Raccoon Face

— Jerry Dyer

Lathering at the mirror,
I notice the brilliant line
between my bare face
and the shaving cream,
my florid hue bleeding pink
into the foam.

I won’t live long, I muse,
Everything in me boils
right to the top: the spicy food,
the salad oil, all of it glistens
in an instant on my skin,
as if my stomach were the root
of some voracious
red blossom.

I shake my head, not wanting
to admit that my feelings,
too, roil uninterrupted
between the surface and the depths,
that my face is but a shiny cousin
to my heart.

I finish shaving,
squint into the reflection,
see the baggy shadows
white around the eyes,
like a photo negative, reversed,
or a raccoon’s face, caught
in the glare of sunlight,
drained of all its lies.

Quantum Mechanics And Me

— Dennis Richardson

It’s something about the entangled electrons, the one’s
Brian Greene spoke of on Nova.  They make me think
of the soup-can phones we made as kids.

I wonder if I could use them now
to contact my mother to tell her: “I didn’t know.”

He said scientists don’t know how the electrons
stay connected no matter how far apart they are,
and if one is positive, the other is always negative.

And I’d like to ask her if she’s seen my father wherever
it is she is.  It was hard to say goodbye to him.

Today, a scientist said he thinks he has written
that one equation for everything, the one Einstein thought
was missing in order to understand our universe.

I’ve been trying forever it seems to understand my universe,
now I think it’s the heart that entangles the mind.

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will test the equation
but it hasn’t yet, still unfinished.  But it’s for the physical
universe, not the emotional one.

I told my mother and father, when I was four,
that the moon followed us home.  And it still does.

Border's Writing Group 2002

— Vicki L. Harvey

The crumpled receipt fell out of the folder
titled “Borders Writing Group 2002”,
the receipt for a Billy Collin’s book dated
July 11, 2002.  Funny that the book is titled
“Sailing Alone Around the Room”.
Memories come flooding back like
the broken hydrant on Lombard Street,
swirling in circular motion around my brain.

Los Gatos Bound…
A special time, conversation deep,
meaningful, like nothing before.
Not wanting to arrive…
Wanting the dialogue to never end.
Arriving to new and special friends
and experiences.
Learning to play with words,
craving your admiration,
not wanting to leave…
Wanting our competitive spirits to soar
to unbelievable heights.
Writing incredible twenty minute poems,
bonding in a way I never thought
possible.

You were my muse!
I was your muse!

Borders came to an end.
You graduated earth school.
I ache…

Mermaid

— Vuong Vu

“For a time I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids.”
~ Sylvia Plath, “Ocean 1212W”

When I was a child, my mother told me
she was once a mermaid who left the sea
and never wanted to turn back.
And I recall, there were times,
in the gentle sunlight of my childhood,
when her skin glistened like fish scales.

I found an old photograph of my family
when we first arrived at a refugee camp.
Our faces wore the weight of exhaustion.
Everyone looked away from the ocean.
It was only I, carried in my mother’s arms,
who turned to look back, back into the sea.

Look at my mother in the picture—
her skin, the color of seaweed.
On the sea my mother became ill.  Water,
handfuls of rice, nothing she could keep.
I was told that I kept crying, and my mother,
too weak to do anything else, stuffed a rag
in my mouth and sang me to sleep.

At the refugee camp, she found
it was not sea sickness, but morning sickness,
 that she had been carrying my brother
for weeks.  He was to be the last
of her children, and she never again
ventured out to sea.

Every summer, I begged.  Mother, I said,
I’ll bring watermelon, sweet sticky rice.
We don’t even have to go into the water.
We’ll sit in the shade and watch the sky,
the clouds  like mounds of rice,
and we’ll look out into the sea.

The sea, my mother said, I know the sea too well.
Looking at me, her eyes as dark as an ocean,
she said, I was once a mermaid.

Precious

— Diane Lee Moomey

not master, not sir, but precious:
we call you that. Now we ask
not “who” are you, but “what?”

Transparency — the faintest outline,
skin of bubbles blown from a child's pipe — only that
marks the space we love to call you.

Within that space, what?
Really, what?

Nobody’s in there, and yet
there’s light, sometimes, or heat.
If I am asked again, what?
and pressed for a reply, I will say
light only, or heat, nothing else,

and clear. Your presence
a pause in the daily news — an iris,
and seen through that iris
a range of impossible peaks.

And also, occasionally seen:
midnight rooms, where aliens couples, naked,
make love
by the light of multiple moons.

Ringer

— Harry Lafnear

Felt sack with a hundred marbles
dropped when I was ten,
one dark evening in the parking lot,
the nine-month sum of wins and losses bursting
in all directions.

