. But those eyes. Full of sparkle and humor.

I helped her pick up her groceries and carry them to her apartment. When I got in there I saw row upon row of African keepsakes. Tall, carved statues in ebony of tall men and women with babies on their backs or with spears in their hands. Paintings of Lions, Elephants and Wildebeests. A huge leopard skin stretched on the wall. My mouth literally fell open. Her apartment smelt like spices and warm milk. There was a jungle of plants in her tiny living room. Crocuses and Hibiscus and Fikus plants.

She told me she’d spent most of her life in Tanzania working as a nurse in a remote jungle hospital. She said how her parents hadn’t wanted her to go, but the pull had been too strong. She had left. She had photos of the babies she’d delivered, of the people she’d helped. And all long before the time of international phone calls and e-mails. The fact that a tiny woman would venture out to this country where she had never been to serve people she had never known boggled the mind." But we were foolish you know” she smiled, “rebellious, wanting to live, to learn, to do something different.”

She poured me another cup of tea and I felt my tongue piercing clang ineffectively against the rim of the cup.

~ Lorena Smith appears in Elegant Thorn Review for the first time.

Poems: Kit Kennedy

2007-04-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

7 RANDOM FOOTNOTES TO VAN GOGH

I watch the sunflower grows menacing

Sunset frames plum blossoms

Storm tonight litter of petals

Walked through the other side of rain no fish caught

Just like a riddle bowl of lemons & a carafe

Stares down winter spring stares back in her glass

Smelled the fecund in a potted chive told me she loved me

* * * * *

IF THE WORLD WERE PERFECT

you would still be
frightened.
Before you were
in the womb
synapses
of ancestors
quickened
to danger.

Thus
the body
practical
& holy
stores
what it can
never
forget.

~ Kit Kennedy’s work appears in Animus, Bayou, Bombay Gin, Cezanne’s Carrot, The Comstock Review, Karamu, Mannequin Envy, Pearl, Poetry Super Highway, Runes, Saranac Review, Van Gogh’s Ear, and The Wild Goose Poetry Review. She hosts the monthly All Poets Welcome Reading Series in San Francisco and is a columnist (Conversations with...) for Betty’s List (www.bettyslist.com).

Two Poems: Greg Braquet

2007-04-19T18:11:00.000-07:00

Merge

Is it a defect in the eye,
or a misfired synapse in soul?

Darkness and dawn appear
as synonym ,
the sun and moon are identical twins,
black or blue sky, blend as one bruise.

Wind blown rain = squalling dust=
swirling snow = a makes
no difference sum.

My blood has coagulated as sand,
but feels the same as when it had
long, liquid legs.

I can now turn myself over and
over to measure time,
ridiculous and awkward
as oO, Oo , oO , Oo
Oo oO Oo oO

I speak silently to myself as
a mark against the void, but
the echo fades like dripping
spit from an observation desk.
Does it ever reach the bottom
as I have?

A sweet butterfly lands on my
tongue, its feet soured in a lemon tree;
I taste only the talc of web and again,
the blurring of differentials leads to a
threshold without form. Is this oblivion?

Then, a letter comes explaining
all the particulars of your exit,
the precise definitions of
of how love is lost, and how,
theoretically, gains can come
from such loss.

And now I start to remember;
the sun is the hot, shiny one.

* * * * *

And Thy Has Brought Me

My catacomb in progress flares,
again my quivering hand to scratch
the chronic scab, bone driven.

Layer after morbid layer
picked away, my neck to rubber
watching how the dead flesh flakes,

shedding by habit,
unveiling a raw ghost
not ready for life.

One day that salivating,
shroud black maw will
invert and swallow whole.

Till then, the ash between my
joints beckons other ash
and the dust on my tongue

thickens, becomes
more palatable.
An immediate presence

falls from my eyes,
always farther in the
direction of the night.

Out there in the unforeseeable
void, a nomenclature is forming
using all of my being for its

voice, and even with so
much of myself committed, I can
not bare to mouth the words.

