Cadralor Issue 9

1. Abstract ideas can be symbolized
with any ordinary object,
as long as the relationship is
understood by the sun and the moon.

2. A child pulls her mother outside to
see seven angels sitting in the
willow tree. They smile at her while her
mom pretends amazement of their wings.

3. The traffic is bumper-to-bumper.
Processed air mixes with the sweat of
frustration beading on the back of
white knuckles gripping a broken hope.

4. Love letters have fallen out of style.
Replaced with modern hieroglyphs,
as if phones are pocket pyramids,
turning our hearts into a cursed tomb.

5. Fingerprints tell stories of broken
skin and tattered pages I left on
the table where her coffee mug left
dark brown rings that stained my poetry.

1
Sitting on the porch at 206 Columbia Street on gray
cement steps, late afternoon—short sleeves, shorts,
feet bare—watching cars drive by, then stop
at the corner for the Heidelbach light to change, I
with my too-fair freckled skin and taste for sweets,
poking my glasses up my sweaty nose, drinking
my useless diet coke, wait, wait, wait for someone to stop
someone to wave, for life to come and sit down beside me.

2
Three bear cubs hang on to the brown bear’s flanks,
press flat her honey thick fur. Their weight slows
her plodding gait through spring grasses. Nothing
is closer than the tenacious clinging of a child clasped
to a mother’s neck, arm, hand. A child’s growth
is measured by the distance between the young body
and hers, sensed in the cooling air that floods the gap
left between mother and babe, as she and time do their work.

3
There are worse things than hiccups at a wedding or wearing a blouse
inside out at an interview. They may snicker until you’re out the door.
But if you walk briskly enough, it’s no big deal. Surely, I’m not the only
flawed person tossing in bed at three am caught in a perpetual loop
of one faux-pas after another. Just keep in mind: there are worse things
skulking in the room’s corners, receding only when darkness scatters
and you can pretend none of your blunders really matters—
when being foolish is the least of your disasters.

4
A hummingbird flits onto the patio outside the poet’s window
as she writes. Insolent, it stares through iron bars and glass.
As if to fly inside, the voyeur darts up and down, from side to side,
then retreats an inch or so backwards. There, it stops—an irate pause
stuck in midair—and aims its needle-sharp beak at her heart.
The poet, too, pauses, imagining the bird finds her beautiful, a rare
species of giant bloom beyond its avian grasp. But perhaps, tired of freedom,
the hummer resents the large black cage in which the poet is guarded.

5
Blue, our house vibrates cold and bright in winter, a gleaming beacon
for our nightly return. It mocks gray skies, repels rain’s gloom,
wears snow like a white mink, preens proud and tall, as neighbors stare.
It stands untouched by their off-handed remarks on the color—
too vibrant, unseemly, lacking discretion.

1. You see a river where the road should be,
   don’t see the last thoughts of a drowning man.
   You don’t see the woman, phone in hand,
   who tries to reach him, tries again to reach him.
   She’s been trying for a long time, for all the months
   they’ve been together. Now it’s too late.
2. You jerk awake to a voice calling in the night.
   Sitting up, you listen, but hear only rain
   pinging against the window. And the gallop
   of your heart. Dim glow of a streetlight
   sputters into your room. Soft sound of breathing.
   You wait for that voice to return, explain. You wait.
3. The sauce is ruined and the pot is scorched.
   You open the windows, fan the air. The charred
   smell is everywhere, but you can’t quite
   make out the odor of argument, the bitter taste
   of betrayal. It’s in the kitchen, it greets you at the door,
   invisible, but lurking. It makes the wallpaper peel.
4. Veins that creep across your hand have thickened
   and your skin, under the reading lamp, is getting
   that corrugated look. You never felt it happen.
   Inside you’re a series of moments: teenager falling
   for the boy in black boots, child falling from a tree limb,
   woman quietly falling apart as love departs.
5. Petals of the yellow tulip cupped sunlight for days
   but now they’re folding down, letting go. And your tongue
   gives up its hold on language. Words can’t excavate
   the underground cities of our lives. The crow
   marching down the middle of your street seems to know
   how the world will end.

1.
The sidewalk cafés have brought in
their tables for the winter, but summer
still sits outside. It’s late October.
I watch the last leaf taken by the wind.
I’ve been waiting here since August
for a storm to brew and fill my cup.

