Gleam Issue 2
The following poems were selected by the editors
for Issue 2 of Gleam:
First Husband, by Jennifer Franklin
Harden, by Steven Duncan
Hollows, by Kerry Trautman
Hylas at Lampasas, by Jenner Shaffer
Insomniac, by Tmishael
Invocation, by Mela Blust
Liquid, by Katie Kemple
Montage, by Carolyn Martin
Negative Entropy, by Diane C. LeBlanc
Pappus, by Lori Witzel
Poseidon Taken for a Squid, by Joseph Salvatore Aversano
Recollections, by Julie A. Dickson
Reliquary, by Jenner Shaffer
Repair, by Diane C. LeBlanc
Snow Angels, by Sharon Waller Knutson
The Waves, by Leah Baer
Three Coyotes, by Jeff Ewing
Threshold, by Lisken Van Pelt Dus
Vertigo, by Ann E. Michael
We Begin at the End, by Kat Good-Schiff
Weather in the Heart, by Sarah Provost
What Remains, by Karen Cline-Tardiff
Winter Bloom, by Sherre Vernon
- Driving through backroads
across the Atlantic Ocean in fog
and rain, music blaring, sheep
attached to green cliffs as if gravity
were an unproven theory like love—
how easy to build a ship of promises. - The snow fell for years—
hiding the fact that he loved
the dog and hated me.
We walked the white roads
and I hid my shame—
the knife I kept to cut myself. - The wooden box of Renaissance words
stands with wreath of rosemary and pansies,
fennel, columbine, and rue. No daisies, no
violets. Dust fills the crevices of its lid
beside my bed. I keep it as a reminder
of what not to allow men to do. - Quantum physics claims my old life
and my new life still exist four blocks apart.
I stand in the park, look up to the eighth floor
of the two pre-war buildings. I cannot
see the fire or frightened faces
in the windows, waiting to be saved. - Oh, his lies—gems glistening hard
as emeralds, amethyst, the sapphire
of our daughter’s birthstone. Harmless
from here, a decade distant. I still want him
to suffer, where Dante damns the betrayers,
after he escapes the hell of his own hollow heart.
- refracted light through row of glass bottles
scatters lines on a white windowsill
spills out in every color - wisps of packed silk tighten around cocoon
suspended from a twig swaying
destined never to open - lint and dust escape deflated vacuum bag
in an explosion of recovered filth
a cloud of simmering smoke - grey geode cracks beneath steel hammer
sending shards of sharp rock into orbit
spitting before a crystal reveal - calcifications found in grandmother’s chest
formed before it was time to hear
what she kept inside
- In the flood, she finally lost
the pale blue pillowcase—
dragged house to house—
pillowcase filled slips of paper scrawled
with words as fuel for future dream poems,
like wishful thinking. - Every locked door is a witch’s,
and behind it Dorothy’s red hourglass
ticking in its drizzling way, and behind it
a clamor of clenched hands awaiting
decisions. Sometimes you have to
follow where the wings go. - A man named Spyder
gave her a flower today
off the back of his junk truck.
It was plastic, but then,
she hasn’t been given a real one
in so many years she can’t remember. - Does the tree with wounded bark believe
it is easier to keep living, sheathing
scarred pulp in new green fibers,
concealing its hollowing insides,
knowing just the right storm
is bound to give it its due? - Viscous April wind cannot be trusted,
takes what it wants. Like how water
insinuates itself toward the lowest point
saturating, rotting its way down.
Like bodies swollen upon waking.
Women full as the moon.
-
Oil
The toe of the moon rocks night & day, the aurora of well-keepers
happy tears of heaven, soft sand drying, slicked-over. Dimpled dream,
napping midday, pastels play the lover to her features, she stretches
through the evening, half-awake with thoughts of every form she will take.
Along the sea with its foaming & sighing, braiding & unbraiding
she hums to herself, casting her reflection in pools,
with a sudden breath she is changed. -
Texas Mountain Laurel
you go bearing death as beauty
clustered grapery shedding scent
pleasantry encapsulating waxen purple whiffs
attended in a congress of bees
beyond me you would have me taste the sweet fruit
slender Helen in twilight-colored fragrance
of malice a murex Medea bad dream you are having -
Order in the Window
A scallop’s high point, on the rattler’s rock. Rumbling annelid, mesozoic keys jangling in the cafe,
waitress poising an iridian bauble on her tongue, Believe I’ll be having the special.
