BY ANGELA SORBY

Cote d’Azure, 1981

Paloma Picasso stands on the high dive wearing a black maillot.
Below her, the photographer forgets the holy spirit’s ascension

as he plunges into concentration: Paloma is vital—her perfume flies
off shelves all over France. Above the photographer’s bent head

a moth unspools its thirty hours of life, extending them unconsciously
until the patio and pool approach immortality. But the sun’s

having none such truck: it sails past, a thrown hat, its arc so fast
the photographer curses. Just out of earshot, a girl in a chador

examines her own knee and remembers how the snow in the Pyrenees
—snow she’s never seen—flies skyward when the wind is right,

as if everything could gather, at last, in Allah’s palm. The photographer
rubs his eyes and thinks about lunch, bread rising, oranges overheating

and falling from a tree in his backyard, how his wife undoes her hair
as she works in the kitchen. She’s over fifty, no Paloma,

and yet his …MORE

BY CINDY MAY MURPHY

and who last week spent three hours wading
through the dregs of the just-drained pond
whose former owner had assured him
could not support life. Though as the last
brown water gave way to grime, he bore witness
to the rip-flash of five slivered backs struggling
like sharks in sand—mudcats, he called them—
all on the verge of a bright, dry death
in the inadequate air. For my father, who worked
without waders through the afternoon, grappling
toward their slick, sharp bodies with bare hands,
who twice swallowed pond scum, twice
lost a shoe to the suction of sludge, and once
fell prone in the mire—a seven pound catfish
with skin-piercing fins cradled in his arms.
For my father, who rinsed their silt-laced gills
and bathed each muck-thick body
with a hose, who placed them gently
into white buckets of water, called up friends
and neighbors, anyone with access to a lake
or large enough tub, anyone who would promise
not to slice the round bellies, not to …MORE

BY JANE SPRINGER

Dear Blackbird,

The only thing that made sense was to fall in love with a carpenter who could build a house upside down out of straw & standing on one foot—

afterall, a scarecrow is just remnant stuffing for old clothes—it took a man like that to make of me, something new.

I am a house now, delicate timber to see through—you are the attic, fat with trunks enclosing:

Seven years of famine, Ithaca & the map disclosing which channel you & I are to arrive through.

Or else you are the attic soaked with light from one window & there are no trunks here— but a clean pine floor & one small, upright piano against the far wall.

For there is an attic in every blackbird.

For every skilled carpenter there is one house to be built upside down out of straw & standing on one foot.

Which explains why the attic opens out to …MORE

BY JANE SPRINGER

Dear Blackbird,

The first summer after you left rolled in as a white & fine grained fog. The question became not: Where had you gone—but one of location, nevertheless, behind what curtain:

The little farmhouse, its sputtering truck & tin shed. The field where trysting lovers met. The dissolution of it all.

& I in a shrunken, hangdog coat. Eternal straw & soddenly present.

Then came a clamor of birdsong, returning:

Grackle, eagle, wild turkey. The silvery voice of a thrush in the thicket. Mockingbird perched on a branch by the highway. Each song brilliant. No song abiding—

it is not, so much, your image I miss.

But neither the farmer nor his wife nor you, Blackbird, came to restore me. So come, hail & damnation. Come, anyone. Come, wind. When the crows descended, I welcomed them.

That is how I became an heaven for crows, by loving their footfall on my shoulders. So learning the …MORE

BY CARLA PANCIERA

“I remember that cow,” my nephew says.  “She’s the one we pulled out of the mud with the tractor.” 

“No,” I say.  “She got stuck in a tree.” 

“The one who got electrocuted from her water bowl?” 

“Different cow.” 

“The crazy one who dropped dead in the milking parlor? Heart
attack?” 

I shake my head. 

“How about that young one, the show cow?  Died in her sleep out in the pasture?” (Head tucked into her barrel the way calves sleep, fields sloughing off mist, trees alight.) 

“That one broke your grandfather’s heart.” 

He’s quiet for a minute.  Six foot three, my book in his hands as small as an invitation.