2.
Homeless man rising slowly from the grill
of a street corner steam vent in the city,
body contorted and bent, frightening, cold,
a figure from Rodin’s Gates of Hell.
I house him here in this metaphor,
where it’s easier to step around him.

3.
I’m lying on the couch reading Turgenev, 
where the nihilist Bazarov says, 
“A decent chemist is worth twenty poets.” 
Icicles titrate outside the window.
A stinkbug scuttles across the ceiling:
a demonstration of Van der Waal’s force. 

4.
A brain the size of a nut can make a forest,
but I’m here doing nothing, like the sky.
So many things need fixing, it’s easy
to live with temporary arrangements
like this lamp with the broken switch
we turn off by unscrewing the bulb.

5.
We’re so far from everything, I say,
not thinking of the men from Veracruz
on the roof after the latest hailstorm,
loud Mexican music and pneumatic nailers,
generators running dawn to dusk,
securing our porous border with the sky.

1.
The room buzzed like a house
of bees as she pulled a thick weft
of my hair taunt, releasing
a vinous cascade of spattering
wet magenta, the dye reluctantly
leaving behind a new me while
the radio played in the next room.

2.
Spring has been getting up late
washing itself at the sink again,
much too busy for a rain shower
so, the crocus sprout like stubble
across the jawline of my front yard,
a baked casket of lines under the sun
while crickets cough up smoke in the scrub.

3.
At the beach we toppled cans
with marbles and stones that would
eventually find the soft flesh
of an earlobe, sending us all
running home to mother
who would scold us and say,
our folk should never hit each other.

4.
The sun is shifting gears
as every essence of the sky
pours down into the half-light,
and the chair by the window
keeps watch, always empty, yet
still waiting all the same,
for the weary heading home.

5.
The hours evaporated long ago
leaving structures of nostalgia
with the photo frames, all packed
like mackerel on the sandy bottom,
splashing, pushing our juvenile cares
out beyond the caution buoys, laughter
on the wind, flying like gulls over the water.

1. Queen Bristle
A thistle dominates the empty
lot, Queen every summer,
regal in spaces kept by the cat
near her many thorns,
but autumn will bend her
snowy head to finches,
the kings when winter comes.

2. White Shad
On all those days I’m small
I lie and harden in the water,
hanging my jointed body
with hooks, and my eyes
turn into black painted dots
which can see better, catching
all the swimming monsters.

3. Well Out
Shelters sprang up like mushrooms
squatting in the scrub as the sky
turned down from amber to indigo,
and the voices around the fires
rose up with the wind, free
until morning when the men came
to harvest the tents one by one.

4. Old Soldiers
Nature sometimes breeds circles
down in the mulch and trenches
perfect pink things in petals,
silly absurdities of softness,
and we linger in these spots
maybe waiting for the punchline,
or hoping to block the wind awhile.

5. Unskimmed
Fat whispers crowded the theater
as the lights went down and
a mass of hands like crabs
started their slow migration,
yearning to find each other
in carefully folded intentions,
and the manufactured darkness.

1. Lying in a hotel room opposite cranes in operation,
I read a nonlinear narrative of lives on Wall Street:
fiction for a world in which I am a pilgrim stranger.

2. In another city, two men on a tennis court are not playing.
They are locked in battle. Somewhere in Gaza, a building
explodes. The Iron Dome takes down another rocket.

3. No birds are in flight, but I hear birdsong through the window
of the Australian Open. A player scoops low, racquet
catching the ball half volley, dropping it just over the net.

4. The spoonbill is not familiar to the crane but belongs with
the sacred ibis: the common bin turkey. Cafés are closed.
making it difficult to find somewhere for breakfast.

5. Some people approve of my t-shirt with two frogs kissing.
I look forward to travel: New York next September.
I will wear it on Wall Street. I have booked the apartment.

1.
A Thai monk, walking through a forest
with his students in tow,
found a huge boulder bending in the sun.
Is it heavy? he asked. Sure! their reply.
Only if you pick it up, he squinted a smile.

2.
An anxious silence skulks before the storm
can grab trash cans/firs/power lines
and drop thundered lightening on mountaintops.
Even communities of saguaros shiver
when gnarly clouds prophecy their toppling.