Through glinting, caliche-dusted trucks, parting the olive feathers of mesquite,
murmurations of belemnites circle a cnidarian Bruegel chunk, Gabriel’s horns chorus
beneath a pterosaur wing steering an onshore flow, gliding ammonitic flats
porpoised with Bacchus-beasts, beyond the littoral mash miles deep in the delta am I,
cynodontic-self stirred, button-nose suspended, long lashes winking, my Asmodeic other. -
Least Brook Lamprey
The world, everything to make of it, a billowing plasma, a girdle of asters,
reveries in the taste of pollens, self-to-self redeemed, carrying all the weight
& still with room at the top. A slow perfection enjoying spring smells,
the feelings of fall, snuggling trenchant to the gravels of winter,
free of questionable shadows, rolling over, belly in delicious grinding grit,
a velvet-skied kingdom sparkling towers to horizons in the night-life of an amiable city
converged on the midway, thrilling to shrieks from the loop-the-loop. -
The Isle
The books were bound in skin, I say, where the gray lady went gliding toward the stairs–
black dog, you rascal chonk– twin eagles of whirlwind tipping the nod– big bat of Brushy Creek,
how does your black baldy? Do bluebonnets still explode in the dark? As if we haven’t lived enough.
The chimaeras are a thoughtful touch. Are they meant to be scary? I never understood. I suppose
the prophets have counted down, an oracle’s eyes rolled back, must have. See if I get this right:
When limulidae come hauling in to shore, blue-blood beating lunar, someone’s meant to be there.
Leviathan likes qui-et, barnacle scruff, no suns on the planet. Ladies send their love. Godspeed, hero.
-
Tea brewing is a work of art
peppermints are made to smolder lime lungs
hibiscus red and fermented rooibos leaves
knock tired bones into a semi-dead zone,
but art is not the debate here, price is..
so, coffee is the next best living liquid
to water – yes or yes! -
There, a rustle in the distance
mama warned that lost eagle forests
wake with the moon and not to wander like mice do
but mama, what better thing could
pretty big eyes do if not admire
rustling arrows under Ms. moon? little owl
met a wind vane and shook his tail feathers -
Guzheng’s vibrato pitches
without a plectrum, chords strike a
note at quarter past yesterday while
banana ears eclipse over lighted tent
Lumiere blue ocean collapses
near the harbor of oriental ivory where
timbres strum a lover’s sorrow -
If I could, I’d sell the moon for a warm milk-laced
cup, trap shrieks against my ribs, not miss
homemade cookies I never sniffed
caffeine-activated nostalgia, me versus
a tampered-with monsoon and a
walk-out monster’s bedtime stories, yawning as
Fang Yue’s zither thrums ‘master’s lost dagger’ -
After birth and bedsores, letters arrived
man plunders a thirty-five year old
‘better or worse’, a wife’s life-savings are
replaced with cardiac arrest
no, there would be no obituary
Sarah’s income was wired to her siblings
only a botany textbook flies across the room
-
my brother and i are tall dark shadows on a south facing cliff, fingers poised and pointing for the next shooting star. some are only brief glimpses of light grinning from a coal-dark sky, eliciting shouts of joy that echo to the sapphire bay, awash in midnight slumber. other stars are distended, glowing tails, cat-like in their saunter across the atmosphere. sean lights a cigarette, his face awash in the cerise glow. a whispered plea escapes my lips, its desperate incantations cosmically entwined with the star he didn’t see.
-
they affix me to a cold table to remove pre-cancerous cells. part of me was a cancer, i think wanly to myself. i look at the ocean of fluorescent lights above, pretend i hover just above my body while i smell my flesh, burning. they tell me there’ll be burning but i won’t feel it – what i wouldn’t have given to feel it. they smile as if numbness is a gift.
-
the lake is a lean, blue girl, crushed blackberry fed and summer thirsty. a little boy diving for shells plops a wet clump of treasure into my hands, and our cerulean eyes strike a deal: he scouts, i collect. his sinew itself is like pearls, sunlight-kissed and sliding through the bottle-green shallows. a woman calls, and his tanned soles carry him through the glisten, away, to the grass, and i watch him until he blends, fat little paint daub in a sea of colors. the breeze comes with hungry arms to make fat dandelion puffs disperse, the soft, lonely wishes floating away from me through the ether, lost forever.
