Untitled / Collage on paper / Piece made for “Jelly Harp” show at Zurcher Gallery / 2009
The Arava Review
/// Contemporary Art & Poetry Review ///
The Church of the Nine Hundred Nails
Over arroyos and desert cobble
through the wood gate
past collapsing thatch
awnings and eaves
where gnatcatchers and grackles
twitch and flaunt
in the fonts
of mixing bowls where
we put our hands
into the birds and water
and kneel and press a thumbprint
of dust
to our lips
scar the sign of the cross
in the air we
of the creosote
we the vulture
we bless this
cross of nails
the nail heads softened
with stones
with cracked hammers
and later years later
when the nails
fall finally from
the crumbling planks
of palm wood
the baked trees
we will hammer
ourselves
to the Lord
and nothing
will pry us free.
Greg Lawless
Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems, interviews and reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from such venues as 2River View, the Ampersand Review, Artifice, Best of the Net 2007, The Cortland Review, Drunken, H_NGM_N, The Hollins Critic, Sonora Review, and Zoland Poetry. He has recently been nominated for a Pushcart and for Best of the Net. BlazeVOX published his first collection of poems, I Thought I Was New Here, in 2009. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Pastoral
One summer late in the summer a storm my father
a farmer still stalking through potato drills
young then half broken only years
from the cracked man the hunched man white
headed like slow lightning he
was infinitely to me walked
through his crop and the lightning
stoked the green rows of potatoes cooked them
in the soil maybe that’s how
the Lord does it he said
His love a straight white fire
pours down and cooks you
in the ground He rips you out
burned back to life spitting the black
earth out breathing His true lightning
a man once a man again ready to meet Him
to face His splintering love to be saved son
to be eaten.
Greg Lawless
Hotel Das Cataratas (if you ever give up)
In the Hotel Das Cataratas two inches of green tongued bugs
filled the lights that hung quietly from the ceiling;
the cold bath never keeping us cool as the hot air crackled over the
whoosh of the falls that we would listen to all night long,
and you made up all the legends that you could never find: the piranha
swimming under your nude skin, you on all fours, your mouth spitting
out from the heat of the dark jungle;
in the dark, your eyes turned into the eyes of panthers,
but you would still make me sleep out in the hallway, where I had to sing
Se Essa Rua Fosse Minha to make you fall asleep.
Then that morning I found you lying there naked on the bed,
your right leg pushed all the way up to your breasts, your long hair
silently covering over your face—the panther in you gone.
I covered you with the sheet and closed the door behind me; I realized
that all your bones and dreams had already crushed inward.
Fourteen years go by until one day when I catch your ghost spying
on me like it always would; what did you always say?
The Serra do Mar spreads across the triple border,
down where you once were, the haunted place where you
brought your soul to rest from all its days.
Wet, scarred, cut up, your insides spilled right out, you and Naipí
floating over the waterfalls like the white braids of twenty ghosts.
Over on the Garganta del Diablo I always looked for you out
over the valley,
the Iguazu snaking through the forests the way you and God
had a way of snaking through my veins.
Jeanpaul Ferro
The Christening of Timothy Gates
What name,
after rolling it over on our tongues,
will unleash itself
in a prep-school christening?
Let’s just think of things that smell,
or rhyme, are found on the body,
or could end in “y”: Gatty and Gitty, Gats and Gitties, were all good,
not great.
Some ended in “o,” but even that didn’t work—
Gatos? No.
It was difficult to brand Gates, like no one ever had
or would before, which I guess
made him lucky
or maybe just
bad with luck,
since if nothing fit
it was actually the worst way to go.
Ryan Tate
The Unvisited Lanes
A groomer of wigs knows certain tricks.
A laundress knows of a lake that washes blood
from a prayer shawl.
A blind man
can remember precisely
the roads of his boyhood, the tilted face
of the last girl he saw leaning toward him.
In the unvisited lanes so many are waiting.
What have you learned
between music and the gray winter rain?
Yehoshua November
Yehoshua November’s poetry has appeared in The Sun, Margie, Provincentown Arts, Adirondack Review and others. His work has received Prairie Schooner’s Bernice Slote Award and was selected as a finalist for the Autumn House Poetry Prize and the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. His first collection of poems, God’s Optimism, won the 2010 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award and will be available from Main Street Rag in August: www.mainstreetrag.com. He can be reached at yehoshuanovember@yahoo.com
