From Ekleksographia

SOMETHING MAYBE

The curve of my spine bent,
along subway lines. The only thing
that makes sense is to lie down
on the sidewalk right now,
beer can crushed & tossed across
the street. We're not going to make it.
For an entire summer my life's
solution was to not leave
my bed. A thousand miles later
& I still want something else,
shifty and shifting away from the center.
It's clear now: we were never
going to make it. The darkness creeps
over, smears in the rain. The end
of the night means leaving the bar,
myself keeping myself in check.
Sometimes I want to go back
& do things differently,
but this is one fuck-up I can't take
back. Pink Moon. Pink Moon. Pink Moon. Pink Moon.
Hit play again. Lying in bed, feeling
the darkness creep over.
Let the weird back in. Find a point
in the distance, fast and furious,
something worth racing off to.
I'm looking for something new,
something catchy, something
to fall asleep to.

© Gina Myers 2009

More from Ocho #11

WHITE SESTINA

Again, they’ve tricked me out of bed
with the rumor of sight. No casual joke.
It seems they didn’t know what they were doing,
as if this dawn of rose and of white
were the gist of some other problem they were working
on. I am up now, and seething

with expectation. How I am seething
that the vision filtered through, and on my bed
stood, for a sweet second, the pilot working
its craft down to its pad, like a joke
which promised to be innocently white
discovered, in the end, to be something doing—

and though I wish I were doing
pet tricks, like a hound who can’t stop seething,
espying through the brush notes of white
(a brand new car, or pillow for its bed)
I am rarely ever in on it, when the joke
escapes into the higher lights, like a clock never working.

But I am working. I am working,
listening to what the repair man’s doing
to the faucet upstairs, and when a joke
falls from his lips, like a bubble from a trepanned seething,
I recoil like a child in its bed
taking notes, but protecting its fairly white

neck, wanting to keep it white. White,
the clouds want to show they’re working,
but I take it they need not lift my bed
to rise to the stars, to explain what they’re doing
so many weeks on the ground, the forum seething
with suspicion, that the mission be some sort of joke—

and, someday, we will just joke
about it, Aeneas. But say this to him, white
is the cloud, like a bang, and the working
a fairer standard to satisfy the seething.
Sure, it is clear there is something doing.
So lie down here, next to me, in my bed.

For the bed is the joke
doing lines before the judges, who are white
with pride and indignation: seething, working—

© Brian Kim Stefans 2007

From Ocho #11

DOUBLE

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away…

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

From Spar

WINTER ABSTRACT

Call me no one, candle abandoned.
From black lots, black columns, dimensions,
scattering wind. It's been a long time here,
the reflected essences of backyards,
photos freezing in your past. And less. And less.
Wouldn't promise but I swore,
love, adventure,
kept the best of our fractured animus,
when you close the door on your nurture—
cure on ice— the most protected picture
once radical, now quest. Dear heathen,
your magnet is nomad, do not ask
for more malignant fires, benigner poles—

© Karen Volkman 2002

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "Technician of Tough Love"

for Alexandra Grilikhes 1932-2003

Puzzling your way back from nothingness
you must be; if the Void is an abyss,
to conquer it in life is impossible.
There is a blessing in ritual,
but it is all from one pull.

Your private treasures I never knew;
beyond the Indian drums (of which you had
a collection), was there something,
some book, some record, you prized
above all others?

You were a technician of tough love,
collected hearts; had a passion
for Chinese herbs boiled down
to the root, to retrieve essential,
healing strength;

ministered weary angels
needing succor, familiar w/ your tongue,
your breath, the beating of your heart.
Saintly, to feed some soul's need
for flesh, nectar, sanctuary,
oblivion;

now it’s death's mystery
from which you can't escape—
maybe. I profess & confess
utter bewilderment.

Remember lunches
at Essene, 4th Street, the crutch
of good caffeinated coffee, conversation,
a few hours rest; was eternity
there, watching you, your Muse,
waiting silently to bear Her naked flanks
to your disciplined pleasure?
Who would know but Her
how you, a restless spirit, learned?

© Adam Fieled 2003-2025

More from moria poetry

from The Frequencies

96.7

Call it another rhetorical device to recreate the century’s slipping music, but the crowd still won’t let me in, even though I undid the drummers with a joke, easing the lingering tension in a light bulb filled with moth shells. It’s moving in step with the city, something like a petting zoo & everything becomes public eventually. Because there was an ad in the paper for a job just like mine, I couldn’t help but bruise the downtime, rubbing the pelt the wrong way. What purrs inside the city? Inside fields of corn & wheat, tobacco & rum, trying to focus the rays since colors could add to it, edged in by the airwaves, tumbling from the towers, the music that slips, that follows us like fallout. The bleachers were crumbling beyond the buzzing wires. Beyond is a thinning crowd. If I put my back to the radio, it doesn’t mean I’m not listening. It means I just want to belong.

© Noah Eli Gordon 2003

From moria poetry

STELLAR MAGNETISM

I will meet you,
when we are both of the dark.
Proxima Centauri. In lifetimes.
A meeting. Travel.
Elephants. Rearranging stars.
We will meet.
The speed. The speed of the dark.
Avoiding elephants. Speeding.
Closest sun. Galaxies.               Away. The heat
travels through spirals, milky way
lightning— dust to dust.
How much more dispersed can one get.
Becoming dust. We meet.

© Carrie Hunter 2002