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( ( } { } { } } ) The Lowell Review
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| (oo) (__ \ ONLINE
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| ^^ ^^ y' [Poetry, Fiction, Essays]
| Cafe-au-lait |
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I n s t a n t K a r m a P r e s s
The Lowell Review is an annual literary magazine publishing
poetry, fiction, and essays.
-=- TABLE OF CONTENTS -=-
&&
Jim Daniels Proving Grounds
Logging Silence
Remembering the Fight Song
Jennifer Milich Ana and the Anole
Paul Marion Smelling Like Childhood
Hilary Holladay Yonder
Patrick Lawler (breath)
Sagrada!
Luiza Assis Wild Horses Run Free
Solitaria
Lola Haskins Pick-up Dancing at the Cypress
Burrows
Elegy on a Winter Morning
James Washington, Jr. Reading Entrails
Dixie Salazar Home Alone - Saturday Night
Celebration Cake
Gary J. Whitehead Lazarus
Sean Thomas Dougherty Far from the Banks of Jordan
Edward Ashton Waiting for the Train
Roots
Mylee Casperson Sharpened by the Cement
Ted Bookey Good News/ Bad News
Kenneth Wolman Why Husbands Don't Leave
Eve Forti Can't Wait for Perigee
Richard Bailey May I Help You?
John Pavel Kehlen Five Poems of Tabito about Wine
Victor Martinez Drinking Too Much
Karen Alkalay-Gut Taking out the Trash
Early Encounters with an Analyst
Don Lanford Singing in the Key of Z
On Visiting a Friend in the
Camarillo Mental Institution
Pamela Stewart The Red Window
Richard Farrell Field Day
______________________________________________________________________
GARY J. WHITEHEAD
&&
L A Z A R U S
The rivers rise and touch the living banks,
the grackles garner berries from the bush.
A stone is pushed by the hands of currents,
and roots are sent to wander through the crush
of ice and ages, to hold and give thanks
again to the mountain and its torrents.
Only those things that have suffered and died
can know the light that comes after darkness
as more than physical, a spectrum truth
divides in the universe, nothing less
than love itself. Even rivers that ride
over ice, ever downward, have their faith.
Life is a possum caught in headlight glare,
and death is what we see by the roadside
in the morning sun. What grows later out
of the church of bones and spreads itself wide
and deep is fed by the song that's sung there
and the arms flung open to catch the light.
_______________________________________________________________________
MYLEE CASPERSON
&&
S H A R P E N E D B Y T H E C E M E N T
Know that no matter
how many years of cement you
swirl to fossil me
I can still bite
the hand that buries.
Hold me with respect
because the side of my skull palming your
hand is seductively smooth,
like a creamy thin eggshell.
Throw me to your other
hand crudely and I'll flip
like a loaded coin and
land on your lifeline.
Heads, you lose.
this side has arrowheads
embedded in sexless cement,
sharpened by the cement itself, a
knife sharpener from my mother's mother's
mother's kitchen.
Try to crush my teeth.
They're sharpened
to within an inch of your life
and hungry.
_______________________________________________________________________
LAWRENCE RUNGREN
&&
R O O T S
I imagine them fanning out through the dirt
wide as a river delta, flooding the tunnels
of the rabbit and mole, snaring bottlecaps
and small stones in their wake.
I picture them vining around shells of insects,
around the feathers of birds and the bones of the dead,
holding the small clods of dirt tight to themselves
as if they were the buds of some exotic flower.
I think of their fine cilia
reaching into the darkness,
the cold rainwater pulsing
through their knobby intersections
like blood being carried back to the heart.
I dream of a taproot boring into the black humus,
piercing the silt and loam, pushing down
through the brown gravel like a snake,
blindly searching for something
more felt than named.
&&
R E T U R N
This was where the fights began.
How many years ago was it
the neighbor woman ran screaming
to the door, her husband staggering behind?
How long since the neighborhood bully
put that scar across your arm
like the long, thin outline of a knife.