~ Greg Braquet exists in New Orleans, but like most poets lives in a world of his own schmoosing. His poetry has appeared in such publications as The New Laurel Review, THEMA, Poems Niederngasse, The 2006 Rhysling Anthology, Red River Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Pierian Springs, Tryst, Side Reality, The Adagio Verse Quarterly, The Little Green Tricycle, The Junket, L'Intrigue, Branches Quarterly, Stylus Poetry Journal, Subtle Tea, The Exquisite Corpse, Slow Trains, Mannequin Envy, Zygote In My Coffee and The Melic Review.

Two Poems: Pete Lee

2007-04-18T05:19:00.000-07:00

And Nothing

And nothing is straight or flat,
and nothing is in rows,
and the creek is babbling,
and everything is decaying
and shooting up green from itself,
and nothing has perfect corners,
and everything's lying askew
as I am lying on this rock,
and the creek is lying
about everything,
babbling on and on,
and nothing about this creek
is on the level...
and nothing is
wasted: nothing is clean.

* * * * *

What Follows

After the brief,
intense storm,

the snow melts
as the sky clears,

revealing sun,
horizon, and

the path you
have been on

all along,
after all.

~ Pete Lee lives with his wife in Ridgecrest, California, a small town in the Mojave Desert midway between Mount Whitney and Death Valley. His poetry has recently appeared online at Right Hand Pointing, Unfettered Verse, The Orange Room Review, ken*again, and Antithesis Common.

National Poetry Map

2007-04-17T17:13:00.000-07:00

The Academy of American Poets offers a great resource for poets and lovers of poetry -- the National Poetry Map.

Simply choose your state to find local poets, poems, events, literary journals, writing programs, poetry organizations, and more.

Three Photos: Orkun

2007-04-13T14:22:00.000-07:00

Kilise

Kapi

Green Bed

~ Orkun lives in Turkey. This is his first appearance in Elegant Thorn Review. You can see more of his photography at his DeviantArt page.

Two Poems: David Thornbrugh

2007-04-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

Ditch Algae

Ditch water between road
and winter-fallow fields
flows over brown scum
like a old man’s toothless gums,
frayed fabric flailing crystal
depths that seem subterranean,
peristaltic, sewage sludged.

We are drawn in like Elizabethan audiences
staring at ourselves onstage,
appalled at the resemblance
of a murderer to a saint,
how elaborately worked lace
resembles knife holes bloody from within,

water flowing along digestive tracts
filtered by gills growing scant inches
under the thin skin we rub together
in ecstasies of angel exaltation,
stain glass glow to our rosy meekness
straining to escape from winter-fallow fields,

bodies bounded by corn rows
cut to stubble browsed by sheep.
Winter water drained off sheep shit fields
flows weed-choked ditch through
fists of algae, single-celled as saints
praying for deliverance from the body,
for a way out of the ditch.

* * * * *

The Art Critic

TV announcer says
The Scream has been found
flashes picture of Edvard Munch’s
balloon man squeezing his cheeks
on that far northern bridge
stolen with emaciated Madonna
two years back and now returned

in his recliner my father stirs
like an elephant seal scenting an intruder
says “what’s the point of that”
of a painting so famous
it’s a plastic punch-me doll
sold in drug stores all over America

his idea of art doesn’t get much past
Spitfires and ME-109s mixing it up
over London the angst in his hand
clicks one channel after another
past the Mona Lisa and mastodons
scrawled on cave walls
abstraction not what his generation fought for

bare-breasted women painted on
bomber fuselages his way
of living with the terror of existence
he couldn’t hear the Scream
or see the Madonna’s fever
from 25,000 feet over Dresden
or Tokyo

~ "David Thornbrugh currently writes from South Korea, where he teaches English in a National University. He writes to push back the darkness a little bit at a time, in the same flighty manner as lightning bugs. He has been published in numerous small press journals, and once wrote the questions for a geography textbook. He prefers multiple choice questions to True/False."

Two Poems: Ace Boggess

2007-04-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

"What Is It That Divides Us?"

[question from jkrishnamurti.org]

I hear silence when you speak.
I promise "nice things," &
you think I said "night sings,"
ask me what it means . . .
to which I mumble
about beautiful moments
that sound ugly in translation.
It is as though no English term
exists to say "I welcome
the rage that makes you smile," or
"I am like you in my originality."
We are torn apart by love
we express in spiteful logic
of ears that have their own agenda
like politicians who give
the people what they want, &
give them nothing.