Memories are like that too. Even this one.
We do lose our marbles.
Some we catch again, spinning near our shoes,
but others make it to the hill or the gutter
or are found again after years,
when the TV depicts a model of the big bang:
the entire universe exploding from its blazing bag,
a flash, like headlights, cooling to reveal
the cat’s-eyes of galaxies careening from the scene.

Though at ten i cursed it,
suddenly I sympathize with the bag.
I am figuratively falling--
have been falling for all my days,
the dropper now the dropped--
and this body, no better
than a felt sack with a tattered seam,
despite any dark distance left,
will someday surely spill,
though it is not when? that I wonder, but what?

Marbles?
Or galaxies?

A Bite of Your Apple

— Pushpa MacFarlane

I’d rather not take a bite
of your apple, if only to share.

It’s not enough for me
to touch, but to hold
to make mine. Not for now,

but forever. To last.
When I hear a birdsong
I want to pluck it off

and pocket the note.
Or claim, identify, make mine,
when I find the source of light—

a ray of sunshine.
To own, not just partake,
or dwell, not linger

without permission.
A free lake to jump into,
feel the warmth,

dive to its depths and remain
before I find my way out.
To catch and hold a butterfly

long enough to leave
its yellow-blue stain
in my hand, then release.

To say your name
and feel how it rolls
on my tongue—

taste the singular sweetness
from a granule of sugar
before it melts, and give voice

to that plaintive dirge
submerged in my heart.

Solutions

— David Eisbach

My search for a solution is often like
being dragged, naked, screaming over ground glass.
To sit like the Buddha, serene and quiet
does not subdue the horserace in my chest.
What gnaws at my nerve ends does not diminish
with the ebbing of my brain’s desperate calisethenics.
Torturous worry and dread finally enforce fatigue.
My body slowly sinks into a twilight slumber.
Suddenly, I am yanked into consciousness.
Like the sun squeezing through clouds,
the solution appears,
cloaked in calm and simplicity.

April Readers

The following readers presented poems at the open mic on April 19, 2012:

Poets, please let us know if our list needs corrections or additions. Names and titles are easy to miss in the excitement of the evening. Especially this month!

You (And Friends), April's Feature

April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate this, Willow Glen has a longstanding tradition of extending the feature spotlight to the entire community, and indeed the world. Everyone who attends the reading on this day is invited to read one poem from a favorite poet, as well as one of their own poems. This tradition has proven very rewarding, and lots of fun.
 
Poetry Center San Jose and the hosts of the readings invite you all to come and participate in this festive event.
 
And if you wish to be included in this Willow Glen Poetry Project, please bring a hardcopy of your poem to the event, and also email it to willowglenpoetry@gmail.com. Of course, it's perfectly okay if you just want to read without submitting.

The reading will take place
Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 7 p.m.
Willow Glen Branch Library
1157 Minnesota Avenue, San Jose, 95125

[Varius, you know something about love]

— Lee Rossi

Varius, you know something about love.
I woke early and walked to the verandah,

saw the fog welling offshore like a giant
wave. To the east it had already engulfed

the land. Only peaks and ridges survived
as islands. It's a day when burly autumn

pushes aging summer aside, the kind of day
when I want to find a girl and hold her

until even that doesn't help. Does anything
help? That smug bastard, Crassus,

sits on his 200 acres, slaves doing all
the work, and praises the simple life.

There's a chill in the air, Varius,
but it's in me too. Who will remember

us, when we're gone? Our children?
They'll be forgotten too, and we'll be

just faces in old pictures, stern or seedy or
bewilderingly strange. And what about

these words? Will they speak across the years?
Who will hear this dodgy, fearful voice?

The Words

— Vicki L. Harvey

My thoughts surround me with poetry of yesterday.

My soul longs to be free from the memories that haunt me.
I squirm with mental confusion so deep.
The “I miss you” still so present becoming quite a bore,
needing radical change.

My thoughts surround me as I gaze out
the window to the only single cloud like
velvet snow.
What’s up there in the cool blue sky?

Imagine a marble stairway going
upwards to all that has gone before.
It is not my job to find all that is lost.

My body feels stiff with unresolved
questions,
questions that no longer matter.

Imagine nothing less than a baby feline
drinking life from a beautiful glass cup.

See the soft blaze of fire reflecting on
the face of someone dear with an orange
glow deep in contemplation.

Hear the sound of bellows breath done
in unison knowing it is the bath for the
soul

Note: This poem was inspired by a creative writing exercise where the writers were given a list of words to incorporate into their work. Vicki used all the provided words, which are marked here in bold.

