Excerpts from MÖBIUS, The Poetry Magazine


FROM YOUR DAUGHTER, ANGELINA How often in your broken English you tried to tell me. Now, I scan the walls at Ellis Island but your picture isn’t there only images of Italian immigrants second-hand replicas of your passage to America. How frightened you must have been barely thirteen years old on the rickety donkey cart over mountainous roads to arrive at the ship. Did you miss them so soon your mother, your father your brothers left behind? Or perhaps, in steerage when storms tossed your body when other passengers fell sick and died your thoughts were needed elsewhere. What did you answer at Ellis Island, when they asked for your name? did they understand you when you said, “Ignazio?” And, when you arrived where was your big brother who was to meet you among the hundreds from so many countries looking for their loved ones, too? Poppa, I can’t find you in the photographs on the wall; why wouldn’t I listen to your stories? I was too busy becoming American to speak good English like the rest. ANGELINA SPERO New York Copyright (©) by Angelina Spero. All rights reserved.		WHAT WE GOT FROM ENGLAND The reason you use two slices of bread to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, mother said, is so you don’t have to butter both sides. You need a clean side for your fingers. It took an English man to invent the sandwich. I doubt an American could have done it. The biggest disappointment of winning the Revolutionary War was we broke away before that country could finish teaching us table manners. HAL SIROWITZ Pennsylvania Copyright (©) by Hal Sirowitz. All rights reserved.


DANDELIONS The other day, I bounced between the blue talons that spear marshmallow floats in the sky and the lawn, full of green soldiers marching in thick patches across the yard, toward the intrusive dandelions that set up camp in random locales. From mower to my knees and back up again I aided the infantry until I became enraptured by one frail yellow weed that suddenly sent me into a past when I sat alone on a stone at the crest of a hill, where in its tiny valley hovered the creeping carcass of poison ivy that devoured our summertime baseballs, around which bordered a flock of dandelions, dandelions I so desperately desired to pick for my mother. I had never seen anyone with a bouquet of dandelions, nor ever noticed any on a corsage but that did little to dissuade me from gathering a bunch. She gave me life, I wanted to give her dandelions. She bandaged my wounds, tended numerous nose bleeds, I gave her dandelions. She gave me medicine, meals, clothing, a home and an education, I gave her dandelions. Here is a football, basketball, ice skates, go play, I said, here are some pretty flowers. I found in the woods, never realizing my debt impossible to ever fulfill. That gift I will give her now, though when she took that wilting fistful of weeds from my grasp, I was as convinced as any nine year old boy, that she owed me. MICHAEL KESHIGIAN New Hampshire Copyright (©) by Michael Keshigian. All rights reserved.


FIRE ISLAND Grinning like Charon, a red man ferries me To the flames of Fire Island. I tip him a torn, Wet buck. Bob Till stands waiting on the beach, Cracking a walnut with his teeth. A crow, Riding a twig, declares omnipotence And an iron love of the sun. After vermouth, Bob shows me a manuscript of poems, for which He wants my praise. He expects me to say It’s the best thing since Beowulf. But sometimes I tell The truth. He barely speaks to me. I sleep On the icy beach, and then again I sleep Under an open, cloudless sky, shivering. As the light trickles out, the day drowns. The moon reclaims the darkening slope of the dune With a house-high tide. I ferry back To a world where no one writes in hexameters. STEPHEN STEPANCHEV New York Copyright (©) by Stephen Stepanchev. All rights reserved.


