Past Works

Volume 10

Strawberry Fields

Kathryn Gahl

You with a mother’s vision on a hot July noon

Lugging three kids with plastic red pails

Into fields rich and terribly sweet so when

Daddy comes home he will be so surprised

Not like that—like this, don’t pick the green ones,

And heavens, don’t smoosh the ones on the ground.

Defiance in small hands, the three-year-old’s

Bladder a reservoir of resistance

Go with your brother up to the porta-potty,

A sister trailing behind while you pluck

Fruit foreshadowing jars of jam and jelly—

Even a family recipe to freeze berries

Whole—eating up time while Daddy

Away in The National Guard

Recruits kids to pick Iraqi streets clean

Hands oily and stained, delicious, pleased.

The Barn Saint

K.S. Hardy

During prohibition

Grandpa would get the spirit

And word would spread

Throughout the country,

Asa’s on fire again.

People would flock,

Wagons and Model T’s

Lined the lane.

Hay bales became pews.

And Grandpa would

Raise the rafters,

Laying on hands,

Doing healings,

Casting out demons.

And everybody would

Sing until midnight.

Then the amendment

Was repealed and

Grandpa’s spirit dried up.

And no one came around

To our place anymore.

Volume 9

Tenterhooks, Montana

James Doyle

Cows ride the rails

into Tenterhooks, Montana,

with that extra gleam

on their thighs.  The cowboys

lift them off the freight cars

and take them home.  No one

ever starves in Tenterhooks,

Montana, though some give up

cigarettes in the summers

for golf.  There are fourteen

churches and one tavern

in Tenterhooks, Montana,

but alcohol is served

at the churches.  The mayor

of Tenterhooks, Montana,

hasn’t shaved since his wife

died in the 1980’s

but he still poses with her

for formal portraits in black

and white.  There are no

television sets in Tenterhooks,

Montana, and this draws

the tourist trade, especially

in winter when cruise

ships and excursion trains

are stuck in the ice.

Since I started this poem,

PBS announced a documentary

on Tenterhooks, Montana,

would be made using

only waist-high cameras

so I should leave out

the cows and cowboys.  It is

about time, I say,

that this town is put

on, or just next to, the map.

Best Asleep

Paul Hostovsky

When he said he loved her best asleep he meant

the grammar of her face—all its tenses,

the never-ending story—how it trailed off into

an ellipsis as she dozed, the thousand outpouring faces

all poured out of the bright container.  And its spout—

the parted mouth, the little sleep-pout of the lips—

how it held fast to a few last glistening drops

which he stole with the tip of his tongue without

waking her.  But she heard him differently.  Didn’t he

mean he preferred her silent, thoughtless, blank

as a blank page, so that he could write the story

of who she was, or ought to be?  And didn’t he think

that loving her best asleep was like wishing her dead?

He said he didn’t think that’s what he said.

Volume 8

It Took A Week To Recite Hamlet’s Five Acts

John McKernan  

To Johnnie Dee     The handsome teenage quadriplegic

Who dove shallow off a Bellevue Elm

And then lived at the County Hospital in Omaha

Where I orderlied the night shift     Competing

Against the rhythms of Buddy Holly and Elvis

Johnnie Dee had saved five welfare checks

And bought a diamond engagement ring

Offered to a Nurse’s Aid from Grace Bible

Who refused it and fled in tears     Never to return

He asked me five time to take the ring

And pitch it in the Missouri River

I ignored his question forever

And dove into my favorite scene     Ophelia’s song

With her basket of fresh flowers and herbs