Gleam Issue 6
The following poems were selected by the editors
for Issue 6 of Gleam:
Life, by Rose Mary Boehm
Now, by Jamey Boelhower
Intemperance, by Becky Boling
Still, by Natalie Callum
Gallery, by Sarah Carleton
To Be Seen, by Claire Cella
A Question of Balance, by Jane Dougherty
Appearances, by Jane Dougherty
Carousel, by Fulvia Del Duca
Transmutations, by Malcolm Glass
Time by Time, by Sarah Gordon
The Last Stretch, by Shirlee Jellum
Ghosts, by Tara Knight
Crush, by Tanis MacDonald
Titles with Epigraphs that May–or Not–Jumpstart Poems, by Carolyn Martin
What I’ve Seen Once and Will Always See, by Carolyn Martin
Altitude Transitions, by Ann Michael
Metamorphoses and Repairs, by Kathy Alma Peterson
Intersections, by Marcella Remund
My Love, a Ruse, Is Rare, by Jacquelyn Shah
What’s Missing, Soon–Me, by Jacquelyn Shah
Phases of Light, by Merril D. Smith
Necessary Now, by Sarah Snyder
Ephemerality, by Maggie Van Putten
Downwind Neighbors, by Sterling Warner
Wild Cards, by Sterling Warner
Regenesis, by Ingrid Wilson
Can You Name the Colors of a Black Hole?, by Jon Yungkans
The Weather is Perfect, the Season Unclear, by Jon Yungkans
1.
From Pont Neuf to Arc de Triomphe
Paris is shining on me.
The streetlights dance their haloes
in the soft evening rain.
Your kiss lingers on my wet skin.
2.
A summer hum lies over the long grass
in my back garden. Birds hover.
Somewhere from a road the bell
of yet another ice-cream van.
Black clouds mass behind the sycamores.
3.
The cargo boats and gondolas
do their twiddly bits changing direction.
Your hands blue on the windowsill.
‘La Fenice’ filled our hearts last night.
Music that soars, and January in Venice.
4.
The flesh is folding, keeping the books
with runes of years of hard work and loving.
I still hear my children’s laughter,
see their father’s bent back when he left.
Yet my rivers run clear; water memories.
5.
Love, you have emptied over me a cornucopia
of riches: joy and hurt beyond measure.
I am lowering my arms, remove my bow.
From summer meadows to breaking ice:
you gave your truth. I relax into your arms.
1. The night light goes
dark. The closet door
slowly opens – so slow
that his mom never
sees it move. He
scampers under the
blanket, trying to find
courage behind closed eyes.
He’s learned that living
people can be ghosts, too.
2. A streak of blue,
a whir of wings,
zig-zagging over a
murky lake. Stops.
A blue dasher is
content to hover over
algae along the bank.
A frog croaks;
creating a blue abstract
drawing above its home.
3. The bell, from above,
releases a symphony
of voices, underpinned
with shuffling soles
and digital pings,
that create bubbles
of laughter
that sound more like
scissors cutting
out a space for being.
4. Her red fur dull,
yet stark against
the crystal snow
she used to bound through,
making plumes of white stars
to dance with. This season
has been quiet. She curls
up against a tree.
Her breath dissolves
into the silence of the day.
5. I’m shedding no tears
as you walk away.
I’ve become a statue
in this garden you’ve
judged not colorful
enough for your eyes.
You’ve removed the
nameplate from the bench
we use to sit on
to enjoy the sun and flowers.
1.
I call them, Romeo & Juliet, for I know
what the squirrels are up to in our attic.
They’ve chewed their way inside, away
from the recent snowstorm. Overhead
we hear their secret playful tussles, those
giddy pawns—not of the stars, but of biology.
Our nonpaying tenants prepare for spring
as we sign the notice of eviction.
2.
They say this is spring, easier to hack
the year into four sets of three months.
Forget the equinox, the sun’s precise course.
Still, we are more attuned to inner clocks,
the body’s sense, the trajectory of stars.
Icy hillocks of snow cringe on dead lawns.
Call it what you will. We know in our skin
the passionate intemperance of the sun.
3.
Snow has fallen in sighs, so quiet, so content—
like a lover who rests a fevered cheek
on the beloved’s breast. Wedded in fateful bliss,
a white shimmer veils the earth.
See the snow, how softly it lies, sated
but heavy with sleep, on the cold ground.
