poems

A Painting of Saint Agnes

A Painting of Saint Agnes

No one caught the beauty that went before
and after you: it fed the air like light,
invisible, life-giving. And your life,
it faded into darkness too, as might

a martyr unredeemed by others' faith.
And into view a painting of Saint Agnes
shimmers; she shares the small coals of your eyes,
that knack of distant gazing, as if kindness

was an amber where the passing life was held.
No surprise then that a dark glance can unman me
in corridor, on canvas; or those full

Interiors

Interiors

A lifetime is barely enough to notice
colour veining stone; striated years leech
into vision, pocking in highlights
that punctuate an unrevealed epic.

Darks and greys line, bowed. Arrested
by a sermon on the sea, imagination
winds round the thread of their minimal
movements; odd heads bow like black buoys.

Ted McCarthy

Ted McCarthy has been published in Ireland, Britain, Germany and the U.S. His first collection won a national award in Ireland, the Brendan Behan Award.

Robt Ward

Robt Ward was born in 1946 and deafened by meningitis in 1949. A southern California native, he spent three of his most formative years in Geneva, Switzerland in the late 1950's and studied too much Latin at Ecole Internationale de Geneve. Later he attended Brown University (where he studied with the poet Edwin Honig) and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.

Hillsborough Avenue

Hillsborough Avenue

         —After Paul Verlaine

Forty Years Later

Forty Years Later

Why bother to root for my brother Joel?
Surely, your quarterback’s body is earth’s, Joel.

You knew how to sell elaborate jokes—
seemingly, you stand at my door grinning, Joel.

Named for the prophet of locusts and kairos,
has the Lord dealt wondrously with you, Joel?

Our mother was a saver of used things
that someday would be useful; she wept, Joel.

I could not have borne following your hearse
through rain. You are buried in sunlight, Joel.

Nola Garrett

Nola Garrett is Faculity Emeritus of Edinboro University of PA and presently lives in Palm Harbor, FL.  Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Arts Letters, Christian Century, FIELD, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, and Tampa Review.  Her chapbook, The Pastor's Wife Considers Pinball, won the 1998 American Poets' Prize.  Forthcoming from David Robert Books, February 2009, is The Dynamite Maker's Mistress: Variations on the Sestina Form.

The Pastor's Wife Considers Pinball

no imageASIN or ISBN-10: B001CXLLR0
binding: Paperback

Ms. Brown

Ms. Brown

Ms. Brown was a sunlight girl.
She traced my heel in a whirl.
She boxed my onions, shattered my keel,
Made me feel what I couldn’t feel.

Mercury-head dimes, her bright symmetry
Speckled my trout into live alchemy—
Feathered my bird and honeyed my bear
Castled my rook from here to there.

So the show would go on through weddings,
Forebodings, bleedings, and beheadings,
She worked her weeding as the catacomb dust
Sifted down over the garden of lust.

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