An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets
Chameleon Chimera page 6
An Anthology of Florida Poets
An Anthology of Florida Poets
MERYL STRATFORD. LENNY DELLAROCCA. GREGORY BYRD. LÚCIA LEÃO. CYNIE CORY. CARA NUSINOV. LAURIE KUNTZ. COLLIN CALLAHAN. MAX LASKY. ZULEYHA OZTURK LASKY.
GABRIELLE ABOKI. HOLLY JAFFEE. SALLY NAYLOR. SUSAN L LEARY. CHRISTINE JACKSON. DORSEY CRAFT. ALEXA DORAN. ANDREW RADER HANSON. ROMANA TARLAMIS. PM DRAPER.
DIANA NOBLE. MICHAEL HOWARD. HELEN WALLACE. ANJANETTE DELGADO. CHRIS BODOR.
GABRIELLE ABOKI. HOLLY JAFFEE. SALLY NAYLOR. SUSAN L LEARY. CHRISTINE JACKSON. DORSEY CRAFT. ALEXA DORAN. ANDREW RADER HANSON. ROMANA TARLAMIS. PM DRAPER.
DIANA NOBLE. MICHAEL HOWARD. HELEN WALLACE. ANJANETTE DELGADO. CHRIS BODOR.
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Meryl Stratford Hallandale Beach (LD)
Her Education Into the quiet classroom of the mind comes flying the furious teacher with a lesson of fear. This bullet is not a bullet, it's merely a word, something the mouth makes for the delicate ear, something the breath sends that troubles the air, a ballet of sound moving through silence that explodes in an image as sudden as death. Where is the wound? It bleeds in the minds of a million grief-stricken girls. They will be pilots, doctors, warriors, poets. They will sit on the ground in the dust, just to learn. Originally published in the anthology Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai, FutureCycle Press, 2013. Lenny DellaRocca Delray Beach (Meryl Stratford) For Medicinal Purposes If we hadn’t been out there doing the mini-search for aesthetics nobody would have known about it, the expansion, all over the horizon trying to make something of itself. The rain came in as proposed and the variety troupe practiced stumbling in and out of the afternoon. The rest of us kept our wits in our hats in case someone needed them later at the hanging. The boat poets arrived with a pause, which some felt was instinctive. What was known about trifles and mechanical things, underground music for example, was scraped away with a map. The big clouds seemed to sense something. Roger took off his funny hat and the children laughed. The card game went on with guests slapping their pounds and lire with flair. Still, the circumference was there. But however grateful the gang was for the lemonade and French lessons, the facts, such as they were about the enlarged world, kept us in our chairs waiting for the gendarme. On the back acre of the lawn Roger’s goat chased the parrots into hysteria. It was quite the thing to see. Gregory Byrd (LD) Theory of Gravity Imagine you wake at five thirty to a DJ's careful voice. You turn on a bedside lamp and on the wall, a damselfly as if in space, weightless. Perhaps it came in with the cats, perhaps when you did, maybe through some small entrance in your falsely tight house. You know you should trap it in a whiskey glass-- in a little dome of pure alcoholic air-- slide a postcard from Paraguay beneath its weightless feet and carry it to the back door where it could rise into the dawning sky. You have faith in your own gentleness, reach for the little folded wings, use them as a simple handle. But as if to confirm that even your most benign motions are murderous without compassion, your fingers clutch the thread-thin body as well, crush it in your most gracing grip. Even in your cupped hands it tears against your calluses. When you reach the back porch and the starred morning sky and let the thing loose, it only struggles into the air, pitching and dipping--no longer a predator but a perfect opportunity for a quick bird to take it further into the sky. And imagine then that you fly to your brother's bedside, listen to his wife talk about morphine drips and radiation, that you tell her to go home and sleep. You see his closed eyes move as if they were something trying to escape. You hold his thin hand as if your breath could break it, as if you were the one who could let him out. Originally published in Tampa Review, 1998 Nominated for Pushcart Prize Salt and Iron, Snake Nation Press, 2014 Lúcia Leão Boca Raton (Jennifer Litt) Yellowed Summers In Florida In the kitchen, months of January, months of December enter my Julys. A pineapple rings home. A disposition of oranges nests among the ferns as they awaken, yawning as the green dew dries up the night. Lightning divided the afternoon yesterday. A white plate in the sink shows residues of skin. Laurie Kuntz West Palm Beach (Lúcia Leão) Anhinga Drying Her Wings