44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s

BY TED BERRIGAN

Nine stories high Second Avenue

On the roof there’s a party

All the friends are there watching

By the light of the moon the blazing sun

Go down over the side of the planet

To light up the underside of Earth

There are long bent telescopes for the friends

To watch this through. The friends are all in shadow.

I can see them from my bed inside my head.

44 years I’ve loved these dreams today.

17 years since I wrote for the first time a poem

On my birthday, why did I wait so long?

                                                                         my land a good land

its highways go to many good places where

many good people were found; a home land, whose song comes up

from the throat of a hummingbird & it ends

where the sun goes to across the skies of blue.

I live there with you.

This is really better than it has any business being and you can’t believe it’s Kenneth Branaugh and not Boris. If you’ve ever worked with guys like Dom, it’s worth it just to see him get his just desserts.

Dragons

By Devin Johnston

We gathered in a field southwest of town,
several hundred hauling coolers
and folding chairs along a gravel road
dry in August, two ruts of soft dust
that soaked into our clothes
and rose in plumes behind us.

By noon we could discern their massive coils
emerging from a bale of cloud,
scales scattering crescent dapples
through walnut fronds,
the light polarized, each leaf tip in focus.

As their bodies blotted out the sun,
the forest faded to silverpoint.
A current of cool air
extended from the bottomlands
an intimation of October,
and the bowl of sky deepened
its celestial archaeology.

Their tails, like banners of a vast army,
swept past Orion and his retinue
to sighs and scattered applause,
the faint wail of a child crying.
In half an hour they had passed on
in search of deep waters.

Before our company dispersed,
dust whirling in the wind,
we planned to meet again in seven years
for the next known migration.
Sunlight flashed on windshields

and caught along the riverbank
a cloudy, keeled scale
about the size of a dinner plate,
cool as blanc de Chine
in the heat of the afternoon.

Picture found here.

This is a prayer for Samhain; this is a prayer for Resistance.

This is the cry that rends the Veils; this is a prayer for Resistance.

Samhain is a dark festival, the feast of the dead, a crone’s picnic.  Samhain is a Sabbat of Resistance.

The bones beneath the Earth cry out, and, more than that, the colonizers fear that they will.  The hungry crowd the dumb supper table and, more than that, the greedy fear that they will.  The chains of slaves clank in the graveyard and, more than that, the slavers fear that they will.

This is the cry that rends the veils; this is a prayer for Resistance.

Samhain is a dark festival, the feast of the dead, a crone’s picnic.  Samhain is a Sabbat of Resistance.

The ancestors throb in our blood and  the merchants of Lethe try to distract.  Our raped grandmothers drag ragged nails across their cheeks and the armies wish that they wouldn’t.  Under the earth, dead children scream for their fathers and Wall Street distracts us with sex and beer.

This is a prayer for Samhain; this is a prayer for Resistance.

This is the cry that rends the Veils; this is a prayer for Resistance.

Samhain is a dark festival, the feast of the dead, a crone’s picnic.  Samhain is a Sabbat of Resistance.

Owls hoot in the darkness and the guilty fear that wisdom.  Bats flap against a dark Moon sky and the predators quiver in fear.  The innocent of Salem jerk at the end of the rope and the church collects the money.

This is a prayer for Samhain; this is a prayer for Resistance.

This is the cry that rends the Veils; this is a prayer for Resistance.

Samhain is a dark festival, the feast of the dead, a crone’s picnic.  Samhain is a Sabbat of Resistance.

Samhain is how our ancestors paid for the right to be part of the cycle.  Samhain is how they remembered the mighty dead, the miscarried child, the beloved ancestors.  Samhain is how they built a bridge to the Isle of Apples, how they ate both the flower and the seed, how they saw a Spring at the end of Winter.  May we have their courage.

Samhain is a dark festival, the feast of the dead, a crone’s picnic.  Samhain is a Sabbat of Resistance.

This is a prayer for Samhain; this is a prayer for Resistance.

This is the cry that rends the Veils; this is a prayer for Resistance.

The cells of our bodies are a prayer for Resistance.

This is a prayer for Samhain; this is a prayer for Resistance.

This is the cry that rends the Veils; this is a prayer for Resistance.

Samhain is a dark festival, the feast of the dead, a crone’s picnic.  Samhain is a Sabbat of Resistance.

May it be so for you.

Picture found here.

The best Halloween movie ever.

Witch Wife

BY KIKI PETROSINO

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter

& we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard—

my pink gloves & your green gloves

like parrots from an opera over the earth—

We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths.

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter

dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon

long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair

& my pink gloves. Your gloves are green

& transparent like the skin of Christ

when He returned, filmed over with moss roses—

I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter:

provolone cut from the whole ball

woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday

I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves

wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out

as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead

& it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body

with my pink gloves, my green gloves.

Picture by the blogger; if you copy, please link back.

I’m a sucker for these. I’ll watch it and probably cry all the way through.

First Fall 

BY MAGGIE SMITH

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark

morning streets, I point and name.

Look, the sycamores, their mottled,

paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves

rusting and crisping at the edges.

I walk through Schiller Park with you

on my chest. Stars smolder well

into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,

the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.

Fall is when the only things you know

because I’ve named them

begin to end. Soon I’ll have another

season to offer you: frost soft

on the window and a porthole

sighed there, ice sleeving the bare

gray branches. The first time you see

something die, you won’t know it might

come back. I’m desperate for you

to love the world because I brought you here.

Picture found here.

Because who doesn’t love chocolate?

I don’t dislike what I’m doing. Just now, that’s phone banking for hours a day for a local candidate. What I’m finding out is that the national issues bleed into and often overwhelm the local issues, which is just the opposite of what I often think, going around saying, “All politics is local.”

But I was watching a garden show where a person who’s moved to a different location says, “My peas popped madly,” and suddenly, I remember what I really want to do. The relationship I really want to have with this land.

I’ll get there, I tell myself. Just a few more election cycles. Or, I won’t. But if I don’t, hopefully someone else will. I remember the suffragettes who lived and died and never got to vote.