Steven Ostrowski

Fragile

1.

She lives

with mirrors

for sisters.

2.

If she’d

been exposed

to poems

as a girl

she might

be okay

alone.

3.

Rags

disgust her.

She never thinks

about god

although she thinks

god is a well-groomed

man in dark Armani.

4.

She stares at men

who lift their little daughters

with strong arms.

Her father lasted one motel.

5.

What can she not bear?

The dream, recurring,

in which a golden man

tells her no.

How, she ruminates,

can he be so happy?

6.

I want to believe

that her goodness

is not lost as I search

for my own.

Who, after all, can know

when and where

the trigger of salvation

will at last be pulled?

News of War

comes in the slanting slicing overnight sleet

and can be read in the hung eyes of yard dogs;

it causes deviations in the flight paths of gulls.

The open windows of meeting houses

slam shut of their own accord; the news

untunes a hundred acoustic guitars.

In sympathy with the dead and wounded,

babies wail across a thousand miles of jagged borders.

Men write desperate questions in the margins

of the history books given them by their fathers.

Nobody’s heart is quite right, but in theirs, mothers

bear the bombs of children who’ve been killed

or grown into killers.

---

Steven Ostrowski's recent publications are a novel, The Highway of Spirit and Bone; a poetry chapbook, Persons of Interest (winner of the 2021 Wolfson Chapbook Prize) and a book of poems, Life Field.

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Steve Myers

Praise Song

Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.

—Psalm 150

Lunch, late May, under the Japanese maple

at our home on Vera Cruz, the dire news

of the roughshod world already dried

and yellowed by the drifted pollen, a sun

that has us talking of those days, early

‘80s, meeting at noon at Sue’s Café

Such head-spinning joy back then, such plenty

of pain, each day harvesting a garden

of fresh sorrows, behind us marriages

gone to seed, days, weeks like a harrowing,

yet waking together to ecstasies

of the body, to laughter and great wonder,

nights the newest music, or rehearsing

in the choir Stravinski’s Symphony of Psalms.

“Choose someone in the audience and sing

to them,” Jamison said, raising his baton,

which is what I’d like to do now, hoping

this poem I’m composing for timbrel, harp,

and flute will sing out to you of the wild

world’s surprises, like discovering Zevon

age 13, hung out at Stravinski’s home

studying classical with Robert Craft

instead of watching Leave it to Beaver

and eating SPAM sandwiches on Wonder

Bread like every other kid, an image

that came to me while seeing him again

on the Lettermen show toward the very end,

with wisdom like unto the Psalmist

beseeching us Enjoy every sandwich.

And now our son, who as a boy could play

the flute as well as anyone, comes home,

keeping his firstborn son close to his chest—

Zevon’s phrase from “Veracruz”— a story

of the country’s chronic viciousness—guns,

the racist Wilson…. And yet, the flute riff

lingering. Let everything that hath breath…

The Radical Road

Less light today than yesterday, though the earth, fat apple, turns

     innocent of the paring of its golden skin.

That year we managed to begin in the kind of Eden

     you can sink your teeth in, climbing Arthur’s Seat,

Edinburgh, on New Year’s morning. In the beginning

     we hit a good stride, leaving the gray city

for the lesser gray of the mountain’s first inclination,

     where it lifted beyond the well-tended park,

St. Margaret’s Loch opening below us, named for the queen

     who served Scotland’s medieval poor, and north

over our shoulder, the Firth of Forth. The stonecrop had gone

    brown with winter, but green held in the gorse

around Haggis Knowe and the Dry Dam, the thin sun’s chitterin’

     licht—its chill quavering—enough to reveal

North Berwick Law, the ancient hill on the eastern horizon

    surrounded by miles of open fields and crowned

since 1709 with the Sign of Leviathan, jawbone

     of a whale. No sign of wildlife around us

on our way—hare, weasel, even grazing sheep driven

     from the slopes by tourists like us, clambering

around the top when we got there, where Scott, Stevenson,

     the two Wordsworths had stood in solitary

contemplation. Still we found it possible to drop down

     over the western scarp and, alone, look out on

Fifeshire, where your great-great-grandfather found excess of rain

     and scant work reasons enough to make

for America. He knew the stories—the show trials, hangings,

     gratuitous beheadings of jobless weavers

following their insurrection in the west. A good lesson,

     Scott thought—the proper lawyer—, was to put

a gang of the surviving rabble to heavy labor, laying

     the pathway we now follow to the bottom—

that would teach them. I’d like to have heard the work songs

     they sang to keep each other going, breaking the stone,

and their cursing. To have seen them turn to gaze on

     what they’d made by morning, then evening, the first  day.

Snow Moon

In the parking lot

of the Limeport Hotel all

four of us look up

at the sky, glowing—

the blue-white of the snow moon

No one speaks until

our beloved friend, once

a virtuoso surgeon,

now, in mid-winter,

finally retired,

asks the great round face

gazing down at him,

Is that what you’d call

“scudding” clouds?, the long habit

of his precision

intellect almost

lunatic for the right word.

Even closing on

90, laying down

the needlepoint he’s working

for his granddaughter,

a Christmas gift,

Alice & the White Rabbit,

he returns again

to his Goethe, to

Iphigenie auf Taurus,

though I fear my German

is deserting me.