Where has she flown for the need to stop on a lily pad and spread wet tipped wings under the ebb of day? What venture caused her to dive into this lagoon black with its endless bottom? Who are we, passersby, to disturb her stance on reeds fragile to sight and thought of these steps we both make on sandy roads? Under waning suns winged and footed journeys are beginning anew and ending, marked with the coming of first snow and last rose. Originally published in Poetry Breakfast Abel Folger Miami (Lúcia Leão) Lazarus Lazarus, Lazarus, frail Lazarus, entombed and forgotten to the musky cold of Israelite cave. Green-skinned Lazarus, sweet friend absconded and risen again —the original comeback kid-- more return from the fists than modern pugilists. You’d never squander wealth, get your prick diseased, pug Lazarus, the four-day boy; no, you lived too concerned for lonely Mary and Martha and the wandering eyes of friends. Southpaw Lazarus, lovable Lazarus, you never took to their trusting friendship in Jesus during those troubled Aramaic times. Good son Lazarus, always on guard, the sickness took you by surprise, divinely deliberate and fast; an up-and-comer’s lightning one-two, no rest and one-two again-- never gave you a chance to counter, parry, work the damn ropes, whittle down their stamina. He took his time, though they begged and begged; doubting Lazarus, human Lazarus, body taut and cold, your sneaking suspicions that the special friend had more than parables to feed the girls; barbaric retribution into the bonds of slavery through reanimation. Patient Lazarus, calculating Lazarus; take your time, your kin come first, walk the ring, circle in-- as the new day’s light hits your eyes you think through the jab’s haze, believe and never die he said? Shit, I think I’ll punch him first. Cynie Cory Tallahassee (Michael Trammell) Vertigo Without me, it was just a theory about why I didn’t want to write this from Brighton Beach in the future. It made me sad as a gymnast after amputation. She was in Rio de Janeiro with her mother who practiced Santeria. I felt dizzy on the boardwalk in the rain. I could not stop the sea from opening the credits of what was left of my neurology at the bottom of a boat that could not be anchored. Cara Nusinov Delray Beach (Kristin Thurston) Sunsets Then Now Winters, we biked through gators, and snakes in the Glades. Everyone did, we were insane, we were young, fearless, bikinied, and we sang songs of hope and protest, my hippy hair grazing my derriere, my two-gallon purple hat, a beacon for boys. We walked barefoot through the bathrooms at Haulover Beach, through that tunnel to the sand, shouting helloooooo, our echo, electric laughter. No one was eaten by a shark or burned in the fires we lit at night on the sand. No rules, no regulations. We just did what was right and lived politically tolerant, mostly kind lives. Now, today, chaos and dictators reign, Fear, Horror, Germs, Smoke, glide by, creating clouds of sorrow strewn like frosted crystal dinner plates across this horizon, stacked like freshly washed dread. The sun sinks, white glass against baby blue, a sky circus: citrus yellow, pink…it fades down, down, backlit by God. Then a haze somewhere north, orange-gray smoke puffs float on atmospheric currents. Cameras click-click. Horizontal whites flash bright neon-- peach, aquas. Venus pops through, Mars, photos turn burnt umber, indigo blazes scream. It’s almost as if the sun wears a veil to stay hidden now that no one shouts joy or plays Frisbee, faceplanting in the sand. Bitten by heat and fear, all sorts of mayhem appears. Tonight, a clear evening, this is a place to be…out in the night. Fireflies spit light, moths flutter in our cellphone lens and dive to nowhere. The moon hangs…there…palms silhouette, and night herons call to their mates. Do sunsets and nature endure through slayings, madness and murk? We stare at ghosts. Collin Callahan Tallahassee (Kate Sweeney) Dear Corporation Richard and I knife the moonrocks into separate piles on a mattress hidden in the skimp forest outline of an industrial park. They crackle like rat skulls in the blades of a lawnmower. Richard squiggles warmblood horses on a napkin as I rock back and forth like a machine full of wet clothes. Moths powder the handrails of gaunt stairwells. This light has the quality of a midwestern hospital. Nitrous canisters lie about. I think about submarine warfare and those balloons in the dead girl’s backyard. The electrical plant is pink thunder. I tuck the aluminum foil