Isn't life a blast
It's like living in the past


Sebastian Liste, This side of the mountain, 2010

Bigeminy
-- by Dennis Mahagin

your electrophoresis
could make headlines

jump

a beat:

Arab spring to ventricular

winter occupying
Wall Street.

Suddenly it's Sunday; morning light leaks
a dirty systole in fisted

sheets, short subway

grope after dropping

a winning lottery
ticket in the jostle

and slam, wringing ropes
from a busted turnstile

rhyme, skip
a stench of wood smoke,
monkey got

flat line
from coffee grind:
a light sweet surfeit
of sleep made
to throttle.

Then some shining star
from the New York Times
opines on Face

the Nation; ekes out

some real choice ones, your guess
he says as
good

as a land mine,
Casio, defibrillator,

predator drone; compares
Wall Street

to a leap

of brook trout
ablation, No Fly
Zone, deep
jagged peaks, the fearsome
mysterious cardio gram.

A pattern

on his necktie stops
and starts

your heart.


After Ritsos
-- by Malena Morling

You know that moment in the summer dusk
when the sunbathers have all gone home to mix drinks
and you are alone on the beach

when the waves begin to nibble
on the abandoned sand castles—
And further out, over the erupted face

of the water stained almost pink
there are a few clouds that hold
entire rooms inside of them—rooms where no one lives—

in the hair
of the light that soon will go
grey and then black. It is the moment

when even the man who mops the floor
in the execution room of the prison
stops to look up into the silence

that grows like smoke or the dusk itself.
And your mind becomes almost visible
and you know there is nothing

that is not mysterious. And that no moment
is less important than this moment.
And that imprisonment is not possible.