Over dinner I think on

Iphigenia

the Merciful

 as I see him with his wife,

filling in the blanks

for her where once were

            words: “committed,” & “prostate,”

                        “testicle,” &

she a former nurse,

as just now “Dodgson” briefly                                  

                        bounded down some dark

& curious hole

            in memory. It’s late, I’m thinking,

thinking of our friend.           

When questioned at some

            mad party maybe 20                                                    

years ago on what

he believed “most sacred,”

he lost no time responding,

                        My own mind,

our beloved friend,

                                                                            in mid-winter,

Is that what you’d call

                                    “scudding”       ?

                             Alice   the White

       Goethe,

 deserting me.

                                                               Iphigenia

the Merciful

   the         lot

                             of                     all

                                                                   of us    look

Grace Notes

I knew then I was lucky to hear them

from an upper room, the students

who perched on the piano bench

next to you, a twenty-year stream

in the pre- and adolescent

particolor of spark, quirk, and bleak—

the gifted boy, Guatemalan-born,

his long fingers easy on the keys,

the two bright sisters, one renegade

in her anime headband, one mezza voce.

One wore the sīmurğ on her upper arm,

the bird of Persia, a vivid blue tattoo,

one, so intuitive, knew to play Joplin

as notes drifting leaf-like down a summer

river, under a dreaming moon. The boy

who struggled for a full season, spring

training through the Series, his Take Me Out

to the Ball Game executed molto

impetuoso, stylings marked by wild

pitches. repeated balks—think Doc Ellis

throwing on LSD—yet I’d see him walk

tall to his mother’s car, always grinning

because you’d told him he’d achieved

something, that he’d be set for the recital

with a little more practice. Or

the cheerleader, who stumbled over

a tricky rhythm till you stood her up,

told her to clap, to beat with her feet,

and that was that. Some came for the music

they hadn’t fathomed might move them till

it lifted through their fingertips—Ode to Joy,

Für Elise, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,

others came for the listening parent

they longed for and so utterly lacked.

What does it matter, the stories that home

back to you, rising glissando runs

of what they’d become—pilot, physician,

upscale designer, the stuff of “likes” and clicks?

Instead, let one young woman stand for those

who simply deepened, gathered, and rose

on updrafts of self-knowing and wonderment

because of you—so many. I see her

in performance, years after her first lesson,

in sky-blue gown, seated at a dazzling grand,

the sacramental bowing of her head

as her fingers release the opening notes

of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme

by Robert Schumann, Op, 9, as if she’d

channeled the spirits of the Schumann home

in the 1850’s, its darkling weathers—

his visions, voices, demons, the suicide

attempt, and soon after, the institution,

his death. Clara alone; the seven

children; Brahms’s blazing love for her

unconsummated. That a pianist

in her 20’s would stand at the threshold

of that sorrow-parlor and press open

the door so reservedly—not presuming,

but revering what hovered in the dim

beyond her understanding—her offering

like the smoke of sacrifice, floating

above the piano’s great backswept black wing.

—for Karen

Penncento: In Falling Snow, I Cross off My Bucket List

the Walk from Philly to the Presque Isle Lighthouse, Erie

—Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

I want to be pure flame, I want to be your song.

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,

we got mangoes and bananas you can pick right off a tree.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

in your heart you'll hear it call you:

Come to me, Come to me. Wait; the great horned owls;

Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

Friends, will you bear with me today?

We go waaaaay back, America.

I think the great chiefs Shikellamy and Cornplanter palavered

in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home

of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths.

Lucky there is an ocean to come to.

The book of moonlight is not written yet.

One must have a mind of winter.

When the sky goes flat, the lake clams up.

Cover us with your pools of fir.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Tree tree tree tree tree tree tree tree.

This is mortality, this is eternity.

The fish wade in black jade. Somebody bet on the bay.

I, too, dislike it. I get numb and go in.

---

Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and three chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he’s published poems in places such as Callaloo, SALT, and The Southern Review.

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Richard L. Matta

Chemotherapy

With each infusion I imagine

I’m a birch tree nurtured

by nutrients traversing

through its roots in a grove.

We’re a community fending

off parasites and strangler figs.

They sense weakness—

those bark beetles, defoliators,

dwarf mistletoes. They’re

like street predators sensing

weakness and opportunity.

We share our collective

intelligence, communicate

warnings about food and

drink. But here the metaphor

collapses. It’s my DNA.

Not the initials I carved

on a tree so long ago. It’s

much bigger than that.

We split the atom,

devastated cities. Just take

a biopsy of Hiroshima trees.

The needle is extracted.

So many fallen leaves.

Bioluminescence

And so in a warm Florida lagoon

sparkling turquoise

as if an ancient Ais tribe

sprinkled magic

into the teeming dinoflagellates

you find yourself

treading and sidestroking,

nearly naked

after you stripped and unexpectedly

jumped from a boat

full of strangers. And as they scream

asking if you’re OK

you know, for just awhile, you looked

like an angel.

---

Richard L. Matta is originally from New York’s rustic Hudson Valley. His work appears in Glint, Slipstream, Healing Muse, and elsewhere. He currently resides in San Diego, California.

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