-
a curl of blood escapes my failing-me body again, drips thick into the porcelain tub, making a union with the hot running water swirling around my thighs. i lament all the ways in which my frame could not be a home this time. that night, i lay coffin-still upon the cheap floral hotel comforter, listening to the snoring of a man who chooses not to be a father to the living or the dead. i dream of a cabin that grows legs and runs away from a seething monster, carrying the children inside to safety. i wake with a start: in the room next to ours, a baby cries.
-
you are three and we are throwing pennies into the fake-teal fountain at the city mall. mine lands with a thud on the cheap, oxidized-concrete bottom, your blond ringlets are loose and waving as you wildly fling yours into the center pool. i stare absent-mindedly as you clasp your tiny fingers together, squeeze your eyes shut, and murmur to the penny-gods you’ve drowned. as we walk away, you ask, as you always do, mommy what did you wish for? i squeeze your hand and reply, i wished for you.
-
The planted pine tree behind the Target
didn’t work out. Its support stick couldn’t
stop it from leaning over too far. One day,
I pass and see that its top has been chopped
off, sap drip tears that dazzle in the sunlight. -
At the hospital, my mother sat on a gurney,
eyes red, she said the pain is unbearable.
I held her hand. We didn’t know then that
it emanated from her pancreas, that her
heart could not outrun an intruder so close. -
The snail had a surprisingly long shell, a cone,
and not the neat round curl of most snails
in our neighborhood. The tip was broken off.
The shell dragged behind, as its soft body wrote
words only the moonlight could decipher. -
The tumor growing on our dog’s hind leg
burst open onto the floor. Emergency
surgery delivered her home in an orange
Halloween cast. She gnawed out of that
within an hour, her shaved leg fighting still. -
Sixty percent of the human body is water.
What can it carve in this odd pond? Our insides
yearn for kindling futures. Sorrow hardens
into an amber stone, we thumb in a pocket.
My mother’s ash hangs from a chain in a locket.
-
Ben Franklin, get a grip! All that griping won’t stop
50,000 pennies pinging on your coffin top.
You’re the Trevi Fountain of Brotherly Love.
Where did you think your penny saved, penny earned
would lead? As sure as the Eagles and cheese steak,
the Philly fathers bank on it -
The mountain I saw was not the one you saw
or pretended to see. We stopped in the cold
at the Viewpoint sign, so I could track the hawks
breaking through the clouds and you, fists jammed
into your jeans, could trace the raped hillsides
where virgin forests used to thrive. -
First prize for Levity goes to the thoroughbred
whose four hooves rose – simultaneously –
above the rutted ground. Runner up: the cricket,
a timid male who knew that volume equals sex
during mating time. Inventively, he devised
a megaphone from a slit catalpa leaf. -
What do I believe? Last night before I remembered
sleep, I told myself whatever lies within time and space:
the raccoons that dig up our yard; the sound of sun
melting snow, the lilac smell of spring. Beyond
irretrievable seconds and breadth/height/length?
That’s another creed. -
In a moment of lucidity, Julia requested
she be laid to rest in her red silk dress with a fork
placed in her right hand. When mourners asked
why, her son explained, Mom always said
the best was yet to be, whether crème brulé
or a mansion in the sky.
-
The marigold, a gift
the giver thought was a hardy mum,
ruffles against a killing frost,
Caltha in the night field
waiting for her sun god,
wasting to nothing but light. -
In winter coat and headlamp,
I pick green tomatoes
after dark, hoping
they’ll ripen in this brown bag
while the fallen ones collapse to seed
as I would if I could tonight. -
The last hours,
muscles gone and bones all
lip and edge of empty,
veins still
limp and bright as hymnal ribbons
holding order. -
Cantrip during an October blizzard:
Of goose down and nutmeg,
wide egg noodles and wool clogs,
of rationed yeast and a fallen hornets’ nest,
of soup, slick wood, and post-dahlia orgasm,
I make this body able to make. -
Is it still there–
that faraway place of salt and oil
where we sat outside drinking gin,
eating salted edamame from a bamboo steamer,
where empty pods held the shape of beans
as we talked about home?
-
It’s a snowstorm, or it was, and
now the sun is setting past our
sight, not yet below the horizon
but unseen. The wind’s made a
lung of tree ice: gray crepitations. -
Everything’s been elided by this
snow. First the junco tracks, then
my steps, a few gone deep where
snow-crust broke under my boots.
