Frank Paino

Apocrypha: The Ram Considers Abraham

And what if my god

demanded of me blood

of my own kin,

a ewe, still unsteady

on spindled legs,

for an offering?

What if I led her

to pasture,

to the old wolf

whose hackled shadow

hunkered

amidst the long grass?

What if I turned

only when the screaming

wind became the tongue

of an angel calling back

the Lord’s command

like a man who swallows

fire and lives to tell?

What if, in praise

of that late mercy,

I guided the wolf to the tent

where your firstborn slept

unattended, tangled

in dreams sweet as

the psalm buried

in his mother’s breast?

My Mother’s Corpse

She didn’t need the blanket,

couldn’t feel the cold

of the refrigerated room

to which she’d been consigned

until I could make it

for one final argument

with love’s

misguided ministries;

though it wasn’t sorrow

that came over me

as I stroked her face,

the thin lips that had

both blessed and cursed

me; only wonder

at such stillness,

the chill rising

as if from an autumn

lake I could not swim,

and the heaviness

when I lifted her

at the shoulders

to put her scapular

into its proper place—

one square of stitched

brown wool above her

heart, the other

between the blade

of each smooth shoulder.

Before I eased her down

against the stainless

gurney, I kissed the flesh

at the back of her neck

where blood had gathered

like a bewildered

tribe before a sea

that had not yet parted.

John, the Beloved Disciple

Lord, let me rest my head

above the prison

of your temporal heart,

its blood psalm swift

as winnowed flames

that clear a field

for someday’s harvest.

Let my own heart sing

in faultless synchrony

and so be hidden

in the selfsame song.

Let me take

the Magdalene’s place

at your feet,

caress the bones

that will be shattered

like tablets of stone.

Let me place my hands

upon these wrists

that will lift you

to each staggered breath

in the failing

pre-Sabbath light.

Master, let me

press my mouth

to the tender space

between your ribs

which will be opened

like a sepulchre

that cradles nothing

but a hollowed

winding sheet,

as if the man

once laid there

walked out

into the garden,

unclothed

and unashamed.

Lucifer, Falling

To be suffered

spirit into matter

to be unloosed

from perfection’s tedium

into the wind’s shrill

hammers

into gravity’s harsh tug

toward

to be made flesh

suddenly struck

match-bright

with pain

and with desire

the gift

of your sweet

diminishment

Frank Paino earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His fourth book, Dark Octaves, won the Longleaf Press Book Prize and is forthcoming (Winter 2024). His chapbook, Pietà, won the Jacar Press Chapbook Prize and was published in 2023. Frank has received a Pushcart Prize, The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including Crab Orchard Review, Catamaran, North American Review, World Literature Today, Briar Cliff Review, Lake Effect, and a number of anthologies. His website is https://www.frankpaino.net.

toc

next

Linda Aldrich

End of the Line

The box smells damp, decayed, perhaps like the casket

the teenage boys dug up when I was 10, pulling out

Clara Smith from 1850, propping her up at the Valley Street

bus stop: black crinoline dress, lace-up shoes, pleated

bonnet, hair flying around a face of bones and holes.

Halloween prank the paper said no living kin.

That made it OK for them, I thought, to put the photo

on the front page and for me to find it funny,

the bus pulling up, opening the door, unable to board,

didn’t have the fare, so Clara was caught bone-handed

on Saturday morning, trying to get home, but not back

to Jesus, just to her kitchen with those ancient potholders

and a drawer crammed full of keys, covered buttons,

small porcelain knobs, yellowed envelopes containing

snips of hair only she could remember.

Perhaps the boys had done her a favor?

***

Obituaries say no living kin, never living kin. Close kin

and close predeceased are named, while nephews

and nieces who drifted away or ran for their lives

are too many to count, or never counted, and are called

numerous for those who want to say at least something.

I cut through layers of twine and a warning

in my great aunt’s loud cursive don’t ever throw away.

As the childless renegade, I’ve ignored these

curled-up photos of my not living kin, shuffled together,

clinging to each other in a moldering montage, peering

around broken edges at me, or rather eternity. Some smile,

some would never, and I sink into all I don’t know

and how they’ve come down to me, the last to be seen

alive with them. What would they have me do now,

we who never knew each other but are part and parcel?