This is how it is when fallen angels
surrender to mortality.
4.
Morning temps hover at freezing. After snow,
mixed precip flip-flops—rain to ice to rain.
My husband, too, juggles his options while
our stoic mini poodle, wrapped like a burrito
in yellow raingear, stands, paws decked
in red balloon shoes, a sad clown. Resigned,
my husband grabs the blue poncho, packs
himself in plastic, and joins the act.
5.
The flat of the blade spreads a layer
of cream cheese, presses it thin to cover
the sliced wheat bread from crust to crust.
The same knife, scraped clean, dips
into fig compote, smooths the dark sweet
fruit over the savory cream. My wrist
pivots the knife to the sharp edge.
A diagonal slice multiplies the loaves.
1.
The water was black silk.
Through the opening in the ice, you
surrendered your breaking
body, gasps
seizing you as you remembered
what it was to be still.
2.
Is taste a memory? Or is it
this lingering
under my tongue? Swollen
tomatoes, peaches, plums. I
could swallow
the seed and pit whole.
3.
Sand stuck to raw
skin. Sand between calloused
toes and the brown chairs
we sat on.
Even after bathing—sand
in our hair, sand in our teeth.
4.
Looking up, I think—it should be
innate. Knowing
whether a star lives or dies. How
is it that light pulses
unchanged after so many years?
5.
The mysterious awareness
of the womb. This opening,
this desire that begs
fruit, impossible
to contain. The unknowable
source of light.
I
A man eats pancakes in the tub, hank of hair hanging
between tawny shoulder blades. He’s all angles—
curved back and lean legs bent to fit the bowl of milky
bathwater. One hand holds a Fiestaware plate with blueberries
caught in the ridges. On the shower curtain, sunfish fold.
II
I dreamt my heart scudded to a stop. Ah, so this is death.
I couldn’t wait to compare notes with my husband.
In daylight, a squirrel breaks through the gap in our screen.
The back door is rotting. Weeds tangle in the lemon tree.
How weird it is that we breathe and then we cease.
III
Long ago, a young woman had champagne and strawberries
for breakfast and wept all day. Turned out she just wanted to
eat the phrase champagne and strawberries. Calorie counting
was a ticker tape holding her in place like a barricade.
When thoughts broke free, they made poems.
IV
Cats and drafty windows. Chairs with broken weaving.
A white plate with a square of butter and another with jam.
A clawfoot tub behind a screen in the living room.
I frame each scene like a camera shot, envious
of my own life even as I’m living it.
V
Leave behind the still life—blouse, carpet, fountain,
painted tiles—and wander past black porches
and lit rooms squared by glass. Climb through dark grass
and dew halfway up the hill then tilt your head back
under the shimmering sky.
1.
The air smelled of damp leaves. My best friend and I
pushed each other on the tire above the driveway,
swaying until the rope snapped and my face met gravel.
I ran, bleeding, into the dark embrace of my father’s arms.
2.
It is possible to watch a snowflake form before your
eyes, a scintillating dance between invisible things—
temperature, air, boundaries. It is snow from a clear
and cloudless place. Someone’s dust touched by sun.
3.
“How did it feel to be with him?” the therapist asked.
Hollow. “What images come up?” The outline of a body
in a bed. Two empty envelopes once carrying love
letters, moved from a wooden box to a can by the door.
4.
“This hand, which is bleeding now, wants to speak,”
said the female Venezuelan leader in Copenhagen,
years ago, holding up a small olive fist, down which
ran red rivers, meeting metal, and wood, and salt water.
5.
In spring, female horseshoe crabs rise up from dark
oceans to soft sand shorelines to spawn. Under a high
moon and below the crescendos of tide, you can tell
a young crab by the lack of mating scars on her shell.
1.
Someone was singing from the rocks slicked black beneath the rain, while the ship rolled, and the day-shadows deepened to purple. We watched the inevitable though narrowed eyes, the blood swelling beneath the skin of the sea.
2.
The love of my life sat in the garden, his head bent, sun swilling slantwise across the roses. He didn’t hear me on the silent grass, though once love would have heard and made him turn, too intent now on bloody fur, his fingers working at the wire noose.
3.
Bare white feet patter on the diamond shards, she smothers a cry of pain, red drops scattering on the cool tiles. The city of marvels strews its wealth across these silent rooms and echoing halls. No on leaves the dark unscarred.