Even these words now blow away -
as does my heart, from deep red
to something pale, untethered, it’s
adrift the way dry snow falls, the
way a dandelion pappus floats and
tumbles once its seed’s dropped. -
Wayfinding, as the twilight settles in,
tinting the blown drifts methylene blue.
An open question, as I’m lost again:
what is it that I’m bait for, or a trap for?
The blue, now darker, now black. -
A pause. My breath—the slow cadence like
yours, I recall, as you drifted off into warm
sleep next to me on threadbare blue sheets.
(Not indelible—a fugitive indigo, so mutable,
weightless as dandelion fluff or a snowflake.)
-
the scenic collapses
into an ocean with it a
stretch of Highway One—-
now Kerouac will never
get to visit Henry Miller;
and not due to the
late hour but it
being all too late -
a tug of
the string on
the dragon kite
tugging on its
string the kite
tugging at small
hands tug in
the wind -
a peasant on a
horse in all of
central Anatolia:
the steppe wraps
round as it did
around Midas’
golden grain
in wildflower -
waterspout round the
surveillance camera
in streaks of night
vision green the
water spray and
light no one survives
the destruction of
anything found
familiar -
the word for winter
in ancient Greek
the word for storm
and for what it’s like
on Hydra in galoshes
arrived at from
the mainland
by squall
- Gladys was reciting a poem
when she stopped mid-word
and dropped dead, no last breath,
no movement, just dead. We froze,
her audience, a stasis of shock. - I always wanted to push her up straight,
my leaning Nana, who swayed right,
regardless of bolsters propping her;
I tended to tip my head so I met her eyes,
I could barely hear her whisper. - Did she remember being on the streets?
Roughly shoved into a carrier, broken tail
beyond repair at the animal clinic. Now quiet,
perched on chair backs; don’t touch me, feral.
Does she recall who kicked her to the curb? - Refusing to use a bedpan, I snuck to the bathroom
when the nurse wasn’t looking, my hernia scar red,
but dignity still intact. I won’t drink your orange juice,
can’t stay in bed watching stupid game shows.
They found me asleep on the window sill. - Even behind closed eyes
I can still see the full moon,
etched on my retinas, beneath
my eyelids like indelible
marker on a whiteboard.
-
Denial of Escape
Alone in the house. Napoleonic chairs pale pink silk, never to sit on. Prussian tigers in china
corkscrew out of sight in parlor mirrors. Summer motes of an ell, a piano’s stale plink.
Deep from a drawer, beneath fine hands in correspondence, string-haired twang is a pirate mandolin. Great barrels double-stack the cellar, snakeskins string the gaps. No getting around Stonewall’s room.
Said over dinner he hoped heaven was like this. Secure rest in campaigns sneaking the valley,
the guest room with its secret stairwell from the closet down to the slave-entrance coat-closet.
Dad sheds his gloves in a grin, Going to make sandwiches, come on when you’re finished.
The grand spiral is for cowards. Think a bright cancel, a green viking ship. Prove you don’t believe.
My arms are full of newspapers from the windowsills, a breath of wind is on my heel,
I am halfway down the tumbledown steps when the door slams shut. -
Garment
They dream of functions, textures, colors.
Denticles, derm of abrasion, silky coverings &
bristling full with stings,
in feather-wraps & furs,
wet or damp or hydrophobic.
A photostatic grid, an eyelid
or two or three, they reflect on the self-envisioned
& when they wake, generations of desire
slide hangers, saying–
I’d wear this out. -
Columbia
Southern belle, Five Points, headed for the horse race, eventually.
Tipsy with lampshades, Army boys on furlough step behind the cordons,
beer trucks idle with their paper cups, a mushy bag of boiled peanuts
kicked against a storm-drain.
Eyes shift, looking to turn a lock.
Sickened, resting, anywhere would do, steps of the capitol.
Beneath the slackened whaps & dings
the grasses of amphorae whisper, a homily reaches,
the emptied stomach perks
to sizzling pork, feet & snout. -
American Beast
Frost-fringed dawn redwood, flowers for eagle-vision, bittern-still in bald cypress,
turkey-wattled, toe to topknot circumferencing the Lost Continent. Clatters gravel,
sticks down, breaks brittle leaves, ice panes collapse. Wades the juicy plains,
shawls through alleys of the Smokies, toward the lowering sun,
a swath of steam nodding, & savors reach the interior seaway.
Anomalous attachment, the swamp-lord’s web.
Thudding stills, & river-lain, the lungs cease.
