LINDA ANN STRANG

EQUINOX EGO

My nightmare is like a message
from the eyes of dying horses.

Her body's foam splashed
from their overdriven flanks.

God's medium, she is larger
than the waking universe.

Her wisdom's all left-handed.
Her rider is Kafka.

Second sight grooms her.
Her landscape is Escher,

and also roaring dust,
the fall of the House of Usher.

My nightmare's shoes were forged
from skeleton keys in the smithy.

Indeed, her trappings are spurs still
sparking on the anvil.

She rests with the homeless
ghosts of grief

in the desecrated
cottage of my ribcage -

and her measures are the overreaching
darling hands of the dead.

LEOPARD TWIST

I lie down to a tango
with a spice merchant.
This is my man of rosewater

filtered through a leopard:
my perfume pounce of clove
delicious claw;

honey made of flute;
hot sting of drink,
cyclamen and lemon;

colt with a secret
paprika concertina; piercing
dance across an earthquake floor.

IDENTITY THEFT

She stands and delivers. Consider her hands up.
Take her scars. Her body makes emergency

hieroglyphics in a storm and it's averse
to cuneiform. Take her lover's

birthmark - you know the one - that gingery
magnet for finger and tongue.

Take her memories of bulldozers in Budapest
all along the Danube, the way she trips

in pirouette or waltz, the limp that follows her
like a loyal dog, her dream of lilacs

at the Turkish baths where girls rise up
more naked than Venus - Venus in diptych

for a vernissage - and disappear into an apse
of mirrors. Lift her secret cochlea,

hearing aid of the muse - Who goes there? -
who goes by the name of Lesion.

She has an underwriter who works all night.
She has insurance and our fingers are light.

Self's reactionary, a mere mirage. Come on,
let's take her - and don't forget the scars

SANDY GREEN

MAD SCIENTISTS

He stomps into the lab,
jerks the metal drawer open,
and thrusts in the PH meter

As he turns away,
his lab coat catches on the
autoclave,
and he trips into a row of beakers

They crash to the floor
and he kneels and weeps-

His lab partner
frowns as he pours liquid nitrogen
from a flask
freezing stray spiders
on the smooth, grey floor.

AND THEN IT WAS ALL OVER, EXCEPT FOR THE PART ABOUT THE FLAG HANGING IN THE WINDOW

It fluttered like someone
blowing air under their tongue,
providing a snapshot of the room-
Flickers of
porcelain dog figurines
on a shelf,
last year's calendar,
the old woman
huddled on the sofa

We'd left the grocery bags
in the kitchen
ready for the week
but she'd only wanted
the crushed nuts
and potato chips,
and we hadn't bought her any.

RISING

Yesterday morning,
as I drove home,
I saw a woman
with a cup on her head-
a travel mug,
red
like a Pentecostal flame

It balanced
as she glided down the sidewalk,
hands in pockets,
at seven in the morning

Was it full of coffee,
hot and fresh from Saxby's?

As I sped by,
I glanced in my rear view mirror

afraid to see it spill
and run down her hair

Was she pretending it was
an amphora
or load of wash?

Or, were her hands simply cold?

HUGH FOX

SPIRIT-PLASMA

A New Year's Eve call from
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
"Grandpa, this is Rivka, I'm
putting together an album of
all the pictures we had taken
together since I was born, and
I want the name of that park
with all the swings next to
a lake...I forget...," "You
sound great...," "Well, I'll
be fourteen in two weeks, doing
OK, and we'll be with you for
three months beginning in June,"
"Great....the name of the park is
Nirgendwo Park...," she begins
to laugh, her father from Stuttgart,
always pushing her into German
("Just a little cultural frosting,
nothing political."), "Nirgendwo
means NOTHING, NOTHING
PARK...," "Well,OK, Irgendwo
Park...," she moves close to
hysterical laughter, "That means
EVERY WHERE...," "OK,
when you're around I'm everywhere,
when you're gone, I'm nowhere...,"
"Like your Czech grandmother in
Cicero, you're like that to me, the
one door I can open without second
thoughts....I even look like you...,"
"And I look like her. Yaksamash?"
"I'm fine, and you...?" "How do
you know any Czech?," "Three
months a year with you for the
last fourteen years....that's a lot
isn't it?" "Not enough."

ALIEN

Czech potato pancake grandma in
a jak se mas world, school-surrounded
Irisher nuns with solid stone brogues,
violin beginning age 6, P. Marinus Paulson,
also a composer (educated in England)
who would teach me "Let's look at chords,
the key of C, the key of....let's play around
with b-flat, left-hand chords, right-hand
melody, let the keyboard talk to you...,"
Latin Mass, Italian pastor at San Francisco
immersions in Bach, Beethoven, Vaughan
Williams, and then German, French, Italian,
marrying a Peruvian, months in the Peruvian,
Bolivian, Chilean Andes, a year in Valencia,
Spain, another studying Latin American literature
at the University of Buenos Aires, learning
Quechua, the language of the Incas, then
Maya, the Art Institute in Chicago, galleries
in Paris, Florence, Rome, learning some
Romanian, writing a book on French film
after ten years of immersion every night,
even relating to grandfather homesteaders
out in Montana, ten years in L.A., two years
in Caracas....married thirty years to a Brazilian,
two trips a year to the island of Santa Catarina
in southern Brazil. O que posso fazer?