3.
What if God is another name for everything––
from earth’s quintillion grains of sand
to millions of murres diving into western waves
to a sugar ant wandering around a computer screen.
But what if no one dares to look?

4.
Whoever said, Happiness begins with onions
deserves to cry. It’s the sautéed delight
of garlic that leads to bliss. Unclove two bulbs
and mince. Sizzle them in extra virgin oil
until transparency fills the ecstatic air.

5.
When the stellar nursery announces
a new star is born and song sparrows
entertain with signatures they’ve practiced
in their dreams, then calendar plants fribble
around the yard and chortle gleefully.

1.
Flashing lights on the stairs
lacerate slow drifting snow,
soft sifting in the window:
blank white in the air
lights blue red blue redblueredbluered

2.
Soaked sandy folds
frozen grit between toes,
a tumble of lake smooth pebbles
shaken out of the sodden skirts
strikes your blue knuckles

3.
Campfire smoke and
scrambled eggs, buttery;
superfine dust from fall leaves
mushroom puffs and pine trees
filtering sunrise beams

4.
Whistles – for dogs for song for love
carry much further, clearer
than a pale honey tenor, on pitch.
silent crying laughter gasping
soft pat of a hand on a back

5.
At dusk in a grimy lawnchair
stiff hands lacquered lichen fingernails
shadows of grandchildren chase fireflies
a ghost on the swing, gargling herons
A handful of heartbeats
then silence

-1-
Maybe a trillion birds trilling liquid notes
melting the humid air. You glance at me
about to walk to where red-winged blackbirds
teeter on cattails, their throaty song what I
play back when entering a habitat all warble.

-2-
In the throes of misanthropy I screen for red
and blue. The arithmetic is moot. Just now out
across the creek an egret flies low and level.
Bluejays plummet from oak trees to experience
gravity. On the quantum loom where is my strand?

-3-
At the pinnacle of ridicule a revolving star pauses
to reflect the laughing stock. There is no rain
in outer space. Saturated, we duck further
under covers in the midnight storm. The weather
wavers between vertigo and lethargy.

-4-
Sitting on my porch I’m part of the planetary
pulmonary pull. In every breath exhaled, a cloud
replaced by fog. Disbelief suspended
in the greater Sky where my inexactitude meets
dragons as they cross from nimbus to imagination.

-5-
Sorrow is residual rainfall on arroyos and dry
stream beds. Awakening a tremor from stones
long thought inert. A glistening reflection on
a time-lapsed river. It’s late in life without
another waiting in the wings.

-1-
We’re in the form and format of our bones and skin
blizzarded with images swirling the globe-body.
Our brains can’t navigate the narrows of the neck
to touch the heart with whom it would consult
more meaningfully if amygdala could meet aorta.

-2-
We reconciled what we could within our domicile
where cat and dog existed in corollated space
and timed their interactions without calendars or clocks.
We humans, paired for life, identified as canine or
feline depending on leash and lethargy, bark and yawn.

-3-
The train stands still, all the while meant to move.
Graffiti on its cars tells the story of its retirement
from conveyance. How do I tell my dead I’m sorry
for the remedies I cannot bring to bear anymore
on thwarted expressions of appreciation.

-4-
Flattened behind the door I wait to spring out
and scare myself arriving with new information
about the realm between coming and going.
It’s like lucid revisitation of a dream I can’t quit
tampering with. It’s like traveling and staying put.

-5-
Push the heart-door open and see the engine stall.
Hold your breath and count to ten and watch
horses held back twitch in frothy anticipation
of a start-over. The surgeon closes the error-gate
behind him, all procedure, no emotion.

1.
In deserts on planet Earth and also on channeled Mars,
organic bentonite erodes as yardangs, huge mounds of clay,
but the presence of consciousness is not accident.
Prevailing winds still blow the ship-like Great Sphinx into shape,
with giant paws in repose—a calm female lioness,
I prefer to think, presiding over time’s paradox.

2.
Of course therapy dogs in classrooms boost student well-being,
but don’t fool yourself. Look into their eyes and shake their paws.
Man’s best friends are judgmental companions re: peer engagement
should young brains err and pick the wrong things to remember
or, like sperm, get caught breaking Newton’s Third Law of Motion
and bully unequal for opposite reaction.

