Poet's Ink Review

February 2009

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Johnson

It is February
and the digging hard.

Darkness is falling
as I roll down my shirt-sleeves.

A few months
and that cherry tree
will be in blossom.

Such a hole a dog leaves.

C.P. Stewart

C.P. lives with his family in North Yorkshire. Formerly singer/songwriter with the cult band Laughing Gravy, his poetry has been published internationally. He is currently the Poetry Editor for Sotto Voce Magazine. More information can be found at www.cpstewart-poet.co.uk.

When the wind whispers to me
I listen, and whims are
cold steel, and
murmurs
what becomes of grass when grass is done
and the silence stretches to evermore
dimensions
and listening becomes obsolete
I don’t know
but I’ll listen anyway
and maybe, when the wind persists
and hisses around the sharp rocks of the
people ocean
I’ll make out the one that will whisper back

Christopher Fog

Christopher is living in humid Florida while getting an MFA. He travels a lot and teaches in different countries.

Michael Lee Johnson

Night has laid a thick blanket
over the body of clouds
who have stretched their slumbering
limbs across the horizon and away
towards the new day.

Kai Hoffman-Krull

Kai currently lives in Tacoma, Washington, where he lives at a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. He works on a farm during the days with adults from the home. He has poems currently published or forthcoming in Gander Press, The Oak Bend Review, Silenced Press, The Driftwood Review, and Frostwriting.

Andrew Cook

I have recently started to submit my work again after a long hiatus from seeking publication and even writing in general. In the past I have had about forty publications most of which unfortunately I have lost tract of. My poems have appeared in such places as The San Fernando Poetry Review, Wisconsin Review, Poetic Elegance, and Royal Vagrant Review.

Three junior monks sat quiet in the temple,
resolved to last the night in noble silence.
The spears of winter sun struck the spinning
dust motes — a dance to silent music from
the unstruck gong, an offering of powdered flame,
homage before the white-glazed, smiling Buddha.
Steady they sat in silence till that pallid
fire dimmed. The chamber dusked. Still
they sat, straight-backed, legs folded on the floor,
and hands correctly resting in their laps.
The chill from snow outside seeped slowly through
the living bone and knifed their shaven scalps.
Yet on they sat silent in the darkening.
A shadow rustled through that stillness. ‘Light
those lamps please.’ Li-mai’s voice exploded through
the darkness. Shards of shattered silence settled.
‘We are not supposed to speak’, Hui-neng
piped through fresh quiet. Before the acolyte
could flame the wicks, Lu-k’uan chimed in:
‘I am the only one who has not spoken.’

Murray Alfredson

Empty clam-cake stands stare
at deserted beaches where waves
wash in, erase the names of lovers.
Summer towns are tired, quiet,
and hawks broadwing the marsh.
Cool winds turn in beyond August.
Mute swans lumber skyward, call,
their long necks extended. Canada
Geese and ospreys skim October
when bittersweet vines grow thick
in a gold and crimson berryburst,
tiny blossoms with corners turned
to mark a page of time. Boats
fold into blue covers, cradle ashore
lined up like old gulls, to watch
the sea. Fishermen nose the air,
hope for early blues and yellowtail.
In small ways, these are not like
other days, when summer slips away

Alice Ahrens Williams

Alice Ahrens Williams is a Suffield, Connecticut poet, artist and teacher. Among her publications are The California Quarterly, The Common Ground Review, The Connecticut River Review, Ekphrasis and Freshwater Magazine. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.


Afternoon Walk

White flakes gather
on happy black noses.
My dogs sniff out
one last clump of grass
lingering
beneath winter's first snow.

J Brasseur

The Black Man

The ashen October sky drained any
tint of pink from the man’s gaunt face.

The fingers of his right hand molded around the frigid iron railing, and the
knuckles coiled until it seemed fissures
would open amid the topography of his joints and fingers.

