freelance patrol sounds the all-clear


walter martinpaloma munoz, traveler 80 at night


The Wait
-- by Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by A. Poulin

It is life in slow motion,
it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:
too much and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenly
stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,
and, leaning out the carriage

door, we vainly contemplate
a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop.


Lure
-- by Stacy Kidd

Were it that the river lay like the children’s skin—
satiable, slight but withstanding.

Some nights, when the women would dress in deerskin,
drunk on the river’s water, my daughter with her dulcet

songs for the long dead. Their Purring and Purging.
Her Winter of the Newly Converted.

Winter, when the women wore their hair in high braids.
When the river shook its thin-hooked fingers,

and the water rose to eat its only edges,
then the women who feared endless dust, knew days

like night and dust, and night came with its own kind
of absolution. Absence. Alchemy. Ice returning to water.


Tough Cookies
-- by Ted Berrigan

You took a wrong turn in
1938. Don't worry about it.

The sun shines brightest when
the others are sleeping.

There is a Briss in your
immediate future.

Take heart. Shakespeare was
probably an asshole too.

Your life is rare and precious
& it has no mud. Stay with it.

You have strange friends, but
they are going to be strangers.

Everything is Maya, but
you will never know it.

Your gaiety is not cowardice,
but it may be hepatitis.