volume seven | number one | spring 2006

Poetry

Carolyn Blount Brodersen
-- On the Bus

Collette Lawlor
-- The Diver
-- Fall

Jenn Habel
-- Us
-- Allow Me to Introduce My Bad Side

Taylor Collier
-- When He Knocks

Janet I. Buck
-- A Letter to My Sister

Linda Benninghoff
-- Voices Soft As Morning Fog
-- The Aspen

Gary Charles Wilkens
-- The Gift
-- I, Tiresias

Jenny Yang Cropp
-- stealing kimchi

 The Gift
 -- Gary Charles Wilkens

The gift is not the trees but the forest.
The gift is not the water but the rain.
Trumpets are not your fanfare,
rather the silence thereafter.
Violet petals are not your path
but what you leave as you pass.
Your shoes are the black soil
and the sky your summer hat.
The Milky Way is but the hem
of your gown. All these gifts
you keep in an old shoebox
and think of me occasionally.

 I, Tiresias
 -- Gary Charles Wilkens

Blind since birth, Tiresias
scoffs at the elites
who tell him of power called
"sight"- what an efficient way
to keep him in his place!

He lives in a blind town
with a blind wife who smells good
and sightless kids with sweet voices.
His drab factory produces black
bobbles at a prodigious rate,
funding the yearly trip to the cave.

He votes for the Blind Party
in elections and prays in a church
without candles. Doctors who complain
of his functionless organs
he suspects of being Bolsheviks.

In his dreams
he sees blue rivers.