Drifts to sea & sinks, is gnawed upon:
hold the dangling arms,
remainder bars a coral cave. -
Galatea
A shadow passes under the door, that would-be, Dr. DeJarnette.
Wild things play the walls, a testament of vines.
Augusta County claims frontier, all that cannot be seen.
In a boy’s heart a scorpion turns, gold under the floor.
The boy chews his fingers down, locked in the room.
Bighoof & his legend of freedom end up a steak.
A porcelain dove, hand-painted by a nun, shatters in metaphor.
Committed to a shallow pit, the cracked swimming pool rings with frogs,
a spontaneous generation of duckweed & of lily blooms.
With machined-motion the eye flutters, & beauty’s monster stares.
-
The Party
I give this Sunday morning to handwashing
sweaters, water running grey from dye
and dirt the color of winter sky.
A year into this pandemic and I’ve forgotten
how time catches, but washing seems
like honest work, the way caring used to feel
when kneading a lover’s sore shoulder
drew soft moans, when gathering the first dropped
orchid blossoms meant beginning not ending.
I rinse and agitate each sweater in a bucket
then shape them on surfaces until I’m surrounded,
a party of cold sleeves and buttons. -
The Facts of Last Night’s Dream
Everyone could speak except my mother.
She was a small skein of embroidery floss.
She hopped from the shopping cart I was pushing
up a steep hill. I found her first
in a friend’s cold garage, transparent and still
until I smoothed her strands and lifted her
into the cart, but she leaped again. She sprang
arms and legs. Running through blueberry thickets
without her silver pail, she picked and picked and
stained herself blue. I chased her until
she tangled on branches, my mother
a web I tried to gather without tearing. -
Against Pulling
The first cut to repair an old book
reminds me my knife is sharp
and fine leather splitting from thirst
is beyond salvage. So I slice
and slide my knife between spine
and pages held tight with linen tape,
shaving flakes of calloused glue
until I reach stitches and knots
and finally, the headband of silk thread
wrapped around cord, bright cuticle
not as afterthought but as architecture
against pulling and pulling. -
Despair
The longer we stay at home
the more often friends lose a chicken or two
to sudden death—no trauma or disease,
just cold wattle and comb
lying in the coop among the living.
Grieving during a pandemic
is a new kind of holy despair,
a nerve tax for time passing
without ceremony, bodies tucked in
pillow cases, wrapped in beloved scarves
for the drive to the landfill, while at home,
in water pans, eulogies well beneath ice. -
Poems for the Living
After the inauguration, the work, as in
now the work begins, isn’t to name
this tree, that bird, but to witness
forces like fury and justice chasing
a woman pushing seeds into mounds
she packed and gathering amulets
ripped from the dead, sweeping
the dust of splintered pods, no prayers
or charms left to summon. The ones
who show up will resume the planting,
writing poems for the living
on paper made of ruined dresses.
-
I flap angel wings
in a snowy bed,
white and frigid
as a house of virgins. -
The farmer fleeces sheep
with sharp scissors,
leaving them naked,
shivering in the shade. -
In an orange blossom blizzard,
the Japanese woman
in the kimono keeps in step
with the strutting soldiers. -
Flaring like a four-alarm fire,
the sun is a mistress burning
through mattresses and mansions,
leaving no survivors. -
I skate nude on ice, freezing
as old flames march beside me,
just out of reach, tasting tangelos
on my tongue, succulent and sweet.
-
The White Sea, 2006
In sub-zero Arctic seas, the white whales follow
Natalia Avseenko, enchanted, smiling, naked body to naked
body, undulating in the deep blue. Fingertips caressing.
Like dancing. Or love. 10 minutes, 40 seconds, the whales
don’t breathe or breach, Natalia needs no air. They follow
where she leads. To aquariums, life imprisonment, while one
hundred thousand belugas swim free, Natalia’s seduction
unheard in the indigo, unanswered. Natalia loves the whales, and
she is so captivating. She is saving them from freedom.
She is training them to bear loss. -
Pacific Ocean, May 2020
Bioluminescence blooms and a woman worn
by death—one hundred thousand from Covid-19,
any day now—steps off California into sapphire
life jeweling her ankles, hands, waist. She walks out
into the sea until the sand floor drops and her arms cut the
star-sequined ocean. She forgets the hospital and swims
parallel to the shore, that brilliant blue line of life glowing
as she turns her head to breathe to the rhythm of that almost
impossible oath: First, do no harm. First, do no harm.
