Raphael Kosek

In the Room with Saint Augustine

Sometimes the spoons are filled with despair

at the breakfast table

and the bowls howl

their one long low note

Did I tell you (after she died)

I never missed my mother?

After she died

Overhear other woman missing their mothers

Do I believe them?

Yes Not really

Maybe

I’m jealous

(The wallpaper weeps)

Sometimes when the night crawls by

Under the moon’s raw blade, the bottle

Grows understandable

Good night

Good girl

(I mean to wake up)

Did I tell you times come

When I hate poetry?

So impractical

Disturbs the psyche

Better to plow a field

But then the trees

Their sway

Their reach

Even their sere cackling

How they lift

To the blazing blue

with its clouds heaving

Believe everything all over again

At the breakfast table

A Calm Madness

“ . . . I sought wisdom . . . in poems and also a certain calm madness.” Adam Zagajewski

Mozart surely felt it and tried to annihilate

that stolid fervor in his Requiem

and the birds churn it when dawn’s pallor

sieves the trees. It’s there when enlightenment

baptizes the confused brow of the seeker.

If you weep at the wood thrush’s song,

you are stung by it. And it simmers in

the horse’s eye, though the breath is soft

with sun and hay. For some it is the blue of far

mountains and the sea’s restless grieving.

Caravaggio found it in the violent

light emboldening human flesh for all

to behold. For such beauty, you have

to be mad. Or it would kill you.

Bluebirds

The air is wet with moist heat on this clouded

late May day.

I’m not sure if it’s welcoming

or not. If I had to say, I think it tastes like grief even

though the birds are going about their business

as usual and my heart still beats. The bluebird house

in the back yard remains empty after

my beloved and I tacitly agreed

to purge the wren’s 6 tiny brown eggs

in her lovingly piled

pyramid of twigs, hoping for the brighter beauties.

I watched his hand clasp the nest

and toss it into the woods. Earlier this week

a child smeared herself with another’s

blood to avoid the gunman’s ire. I think

it is going to rain if it makes its mind up

and there will be no bluebirds

in this house of death.

---

Raphael Kosek is the author of AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two prize-winning chapbooks, HARMLESS ENCOUNTERS (2022) and ROUGH GRACE (2014).

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Kai Jensen

Brief siblings

1.  A brother

A big man in a motley top

dogs me through Ikea.

First we share a slot

in the big revolving

door – Hej! – and when

I reach the men’s toilet

he’s already there

ablaze with colours

and later at the head

of the cafeteria queue

then chooses a table

three rows away,

facing mine, his big

ruddy head, with its bald

spot peeking through, bent

over a plate of meatballs.

I wonder whether he’s aware

that we’re entangled, briefly

bonded in some quantum way.

On any given day

in any public setting

there’s almost always

one such karmic sibling;

what’s the bet he snaffles

the last two-by-two gloss-

white Kallax flatpack

on the pallet in aisle 9?

But then I see him

held up in the toy section

dancing to entertain a child

like a clumsy bear.

2.  A sister

Waiting for my toastie

in the wintry air

I watch you pacing

briskly, your funky

boots and electric hair

and feel my family’s itch

to speak to strangers,

form a bond, quick

and deep as superglue

but then regret, fall out,

fight or kill by neglect

etcetera. And so

I inspect my own shoes

and later, carrying

takeaway cups to the table

find I’ve gone off you

walking erratically

in front of me, oblivious

caught up in some intensity

I might have bought into

just plain in the way.

Another bodhisattva

Someone has to watch the cabin crew

act out the safety instructions

so I do, looking past the bouffant hair

of the tall guy two rows ahead.

I’m rewarded when the nearest steward,

older, with a simple bob,

suddenly lights up – it’s show time!

Blissfully she clips and tightens the seatbelt;

releasing it is a vast freedom.

The oxygen mask dangles like exotic fruit

or a Christmas tree ornament and she’s

an ecstatic child. Roguishly

she dons the frayed lifejacket

for a fancy-dress ball, shares the joke

of its whistle with us and struts

proudly down the aisle, acknowledging

non-existent applause, turning her head to check

that we’ve taken her point: this humdrum

commuter flight goes to paradise.

---

Kai Jensen was born in Philadelphia, as a child emigrated to New Zealand with his family, and is now an Australian. Kai lives and writes at Wallaga Lake on the Far South Coast of New South Wales.

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Steven Ostrowski

Fragile

1.

She lives

with mirrors

for sisters.

2.

If she’d

been exposed

to poems

as a girl

she might

be okay

alone.

3.

Rags

disgust her.

She never thinks

about god

although she thinks

god is a well-groomed

man in dark Armani.

4.

She stares at men

who lift their little daughters

with strong arms.

Her father lasted one motel.

5.

What can she not bear?

The dream, recurring,

in which a golden man

tells her no.

How, she ruminates,

can he be so happy?

6.

I want to believe

that her goodness

is not lost as I search

for my own.

Who, after all, can know

when and where

the trigger of salvation

will at last be pulled?

News of War

comes in the slanting slicing overnight sleet

and can be read in the hung eyes of yard dogs;

it causes deviations in the flight paths of gulls.

The open windows of meeting houses

slam shut of their own accord; the news

untunes a hundred acoustic guitars.

In sympathy with the dead and wounded,

babies wail across a thousand miles of jagged borders.

Men write desperate questions in the margins

of the history books given them by their fathers.

Nobody’s heart is quite right, but in theirs, mothers

bear the bombs of children who’ve been killed

or grown into killers.

---

Steven Ostrowski's recent publications are a novel, The Highway of Spirit and Bone; a poetry chapbook, Persons of Interest (winner of the 2021 Wolfson Chapbook Prize) and a book of poems, Life Field.

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