* * * * *

"How Would You Like Your Death?"

[question from Mahmoud Darwish's poem, "They Would Love To See Me Dead"]

Served with mystery: glance
at constellations unrecorded, unfamiliar sun.
None of the certainties
answermen promise kneeling
by a cancer patient's bed,
squeezing his hand to impose a prayer.
Spontaneity mixed with spectacle:
head in a lion's mouth,
car leaping fat ravine,
politics awakening culture
as the Tiananmen student
standing ground before a tank,
steel belts agrumble
with his possible death, &
for me, then, no sanctuary
in a camera's lens.

~ Ace Boggess is the author of two novels DISPLACED HOURS and BEAUTIFUL AMBIVALENCE, both available from Gatto Publishing; and two books of poetry, THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL WHOSE WISH WAS NOT FULFILLED (Highwire Press (www.circlemagazine.com/beautifulgirl) and, as editor, WILD SWEET NOTES II: MORE GREAT POETRY FROM WEST VIRGINIA (Publishers Place). His writing has appeared in HARVARD REVIEW, NOTRE DAME REVIEW, ATLANTA REVIEW, FLORIDA REVIEW, RATTLE, and many similar journals.

Three Poems: David Luntz

2007-04-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

Odysseus at Sea

There have been no birds for days.

Only still gray sea and the weariness of silence.
Sometimes, if he closes his eyes, he can
swear he hears time’s dull metronome.

But he’s not sure.

Enraged, he bellows into the void:
Aeolos, give me some fucking wind.
But who’s he kidding?

It’s the nature of the gods to ignore you when you need them most.

With nothing else to do, he recalls the art Circe taught him.
What are they?, he asked, pointing to the symbols that burned like
phosphorus across her chest.

Signs by whose combination you can write words, she said.

Would their knowledge give him the power of prophecy?
No, she replied.
Would they let him see the thoughts of other men?

She shakes her head.
Then what use is it?, he said pouting.
You won’t know until you master it, she cooed.

Which he now does with much difficulty,
(like a butterfly struggling against a chrysalis)
until he grasps it in all its radiance, beauty and transience.

But he’s been tricked.

This art cannot be conveniently forgotten or ignored.
Like the tissues that spool a cocoon it has enveloped him.
For days he watches thousands of butterflies threading the air.

Then the wind came.

* * * * *

The Achaean Returns

He makes his home now by the shore.
He senses he will leave soon, but he’s not sure to where.

Shells cluster over him in pink constellations.
Fishnets, as the villagers call them, braid his eyes.

The canker of memory still smarts, but he’s gotten used to it.
Blindness has illuminated him.

Still, he will concede, he often regrets the day he learned to read,
Circe smiling and the sky swollen with butterflies…

While he gorged on all the different words,
rolled them across his tongue,
gargled syllables in his throat,
bit down on the consonants,
released vowels into light and clouds.

Then, as though he had left off dreaming,
he hears her voice call to him from across
the sea…

Blown from a conch of seven chambers
and supple camber, his mother’s voice,
like a forgotten scent, singes the raw nerves
of memory…

And he wonders, not without resentment,
why it took her so long to find him.

At last, blind, alone and dying, he knows now
where to go…

He will slip away unnoticed on the tide,
unwind the stifling skein of words and thought,

desire and memory, sail to her directly without
stars or lodestone, and sleep again in her arms.

* * * * *

Starry Night

We are by the sea at night, not dreaming,
just sleepwalking through time’s dark
asylum, spellbound in solitude, wondering
whether fashioning a man from dust is more
perverse than creating an endless universe.

The stars drift across the face of the ancient
seabed. They seem to cry out,
There are no mirrors here, only windows.
Beyond, in the woods, moonlight
soaks through the lachrymose dew, sullen pools
reflecting birches and oaks in amber hues.

Birches and oaks tense in the breeze.
Shadows shiver on the dews’ taut skin.
These tender the illusion that the gods
have not abandoned us, while the single
path through the woods winds gently
to the end of memory and anticipation.

~ David Luntz started writing in 2005 and has appeared in various online journals. He has been nominated (2006) for a Pushcart Prize.

