Steve Langan

Good Morning America

I am so sorry I nearly left the mind

for the body, for the spirit; forgive me.

Most days I am really very happy,

I utter with dripping reassurance,

though some days I’m a severed finger

wrapped in ice on a cold table…

and I’m the surgeon driving in

from south of town in the rain.

Please withhold your pity and contempt.

I cannot see much out of these eyes.

I don’t have a disease. Months recede

into seeing nothing much often or well.

And everyone dies? my daughter says,

glancing away from the television,

but I have to go to work every day at eight;

I don’t have time for questions.

It’s the place where all the people are,

I told her one. We complete projects,

we make money, we walk down

excellent hallways chanting emails.

Right Mind Poem

Consequently, we visited the Right Mind Boutique

to be fitted.

Plantations with rows where in the damp evening,

shirtless amid the ringing, you were reminded.

I am not condemning (repeat).

Neither am I beseeching nor promulgating.

Consequence matters…and you and I?

We falter and disagree, reassemble, try again.

The manner in which you consider love

is how I have begun to connect rigor to tumult

while you gently take my pulse—

tickety tick—“thank you friend”—

as the slowdance of white uniforms

enters our likewise room.

Diptych on the Sofa

I have my feet up and my arms folded.

You never know what’s coming your way.

A few birds in the engine and now

we’re standing on the wing in the Hudson.

As an antidote against dying,

I began to learn to pay attention.

Greener greens, purpler purples,

fruit on the vines we can almost reach.

My arms are still folded; my legs, crossed.

It takes its toll, relaxation.

You begin to notice your reflection

in every crisp pixel; you love too much

the ironic announcer you hated once.

No one loves television more than I!

Runaway Haiku

Gentle rhythmic trickle on the roof late last night—

who are the most incredible poets writing today?—

and now rainfall with mist all day

like somebody who knows something well

and tells others but tells them over and over

until even those polite listeners smile implying stop

in a clenched posture bordering on rage.

The neighborhood kids congregated at my house.

I felt special. Mom was kind to them.

A ragtag group. We aged and of course we moved on.

It’s not sad, really.

Reputation matters in all seasons, especially spring.

The town workers are out cleaning and clearing;

their bristle brushes make our children nervous—

be a good sport, we remind ourselves, at all times—

and now the whole town’s out in hats and slickers

watching the clamp followed by four deep trucks

gather up their careful piles of soggy brush.

Seven Quatrains

I heard it clearly, even though

it was breezy and I was on duty,

young and serious, apprentice to

the great and competent—

The many ways my throat felt cut,

an oily rag on the table nearby,

time and good intentions, and even once at

that fun party we thought we’d have to miss—

When you name me, keeping my spirit alive,

yourself not dead, or just to fill time,

remember my panic, too, my rage and mistrust,

the flowers I trampled through, and that other time—

I upset nothing, not even the snake

who seemed prepared for my prodding;

I upset the wind a little. I upset the guardrail near

the church by neglecting it—no, forgetting—

Saying excuse me to my own ghost is how

careful I am today on the fragile planks

the workers are building when it’s not raining,

and where do they go when it is—

Calling me in from our front porch

for dinner, for a new beginning,

before I was a sinner, before all the sinning,

people whom I love, who love me, a tranquil day—

Overwrought practices, miserable conclusions,

someone else’s compendium of sacrifices,

and it’s possible now to breath well and sleep,

and the food here is delicious, tender meats, leafy greens—

---

Steve Langan is the author of Freezing, Notes on Exile & Other Poems, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, and What It Looks Like, How It Flies. His collection Bedtime Stories (Littoral Books, Portland, ME) will appear in Spring, 2024.

toc

next

Sally Cobau

Yellowstone

At breakfast, in the Three Bears Restaurant

in West Yellowstone, while eating a huge cinnamon

roll, I overhear the man in the booth beside us

talking to his wife:

“This is like back in the time of Noah…”

And who can argue with that sweetly innocent view?

This over-fed, jovial, born-again Alabaman

with his baseball cap,

eager for the day before them:

They’ll shove the buffalo on the Arc,

along with the elk and glistening dragonflies.

Later, we stand before the bubbling,

glittering pots and pools, an iridescent

mat of pinks and blues structured

by hydrothermal microbes.

People have died in these scalding pools—

20 to be exact the plaque reads, God bless

their souls, those who couldn’t resist the pull

of these clammy, salmon-colored, marbled flats,

like tiles, my daughters says, always

one for a good kitchen remodel.

The girl who couldn’t stand the weeds

in our backyard, who was disgusted by our blown-

about shingles, stands in awe.

There are hats to prove it. I mean, hats blown off

that you can’t retrieve or you’d die,

sink into these scalding mud pits, this boiling quicksand.

The hats—a cowboy, a straw sun hat, like I wear, a baseball,

and a Hawaiian

bucket—rest on the cracked and creviced surface beside

pink bones bubbled up from the underworld.