Pedestrians darted glances
at the poised dark figure three stories above the pavement. Three centuries ago,
they would have called him the Black Man

and whispered incantations to save their souls

As it was, they hurried away and fearfully eyed the encroaching shadows
of twilight.

Chaney Harter

Chaney's poetry has appeared in Teen Ink and in Reflections, her high school's publication. She also won first place in the Lake Oswego Public Library Teen Poetry Slam.

WHAT SHE MIGHT HAVE SEEN

The ocean burns,
a falling star
encircling
Earth. It strikes shores
with angry hands
relentlessly.

The lunacy
of gravity’s
pull arresting
seas, holding in
thrall waters will,
is Moon’s secret.

She leaves clues in
each ebb and slack,
looks back like Lot’s
wife, curious
at the taste of
salt in her mouth.

Sgt Ben J. Brasher

Ben is an active-duty Marine currently teaching Korean at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. On a recent deployment he rediscovered his love of poetry and has been reading and writing as much as my duties (work, husband, father) permit. Some of his work can be seen online at www.PoetsHaven.com and has recently appeared in the Black Book Press.

In the Stillness

Margins of dusk
are pinned
to a rope
of networking pine,
open eye of moon
fixed
upon reclining day,

unhemmed shadows
camp around
squatter bush
and like lean-tos
tilt away
from matchstick woods,

moon switches off
stars go missing
and the air
cold-shoulders
night,
I feel shivers of snow.

Adele Kearns Thomas

"In the Stillness"' was published in Bywords,(Quarterly journal, Spring, 2004)

Bio:Adele has been published in Canada and U.S. journals , magazines and anthologies. Poems appeared in The Prairie Journal, Quills, Tower, Ascent Aspirations, and Mobius to name a few. She has published two poetry collections, Behind the Scenes and Scattered Perceptions; a third to come out shortly. She co-edited an anthology for The Ontario Poetry Society, 2008, and is a member of The League of Canadian Poets.

Stone Sagas

In Reykholt his statue inspects the old church’s
slight movements, doctrinal pauses before light
warms the wood pews, its garden of crosses
shaved from the hillside, also the sun-bleached
lava fields, fluttering mountains, awkward streams
keeping back the fjord’s distant glare, overseeing
the various separations.

The colorful doors of the scattered houses all close
in greeting. Winds panic from all sides,
graying the sky. My eyes stone in response
as I read the great sagas of our time,
those even history cannot shame.

In the margins I note such fear
solitude bears, its proximity to stone.
No music whistles from the land. No overtures.
No warnings. Only the brash noise
used to startle time into progressing.
The misspelled experiences. The old tongues
buffered by unyielding monuments
hands could never write or, in a definite image,
reshape.

John Sibley Williams

"Stone Sagas" was previously published by The Journal.

Having received an MA in Writing, John has recently returned to the Boston area to complete his Education degree, and he is presently compiling manuscripts composed from the last two years of traveling and living abroad. Some previous or upcoming publications include: Flint Hills Review, Cadillac Cicatrix, Juked, The Journal, and Barnwood International Poetry.

Invisible

Infrequent and almost always in the dark
you knock loudly across my blanket,
a rude announcement that you have arrived
in need of my attention. My eyes focus
on the opposite wall, air shimmering
above the heater, straggling locks
plastered to one cheek. I’m dry, opaque.
How easy it is to become invisible.

Kathryn Messer

Kathryn is a second year MFA student at Carlow University and lives in beautiful green Oregon. She works full-time in the insurance industry and does most of her writing evenings and weekends on her farm. While she often writes about her farm and nature, she tries to incorporate how it all relates somehow to the human cause.


Wound in Cellophane

The older women come to coffee
with cookies wound in cellophane.
They talk of children

or their children’s children
or their garden.
Or they simply sew

and watch the young girls trickle in,
buy berry rolls and coffee,
nibble, sip, lick fingers, blow

small parachutes of smoke,
and laugh a young girl’s
world of willy-nilly.

Donal Mahoney