“Oh wait:  Remember that one who couldn’t calve?  We hacksawed the calf out?” 

“That cow bled to death.  But you weren’t born when that happened.” 

He shrugs. 

“She wasn’t the one who swallowed something and choked.  I know that.  You …MORE

BY SONIA GREENFIELD

The hummingbird follows me
through the park and it takes a certain
ear to hear her. You say you wish
I lived more in my body. If you call me
           light-boned, I’ll try. Grass fields
and tree patches roll down to the water
in a palette of wheat tones, and the water
is a flat slate of gray that tips up
to the sky, as if the water had pivots
           at each end. You wish I were less
of a looking-glass. The coin plants have gone
to seed again. How many could
           I pay you to keep my heart
a little longer? A million silvered discs
pour through your fingers.

BY SETH ABRAMSON

         The only way to paint a boulder in the surf
is as though it were alive: cooling the moving flesh with colorlessness,
then down to its verb, then evolving to an unknown
beauty in the reeds, where its remarkable lifetime may be no more
than that thing—which could stand for anything—we catch by glimpse,
in a moment we believe we could actually vanish,
having seen the sudden flickering—say, across the intimacies of rocks—

which makes, if we believe it, even the thinnest landscape look briefly
like heaven. So, boulders aren’t easy.
         On beaches small children—not with latitudes but seasons
charting their growth—use them for maps, as one after another dares
to swim further, and closer to—perhaps just a gross admixture
of moss and slope, or perhaps, to a painter, a howling minister in black,
a juggler in his moment of desperation—atop the ferocious relay
of the tides, across the loose graves whose grass will never come in.
It’s hard to paint all …MORE

BY JOHN C. MORRISON

After breakfast I chain
his wrists, ankles, lift
and lay him in a casket, kiss
his forehead, padlock and plunge
the heavy box into the icy river.

A minute later, I panic
peel away shoes to dive in
and he rises soaked, shivering
and beaming on the rocky shore
of the far bank. Then he’s over

the rise to school where bored
in class he folds in half,
again in half, folds, folds,
with smart creases, folds
until he lies on the desktop
like a well-worn wallet

his teacher, Mr. Jaybird,
opens to find three dollars
for lunch, a matinee
movie stub, and a photo:

my boy grins, gives the camera
a wave, behind him
hand on his shoulder
all smiles, me, his old man.

BY DEBORAH CASILLAS

Degas’ horses were wrong
at first. At a gallop the legs blurred
beyond the eye’s seeing. Even
Gericault painted them bounding
like a deer. It was only
prancing, rearing, walking,
that the artists got right. Then
Muybridge made his photographs,
a series of cameras
clicking as the horse passed
so the exact sequence of the stride
was understood, the front legs lifting,
stretching, the muscled haunches
propelling the body forward,
the amazing moment when no hoof
is on the ground and the horse
and rider are suspended, freed
from the earth, lifted by muscles,
tendons, the delicate, impossible
cannon bone that bears
the weight and springs again.
How Degas, not himself a rider,
understood that finally,
modeling in the third dimension
so he could feel the motion
in his hands and transfer it to
canvas. In the bronzes cast
from wax models after his death
you can see his fingers probing,
finding the movement, the way
the neck stretches, the angle
of the head. Some of the horses
are incomplete, a leg half missing,
a partial jaw, the tail left off,
as …MORE

BY DENISE DUHAMEL

Paul said, “It was John’s idea to call the movie Help! And I think from the things he said, that was his state of mind at the time.” The movie was originally going to be called Eight Arms to Hold You which is also a plausible name for a Beatles movie. The lyrics of the title song: “One arm around your shoulder, one arm around your waist, one arm, one arm…” But Help! is better—Help! is a core member of the volitive and imperative class of interjections, expressing both a want and a command. Eight Arms to Hold You implies a want—perhaps a beloved keeps squirming away, perhaps two arms just aren’t enough to touch all the surfaces of the beloved. But “Eight Arms…” isn’t much of a command. Lennon knew an exclamation point after that would just look silly, like an extra arm with a balled up …MORE