Immaculate Conception II

— Dale Carrasco

Octomom is great,
fabulous, like the discovery of black holes,
virtually unimaginable before,
the universe is suddenly greater then it was

She is a mom, x14, and like Tiger Woods
she carries a great record,
a first and a perfect score, 8 holes in one ...
can you really argue against success in a
case like this ...

think of Octo mom as the rescue team
pulling eight miners from a cave in,
and what if one lost a leg, another has
lung problems for life, maybe some mental disability ...
at least they are alive, not like those other
embryos of those other women
who leave them suffocating
in Petrieified existence

Yes, perfect, Octomom is perfect,
she is so competent at speaking,
honestly when she is finished
I feel like she has put me a crib
where i am speechless and laugh and cry

I think Octo mom is such a dedicated mom
that even if half the eight should die,
she would do it again.  after all
it is her money, and actually she earned
it all last time by working two jobs.

The mother is the mother, the children have no other,
and what stake do YOU have anyway,
you can shift your feet, you can smile real sweet,
but really what can you say

ah ... Let her alone, let her gnaw on a bone,
while her children wither away,
a lesson she'll learn, that if reality you spurn,
well, ... "SORRY" ... is not enough to say

and don't you know that we will crow,
and try and put her away,
we will get satisfaction from her malefaction,
if her children don't survive to play

but that is fantasy, romantasy,
it is, we feel, a hostage situation,
it has the feel of the terrorist deal,
with innocents in matriculation

she has us breaking bad,
we feel so sick and sad,
and somehow we are pissed
like we are being had

What can be done?
grin and bear it?
study the situation
while we wear it?

But please ...
the righteous wrath is delicious,
and the cudgeling of her iniquities
positively nutritious

the entertainment
could hardly be better,
and on a cold day ...
why ... you hardly need a sweater

we choose to squeeze into her shoes
and wince and cry in pain,
why not just each ante up the nickel
and count our beneficence  our gain

I mean ...
she serves us very well ...
an immaculate conception
from a perfect ...

Holy Cow! ... fourteen children

Not Counting

— Jerry Dyer

I’ve been alive for exactly
2,880 weeks.
This is very accurate, including
even the thirteen leap-days
that I have been forced to endure.

If you want to count by season,
I’ve entered my 221st.
I’m long past my axial age,
way past the first mud of spring,
more than a kite-string’s length
beyond summer, deep into leafless Fall.

The morning sun is pulled out
of the bag of night like a scrabble-tile.
There are only twenty-six
possible shapes to the day,
not counting the two blanks that
give us the chance to make something new
out of what we have.

Then again, there are only 23
pairs of human chromosomes,
our stencils, shaped and cut out
by our forebears or our race,
giving us all the instructions
that our living gets to use.

I’ve been alive for exactly
20,162 days.
This is approximately the number
of human genes, which sets us squarely
between the chicken and the grape.

Name

— Casey FitzSimons

Its long vowels sucked you
into the world, hard consonants
spanked your butt. Its last syllable rises,
something wispy from your
life in the womb, evaporating.
If I say it behind you, your fringe
of nape hair twists
like a school of fish against
your collar. It travels the space
between us, the sound. You turn your ear
to messages from my mouth, lift your chin
for my hand under your jaw.
Only so many times will I say it
into the air, before it comes
unscrewed, fragile contraption slowly brittle,
one day just fails, parts dangling.
From its pieces, no answer.

Locution

— Dennis Richardson

Today is your day of choosing, a gift from me to you,
time to choose with thought rather than grab the hurry,
the import of your morning now laid at your fingertips:

there are the two coffee mugs that were in the dish
washer.  I didn’t choose one for you.
And there were two different kinds of coffee filter

holders, even two different bags of beans to grind,
a difference I could not taste or smell, the choose
surely you would prefer to make over mine.

It is my day for locuation, to ponder about the word
locution which I, at first, thought had to do
with locomotives, or possibly, the act of crazy,

which made me think it might have something to do
with Occupy Wall Street, you can see where the crazy
came from, people mad as hell and standing for it

and this on both sides, a one per cent versus
ninety-nine per cent, a choosing made easy,
the per cents yelling at me, “Are you loco?”

I know I grabbed your arm just after you had a chance
to choose your mug.  And then pushed you toward the door
to go catch the train, you just reaching for the coffee pot.

But I have to save you I say.  It’s getting pretty ugly here.
You can get your coffee in the dining car...
I don’t understand why you choose not to come?

March 15, 1980

— Judy Sandretto

Coming down the stairs I see smiling faces
while I float in my wedding dress
and he isn't looking at me.

I went to stand beside him and he stared ahead
as the minister read from the The Prophet
the words we had carefully chosen
for our children to hear
While our mothers held hands.

The minister asked us to repeat after him
and we exchanged our simple rings
We were man and wife.
Only then did he look at me
and he smiled.

He always said that I was a part of him
and that we were one.
He thought that he was strong
and that he would carry me
When all I wanted was to create a beautiful world for him.

I couldn't breathe.

Life is good today.
It is peaceful here
My children treasure me.
My grandchildren treasure me.

I am made of precious metal
and polished with a soft cloth.
I am a treasure.
     and I am where I belong.