Loneliness met you early here,
cold from the light of distant houses
and railroad tracks that raced
the dirty river,
met you gray as the sky
above the box plant
or wind through high-voltage wires.
Those memories follow now
like factory smoke in your clothes.
Everything else has changed.
The apple trees you planted
are taller but bear no fruit,
unknown children stare at the cars
passing by.
The grandmother you loved
has been dead ten years.
Your mother is an old woman
who thinks often of death.
The odors of home seem strange now,
your first life vanished like a dream.
_______________________________________________________________________
KENNETH WOLMAN
&&
W H Y H U S B A N D S D O N ' T L E A V E
They live with the film-noir spectre
of the furnished room and gray chill mornings:
of waking alone to the unpurgeable
night-drawn erection that stands before them,
an assassin�s dagger held by a dream-succubus;
of cigarettes lighted before breakfast from hotplate coils;
of phlegm coughed sootily into kitchen sinks;
of instant coffee drunk with a sound renouncing hope;
of visitations by children who after an hour
scrape their feet from boredom,
yet cry at the time to say goodbye.
They fear the moment
when food will stick in their throats
and they will die alone,
able not even to gasp, thinking only
of the absurdity of this death in this life.
They live with their addiction,
on gray chill mornings,
to a presence pressed next to theirs,
a separate body that breathes in half-light,
a half-remembered other presence
in the same body and same space:
a presence with the familiar name of Wife
who transmits the current of memory
to light the cells that else would fade to gray,
wither in the cold like last spring�s flowers
mowed under in autumn and buried
beneath piles of rotting leaves that have dropped,
as they must, under the burden of time.
The drone of habit whispers
that mutability is all of constancy,
that change must be endured like growth itself,
that life continues through seasons that green,
then wither, in repetition of themselves.
They live with the love that shifts
in the half-light of gray chill mornings,
that reaches toward the sunlight, opens,
pushes forth the daily newborn hope,
seeks the vestiges of spring�s memory
even in frozen ground where the seed,
planted long ago, has flourished and been harvested.
They dream of plates heaped high,
of kitchens vibrant with the smells of harvest
and of tastes that swirl and mix on the tongue,
each distinct, but each blended
into the singular taste of nourishment
at the heart, strength renewed.
They dream as children of an earth
that feeds its lovers from a neverending store,
replenished by night: and waking slowly,
rubbing sleep from their eyes, remember the knowledge
that theirs is the earth in which to plant,
to till and revive what renews in love.
________________________________________________________________________
_The Lowell Review - Online_ is archived at ftp.etext.org along with
a number of other fine publications specializing in literature. After
connecting with the etext machine using the interface of your choice,
change to the /pub/Zines directory. You may be interested in looking
at:
Lowell_Review
CORE_Zine
Intertext
Morpo.Review
Whirlwind
Interface
Atmospherics
Cropduster
RIF_T
and others being added daily.
_______________________________________________________________________
Announcing...
_____________________________________
CAPA: the Contemporary American Poetry Archive
An Internet Archive for Out-of Print Books
_____________________________________
CAPA is an electronic archive designed to make out-of-print volumes
of poetry available to readers, scholars, and researchers. The books will
be stored as individual text-only files accessible via GOPHER on the Internet.
Poets or their executors who hold copyright to books may place them in
the archive free of charge; once a volume is archived, it may be read on-
screen, searched electronically, or downloaded freely. However, the author
retains copyright and must be compensated if multiple copies are made (e.g.,
for use in the classroom). When the author receives an offer to reprint the
book, we will withdraw it from the archive and post a publication notice in its
place.
Books from commercial, university, and small presses are eligible for
archiving; self-published and vanity press books will not be considered.
For further information and guidelines, contact:
Wendy Battin, Director
CAPA
Box 603
Hadley, MA 01035
(413) 585-9149
email:
[email protected]
Charles O. Hartman, Associate Director
CAPA
Box 5505,
Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Avenue
New London, CT 06320
email:
[email protected]
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