4.
The drunk staggered, street light shining on his congested face, dull-silvering the greasy puddles on the quayside. Black harbour water slopped against the wall. I watched, peach juice running down my chin, waiting for him to slip.
5.
Summer fades too quickly, winter comes galloping cruel, and we forget honey-happiness. Roses die and where do the butterflies go? But this land lives, breathes warm in its coat of brown leaves, the light is blue and clear, and horses are running.
1
Torpedo fish rocket past in candy-stripes,
pretty, but with a sting in the tail, and
they will never soar with the swallows.
2
If a rose is like a peach is like the moon,
then I am like a birch is like a ghost.
We can play these games forever.
3
It is only a lake, but it goes deep, beneath
this dusty crust, where slow, dark things
have lived since the beginning.
4
Funny how sweet and sweat
are almost the same, like moon and moan,
dream and dread, dear and dead.
5
Dusk light fades, yet we can almost touch
the sky’s purple hem, and the cowl of the world
lies gold and blue about our shoulders.
1.
For the leftover flower in the field
truth comes dripping in the storm,
its petals bend at the fallen beat.
2.
We are born with the eyes open, but
the white gleams of the first summer
would burn even the dove walking.
3.
This lonely meal chokes me with bites
of the vineyard in September, birds
ripping the abandoned sugar peels.
4.
A grandfather’s sweater values tight
patterns, each row intersecting a
softer version of the same thread.
5.
All seasons smell of the humid grief
that creeps in the timber door, ajar to
the honey beams that glitter in musk.
1.
In the street gutter leaves laden with mud
lie waiting for a storm to carry them
to the dark gray river. A motorbike shakes
the silence with anger. In her holly tree,
a mockingbird weaves a sweet polyphony.
2.
Not so long ago, sheep herded
border collies along this road. Now
the fences have fallen, splintered
into nightfall. The wind blows west,
but the aspens lean eastward.
3.
Mexican workers bend the branches
of the olive trees to harvest them,
as the sun rises in an obsidian sky.
I know they are Mexican because
they keep whispering, “Libertad.”
4.
The Roman arches fallen to sand
lie still, pocked with the rain we had
conjured with our dancing. As the sun
breaks loose from the dark sea, we open
thousands of books to the light.
5.
The plane lands on a cloud and Claire,
a tall attendant in an onyx gown, helps me
exit. As I stand on the mist, I watch,
mesmerized, as schools of manta rays
below me sail in loops and chandelles.
1.
Silver rain in the station arclight
buzzed against the concrete platform,
shined caution edge into gold,
soaked a single shoe between the rails.
2.
In mid-March, the beach was white
with new-fallen snow fretted by
footsteps of Black-backed Gulls
gathered in knots against the cold.
3.
There were toads and moss
beneath the front porch steps
that peeled gray paint in scales.
A single fiddlehead unfurled.
4.
Through reflections of tail lights,
two diners sat at the counter
isolated from the car horn cry–
yellow taxi versus orange-caped girl.
5.
In the parched soil, sunflowers
stunted but blooming broad gold
brush against your hand, my face
to guide us from this dry season.
- Red racers crisscross the basement, bellies concrete cool.
Lured by sprinklers, rattlesnakes coil in catmint,
guard dog bristles and barks. Wildfire smoke thickens,
the pool a sheen of ash. Berries burn before they ripen,
deep well sucks air. The pond is a puddle in cracked clay,
fish shriveled along the shoreline.
A heron feasts. - Sound is the last to linger—a soothing voice, whoosh of wings,
waves washing the shore. How many gulls have you counted,
foghorns leading the lost, the whispers of skipping rocks,
shovels to sand for butter clams? You always loved the sea,
its silky song the promise of escape, whitecaps pearling
the surface in a winter storm. Now you seek
the perfect shell. - Raven reels into the eye of night, a dark angel rising like
grief. Drawn to light a luna moth escapes into a weaver’s
orb. Black trumpets feast on death. A cormorant unfolds
her wings in prayer, returns alone to a broken nest.
The moon swallows the sea. Why wait for what never
comes? Hell is a compass pointing north,
guiding you home. - The time you woke him with a tavern whore, he laughed,
said gotta shower like a brother understood the macho
of a cheating fuck. Or the time he arrived uninvited wearing
a MAGA hat, spewing bull like bile. Or the time you reeled
up dead weight wrapped in yellow raingear and he cursed, cut
the line, yet you never told a soul because you
love your brother. - Swing me to the next part—help me unravel the chaos
near this wasteland we call home. Catch and pull right
from wrong passed back and forth from palm to palm.
