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Gretchen
She is always there: statuesque and bare near Lake Michigan where the winds whip your past present her presence is close to my pen hair hanging eyes glazed.
So I leave for Long Island Where his mirror reflects bound-feet memories The Orient A half century past Women whispering submissively in Ho Chi Minh City kimonos and buns pushed back
And I play dominoes with my nephew while you dream of Paris. I know it never worked for me. When I was twenty: I wandered the Seine alone thought of joining lovers at the Louvre even entering a painting would do especially Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe with its nude.
LE Pyramide went the way of the rose. I am not sure I ever had a rose-garden. The men I chose were taken: By addictions By wives By other men By their own lives Does it really make a difference?
Lynn Cohen Professor of literature and creative writing at Hofstra and Suffolk Community College, many publishing credits |
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“Dover”
A goddess mounts hard cliffs: bare through Cheshire, Canterbury, Cardiff her hair floats through the years eyes olive green the fruit of Tuscan trees slanted like Asian Oranges in the lost markets of her unconscious on a ripe summer morning the cornucopia of life
Be her host let her ride you through undersea tunnels share orgiastic promises primitive reed-covered thrusts sharp and unforgiving as purgatorial pirates sail past orbs
All the flowers are evil in the rose-gardens of memory sanctified symbols of sacred ladies dance to your cadence prostrate at the feet of your poems’ strophes and meters
Lynn Cohen |
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Worst Fears Realized
Huge grey boulders of my very worst fears have been unleashed by some wild circumstance. Held up by sheer luck, they hung there for years now down the mountain they gleefully dance.
‘Cause luck runneth out if you play too long, the bastards were sure to come a-sliding. I still don’t know what it is I did wrong, but it’s this day from which I’ve been hiding.
Naked alone at the foot of the hill, it’s a pity those rocks could not hold. Nowhere to run, they come in for the kill, I mumble a prayer as I watch it unfold.
Some say the mind is a powerful thing by thought alone good or ill can it bring.
Andrew M. Echel PPA accountant, formalist poet (sonnets)
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Sonnet for Scott Joplin
The King of Ragtime toiled in the sunlight way down south at the mercy of the breeze. Tunes, like vines on the side of the upright; notes sprang from his hand and sweat blessed the keys. Like many great men, a life filled with grief inspired some of his awesome creations. Sugar Cane, Cascades, and then Maple Leaf left them blue or in total elation. His marches, two-steps and toe-tappin’ rags rang throughout saloons in nineteen-o-five. Glorious waltzes and mellow slow drags, wild syncopations, they all came alive. Though scorned at the time as music impure, now we are certain his works will endure.
Andrew M. Echel |
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Creating In a cozy cafe of soft repose I write a harmony Of original And aesthetic masterpieces In rhythm with the rain
David Fox Poetry journal publisher, many credits
The Tree Poem We are like trees. Some of us are as steady as tree trunks, others as delicate as the leaves, and like the leaves, we are constantly changing making resolutions every New Year to start again, anew. Many of us are like the tree's branches exploring different paths in this labyrinth we cal life. As we grow older we are even more similar to the tree, each wrinkle representing another year of life like every ring on a tree stump. If I can even live a fraction a tree has, I will know I've lived life to its fullest potential.
David Fox
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Winter Solstice For Stephen Dunn
Students line oblong sides of a plush parlor plump chairs front a fireplace. the years die away as my poet quotes Baudelaire chops metaphors stomps muses undoes images defines tone entwines voices reads about love: wives and ex-wives -- the places we have all been.
His beret covers what the decades cannot but I can see what I have always seen: neat hair and beard I can hear an erudite speech that has always been there as I close my pupils sit among my school children feel my mortality and grieve
Lynn E. Cohen |
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