First, do no harm. -
Paris, 1902
Two new radioactive elements: polonium and radium, 0.1g chloride
between them. Marie and Pierre Curie proved them into existence,
their “gleamings, suspended in darkness,” the “faint, fairy lights” of
glowing tubes. Lights which might one day save life. In Paris
elsewhere, Loie Fuller dreams of dancing dresses fashioned
from radium, a Fire Dance illumined by gaslight in red, yellow,
orange, green, violet, blue, swirling fabric echoing flame. Marie loves
the “spontaneous luminosity” of the radium’s faint blue light
as she loves Pierre. The young tongues of radium girls moisten brushes
to paint numbers, to glow in the dark. -
Vietnam/New York City, 1965
People are dying in Vietnam. Agent Orange is beginning
its generational effects. A girl in a play across the ocean, loves gamma
rays and man-in-the-moon marigolds. A girl in love with science, living
past a mother’s lethal love. Agent Orange is one of the “rainbow
herbicides.” It has tactical uses. Ask the Ho Chi Min Trail. Ask
the U.S. military. So many color-coded means of killing: green, pink, white,
purple, blue, four kinds of orange. So very many ways to die. Ask the girl
with the gamma rays and the marigolds she’s raised from seeds. She loves
wavelengths: in her care, the flowers survive, bloom. Ask her about the
dangers; she knows how to keep things alive. -
Hallway Closet, 1953
Mother banishes me to the dark, beaded dresses from
her 1920’s dancing days vibrating beneath my fingertips: red,
green, gold, blue sing their colors to me. Each color electricity and
buzz. Each color a different song singing my body, blue
the loudest. My birth the year of peace, so they say, Hiroshima
and Nagaski, hiding under desks from H-bombs. I know
the hiding won’t save us, just like I know I see colors in the dark.
The door opens and light spills, blue dress a shining flame in my arms.
“I love you,” is what she says. It doesn’t matter if it’s true, because
I am right about the heat of blue.
-
Three coyotes follow
a pair of deer at stride through
the shallows, not one
looking back. -
Freight cars tagged
and sided signal their allegiance
in shadowed runes debarking
into the trackside weeds. -
Clouds, they say, from
the north carry the exhalations
of glaciers frozen again
in release. -
A red-shouldered hawk
flexes its wings along an arc
of horizon, undoing meridians
with a talon’s flick. -
At a candescent door
voices within shed winter from
my shoulders, rising light and hoarse
as gulls renouncing the tide.
-
Tonight’s monster saucers its eyes
huge under a wild white head
but I have learned how to keep its kind
from crossing the threshold.
It scowls from the doorway. -
The grave is marked as it has always been,
a granite stone set into the earth
at the crest of the hill. The name
and dates have faded slightly, is all,
veined with lichen. -
Behind the liquor store, boxes
scattered – Relax Riesling, Admiral
Nelson’s and Lady Bligh’s Rums –
like the aftermath of an orgy,
limbs and flaps akimbo. -
Night fell like molten lead
poured into webs of maple branches.
The sky filled it like stained glass –
blues darkening into indigos,
then deeper like the heart bruising. -
The sun today bounced hard
off the snow and windshields
and roads. Even our dead ash
gleamed in its brilliance.
Light ricocheted clear through us.
-
Near Abiquiú the mesas
drawn up from desert
studded with rabbit sage
above the rock slab
prickly pear’s bold blossom
a sheltering scorpion -
It hurts to give birth,
I read. So I studied how
to break myself open into
surf and tide pool
wave after wave
swelling -
How to skip a stone well:
you find water broad
and still on a day windless
a bank littered with chert
flint or shale—
the toss is just as horizontal -
Walking up the driveway
I am wearing my father’s hat
beneath my boots the gravel
irregular and stony cold
fringed with yesterday’s
scant snow -
There is nothing to forgive
not the harsh word or
the times I abjured your heart
today’s pearl sky and soft rain
tell me this is
a benediction
-
Yesterday my mother took me
to the forest. Surrounded by green,
no recourse to sky,
we followed an uneven path.
When darkness fell, she stepped away.
I can’t teach you what I never learned. -
The mind is not a hollow-boned bird
that can fly all day
until the sky turns red.
It is only a kite
and needs your body for tether
so it can swoop and soar. -
Today you must climb the mountain
with your burden of stories.
Now is not the time
to walk alone in the forest.