Take charge of the last stretch not yet defined, where
sun burns red and the tongue of the crescent moon
is a tombstone. Listen to the swan,
wild and defiant.
1
Halloween 1985 came caked in greasepaint and hair stiffened with spray in.
How the gyms at school dances are like cadavers wearing red lipstick. Costumes
hid changing bodies inside strobe lights and electronic new wave notations.
A Thursday, sixty days after they found the Titanic off the coast.
Confident, he was the first boy who ever asked me to dance. Firsts bristle
like the pinecones and thistle leaves hidden in velvet lawns. Fingers intertwined
like ropes of molten sugar; our breaths like birds, fluttered. Lately
the years separate and pile up like pages of dry paper. The day they told me he died
was such a strange thing. He was living in the backcountry of memories: he still is.
2
The rupture of a family can be captured on standard size paper. Words form
when capillaries near the stories surface are broken by impact. Love leaks out
of the vessels and creates a standard filing document. The report initially appears
slowly as a discoloured mark that none notice. With time and perseverance
though, you can nurture a bruise worth writing. One can create their own
magnum opus in hematoma and 12-point font. These works pool mostly and clot
in an organ, usually the heart. All bruise histories have a way of fading to black
and green. With some luck the astute author learns to write in old ink.
Narrative can be caught under skin and leave a mark to last.
3
Larking yellow dandelions inside the night mutate, heads turning
to ghost puffs. The colour closes its eyes in evening, but the snowy orbs
remain. They have a way of knowing they are needed in the darkness.
Clapping, the trees desperately keep their leaves as long as they can.
For them golden is the end of life, a mirror of us. Dry foliage sighs
and gives up its essence to my uncaring boots. For seasons now the colours
have chased each other, ending in white. Relentlessly the wisdom of this
colour paints the clouds and the ground. Isn’t the end really just the absence of something,
a spiritual draining. As all the hues, tone, and tints fade slowly into white noise.
4
I had the vision again, out the front door into the night. The old family
Home stands there shocked as I slam the gate. In the child’s body
of this phantasm, I’m heavier than the world. Here I know that I can fly,
and I kick off gladly. Inside air as dense as water, possessed, I dream
and dream anew. Trance mad at every crag and precipice, I will throw myself
off. I’m so sure that I will glide, my fear has become non-existent.
This treacherous fantasy likes to follow me into my waking hours now.
Whispering and leaving me seeking every cliff’s edge, wrong man,
wrong addiction. Today my family home will be torn down by the new owners.
5
A woman stands solidly at the pewter window, regarding the spring melt.
All the revenants it has left behind reach up from the mud. Half-light fills
the room and it’s either early morning or late evening. There are shoulders here
that will not tell, a rake is ready. A carefully tended space stands beside her,
and her eyes keep secrets. Rough hands smooth down strands of frost in hair,
mounting an escape. Her spring-loaded posture says she will be moving
to the door soon. The clearing of debris, a human act older than thought
or word. She knows some things want to stay, while others leave without asking.
In profile, her phantom smile says she has done this all before.
1.
The last book I opened had thunder bolts
scrawled in the margins. They did not zap
my fingers, no matter how much I begged.
The jitterbug’s a panic attack with steps.
2.
The plan was to be a lot smarter. A lot.
To eat all appetizers for dinner. To refuse
cleverness in a smart way. To sneeze well.
My face feels too big, flattened by the wind.
3.
I can always find the coldest person
in the room and freeze-dry my day
to a handful of crystals. I can whittle
the week to a sliver, or stew in its juices.
4.
Between my rage and my rest, there’s gum
that tastes like soap, there are my glass hands
in my friend’s skyhair and my offer to drive
to a party where I’m not sure I’m welcome.
5.
I like it when a camera swoops in on a face
narrowing their eyes at someone one else.
Squints love a crush zoom. A jolt makes
the day last longer than a conjugation.
1.
A Case for Confusion
-The stories we tell ourselves need not apply.
2.
Strolling through the Great Indoors
-I’m not positive about my negative capabilities.
3.
Practice to Be Lucky
-There is no shortage of desires or preferences.
4.
Essentials
-On which side of the horizon do you sleep?
