Poetry Issues #4 is out there, and in here too:

Education

Under embalmed squirrels and framed Jesus Christs

vast world maps with the USSR and Czechoslovakia,

under roofs that leaked on glossy hospital-pistachio walls

child eyes rolled outside tall windows on the concrete yard

where allies were chosen and enemies constructed

as demanded by parades in mid-length skirts

and blue-white flags so big that only boys could lift them.

By the blackboard the chalk flakes still landed like snow

on the thyme-honey-haired girl with the red barrette:

I will never climb on the fig tree again.

The Dying Art of Restoration

I don’t know for how much longer

I will be able to fix things.

My swift fingers are cemented

in the once dripping glue.

Now I’ve only got my thumbs left –

a true crustacean with hard-shell woes.

I will crudely mend another gimcrack

before some mishap makes me watch

tacky friendships smash like bibelots

in my life’s living room.

The Shakespearean Prophecy

You will raise your children on free-range ambition,

lull them in the cradle with sonatas of success.

Like race horses, they’ll have a taste for competition

but you will find that their minds quite often digress

and bend under the brewing threat of mediocrity.

Concerned, you will then use your means to devise

a stratagem rooted in sincere parental hypocrisy

as your offsprings will hunt a vacant glittered prize

or seek arduous relief in codependent relationships.

They’ll spend small fortunes in mindfulness remedies

make gods of psycho-gurus trying to come to grips

with panic attacks and other acquired emergencies.

Your greatest investment will lose much of its equity

but you’ll always save face with industrious charity.

Balance

Those twilight moments,

when neither here nor there saves

you stay still and hark.

Temperature Rising

I am the grumpy one.

The one who flinches at the sun.

Hot summers should be banned

along with bronze tans.

Since all association was removed

from counting ice creams and dips in blue

in the sunswept nooks of memory resides

the transparent smell of the moribund.

And I – I keep my dead roses in the vase

unwilling to accept or to part.

Next issue: September 2016