Issue 11
Summer 2002
Anne Fraser
I live in Seattle Washington with my husband and two sons. I started writing poetry very sporadically a few years ago mostly because it's really good therapy. I have had a few poems published on the internet and in the small press. I graduated from Central Washington University and work in a law firm.
Crystal Panes
Slow rippled music on a summer night,
legs drawn up beneath melon colored skirts.
Brown feet - bare with pale painted toes,
Tussled manes of brown and honey, now thick
stranded in leaning forwarded over red filled glass.
In the center of the eye, images dance, each
passing through small red crystal panes held high
and to the lips. A crepe blouse falls further off
the shoulder with each toasting to ourselves and
to each other.
May it never end.
Maggie Ann
Posing stiffly, smiling against a backdrop of summer and clean
white sand, you squint against the sun, dark creased eyes in a
smooth oval face. Hands held, unseen behind the back, standing
on the balls of bare feet, are you anxious for the beach or does
hot sand burn the crevices of your skin?
Your still-child face stares out at me, curves of shared heritage,
unmistakably carved in bone beneath pale skin. To me, an unknown life,
eased through shadowed boardwalk slats and time, held smooth
behind a glass. Does someone have your stories?
A city girl with corn silk eyes, did you come to dream of young
men, one soft-faced and gentle like the taste of slow sweet honey
against the skin. Did he come and stay or did he leave,
turning intimacy like a key within a closing door?
Did you live to hold your newborn son, to nuzzle into his soft creased
neck and breathe him in, the elixir of slow sweet warmth, this
love, tucking itself into the marrow, before he grew and found the
language to become another?
Did you become, like the women of your time, a toilsome
spinner, drawing what you could from life along thin threads gleaned
from what was left behind. Forming brief alliances with possibility,
the instinct for gambling and destruction within the faded?
Or did whipping winds braid a different thread for you than held by me?
I hope for you Maggie-girl, barefoot and carefree beneath fluorescent light.
A Man, a Woman and a Chair
A faded arm chair whose worn and sagging cushion has assumed
the lumpy shape of dog butt. Colors merged indistinct to something
brown, elastic meant to hold the corners firm, sits strained and limp
with no apparent will to hold its own.
It might be kinder to toss the chair away to spare its seeming struggle
to remain. And like the chair, the length and stream of little and uneven
things, have rested in the mind. And with each sitting, worn and creaking
springs are weighted down, merging further into furrows of a closing palm.
Angry words, are soon bartered for the truth. Had we only heard the
softer colored words that lay, almost ready to be spoken beneath the tongue.
Life's accumulations, pride, remembed pain, soon choke the passage of
what lays beyond. I never meant to hurt you.
Come take my hand and sit with me, in my lap or I in yours, and place your
ear against my lips. In this moment of suspended time, close your eyes against
the skyline. I will whisper not only what I truly am and feel but what I almost
rise above and could become were you to hold me.
Cresting
The scent of a vast ocean
and its round circle journeys
from home-to-sky-to-home.
With salt lips, we laugh and wade
across froths of curling waves,
skirts held bunched up within tight fists,
to feel before the crest withdraws.
Gulls with white fringed wings
are high companions, soaring,
arching within the winds.
Seaweed grasps at toes yet
peels away like bandages and old skin.
Within the clinging smell of kelp and molted crabs,
we have become light and liquid.
A Separate Order
Soft padded feet of gray and drizzling rain,
a rhythmic and insistent brotherhood of mists
across an ever reaching sky. To join, to merge
and slide against the rimmed curl of leaves and
fractal ferns, to sweep the textured face of spongy
moss, spiced clover, and mulching leaves. Small,
once-potted things, green garbed and budded,
open out to touch the separate order held in
rising tides and in the scent of apricot and scarlet.