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STONE SOUP
Allen M. Weber
(Desert Moon Review)
I build bonfires in deserted streets,
tend needful cauldrons of boiling rain.
From unlit houses, humble townies
watch to see if I will step too near,
feed a flame, and for a moment satisfy
their monotonous hunger. Abandoned
daughters wade through pigweed gardens,
stare past tilted pickets, and overlook
their own seasonal fast. Today
each man of rag and bone has gone away;
they scuff dust-white shoes on gravel roads,
or stumble after a nag with a plow
to turn a barren field. Art is wasted
on the artless; I play their kin for fools,
trade hyperbole for food--the odd
wilted carrot or an off cut of meat.
My contribution is chalkstone, color
spooned from evening’s bowl, but a woman
may take sustenance from seasoned words,
and leave her scent in temporary hands.
Her accolades may serve me well, but still
I’ll fade into this self-made parable--
two stone less than Sunday last--still
I’ll carry no salt, no onion for tomorrow’s soup.
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FLINT MICHIGAN
Stevie Jean Reed
(Blueline Poetry Forum)
Sleep inside this wheel with me.
The smell of men leaving. Tarred bulk
of cloud in a stiff sky. Factory down
and nothing left but marrow and marrow.
Stacks of tires, I’ll build you a nest,
high up and deep.
Fresh treads,
no miles between us
only rarefied childhooded brittle-lusts.
So sweet and stale our heavy breath
curled in like astronauts.
Small stowaways
not wanting to go home where there’s
nothing but explosions and hands.
Cold supper
while i hold you
and cup your crumpled chin,
drink it in.
Here today, gone tomorrow
is your face
and the name I gave you.
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ELDERS: VINCENT AND PRUDENCE
Adam Elgar
(The Writer’s Block)
They were the chatelains of slant, moist acres.
Pasture, orchard, bean-rows, slate-tiles, granite.
Counterpointed comfort and endurance.
“Shoot the menfolk,” he would say.
“Ensures a happy family.” Pheasants, he meant,
and practiced it until his aim deceived him.
She terrified our daughters, glinting
in her seventies with the spring
and toughness of the farmer’s wife
we’d never known, who roared her jeep
through narrow lanes with five sons
bouncing in the back.
They believed the wedding of a minor royal
merited champagne, that boarding schools
made men of boys, that women stole
men’s jobs, and yet we loved them:
for saying what they meant, and meaning it;
for standing in as parents; for the valley, woods
and angled drizzle that seemed part of them.
Later, they withdrew to a single small-town story,
with the essential glimpse of grazing cows
out of one back window.
He said, “You either go on, or you go,”
his hand peat-mottled like his single malt.
And after Prudence had diminished,
grey-skinned, scant-haired into her own shadow,
Vincent took his own advice.
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