MY COUSIN CALLS My cousin, who ignored me for forty-five years, called the other day. More than a year after Katrina, she wondered how I was. She was fine, she said. She had three daughters. Last year, she took a month off, lived in the country, picked vegetables and put up jam. She worked for the bank for four decades. Her sisters— I struggle to recall them—have children and jobs. Her mother is still alive. Cousin Bill—I met him once— is dying of cancer and wonders about me. My father, she said, had to work in the cotton fields after the war and dove for cover when he heard thunder or a Studebaker backfire. Her children expect too much of her. She hopes I am alright. I am fine, I tell her, and I wait, but there are no questions about husbands or children or career or houses in shambles, and I do not speak of expectations, or make sweet talk of preserving berries for a later date. What I tell her is that many of the sheltering trees are gone forever, and the view has changed dramatically. Without the protection of sharp needles and hardened bark, I see more than I want to see, and I can no longer recognize my own landscape. There is silence, and we hang up. DIANE ELAYNE DEES Louisiana Copyright (©) by Diane Elayne Dees. All rights reserved.


GLACIAL WARNING Norway’s Breidalblikkbrea glacier thinned by almost 3.1 metres during 2006 compared with 0.3 metres in 2005… Reuters, 16 March 2008 How much longer till men and women, Like miners hearing the song end And seeing the canary’s corpse, Rush from the earth-cave…to? Miners scramble out of the mine Gasping for fresh air, while we Flounder from the encroaching ocean. Some make it to high ground But what habitation or work will they find? Only a few scientists note Breidalblikkbrea Melting at ten times the rate from one year To the next in once frigid Norway. Walruses crowd shoulder to shoulder On the shrinking ice floes, their tusks Bright in the arctic sun in contrast To their brown shaggy bodies. Like the polar bears, these sea-loving Mammals, once the melted floes Can’t support them, are, like a swimmer Too far from shore, doomed to drown. The adaptable homo sapiens will Migrate to higher ground where he can, Leaving Long Islanders, Bangladeshi, And the Dutch to the rising seas. GEORGE HELD New York Copyright (©) by George Held. All rights reserved.


CARBON SUMMER — for Al Gore and Majora Carter “Thousands have lived without love, Not one without water.” – WH Auden I look in my grandchild’s eyes, watch his small hands grasp his toy globe to spin it, and realize Earth’s fever rises. She can’t heal herself. The North Polar cap melts. Glacial cliffs slide into rising seas. People drown in flooding coastal ports. Climate refugees migrate upland into alien cultures where religions clash increasing wars. Not even the richest will escape huge storms that batter cities. Forests cleared rip species from the torn web of life. Greedy leaders resolve to be impotent. We sicken Earth with buying and selling useless junk. Every day, seventy-million tons of brain-damaging poison is dumped into the thin shell of Earth’s air as if it were an endless sewer out there. Swelling heat traps burn cities, dry reservoirs. Atlanta, for one, is running out of water as vast droughts dry streams, rivers, aquifers. Faltering farmers everywhere lose their living. Pollinating bats and honey bees die weakened by pollutants. Amphibians and birds diminish to extinction. People of the Artic and Pacific islands flee ancient lands. Wild fires force thousands from California homes, poisoning air. Chaos of floods and fires topples governments. Carbon emissions are tasteless, odorless, out of sight, out of mind. To avoid calamity, what seems unprofitable isn’t imagined. Where lies collide with eco-logic, battlefields bloom with blood. Earth locked in irons of medieval religions used by weapons dealers to sell tanks, bombers guzzling, burning oil, threaten nuclear winter with carbon summer. There’s no other way to say it: “We murder our children with our apathy.” What have we done today to save them? Who have we called to protest? What letter have we written to senators? What donation have we given? What alarm bell have we rung? I watch my grandson’s small hands spin his toy globe, and realize there will be no eyes, no ears, no hands, no art, no song, as our dusty planet lost in endless space with all our useless poetry — home to our dried tears of love and laughter — could spin burning in silent thirst. DANIELA GIOSEFFI New York Copyright (©) by Daniela Gioseffi. All rights reserved.