ABIGALE LOUISE LeCAVALIER

MORE ABOUT WATER

How desperate;
looking through the lace
of fine lingerie,
spitting on the ground
into curbside potholes.

Perplexed.

Just moments ago
she was there,
and heat radiated
from her,
flame in an hourglass.

A c-note
and she is gone again.

A one time affair
that has lasted a lifetime.

Lipstick on the butt
of her crushed cigarette,
still has a little shimmer,
but no smoke.

And it will be a few days
before the call is placed again.

A time is chosen.

For another one-nighter
that will last forever.

FOR NOW

Drunk by midmorning
never so discontent
or desperate,
some say crazy.

Perhaps?

Muddled like old macaroni
sitting in the sun,
and yet unattended.

Bothersome;
all this extra skin,
this baggage,
these pieces to
someone else's puzzle
I'm stuck with.

For now.

And crying about it
never helps,
just trails cheap eyeliner
to my lips.

Making a clown
out of a doll's face,
like spoon feeding
a baby;
nothing but mess.

Yet I know
I still have so much to look forward too,
I do!

Just no way to get there.

RATTLE AND TILT

"get well soon."
she said.

Walking the street
as if never tumbled,
scanning the ground
for stray pill bottles,
or ancient sips of whiskey.

Keeping her head
tilted down slightly
helps with hiding,
that extra little something.

Another dead giveaway.

And the taste
of cinnamon lingers,
for the fortunate only,
cloves and course pepper,
better suited
for a girl
in such circumstances.

And the circumference of the city
swallows her whole,
as the long day
turns over
to an even longer night.

Exposing the belly of the snake
and the rattle of its tail.

Linda Ann Strang lives and works in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Recently, her poems have been published in Flashquake, Scheherazade's Bequest, and Electric Velocipede. In 2007 her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Sandy Green writes, "I grew up in New Jersey and returned to live in South Jersey after graduation from college. My poems and stories have been published in several literary reviews, newspapers, magazines, and anthologies including Bitter Oleander, Anderbo, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Ibbetson Street, and Chicken Soup for the Child's Soul(HCI 2007). My chapbook—Pacing the Moon—was released by Flutter Press in 2009."

Abigale Louise LeCavalier's poetry has appeared in many online as well as print magazines, including Fullosia Press, Black Cat Press, The Sheltered Poet,The Same, FreeXpression, and Record Magazine. She submitted the following: Her name is Abigale Louise LeCavalier, a name that was not given to her, a name she chose for herself. Louise is for her grandmother whom she loved dearly, and she shares that name with her mother and sister. She kept the last name because she wanted it to remain the same as her two sons. As for Abigale, she wanted something as far away from her birth name as possible, and she always loved that name. Abigale has seen the movie The Breakfast Club probably 100 times, but remembers first time most clearly. For this reason: She looked like Anthony Michael Hall(Brian), wanted to be Molly Ringwald(Claire), but identified most with Ally Sheedy(Allison). Now her life consists of trying to make her "outside" look like what she identifies "inside." The hardest thing she have ever done.

Hugh Fox's bio is a novel in itself. We offer a small part of it here: Born in Chicago, 1932, polio as a kid, first human being to receive a pre-Saulk serum that worked. But because he had been crippled for more than a year, and his father was an ex-violinist turned M.D. and his mother a frustrated non-acting actress, he was soaked in culture during his entire childhood: violin, piano, musical composition, art, travel. Then pushed into medicine himself for three years of pre-med and a year of medical school. Rebelled and got a B.S. (Hum.) and M.A. (English) from Loyola U.in Chicago, a Ph.D.(in American literature) from the U. of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), marriage to Peruvian poet Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos. Prof. of American Literature, Loyola University in Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University) , 1958-1968,Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language, Michigan State University (1968-1999).Taught writing and film. Now retired, Professor Emeritus . Fulbright Professor of American Studies/Literature, U. of Hermosillo, Mexico, 1961, U. Católica and Institúto Pedagógico, Caracas, 1964-1966, U. of Florianópolis, Brazil, 1978-1980. Married Brazilian M.D. Maria Bernadete de Costa.1 yr. studying Lt. Am. culture at Mendoza Foundation (Caracas) with Mariano Picon-Salas. Organization of American States Grant to study Latin American Studies/Argentinian Literature, U. of Buenos Aires, 1971.John Carter Brown Library Fellowship, Brown U. , 1968 (Studies in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish economics and avant-garde literature). OAS grant as archaeologist, Atacama Desert, Chile, 1986.Lectures in Spain and Portugal 1975-’76.Lecture on his archaeological findings at the 2007 convention of the Ancient American Artifacts Preservation Foundation. Founder and Board of Directors member of COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. Editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry, 1968-1995. Latin American editor of Western World Review & North American Review, during 60’s. Former contributing reviewer on Smith/ Pulpsmith, Choice etc. currently contributing reviewer to SPR and SMR, etc. 102 books published, his most important novels, short stories, plays still unpublished. Check out Hugh Fox on Internet Search

Jerseyworks home