into my breast pocket like a beautiful child. originally published in Bat City Review where it was featured as the winner of the 2021 Bat City Review Editor's Prize in Poetry Max Lasky Tallahassee (Colin Callahan) A Ghost’s Proposal in a Court You handed her a ring while the rain slanted then turned aside. She vetted the thing like a veteran jeweler, eyes dialed in under the streetlight’s hum as you stood against her car in a cul de sac. Who drove a nail into your palm? Holding the stone upturned in one hand, she appraised the world: the band was stained, ring head cut of amethyst, and the rain fell constant, cold like a chorus to some lame pop song she always sung now stuck in your head. She thought then you couldn’t trust, even if you sometimes did momentarily, sporadically—it was a problem. When you caught scent of seasalt, fishbait, you recalled all those summers never coming back again, standing near the Broadway Basin-- the same fishing charters, docked in predawn, pass through the Manasquan Inlet by daybreak, the inlet connecting the river to the ocean, the rough Atlantic. Before she could respond first light broke low, some gulls flew overhead. She wishes you were sober, she said, cleaner than sand in glass, warm as the warmest sunrays straying in through windshield, across the wheel, and you agreed. Twirling the ring in your hand, you were half happy she declined and didn’t say how you read into signs that don’t exist, at least to no one except you—the gull swooping low from a street pole means more than its cries, that she’s close, for instance, to being hopeless, or that you have a chance if you start charting the right path. And later, wordless on a bench, you watched a row of people along the seawall, some casting their lines out, others reeling in, and one untangling his from a stranger’s. You considered throwing the ring into the water, you thought of handing it off to someone random, of hocking it at the nearest pawn shop just if the profit was worth it. She’ll either miss you or she won’t. And though the view of the ocean was wider than the quiet court she grew up on, more expansive with the clouds plowing over the horizon, the cut up surface glinting shards of diamond, nothing inside your chest swelled or opened, nothing broke like a wave or ebbed, your desire heading in two directions like the ships through the inlet, some to harbor, others seaward, and you, steady in the middle. Zuleyha Ozturk Lasky Tallahassee. (Max Lasky) We Fuel Us Clairvoyant We take off our headscarves. We shut blinds. We take wing after wing and boil us. We burn paper as fuel for the samovar. We no longer pray in mosques, we no longer sin, instead we king our sky as clairvoyant. Break our bones like reeds to sing until we return to Medusa’s mausoleum. Our hands appear to take off our headscarves. We shut blinds. We take wing after wing: burn over sky, we snow us in—a mother sting in our womb. We bury Istanbul. We forget our wooden hair. No longer we pray. No longer we sin in mosques. Instead, we king our grandmother gutting peppers. We pocketknife. We shrink our sky as clairvoyant. We pluck our lives. We chore. We tear. We take off the blinds and shut our heads. Scarfed, we break wing after chicken wing cooked beside stuffed peppers we bring us to clairvoyance. We burn joyous. We wear tight the fear of mosques. Prayers tell us to no longer sin. Instead, we king ourselves. We exist in every story censored, every surgical string to enclose us. We milk us sour and burn us as fuel for the samovar. We take off our headscarves. We shut their blinds. Take our wings off no mosque prayers. We sin longer! No longer do we king. originally published in Small Orange Gabrielle Aboki Tallahassee (Zuleyha Lasky) Mario’s Last Dance The doors of the church swung open, and sunlight kissed our skin, welcomed us to the realities of the new world no more smile in my uncle’s eyes. That unholy morning, my aunt called to tell my grandmother she had lost her son on her birthday, Bible slipped from her fingers as she cursed into the open air. My uncle, who surprised me with bright pink rolls of Bubble Tape gum and UNO, who was the first to jump on the dance floor at a wedding reception, a crowd always watching, not unlike that night outside of The Gambler. The gunshots pierced the air, shattering through bone, his skull—a wine glass falling from careless hands. How cold his body must have felt when the crowd scattered and left him alone on the 3 a.m. concrete to die in darkness, barely making it to Sunday. |