5.
Ambiguity Is Creativity in Disguise
-Beware of being tricked into happiness.
1.
My first 1st grade report card:
Conduct: She talks too much.
Seven years of silence.
2.
My jump shot nicks the rim,
lands in a defender’s hands.
The buzzer shrieks loss.
3.
A sea turtle caught in
fishline struggles for air.
My almost-touch not enough.
4.
At 10 a.m. raccoons ransack
my cat’s breakfast bowl.
Forgotten: their nocturnalness.
5.
My mother’s light blue eyes
open before her last breath.
Grief: another name for love.
1.
Three days back from high desert
dust on my shoes, in my nose.
My body had busied itself
making red blood cells but
I am again at sea level
tidal flats, salt foam, gulls.
2.
I remember discovering
wood rats had entered the house.
Attic activities and
hole beside the light fixture.
The landlord used poison—
I’d have preferred hawks, owls.
3.
On the Great Lake that summer
a season of dead alewives
luminous on sand in sun
after the storm flooded us.
Alewives in basements—
fish-stench and black mold floating.
4.
We visited Loch Lomond
to walk beneath linden trees
speculate about white swans
and magpies’ nest collages.
We rejoiced to find ice cream.
The birds observed us, gleaming.
5.
There are mesas below me
sketched in drypoint, ochre, red
and purple, an undulating
ancient ocean’s benthic floor.
I think of ceramic glaze,
wheel and kiln. I think of you.
1
Leaning against ascendant scaffolding
considering fragments of the vision
occurring near a layer of fog over water,
I am swept up in becoming featured
in advisories of lucid dreaming.
2
The heat builds a high rise on its own
steam. In order to go about the city,
we claim a humid square of sidewalk.
Concrete is our way of thinking, nudged
by the random artistry of fallen twigs.
3
In the studio, my shadow sits for portraiture,
sure to humble my stiff brush and muddy
what is bold about my reds. Instead of light,
necessary for the shadow to show, I work
at dusk when borders are unclear, tractable.
4
Seventy three years lived; such difficulty
managing the memory banks. Tellers fired
for the boredom of their job. Behind exec
desks, VPs remove their shoes. I’m only
a customer: not tough, not best, not repeat.
5
I am living the late question, rolling
logs the balance of my days in camp.
Every dusk the sunset asks if I’ve had
enough light, drawn as I am to darkness
free of flippant palm trees making mirth.
1.
In a classroom in Milwaukee, second-graders huddle
beneath beige metal desks. They giggle and spin chairs,
as children do. Bonnie’s pigtails flip and fly like red flags
in the wind. Their teacher stands at the door, peeking
through a crack in the blind at the hallway scuffling.
2.
In a slow orbit around her fiery heart, Earth rocks us
in her cradle, sings us soft lullabies of wind and wave,
birdsong, cricket, bark. The ache of her mothering falls
in tear-rain, bubbles up from rock, gathers in streams
into rivers, until oceans well up with her love for us.
3.
When you haul coffee beans up from the basement
freezer for me, Beloved, when I add the right amount
of black soybeans, cumin, and red peppers to your chili,
when we each have dogs snoring in our blanketed laps,
then I know it’s safe to rest in this temporary balance.
4.
Last night I dreamed of Mother. She was on the sofa
trying to knit by the light of blue blinking fairy lights.
She looked up, called out my name, and I felt struck by
lightning. I fell to my knees, terrified and so grateful
for the electric tremors in my empty upturned hands.
5.
We are not yet finished here. There’s so much we still
don’t know, so much to hold onto—the way luna moths
find flowers, your eyes, how the dead keep pleading with
us, how we must come together, find common ground
in which to plant seeds of kindness, peace, communion.
1.
We were by the river, the water full of broken,
worn wedding rings with on/off switches.
Vast is this water, vast and incapable of solace.
All our carefully cultivated notions of realism
presented themselves as ghosts we could smell.
2.
In your version of heaven I am blond, thinner.
We’re not a movie, I’m still driving without a script.
The flower crescendoing toward the light
is never enough––roll over and tell me you’re a
messenger, decrease the pressure of the song on me.
3.
It is important to be accurate, to measure results
of the sprays of hard white stars which bite down
on your heart––needles behind, needles before,
the glitter from the party stuck to your toes.
The essence of your dolor has become rarefied.
4.
How will you know what my poem is like?