People at the summit
are waiting for you. -
The fish tasted like water.
Now the river
lives in me.
When I die
I will be greeted
by millions of tiny mouths. -
If childbirth is wildfire
my womb is stone.
How will the forest renew
without me? My legacy:
a bare, granite mountain.
You can see for miles.
-
I married on summer’s solstice
to let in more light, alas. You don’t have
to have malice in your heart to do real harm.
Yellowing leaves, smoke. -
Summer is brief as a salt breeze
or a ticker tape parade. Dogs yawn
in the shade, such diligent indolence, all
ruby mouths and loose paws. -
In the four small rooms under my ribs
it’s always ventriloquist weather, a mirror
reflecting itself. Love masquerades as nostalgia,
or vice versa. We light the lanterns again. -
Once we read runes in the scat recitation
of salt spray frozen on stone. The sky
was the rough, maculate white of birchbark,
and later, though not enough, my skin. -
Maybe the sun always scatters its beads
like a blessing. The small leaves of spring synchronize
their celebration, the humblest weeds
mumble and thrum with life.
-
The dirt opened beneath our hands, no matter
the agglomeration of minerals, dead worms,
time-worn rocks, it was not enough to fill
the six foot deep hole. Your body could not
fill the hole, could never fill the spaces required
of you. You always in the background, silent. -
I strapped myself into the same car, five days every
week, 51 weeks every year. I drove across two different
bridges to strap myself into a desk, surrounded by fast-
flying papers and busy lines. I watched as the crews
rebuilt the bridge for two years. I watched as I drove
my car through the new guardrails, braced for impact. -
Too many dishes. Mismatched plates piled up in
the sink, glasses chipped at the mouth, sharp edges
worn soft as I rub my tongue across them, reminded
of rocks tumbled by the ocean. I take pictures of
the assorted implements, offending dishes, post them
on Marketplace. Go to the store and buy paper plates. -
He lay in the same bed every day for a year and a half.
Two hours before he died she rose from her own bed
and sat beside him. I can still hear the bed creak under
her weight. They held hands for the first time since
they eloped 58 years before. His face screwed in pain,
then relaxed. Do we all know when it’s time to let go? -
A bite from each piece of candy in the box. Replaced.
I can see the pinks and browns attempting to ooze
from the dark chocolate, onto the brown plastic.
She used to eat a bite a day. I never understood how
she didn’t gobble them all up. Now I look at what’s
left, a turn in my stomach, and throw the heart away.
-
She mists the room with rose-water
combs my hair to spring curls. In her
world the tub, the toilet paper, her back-
zip slacks are pink. On these church
mornings, she calls me Sharon,
like she knows I am ever the thorn
of the desert rose, not a sweet
parlor wine we can’t afford. -
In the dirt and brush of Ojai, beneath
the Grandmother Tree, a stranger spritzes
my face with a petal infusion, says it clears
the spirit to receive. I catch the eyes
of an old woman in ropewhite braids. She
says she knows me from before. I only
remember my sister saying that I will wither
into her. I’ve lost her name. -
A cedarwood hairbrush. A rattail
comb spitting teeth. My mother
yanks and twists my eyes, wrests
the hair from my face. She casts
a net to catch my strays.
Plastic bobbins crack and lock
into themselves and burrow
beneath my scalp, bleed. -
She speaks absently over me: her first
husband washed her ritually as an act
of love, each time. But my grandfather,
palm-tree-trimmer, scavenger-who-
sleeps-in-the-truck-cab, knows better
the nape of her neck. We snap green beans
into a tin bowl. Later I will sneak away
and paint her wall with pink polish. -
Little child, yes, the rose-water.
Little child, yes, I am open again
to pink. I am the age of peppered
greens on kitchen counters. I braid
your hair in a crown, simply. We gather
acorns. Juniper, I weep only when I think
of the granddaughters I will never see,
the granddaughter you did not get to be.
Ready to write your own cadralor?
About Us
Gleam is a journal wholly devoted to the new poetic form, the cadralor, created by Gleam’s founding co-editors, Lori Howe and Christopher Cadra. The cadralor consists of five short, unrelated, highly-visual stanzas.
Get In Touch
If you are interested in submitting your own cadralor poem or if you have questions, you can reach out to our Gleam email. We look forward to hearing from you!
Meet the Editors
The cadralor was co-created by:
• Lori Howe, Editor in Chief
• Christopher Cadra, Senior Editor
Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor 