Poetry of Issue #5
 
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Table of Contents |
Dog Days One day you wake up feeling foul ©CTvM Engel |
Gone with the World We drive down to the city Bent on mischief and sport, We make toasts and coax Outside, the deserted streets Richard Levine__ |
A Beauty We Fear You couldn’t burn the blame. Tim O’Brien The dark rose up as I walked down to the meadow, where that morning I found a nest yellow jackets had buried beneath an Asian pear tree. If not destroyed with care’s hand, they’d menace my fall claim to the apple-shaped pears. That morning, beneath knowing and sight, I had driven a gray fertilizer spike through the buzzing heart of their hive. A crazed spiral raged up from underground, a loud, black belch winding out from Beelzebub’s mouth. Two stingers caught and set fire to one arm, as I ran back the way I’d come, terror driving the swarm and my heart. Returning that night to fight fire with a quick splash of kerosene and the strike and fling of a wooden match, I watched Hades consume the hive, burning it alive and into my pulse – nest of hexes, village of huts, wheel around a hub. Then, like an uncured log, memory spit up sparks and a young man’s silhouette - armed and waiting at a far Vietnam gate. It was the time of day the French, who’d failed at Quang Tri before us, call hour between the dog and wolf. We waited for our eyes to accept the dark and our hearts their witness. Then, moved out to destroy a beauty we feared. What calm can calm, then, after horror Richard Levine__ |