New Orleans

The French streets beat with feet,
In your home in the City of Dreams,
Rubbish and Whiskey from Tennessee

Where it’s certainly easy to do as you’re told
‘Cause Mama would never be so bold
As to bar you from those dirty sinning streets

Where the women open their second-story shutters
Calling you up from the gutters
That stream with bourbon whiskey

Tragedy descended quickly, the rain slows to mist
And the red-nosed aristocracy smile, blessed
On the dark streets that beat with feet

We tripped and skipped bourbon-drunk
Through damp bayou air and cigarette smoke,
Beads and whiskey from Tennessee.

God smothered what we thought He couldn’t reach,
Taught us what the Blues failed to teach
On those uncertain streets that beat with feet,
Lost souls and whiskey from Tennessee

Rachel Boury currently lives and writes in Chicago, IL.

The Beach at Douglas

a photograph of my mother’s family:
they stride through the frame in jumpers,
scarves, anoraks, each in a different direction.
Big Susan caught half leaping, my aunt’s
reaching arms, and Nana’s pointed nose
remind me of a flock of seagulls scattering,
about to rise.

My mother shakes her head fondly
at this photograph, saying what a funny lot
they are, and by funny she means peculiar,
and by lot she means group, clan, collection
of odd souls thrown onto a grey beach
in the ‘70s, with only blood to bind them,
scarves to shield them from the wind
rustling their anoraks, the wind
sweeping the sand into the sea,
the sea onto the sand, the wind
whipping between these frozen figures
held in flight; stopped from scattering.

In the picture, my mother wears flares, round
glasses, and the grimace she makes in the bright
sun, or the face of the wind. She was first to scatter
from the cold beach, the island of wet promenades
and palm trees, bent by Irish winds
where her sister still lives, dying
of decay in her brain, the grey
matter dissolving, synapses faltering:
her thoughts scatter, her hands shake.

My mother, flown across a sea,
an ocean, and stalled on a dry
continent far from the beach,
from anoraks and the reach
of the wind, shakes her head,
says what a funny lot, and drops
the photograph into the scattered pile,
the shriek of seagulls
caught in her throat.

Holly Kent-Payne will soon begin the MFA program at New York University. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The Man with the Beret

Biarritz. Hard to believe I’ve reached
this fabrication by the sea
where kings and empresses once held sway
and Picasso’s brushes
cut bathers into triangles.
        Sitting on a rock and watching
families, well-coiffed dogs, grand-dames
in white shorts and sandals, old couples
holding hands as they walk the quay,
I feel more invisible than air

more foreign than a phantom from the days
of Napoleon III who might at any moment
alight from the Rock of the Virgin.
I want to go home, as much as I first
wished to come here; begin to walk away
just as a man with a battered beret passes by,
as if part of an old cartoon.
Voila! I welcome the joy of cliches
that relieve by returning the familiar,
like a Picasso so often viewed

its angles now form another cartoon,
demanding no more effort than a ritual
performed over and over, reassuring
as rhymes, those predictable and
recollected sounds from earlier lines.
        I think about earlier times,
foreign as the landscapes
of memories,
as La Belle Époque
before the wars and fires.

--Biarritz, France

Barbara F. Lefcowitz has published nine books of poetry as well as fiction, essays, and poems in over 500 journals. She has won fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maryland Arts Council, among others.

Untitled Tanaga

Father crossed from Philippines.
He came in coldest winter.
Sought new life, home, beginnings…
A handsome orchid transplant.

Robert Francis Flor graduated from Seattle University with a B.A. (1966) and M.A. in Education (1975) and, in 1978, earned a doctorate in Higher Education from the University of Oregon. An emerging writer, he has had poems published in the Tamlyfur Mountain Poetry Review, Poets Against the War, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Field of Mirrors anthology. Robert is a member of the Washington Poets Association, the Filipino Cultural Heritage Society, Artist Trust and take playwriting courses at Freehold Theater in Seattle.

[Editor's Note: A tanaga is a type of short Filipino poem consisting of four lines with seven syllables each with the same rhyme at the end of each line... more info]

Gaggio Montano: Liberation from Germany, 1945

At thirteen, the grandson,
Braces on his teeth,
Gangly, alert, affectionate,
Is beautiful.

His grandfather, Fabbio, a man
Seventeen years older than I,
Is touchingly obsessed. He wants
Us to feel, to touch, history,

Those fierce days at Riva Ridge and
Gaggio Montano. He pillages
Cabinet after cabinet, showing
Artifacts: Grenades, unopened packs

Of Lucky Strikes, tooth powder, and
A full array of uniforms the Germans, G.I.’s,
Italians, even the Brazilian Battalion, wore.
And here he stops, a tear in his eye.

He holds a faded photo of a soldier
From Rio de Janeiro, “mi caro amigo”
He intones. The grandson says in English
What we had already understood.

Then the old man affectionately tries to
Place a Mussolini youth corps hat on his
Reticent grandson’s head, and he resists,
Playfully: “No, no, no,” he insists.

His grandpa doesn’t argue,
Just reaches somewhere else and
Hands me a medallion from 2005
Celebrating the 60th year of peace.

The boy’s sweet smile now illuminates
The scene, restores a bit of light
To a small but cherished room
In the mountains of now free Italy.

( July, 2007 )

Don Foran is a Literature and Ethics professor living in Olympia, WA. He has a strong commitment to creativity and sustainability. Travel, he says, enriches his life.

Finding Chris McCandless in Utah

of all places, in the empty orange and reds
dusted with dry thriving sage and
ancient twisted trees carrying leaves
like needles. Among slotted canyons, spooky
and narrow as the space between my
claustrophobic praying hands, I found him.
Reading a story I meant to open,
but never could indoors, he talks of a
predecessor who disappeared
in these sunset lands where I am standing,
with a map; my trail sketched free hand.
The dappled light from our dry brush fire
illuminates a camp made among
flash flood sands and debris; we pack
up for higher and less hallowed ground.
He wouldn’t have to tell us twice.

Brittany Faith Harmon originally hails from Yakima, WA, but currently calls Seattle home.