I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this
blank atmosphere the tongue lies bedded in,
into beautiful forestations of made language
where vowels cluster, uncertain, in a beautiful vase.
5.
In May’s red ruse and smattered ravishings,
a junkyard lies at the end of the road, unused.
And endless, a train is moving slowly on.
I will not give in, I will grow more strange––
strangeness is what I’ve learned to yearn for.
1.
Weeds, no ice plant, no ivy, just tiny
lawn clippings, old leaves. That circle
has no belly button.
2.
And so I cement my semantics
with only my jeans pulled on;
they can make any song.
3.
Evening birdsong had folded into chalk
and the mountains were on fire––
goodbye, oh gentleness!
4.
Nothing’s wrong, even the desert’s emptiness
brings space debris indoors. I start to believe
her twin black crystal balls.
5.
I was too attached to this life.
A hearse pulls up and idles
under the chiming bell.
1.
The disillusioned sun
hides behind a pewter plate,
a shield of sorrow
reflected below, no waves
rock the flat grey sea.
2.
Here the river
is sinuous, like a snake it slithers
onto shores and into minds,
Remember, it hisses, and tongues
the shoes left on its inky bank.
3.
Light streams across galaxies
in connections and near misses–
once her eyes fired
and hit targets without fail,
now neurons forget how to pull the trigger.
4.
Desire lingers
in the smoke of dreams,
ghost hearts beat on a shelf, ticking
they strike midnight,
wait for dawn.
5.
I recall that walk–
the skimmed-milk morning moon
floating in the misty puddles of my tears–
but now the sun has crowned you in gold,
you take my hand, we stand together gilded, glowing.
1.
There are six flags planted
in the moon—each a puncture
through dust. We see you, Moon.
We all feel the tide rise against
our bruised skin no matter
what planet we are on.
2.
I keep opening the cellar door
for what I never find, keep
holding oranges in my lap until
I am hungry. Is everyone a little
royal, a bit perfect—that pinch
of saffron in the soup-conjuring.
3.
As if I had hollow bones
and widening feathers to lift
in wind, as if I could translate
the hover and grip of sky,
as if I were a weather-teller,
decipherer of cloud and horizon.
4.
In every home an altar
and drifting in the green
Ganges above Rishikesh,
almost feeling the tender ashes
immersed in the cold water
textured and held by ghosts.
5.
Every word I write is me
ignoring death—all that
I lived a possible mooring.
Hold onto the morning mist
just touched by light.
Just write it down.
1.
Pacing, worrying as the crowd gathers
the comedian tells jokes to the usher.
She throws back the doors. Showtime!
Pinned to the stage by a lone spotlight
his only thought: I hope they like me.
2.
The blades of the overhead fan creak
as they cut through the dry dusty air,
spinning slowly in hypnotic motion.
We’re together on the bed, sated,
passionate sweat cool in the breeze.
3.
Caught in the serrated edge of memory
a family summer photo. Mom looks tired.
Crewcut brothers stick tongues out.
There’s ten-year-old me, showing off,
posing in my new outfit. Daddy’s girl.
4.
Dawn and he’s smoking on the balcony
when a hot air balloon appears, drifting.
It hovers and hisses, bright colours lit
by the burner flame, scarlet, indigo.
The pilot waves from his wicker basket.
5.
In the midnight quiet of the hospice,
he nods off, then wakes with a start.
Reaches again for his wife’s hand.
The nurse enters. Time for pain meds.
They both know these will be her last.
I. Backyard Divination
Employed by Beeman’s
psychics, Becky played on people’s
fantasies, hopes, dreams
caused tables to move, lights to flicker, winds to blow,
& voices to echo in dimly lit rooms as seances promise visitation
reveal secrets to friends & family; recharging cordless Ryobi
batteries blink red & green tease assimilation of energy, electricity
surging through empty cells; adapting technology, bringing life
to inanimate figures, she enabled her front yard witches to cackle,
Santa to dance, cauldrons to bubble, reindeer to fly, skeletons to sing.
II. Barbecue Technicians
Men gulp Fosters beer
anticipating thunder
& sparks post twilight;
testosterone on overdrive, they act like adolescent hoodlums
focused on fireworks batteries, eager to light bottle rockets
surgeons, mechanics, lawyers & plumbers flip beef & veggie
burgers more often times dropping them on coals than landing
on grills; mesmerized by sizzling burning grease & smoke
they observe the sunset, swat twilight mosquitos, hold punks
until dusk gods’ signal torch time for pyrotechnic displays.
