January 2008, by Ben Mazer

Ben Mazer is a busy man. This spring alone he is celebrating the release of three new books:

* January 2008 (Dark Sky Books)

* POEMS (Pen & Anvil Press)

* Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press)

We applaud Mazer’s achievement and feel both honored and excited to work with him. He’s a tremendous poet.

For those of you interested in hearing Ben read from his new collections, the following readings are coming up in  NYC, St. Louis, and Harvard Square.

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Recognize that handsome mustache? He’s the man that made your nightmares. He made black birds spooky. He put you in the pit. He placed you beneath the pendulum. The evidence of his ingeniousness still swings back and forth above you. The anxiety of his insanity still haunts you in the heart. His works can be compared “to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping of the veil.” — Brian Allen Carr

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i.

She is surrounded by leaves.

Lying beneath the canopy,

leaning in         to smell a single bud (still green)

brazen enough to burst through the tangled roses.

ii.

The family gathers

on the freshly mown lawn.

The man and the children wear green

shirts, green shoes, one grass-stained pair

of torn shorts.          Mother binds

herself in blue–same (color) family.

iii.

She cocoons in the iris bed.

Swallowed by its spiked headboard,

dried stamens turn to dust

in her hair.          Deep inside

there is no scent.  The air is dead,

making silence       not love.

The man     tugs a cord      resumes mowing.

iv.

The neighbor watching

from behind tattered curtains

is wrapped in olive cotton.

His camera ticks

like cicadas clicking ribs.

v.

She remembers it is grasshoppers

who rub   veinless wings    to sing.

Dinner refuses to cook itself.

She rises from the bush–

odd butterfly–

invites her family to sit, enjoy the salad.

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Jill Wickham is a poet/artist/teacher in Upstate, NY, funding her writing habit by running a children’s art studio.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Weave, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Pirene’s Fountain, among others.  She is a co-editor of the literary magazine, Ouroboros.

At late night we wander,
wading through untuned New Orleans air.

Breathe bourbon and cuss
softly, shoulders hooked and eyes
darting,

careful not to stare
into the phantom lenses that film us.

Slick haunt, we know the stars
are on earth tonight, our clan
the center of everything that ever
existed.

Hair in our face, we saunter
low-slung up dark avenues, black
glasses obscuring our vision of the moon.

__________________________________________

Nathan Scott is a 23-year-old graduate student in New Orleans. His twitter is twitter.com/nathansavin.