A declining world catches in my throat.

I’d like to leave my Claras and James Henrys

at the bus stop some dark morning.

***

Instead, I hold them up to the light and touch their faces,

read what’s written on their backs. Great-grandmother

Elizabeth with her solemn face and the dress she made.

William James with scuffed shoes, hands clasped.

Edith and Harold in wicker chairs. Gravestone

of infant Marion and mother Ernestine, 1887.

Martha, Richard, Kathleen, Emily, Garnard.

Ahhhh, I say. Ah-men, Ah-women.

Ah to the theys and the not-theys and the many ways

we name ourselves. I say thank you.

I will make a boat of you and set you on the water.

I will wait for wind.

The seldom rain

brims the edge

of drying leaves

and hesitates

before it drops

as beads

that bounce

that break

but never saturate

the pavement

we have made.

The world’s grown hard.

It dessicates.

All that flies

is bullet-shaped.

My body that was once a lake

is now in drought.

You see the very least of me,

my fears my doubts

have hollowed out,

and all that I’ve held back from you,

especially my love for you,

the ways I haven’t touched.

The world’s grown hard.

It dessicates.

All that flies

is bullet-shaped.

This empty gourd can still make sound.

My feet can pound the sand.

I fiddle forth this dance for you.

I sing this song.

I let my cheeks grow wet.

Linda Aldrich has published three collections of poetry, most recently, Ballast (2021). She won the 2023 Maine Poetry Award for Short Works, and was the Poet Laureate for Portland, Maine, from 2018 to 2021.

toc

next

Justin Lowe

Owls in the Gutters

            for Micky Dayman

I.

this is only a beginner’s guide:

for the more advanced there is Bach

and that autumn leaf that tickled Bashō’s snoring nose.

item one:

do not roost in some dark corner

keeping guard over your cold body.

circumstances have rendered you lighter than air,

use this fact to your advantage, friend,

you are celestial now.

slowly, without your even noticing,

you will forget whose body that is

with the tag on its toe,

forget everything, even how to breath,

even forget that you are dead,

which is when you will start to loom large over your void.

death is best left to the living, friend.

you are the glint in the silt now

of the slow wend.

II.

sad is not an epiphany,

sad is not some underline in a diary:

sad is just sad.

sad growls what do you want?

me or ten years of lead-limbed mornings?

sad says a lot but slowly,

like the ground beneath us.

sad makes a point of fluffing the pillows

that your head can barely rise from.

sad says the tap drips

as a cold fact not a plaint,

pips along like a child

chasing gulls in some old Super-8.

sad nods her head in her sleep

as though confirming a whisper passed on.

III.

there will be

no more poems

friend

the words

once thought infinitesimal

have just about

run out

these

are the last

precious few

the void

has crept up

to the wire

we must

hold steady while

the darkness mills around

for

when you left us

you left us speechless

IV.

since the funeral

my shadow has become

a sort of pale echo, a limp tethered thing.

I noticed it first that morning

as Lindsay and I killed an hour

before the 11 a.m. service.

we were strolling down the rows of smudged headstones,

this limp form trailing reluctantly behind,

as though some dark ink had been spilled.

Lindsay’s beside it seemed so bold and so true,

like one of your stories,

while mine seemed to be saying dive into me, don’t worry.

so, the cemetery gulls duly obliged,

only to rise again sharply

with those dry crumbs that always catch in the throat,

water the eyes.

V.

I can no longer judge happiness,

other people’s or my own.

the nature of the fire on that distant ridge,

its scale and intent.

not that I don’t believe

that happiness exists.

I know it does

because it casts a shadow.

it’s just that happiness has always been

the simplest of constructs:

someone smiles they are happy,

someone laughs they catch the ear of the gods.

VI.

aged eight

I glimpsed my first widow’s smile,

a pale ember

in the cold ash of whispers and grimaces,

the laughing priest

never far from the banquet table,

all the pretty flowers

bursting with colour around the closed casket

where the dead always seemed to be telling some office joke.

I would run off with the other children

to play amongst the headstones, scratching my head,

listening to the breeze

sighing in the thistles as I hid:

the longer they took to find you

the happier it made you.

Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. His ninth collection is due out through Puncher & Wattman in October 2024, and he also has a novel doing the rounds of publishers Down Under.

toc

next