III. Desktop Arcade
Gina’s windup toys
moved across her roll top desk
drummers pounded skins
& clappers slammed thumb size cymbals eventually falling
off the edge, landing like meteors in a wastepaper basket lined
with bubble wrap. Gina got flirtatious with colleagues
writing love notes on post-its attached to toothpicks & taped
on mechanical toy arms, she sent tidings, blew kisses
at co-worker recipients across the room hoping, wanting,
half-heartedly expecting, a minute missive in return.
IV. Splintered Splendor
Brandon reclined on
his chaise lounge like a weathered
driftwood sculpture: pocked
world weary; like a dignified artifact, his ruts & grooves spoke
volumes about time spent abroad absorbing foreign cultures
where his creativity took a backseat to the driving pulse
of big business & amassing personal acumen. As twilight stretched
silver arms around his prone figure, it seemed to grasp & toss
Brandon’s tattooed torso into an inky night where stars hid
behind cosmic storms & his essence energized the horizon.
V. Moon Dice
Buddha statues lurk
Shinto deities nestle
among ginger roots;
come stroll with me though manicured paths of thriving vegetation,
dormant seeds. lofty grasses, aromatic lavender & soothing hibiscus
in the grove where questions never linger beyond wrought iron fencing
& archways, honoring barefoot Tao masters treading over brown leaves—
remnants of lemon balm, pineapple mint, catnip & rosemary—
turning to compost, teaming with worms, celebrating tea garden temperance
as hollow bamboo stems whisper mellow notes like a shakuhachi.
1) Adrift
Dreaming of Jules Verne, floating over the Himalayas,
I imagine days & nights Five Weeks in a Balloon…, its
willow-cane basket zips over artic ice like a wicker hockey puck.
2) Lament
Deidre radiated orange marmalade lipstick
across the bustling courtyard, her movements
pierced & hooked night like a porcupine quill.
3) Clueless
Valley girl cathedrals once ruled supreme
ere online shopping replaced galleria strongholds:
sacrosanct dollar stores litter Encino malls.
4) Peacocks
Tattooers apply ink like a master artisan;
3d images emerge on their human canvases
panting, purring already as spotted as a leopard’s skin.
5) Exotic Claims
Strangers explore dark Baltic Sea corners, hydroplaning
a dirigible over Viking exotica, examining wasteland treasures
concealed beneath rubble & a plethora of melting glaciers.
I.
April evening
the lake a pure blue sheet
a red boat moored and edged in ochre
songbirds chatter
golden, light.
II.
Acapella dreaming, you
tapping on the kitchen floor
reel-to-reel
cut to a scene
of smoke, wraiths, dancing.
III.
Genesis imagined
stars burst into
rivers of white light
faint as whisper,
hard as heartbeat.
IV.
A shipwreck
on a storm-tossed sea
through centuries
rusts in the bay
out past the tide wrack.
V.
East of Eden
Pennines rise
like sleeping megafauna
remnants of a lost ice age
we wake, imagining.
1. brume
Pearlescent dawn. Brain’s fogged in, reminding me of a small airport I’d pass early mornings heading for my great-grandmother. Limp white-and-red wind sock near chain-link at boundary. Cessnas, Beechcrafts parked along the single runway, white and white. Different numbers and colored stripes along fuselages the only way to tell some from others. Ocean crashes along the other side of black, wet asphalt. Salt air cold, damp. Wind whistles. Open window. Turquoise leather and white patterned-fabric seat. Cement and rebar sky.
2. smaragdine
Jade is envy set to stone, cracking and pulverizing bone. Glitters, polished and wet, while a person drowns. Waves stretch and wake in this color a few seconds, throw themselves onto shore. Sun, seeing right through their excuses, hesitates to pull them back. Claims moon was responsible. Claims this is why self-harm is lunacy. Slipping back into dizziness. Falling again through black, an oversaturation of emerald, every night. Howling while feeling every ounce of crashing. Granite’s hardness, sandstone’s gritty brittleness.
3. epigenetic
Sounds like “epidemic.” I prepared meals for a neighbor quarantined for Covid. Left them on his doorstep, rang the bell, got well gone before he opened the door. “The expression of genetic information.” Watch people run when words flare, yellow and scarlet. “Modified on a molecular level.” My pastor warned creditors would sell us molecule by molecule, if they could. Repay society. Like a wood plane on a beam or sawing to size. Change those neurodivergent atoms. Make them fit.