3.
Six Armenian guys off the boat walked into Naugatuck,
mill-town home to Naugahyde and Puritan witch hunts,
and realized the power of sin in the American Dream.
The Peters joined the Pauls and manufactured oval mounds,
soft-centered bars of Almond Joy, scrumptious gut-friendly foods.
Please don’t take a hammer to them in a Luddite rebellion.

4.
Garum, the Roman fish sauce, is chafing in the pan. Birds flit.
A dog barks. Sky falls. Ponds boil. Athletes lose the footrace with death.
The perfumed hair of virgins burns. Slaves steal the silver and flee.
On litters ahead of the mob, fat men become flattened men.
In twelve hours, toxic layers of tephra entomb the city.
Wings of wild swans catch fire above ash of the ancient order.

5.
Dry-docked on the lawn, don’t leave me hog-tied to the mast.
Can you see to row? I will allow you latitude to laugh,
if you allow me longitude to love our small craft.
My heart beats with the oars in aspect, a ratio
of waterline to beam, a magic number at sea
as, side by side, with four chapped hands, we count blades of grass.

1.
The meadow has its own language, wildflowers
are words dotted with bees; the summer sky exclaims
sun and scent. Gold, green, and blue form sentences,
the black question marks of crows ask
where does time go?

2.
DNA like time-traveling ships
that sail with stardust through twisted ladders–
she has her eyes, his long legs,
she carries art and dreams in her blood,
heart-songs of the past, seeds for the future.

3.
He has become a night-shadow,
that needs no light to exist, ancient, youthful,
in darkness, he takes his victims with a kiss,
their blood becomes his blood. Endless
eternity, forever without a dawn.

4.
She is an echo–always
she repeats, her own thoughts unvoiced,
glimpsed in widening ripples of a stream,
her reflection there. Look carefully.
Call, and she will come, a wind-flute, a water-whisperer.

5.
Sheathed in lapis and azure, the couple
stands at the sighing, river-kissed shore,
sparkling night birds chirp above them
and sky-gold fingers reach across water
to cradle them on canvas. Immortal.

1.
A hawk whistles in amethyst, purple-pink
script scrolls across the cornflower sky,
notes fall in raptor-rhythm and wind-sough,
cross time and space; a lonesome, fearless
song brushes my skin with feathers of hope.

2.
Summer roses in all the shades of dawn
raise flushed faces to the sun,
smile like department store testers,
spritz their perfume, and I
am caught in scent-clouds, transcendent.

3.
“It’s never been sealed,” says Pandora of the jar,
indigo earlier, now glowing caramel, full of words,
star-bright, glittering pebbles, and sharp thorns.
Wreath them like laurel round your brow,
a symbol of victory over gods, demons, your muse.

4.
The moon strums the night,
silver notes glissando-glide into smoky blues.
I dream in counterpoint strands, fugue
voices become birds, robins wake crows,
the sun rises, a luscious apricot aubade.

5.
I’ve dreamt of that hill with its
towering street-sentinel oaks,
the moment you left, and this moment now,
my feet no longer in slow motion, but running,
running up the hill to where you stand, waiting.

1.
On the wall above my outlet,
an old scorch marks the plaster,
underneath a coat of off-gray paint.

2.
A silvering coral touches
the calcium deposit that was once
its mother’s skin, and bubbles.

3.
Even as acid stains the teeth
of statues white, it surrenders
into the limestone and dies.

4.
I grab a blackberry, and it grabs
me by the needle, takes a strand
of dermis for a payment.

5.
I lean in, listen close as a lover to her
chest, to the ocean washing on the sand;
a name is born out into the sea.

1
snow kissed us
on the forehead
skipped to Wednesday
our present life
otherwise a perfect
sandhill cadence
sends out long gazes
all morning now

2
the titmice
blinking in and out
of our dead hedge
no longer startle
at the sound of guns
there still must be
breath to be had
down there

3
if we vacuum
more often will the
smaller portions
of discarded dust
sum to the usual
amount of litter?
our projects
are on a knife-edge

4
I trace a cat’s
paw prints out to
the frozen brook
worried I won’t know
what I’m capable of
a barred owl
hews dusk from
pine and shadow

5
eleven ewes in a
paddock make
a kind of tomorrow
you could want
hay goes out
wool goes up
bagsful lining the loft
like wedding favors

1.
The tulips are a fresh-cut bunch
from Trader Joe’s, soon-to-be blooms
peeking from their tight green buds,
vermillion petals tipped in yellow
atop matchstick-thin stems.

