Poems, Prose, Photos & the Art of Being Human
In many traditions, this long night marks the end of the solar year, the final day of increasing dark. Tomorrow our days will lengthen and a new year begins, not by calendar, but by the sun’s time.
Here’s to the cycles and the richness of dark, the silence of snow and opportunities to reflect, to sleep, and once more emerge into increasing light.
May this year bring peace, more love, more ease and safety for all. HAPPY SOLSTICE!
DARK IN LIGHT Wanted to show you the moon but cruised off the wrong ramp and wound up in a war zone where there is no curfew: men standing solo in the middle of the street or huddled, talking beneath burned-out lamps; wanted to show you the soccer moon but drove down darkened roads with bars enclosing windows and doors, barbed wire spiraling a hardware store and nursery—planks and daisies out of reach; wanted you to count the seas across that haloed orb but drove alone through neighborhoods as treeless as that dog-song moon; beat-up cars driven beyond unmarked borders pulled over by uniforms with clubs and guns, jagged tension cutting concrete air; I want to know who declared this war of Americans against Americans: children peer from sheeted windows, women hide behind hollow doors, a man looks up from an empty street, each of us equal distance from the sun’s reflective sphere.
Thank you to the editor of Something Like Homesickness for first publishing this poem.
Whatever you need to do, do it now. The conditions will always be impossible.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Harry S. Truman
Please VOTE
painting & photo by Elizabeth
THE CHOIR I walk and I rest while the eyes of my dead look through my own, inaudible hosannas greet the panorama charged serene and almost ultraviolet with so much witness. Holy the sea, the palpitating membrane divided into dazzling fields and whaledark by the sun. Holy the dark, pierced by late revelers and dawnbirds, the garbage truck suspended in shy light, the oystershell and crushed clam of the driveway, the dahlia pressed like lotus on its open palm. Holy the handmade and created side by side, the sapphire of their marriage, green flies and shit in condums in the crabshell rinsed by the buzzing tide. Holy the light-- the poison ivy livid in its glare, the gypsy moths festooning the pine barrens, the mating monarch butterflies between the chic boutiques. The mermaids handprint on the artificial reef. Holy the we, cast in the mermaid's image, smooth crotch of mystery and scale, inscrutable until divulged by god and sex into its gender, every touch a secret intercourse with angels as we walk proffered and taken. Their great wings batter the air, our retinas bloom silver spots like beacons. Better than silicone or graphite flesh absorbs the shock of the divine crash-landing. I roll my eyes back, skylights brushed by plumage of detail, the unrehearsed and minuscule, the anecdotal midnight themes of the carbon sea where we are joined: zinnia, tomato, garlic wreaths crowning the compost heap. Olga Broumas
I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
INCEPTION
She asks,
wants him
to be the first.
As if the other
were a ripened peach,
easily bruised,
they time their movements
to the ancient
pulse of
hearts
then
seas.
Sharp tears through
hidden flesh
steal her breath.
They stop,
begin again,
relentless clock counts towards curfew.
Soothed by his hot sweet breath,
she rests in his embrace—
linear time shifts to the relative distance
between innocence and experience—
she arches,
accepts whispers
fingers
lips
as he eases her through
surmountable pain.
Her chrysalis rips,
new life emerges:
the harsh sun
scent of clary sage
wings drying in a warm breeze.
Thank you to the editors of Hot Flashes: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 