4. rubricate
Eternity is 35 percent red, 35 percent green, one percent doubt to throw the planet off-balance and 29 percent blue. Colors in flame. Only what fire touches goes black, gold and scarlet along an edge, then ash gray in words and glances. Faces turn. Figures withdraw into the distance. Not even the forest fire others think of raging sets them running. Just blow a smoke ring. Watch the sun weep rubies as they leave, while the surrounding sky turns amethyst.
5. ignescent
Sun flashes white and silver between Chinese Elm branches. Petals fall. Small and elliptical, they carpet bare ground in a palette of earth tones, surrounding a trunk mottled light-gray, tan and red. They drain so much color from the tree that the leaves fall next, a uniform medium brown. bare as it rises. Morning sky glints stainless-steel. Bare branches continue to gleam, pulling surrounding light toward itself. The ground below remains shadowed, as if the tree’s leaves had never dropped.
1 Title taken from the poem “Tripping” by Bob McAfee, which appeared in Gleam, Issue 4 (Summer 2022).
1 (for Donna Hilbert)
Sky, a magician, transforms a window into a guillotine blade.
It melts glass panes into silver heart-shaped pools which shimmer in pale light.
It shelters two lovers from waves, blurring their bodies to resemble
water, trick the tide into thinking they have flowed beneath the sand,
indistinguishable between grains. Sky swallows walkers into fog,
which lifts as sun overcomes its indecision, allowing them flight.
Sky keeps changing colors at sunset, unsure which clothes to wear to dinner,
trying to match the wine but gazing forever at the menu, silent.
It looks toward the beach. Reads the sand’s ripples like pages in a crime novel.
2
My yellow face-mask was new. Hospital wanted a blue one anyway.
Maybe more about perspective than germs which might leak into the air,
noiseless and unseen, for staff or other visitors to inhale and
note. Something sunny in the hospice ward to compete with red roses, paper
Valentine’s hearts pinned like butterflies on mounting boards at the nurse’s station.
Blinds in the room drawn when we entered. Through the shade, a fog lifted.
The two of you talked as if we were all at Norms having lunch. White plates
with fish and chips. Me wondering where the waitress had gone for coffee.
Face masks tucked into pockets, their elastic ear loops dangling loose.
3
A road in Tibet runs into a mountain-high wall of bungalows.
Blue sky meets sky blue, firecracker red, coffee brown—facades festooned with
eyes which may be clouds for all the eyes imagining through their views.
Gazing like windshields of discarded streetcars in a Tijuana
scrap yard, row upon row of glassine bug eyes on fire-engine red faces.
Bright green weeds grow tall as passengers who commuted on them daily.
Abandoned cars stacked vertiginous as Macha Pichu ruins, houses
in long stone rows chilled by passing clouds, ceilings open to high-mountain air.
One scene’s residents blend with the next scene’s ghosts and the third scene’s tourists.
4
Dad said Mom would sleep a little more each day until she didn’t wake up.
I was a stick figure drawn on a blackboard like the big ones at school,
but only in her mind, and I had over time and dementia
been erased. Caught in felt, I was clopped with another eraser into
a cloud to drift and dissipate. Like the ball-turret gunner in the
poem3—only broken plexiglass and a steam hose know for sure, to
pervert Miss Clairol’s ad line—but quieter and seeming more complete,
surrounded by pines and rose bushes eaten down by Bambi’s in-laws.
As a swaddled infant, I heard Mom cry when Bambi’s mother was shot.
5 (for Mae Salinger)
It rained outside during the funeral but the clouds were amethyst.
Rain carried a purple tinge. Wind froze as we stood graveside, listening
to the rabbi about Momma Mae. Lived over a hundred years and was
a card shark, mahjongg matron. Snuck her grandson into the casino
on a cruise ship and snuck out together after they hit a jackpot.
When we cried for our loss, the rain, still coming down, washed our faces clean,
and there was something more than color in the clouds, like a jewel spun
into a cloth more like a blanket than a prayer shawl wrapped around
our shoulders. Something holding us tight as the pine casket descended.
2Title taken from the poem “Thank You for Not Cooperating” by John Ashbery, from the collection A Wave.
3“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell.
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 