2.
1:00 a.m. doorbell. Dogs leap up and bark.
I’m plucked from a deep sleep. The house is dark.
I grow quiet, shrink. Back of a stranger’s head
captured on my Blink camera. My shoulders,
gut, entire interior is shaking, shaking.

3.
Graham cracker crust frames cheesecake.
Big 12! Happy birthday, Adam! iced in red cursive.
Brown eyes, long dark horse-mane-thick bangs.
He holds one of the dozen tall skinny
lit candles in his hand.

4.
Ancient cable box catches fire in the alley
behind my house, torches utility pole. Ding
of my neighbor’s text: Are you okay? Flames
20 feet above your roof. Firetruck strobe lights
flash outside my window.

5.
Row of skyscraper-palm-trees wrapped in fairy
lights line the sidewalk. Halfmoon is high, high
directly above our heads. He holds my hand, points
to a tiny pinprick of light, says, and I think that’s Venus.
I almost tip over looking up.

1.
On our walk around the neighborhood
with no sidewalks, three tween girls
speed toward us on two electric scooters.
We leap out of their path as they whiz past,
eyes wide, mouths squealing SORRY!

2.
The fourth grader’s Lunchable
is a plastic square of silver-dollar-size
slices of cheddar, turkey, ham,
an Oreo cookie, and she calls
this meal charcuterie.

3.
Tangelos from a friend’s tree piled
in a black wire basket. Orange orbs
each capped with a bulge. Thick dusty skin
washed in a stream of tap water, peeled.
Sweet, juicy, a few seeds.

4.
The children cut, paint, fold fuchsia
hearts, cover shoeboxes in red paper,
glue sequins, stars, gold and silver
doilies, glitter their names
in swirls across the top.

5.
She drops green grapes for the peacock
and it follows her, shimmery teal neck,
nubby gray tweed wings, cathedral-train
of jewel tone eyeballs, tail sweeping
the ground before opening into a fan.

1) Chronos’ Embodiment
Hourglass sand drifts
down thin fragile necks
measures time’s passage
we skip stones across waterways
each bounce portending new life.

2) Persephone’s Promise
Lilac fragrance floats
spring days breed insect larvae
sundown crickets chirp
as animals couple our
emotions thrive like grapevines.

3) Apollo’s Bounty
Sunrays blister backs
nude volleyball players bounce
free from restriction
exchanging summer troths we
romanticized endless eves.

4) Demeter’s Harvest
Autumn encroaches
fiery maples light hills
squirrels gather nuts
Mabon’s mysteries emerge
calloused hands bundle wheat shocks.

5) Boreas’ Chill
Tropical rains fall
corrugated roofs drain
Hawaiian winter
I long to cuddle both day
and night by flames and ashes.

1
The road is sepia, a reddish brown that belies the desert’s white heat and deep-blue cold, denoting not morning or evening but after something. The sawdust-dry meat loaf sandwich, made palatable with ketchup. Coffee with an undertone of dust-fine sand and brown weeds but wet enough to be stay refreshing even with the heat outside and lots of it. Perching on a stool’s a welcome break. Watching as a waitress clears dishes, make another pot of coffee. The luxury of not moving 20 or 30 minutes, sun not beating down like on the road. I’ve enjoyed those times the most.

2
It says on Wikipedia that flies followed people when they moved from the Middle East. They get everywhere—even behind a sizzling windshield when you least expect it, are most disinclined to crack a window to get it out. One wings in when someone dies in an Emily Dickinson poem, a black speck of white noise to show something’s still alive in the room. One appeared the day Bill Mohr lectured about Emily Dickinson, even with the doors and windows shut, and we did the best to ignore it. They buzz like memories of mountain trips and loved ones missed.

3
Who in Bishop, California would call me? Says it’s important. Drives up in jeans and a black T-shirt, haunting me with a smile. Black hair slicked back. Ray-Ban lenses deep, dark green, keeping glare out, secrets firmly in place. The dark-olive ’56 Chevy pick-up he drove up in suits him. Dad towed in one he found in a salvage yard. Got the engine running. Body fixed, painted. He and I drove in it on weekends to the hardware store and Uncle Ray’s house when I was in elementary school. Wait. Is this Dad, back at the age we did that?