It’s raining and we’re covered in jackets, ponchos, and even

trash bags. Kids run in their jelly shoes, slapping

the wet boardwalk. The porta potties are our first

destination.

I grab the notes from breakfast, hastily

written on purple Post-Its, wordy

recommendations about the volcanic

Earth beneath us, the blistering score of these

turquoise pools that look like fancy whirlpools for the elite,

scribbled notes about the process involved in creating

this land.

Sometimes I Feel Scared

Where to begin, where to begin…

The snow, the snow, a marbled pattern,

marbled patterns

pitter patter still melt pitter

I can’t explain why rain.

I’m not coy; I’m complicated:

decent, descent

spinning in the vehicle, the floodgates, hydroplane, windowpanes, smudge.

Yours? Mine? Yours? Mine?

We were so greedy, money in our hands, coins.

You said the emperor had no clothes

or was that you, naked?

“What’s up, Virginia?”

I dreaded telling the truth.

I read the story

about the mother who wanted to tell her daughter a fairy

tale—thick hair like thorns,

a red-robin robe, of course against the snow

running away, running away

to the grandmother’s house through a forest. A wolf, a wolf, many wolves.

But back to the story, back to the story.

A barn, far away, under snow.

I find all this ridiculous, you fool, you creature,

vomiting on the wet ground,

puking your guts out,

sometime soon,

somnolent moon.

Travel Poem

There was shame in wanting too much

from the cosmos—each plant, lover,

the divine touch of Davinci or Campi

with his earth, sky, land, and sea. I wanted

the pig’s bladder blown up like a balloon

and the lushness of the dimpled grapes,

the crisp look of the dead pheasants flung

over a shoulder, as well as conchs and seaweed.

Pizza at the bar—I wanted that, too—

Buffalo mozzarella wasn’t enough, nor was flirting

with the wildly vagrant figment of my imagination

or your ghost. But back to the real.

Shame for my longing, flummoxed, at the gate,

grasping my old suitcase.

Thinking what? When? Buying chocolates

with windmill packaging because I felt

I had to. Then littering in the bathroom, but it’s not

littering when you take things with you. Sit

in Gate F-5, like some boring meeting. Wrap

your souvenir in fractals,

warped shapes, logos, a reason, and logic.

I can’t imagine this; I’ll keep turning it in my pocket.

Cake

They say she cries out for her favorite sister, but Judy—my mother—is dead.

Maybe she will cry for her mother, but her mother is long

Dead: Olive, riding her horse through the snow in Maine.

I once cracked a purple mussel shell and my greed for that moment

Lingers. That’s the way I want to put it now,

Though I could say, a kid walking over sand.

I was allowed to eat two cinnamon graham

Crackers as I walked over the clam-flats into the dense murky water.

The snarl of bright green sea grass licked my legs,

The soggy cracker dense in my mouth.

Who cares about grief? It's just a word. Like sand or snow. I could eat

A lot of coconut cake now that everyone’s dead:

No one will care how fat I get. I could eat and eat and eat,

But I don’t want to. I still remember my mother sending me to camp,

Then the quarters that arrived in the mail, taped to a piece of cardboard.

I rushed to the soda machine. Chose grape, my favorite. It was only later

That I felt sick from all the soda and left the dance before the boy

Could touch me, under my yellow shirt.

---

Sally Cobau is a teacher/writer/mother/yoga practitioner/hiker from a tiny town in southwest Montana. Having received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana, she's had work published in rattle, Room magazine, Ekphrastic Review, Poems Across the Big Sky, the Sun, writing in a woman's voice, and Oyster River Pages, among other literary journals and anthologies. When she's not writing, she's hiking the mountains near home or taking photos on her iPhone.

toc

next

Marg Walker

There Are Days

this cage without bars

this rut you are wearing into sidewalks

how you can’t buy passage anywhere

and haven’t packed properly for staying in place

none of it makes sense in the old way

and yet there are days when you remember the unmoored mind of summer as good, and the river’s endurance through drought and flood, on its banks the wild asters returning to bloom again

ragged and dug in.

Distance Theory

after Czeslaw Milosz, “Encounter”

The child stands on the green sofa so she can see

out the window. The front door clicks shut.

The mother, in her everyday dress, clutches her purse

and walks to the corner where the bus will come.

The child’s hand touches the impenetrable glass.

Today neither of them can be sure

where the mother went for those few hours alone.

Whether this might have been the day

the child first understood how things would be –

that from the deep pool of family waters

abandonment could surface at any time and,

though the mother returned, drown the swimmer.

---

Marg Walker pursues her abiding interest in the human voice through poetry and music. Her poems have appeared in Minnesota Monthly, Tishman Review, Wilderness House Review, Red Wolf Journal, and other publications. Marg co-hosts the Midstream Reading Series, a monthly live poetry reading series in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sitting in Lawn Chairs After a Complicated Day, was published by Nodin Press in February, 2020.

next

toc