[CREDITS: Starry Night appeared in Mastodon Dentist November 2006. The Achaean Returns appeared in The Centrifugal Eye August 2006. Odysseus at Sea appeared in Facets June 2006.]

Two Poems: Rachel Diem

2007-04-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

Gabriel crosses a border

Everything happens at once, so he has to arrive; someone shoves him out the door of a passing car. This happens: a somersaulting hard-scraping skid on the pavement, torn clothes, grit stinging, raw skin. Events occur in space, it has to happen somewhere: some road running north from the old military highway along the border, near Progreso, near Relámpago, maybe. And she has to be there too, shivering in the March wind, waiting for a ride, for the schoolbus, with a group of girlfriends. They call out warnings and taunts as she goes to him. His jeans were pressed, once; his shirt had been clean. The wind has been knocked right out of him. She kneels over him; he rises to his knees beside her; she lifts her hand to brush the dirt off his cheek. He sees sunflowers arching behind her. When he stumbles to his feet he's taller than she is, and skinny, and he laughs, even though he hurts. We don't know what she sees. Somebody new to this side of the border, somebody with tears in his eyes, somebody with wings. We don't know what time and space are, or how they work. He has forgotten air, and breath. He doesn't seem to be used to gravity. Sunlight breaks through the clouds, and for a moment even you can see their halos.

* * * * *

Witnesses

I walk the path back to the cabin
and hear movement in the weedy brush.
I see a badger. He looks at me.
Nothing but yarrow and Queen-Anne's-lace
between us. I move away, afraid,
not wanting to cause fear.
Inside, the clock says it's nine but it’s afternoon;
the clock lives its own time, or none.
The hands move, but maybe it's only
to cover its face.

Empty and blank as a movie screen
in a closed theater, I think
of the badger's appraising stare.
I don't know what the badger sees,
what you see, what anyone sees.
Run away now –
behind the screen are the real stories,
true ones, ones I haven't told you,
not wanting to cause fear.

When I was twelve I walked up wide stairs,
stood facing Picasso's Guernica.
The century turned inside out
and the inside was gray
although I knew it was burning.
We flew from Germany with bombs.
I couldn't hear the horse’s screams, or hers,
or my own, over the thrum of the plane.

I know the badger sees me
as I turn away. Clock, cover your face.
I use dirty words, and the dirt
comes from the ditch where we tossed the bodies.
The badger sees that too. Queen-Anne’s-lace
and yarrow grow up out of the ditch
and I keep climbing the stairs
in the museum of the 20th century,
trying to remember what happens
when the movie ends.

~ Rachel Diem lives in Saline, Michigan. This is her first appearance in the Elegant Thorn Review.

National Poetry Month

2007-04-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

April is National Poetry Month.

[click image to see it full-size]

As part of National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets is offering a poem a day delivered to your mailbox.

Poem-A-Day
After 20,000 readers signed up in 2006, the Academy will again offer a daily dose of new poetry each day this April. The poems represent some of the best work being published in 2007, and include new poems by authors such as Eavan Boland, Henri Cole, Kevin Young, and Carl Dennis.

The poem for April 1 is from Noah Eli Gordon:

An exact comprehension of the composer’s intent

Cloudless sky, a tendril root, a chord begun
    as unfolding duration & one’s lost words,
a red lexicon, an empty definition

gathering its discourse—the flow from content
    to perception: language is a translation of grace.
Say the body, say the heart, a composition in blue,

the passing energy, cell, motion, inevitability;
    an impact until meaning wears through
the mind’s opulence, its spindle—a white thread.

Tethered to conviction, one says moon, one, emotion
    —the recurrence of night: a door will open,
shifting from anonymity to intellection—a translation

of sight with speech, awoken not by voice
    but what precedes it: the worldliness, wordless;
a measure of sound or movement to song.

Three Photos: Manuel Librodo Jr.

2007-03-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

" Towards Nirvana (An Extraordinary Goal)"

"Bubbly"

"Etherial"

~ Manuel Librodo Jr. has appeared in Elegant Thorn once before. He lives in Bangkok, teaching in one of the international schools there. You can see more of his art at DP Challenge and at his page here.