4
We couldn’t see the San Gabriel mountains most days in elementary school, just smog-grey sky. One clear morning, my sixth-grade teacher marched us into the playground, pointed them out as if to say, “Look! There they’ve been all along.” They were clear and craggy as the Sierra Nevadas in a photograph. The Sierras are bluer—a cross between early-morning sky and smoke ribbons that rose from Dad’s Pall Malls. The highway moves straight toward them, a lazy brown-black snake. The desert looks hot enough to melt the asphalt’s tar. In their cool hue, the Sierras could pass as an illusion.

5
The desert that’s been a metaphor for waking and breathing becomes literal past Barstow, heading east. Radio’s a fly buzz. I take in a Mojave spotted green with tumbleweeds, quietly amazed that isolation’s a friend, not a tormenter, doesn’t expect or demand. Ringed with violet mountains, a crazy-crimson sunset blooms, tinged with pinks and purples. A rest stop near the grade’s top reminds me of people. It’s empty. I stop and look into the black night. Ten more minutes of not being expected to become the guy with the right house, clothes, career and found wanting. It buys me time.

¹Monoku by George Swede published in NOON: journal of the short poem, Issue 25 (April 2024). Used with the author’s kind permission.

1. Or Rather There Are No Lines in the Time
First there were trailers, then shelves built inside the trailers to add bodies, quiet as firewood left to gather moss unless the trailer’s bottom fell out and the logs had faces. Hospitals stacked cadavers inside waiting rooms to wait for what or whom, as if the forest floor might take them into its bosom. Nights approaching Christmas lingered and passed. Undertakers kept busier than woodcutters trying to clear away the dead until they froze into place under Sleeping Beauty’s spell. Snow fell and fell like a scene in a film.

2. And Toward the Center a Vacancy One Knew
Green and green and green. Whittier College’s dorms more Yorick’s skull from Hamlet—walls the color of bleached bone and void of the infinite jest that spilled from doors onto quad and sidewalk. Mockingbirds squawk. Their black-and-white-striped wings flash from tree to tree, followed by an awkward stillness. The clicks and clucks of gossiping ravens are the sound of multicolored plastic marbles inside Fisher-Price lawnmowers, popping like popcorn. They break off to stroll red clay-tile dorm roofs. The corvids look almost professorial as they meander, wings folded back in philosophical contemplation.

3. We All Bought Tickets to the Allusion
Tablecloths immaculate, crystal polished, servers ensconced in permafrost. A good meal can cure you if it doesn’t first kill you—any medical professional worth Escoffier will attest to this—or, barring this, a shot from the bar of medicinal wonders. As fine diners, we’re sure the plague will wait to touch us. Be it Covid or bubonic, it’s a mannered pandemic. If there’s no civility in a mass emergency, where are the dinner mints for the autopsy? Were efficacy numbers overcooked, salmon underpoached? Was the strychnine served with coffee real or imitation?

4. You Don’t Learn the Cancan at Obedience School
On Dia de los Muertos, the Jesus line snaked, dressed in black. I thought of glowing carbon firework snakes rising from tablets once my brother touched a match to them, breaking into pieces, rolling through a smoke haze. The wind waited, patient and inarticulate, whenever I passed, past Thanksgiving, Christmas. A man played his guitar from a distance, ambling a step or two alongside a white sawhorse. The irony of Death astride his pale mount, while this guy strummed one life at a time and took his sweet time about it

5. Like a Night Sound for Which There Is No Explanation
I keep defining silence by what insists it’s missing. No college kids lighting up in front of my place. No iPhone blaring a soundtrack. Instead, a hush that in itself is a sound, has a heartbeat, inhales cool air. An evening into which those kids might prefer to blend, seamless with the dark, draping their bodies along a brick retaining wall like the lantana hanging over their heads. Laugher merging with purple blossoms, lambent stars. Conversations hovering, hot-air balloons, until the heat inside them faded and gravity kicked in.

¹Title taken from the poem “Five Pedantic Pieces” by John Ashbery, in the collection As We Know.