Two Poems: Francine Marie Tolf

2007-03-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

ASH:

what fire tastes like,
once its heart has chilled.
It rides November
like a pack of windy crows,
scattering wider and wider . . .
Where does it settle?
Street corners. Rooms.
Unastonished,
we walk on dead stallions,
wipe hair that held sun
from dusty shelves.

* * * * *

ON A BENCH IN LINCOLN PARK,

I ask the woman in sweatpants
if her dog is friendly,
and we get to talking.
They wouldn't tell her at the shelter
what was done to him,
but when she first brought him home,
he crouched under the bed without eating for three days.

He's a Doberman
with clipped ears, a docked tail,
and such numinous brown eyes
I lay my face against his side,
which is warm with sun.

"These deep simple necessities
by which life renews itself."
We never earn them, do we?

In early spring light,
he lets me hold him
for a long time.

~ Francine Marie Tolf appeared in Elegant Thorn Review back in November. She has a chapbook of poems (Blue-flowered Sundress, Pudding House Press) forthcoming and an essay in the current issue of the online journal, Apple Valley Review.

Spring Poems

2007-03-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

About.com has assembled a collection of classic Spring poems to welcome the season. They are seeking submissions from contemporary poets writing about Spring.

Here are the poems they have collected:

A Spring View
~ Tu Fu (c. 750)

Though a country be sundered, hills and rivers endure;
And spring comes green again to trees and grasses
Where petals have been shed like tears
And lonely birds have sung their grief.
...After the war-fires of three months,
One message from home is worth a ton of gold.
...I stroke my white hair. It has grown too thin
To hold the hairpins any more.

~ Trans. Witter Bynner

* * * * *

William Shakespeare,
“Spring,” song from Love’s Labors Lost (1598)
William Wordsworth,
“Lines Written in Early Spring” (1798)
Christina Rossetti,
“Spring Quiet” (1847)
Emily Dickinson,
“A light exists in spring” (#85)
Robert Frost,
“A Prayer in Spring” (1915)
D.H. Lawrence,
“The Enkindled Spring” (1916)
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“Spring” (1918)

Enjoy!

Three Photos: Judi Liosatos

2007-03-15T19:43:00.000-07:00

"April"

"May"

"September"

~ These photos by Judi Liosatos are from a 2007 Landscapes calendar featuring her work throughout. You can see much more of her beautiful photography at her website, Judi Graphics.com.

Two Poems: Gabrielle Wilkon

2007-03-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

alternating spectrums

a light
flashes in her eye
and a galaxy forever changes

spectrums from yellow to red
but the speed of light is diminished
to a halt

one scream arises from multiple mouths
and is cut by the reigning silence
of the intersection that no one cared to stop at

mantled steel and frozen expressions
are shared
among the participants

the sounds of distant crowds
with mouths agape
hide the whimpers

a wave swims to the scene
and takes the evidence
away

into the blue, cloudless sky
the light turns green again
but no one is left to stroll through

* * * * *

Subway Portables

She smoothly opens her door
and welcomes me into her boudoir
of orange upholstery and musky aromas

I sit in a corner near a window
but she yells destinations
and draws my attention to the space within her four walls

I open my familiar book and cautiously gaze down
but she sits her representative near me
who shows me the paper distributed to her every corner

I nod and say that I’ve already heard the news
but she continues to force me to read her publications
I guess that’s all she knows

she slowly sings ‘summmerhill’
and invites a band of silent guests
into the room

we all sway rhythmically
with the motions she provides
no one falls out of tune

her trumpet blows
at the arrival and departure
of each guest

this is why I have come
to hear
her sweet trumpet blow

~ Gabrielle Wilkon is a 23 year old student learning about the body and vigorously scribbling down words on the side. She is a co-creator and editor of a student zine and an occasional contributor to the Kinesiology paper, “The Flying Walrus.”

Poem: Tim J Brennan

2007-03-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

one Sunday minute

it rained earlier, still wet
her hair a wet dance
breeze through blond

an orange perfect candle
wet, wax minutes dripping
away one Sunday
minute after midnight

our last kiss like a jar
of fireflies, even the clock’s
bells blushed twelve times,
once for every curvature

how i envy her love

~ Tim Brennan is a regular contributer to Elegant Thorn Review. Tim is a teacher of young minds and hails from southeastern Minnesota. His poetry has appeared in Green Blade, The Rose and the Thorn, Shampoo, and he has been a featured poet on Minnesotaartists.com

Three Photos: Judy W

2007-03-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

"Imprinted"

"Boulevard of Broken Dreams"

"Armageddon"

~ Judy W (Judilta) says, "I grew up with a favorite uncle who was a photographer, so I've been on one side of the camera forever. I really got into shooting myself about 10 years ago. I just keep plodding along, and learning, getting new cameras along the way to help."

Two Poems: Tim J Brennan

2007-03-05T06:20:00.000-08:00

In there

for forty-seven years of marriage,
mother kept candles, white
solid paraffin, like little wax children

she loved to light them during storms,
to hold them in the darkness, smiling
at flickers, created shadows on the wall

a lit candle
has fingerprints, she said
its own wick, tearing
darkness, forcing
it to surrender
a small part of itself

a candle aches for darkness,
to be used when cold winds scream,
and loneliness, while not fatal,
is wrapped in the poverty
of its unused self

she told me all this
when expecting storms,
while waiting to light her candles,
kept above the stove, in there,
just in case, she said

* * * * *

Dance Steps

Some of us gaze into our dance
partner’s eyes like others glance
contemplatively at stars, seeking
guidance in our steps, one leading
the other obediently following

each feeling the other’s rhythm
like listening to evening lake waves
or studying bending grass fields,
others awaiting turns patiently
like sitting early in a quiet church
hoping within themselves to somehow
learn what shape God really is

~ Tim J Brennan, a teacher of young minds, hails from southeastern Minnesota. His poetry has appeared in Green Blade, The Elegant Thorn Review, The Rose and the Thorn, Shampoo, and he has been a featured poet on Minnesotaartists.com

Two Poems: Mark Jackley

2007-03-04T06:30:00.000-08:00

RAIN

It bumps against the window,
staggered and ecstatic
to bring the news: The heavens
cup the earth, and now
the world is small, and quiet,
as a breath. The cat
blinks and wonders. Tell me,
friend, the rain is not
a gift but a cold fact,
and I will take your word
in my hand and skip it
over my wet heart.

* * * * *

CREATION

My eight-year-old Liana
is drawing a picture, bold
Crayola strokes, an apple tree
aswirl. In the center
of its foliage, there is an opening.
Light pours out. The artist
cannot tell you why.
It is a mystery,
and she is an artist.
The blobby clouds, blobby birds
and sun are swimming towards the hole.
The sky is a sea of blue,
and the sea is swimming too.
In what? It is a mystery,
and she is an artist.

~ Mark Jackley is a business writer in the Washington, DC, area. His poems have appeared in various journals and his chapbook, "Brevities," is forthcoming from Ginninderra Press.

Poem: Andrew Miller

2007-02-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

Magdalene

1.

I write letters of admiration to the moon.
We correspond:
A crater for a scar. A sea for a bruise.

2.

The elm trees are dying of a Dutch disease
that bears their names.
The wind administers it like a syringe,

so his hands found me gently in our first room.

3.

There is a hospital train
full of amputees
vanishing into the mouth of a tunnel
in the Alps.

You are an orderly.
And you a patient.
And you an engineer.

Soon we will come out the other side of the mountain.

Beautiful as a hospital, the moon awaits.
It is the tattoo he carved himself
slowly above my elbow.

4.

I am the driver.

We are coming to a town
where the children eat candy
the size of the skulls of children.

The stars have nothing to add.
The elms are those who waited too long.

It takes everything to leave a man.
Nothing to divorce him.
He arrives in the faces of my sons.

5.

If a man replaces himself with a knife...
If a man replaces himself with a roll of dimes...
If bits of glass shine in your skin...
If you wake far from where you were standing....

You are here.

~ Andrew Miller received my MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1997, where he studied with Larry Levis, and then later Gerald Stern and Ellen Bryant Voigt. His poems have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and The New Orleans Review. In 2002 he was awarded the Runes Prize for Mystery and two of his poems have been nominated for Push Cart Prizes.

Three Photos: John Craig

2007-02-23T06:34:00.000-08:00

Library

~ John Craig is regular contributor to Elegant Thorn Review. You can view many more of his images at his Flickr site. You can also find him at his blog.