IN THE RAIN FOREST, ECUADOR Above, the sky’s bounty. In the distance a rolling noise, the growling rumble of a coming storm. Tall trees, wind-bent, formed a canopy of leaves. Firmament covered us like a gray bowl. We slid like fish over slippery rocks, hiked past hidden snares and steep waterfalls, through lush thickets of medicinal herbs, on narrow paths that had no provenance. Ankle deep in a shallow stream, barefoot Indians panned for gold. From a high plateau we saw a man-scarred mountain, noisy and birdless. As we snapped photos, drops began to fall, slapping the large leaves in slanting streams, pouring through boughs like leaks from a cracked pipe. Voices dulled. we scrambled for bush, dodging trees that might be lightning rods, huddling like hares in clumps of friendly growth, enwrapped in the pristine jungle where tons of untapped gas lay buried under mire. Before and behind lay future and past Beneath, deep as our vision, earth’s bounty. PHILLIP CORWIN New York Copyright (©) by Phillip Corwin. All rights reserved.


KUDZU HARP Let me play this kudzu harp a while longer while the summer is so green, and the poised blue flowers that swell from each green string sing out their noise JEREMY M. DOWNES Alabama Copyright (©) by Jeremy M. Downes. All rights reserved.


THE FIG TREE In this shabby corner of the yard you looked into the thornbush and thistle down to a pool of shadow (never getting enough sunlight to evaporate) and discovered a miniature fig tree, a mutation of the trees smuggled into this country by great-great-grandfather from the kingdom of Naples long before the hordes passed through Ellis Island. But they all perished two winters after your grandfather because not one of his sons, including myself, cared enough to wrap and tie them against the New York winter. No, son, we cannot transplant it: the thornbush and thistle wrapping themselves around this tree have done what we Americans taught ourselves not to do, and the tree did its part, hiding its fruit, not tempting our guilty tongues. JOSEPH CARUSO New York Copyright (©) by Joseph Caruso. All rights reserved.


TRAVELING: SESTINA Like a bird I take to air, fall migration, east to west. Follow sun over mountain and prairie, surrender my freedom, my space. Plane climbs clouds, fliers in comatose state. ride the wide-open road of the sky. Reminds me of sculpture, Climbing the Sky, mother, father, children ladder-step air while we trace boundaries state to state. Sun threads cloud, afterglow west, embers blossom in space, grass fields below and vanishing prairie. Autumn dusk transcends endless prairie, light slumbers early in evening sky. Extending wings, we glide through space, breath after breath, recycled air. Distance is time gained out west. Sun on my back and free mental state, I’d rather pedal my bike, carbon-free state— on trails, meadow and prairie. Bike both coasts, east and west. Savor salt-plumed sea air near shore and a fog-curtained sky. My legs pump rhythm, capturing space. A mile is a measure of space if you live in a mathematical state. Toss numbers aloft in mid-air, map roads that wind through a prairie. Take time to count stars in the sky, follow highways heading west. No Wicked Witch of the West lives here, no spell nor tantric space found in hallowed sky, 32,000 feet above world’s sorry state. Eagles and hawks own this prairie, join wings on wind, music in air. How lucky to shed earth’s state, skim air, a bird’s bliss in sky on the prairie— a space for my heart in the west. LORRAINE A. VAIL Florida Copyright (©) by Lorraine A. Vail. All rights reserved.


CHUCKLES FOR THE OUT-KID Being a half-Cherokee kid was a matter of fitting in to where I was out-fitted for admissions of identity, and confusions so personal no laughs could soothe them. I couldn’t abide the paths of least resistance: irony, after all, is my conduit to chance and to the notion that wolves chased rabbits down the center of my street. Remembering the uprootings, the tears trail, and the old name of the Delaware centered me in this world, a standard against the girls’ queries about an island origin. So I can chuckle at the innocence of the immigrants of Billy Penn, of the golden door, the galley slave who asked me, standing home, “Where are you from?” Like, my blood is a local river and creek and stream. When the street caves in again at 63rd & Market, they’ll never know why my arms will tingle. RON WELBURN Massachusetts Copyright (©) by Ron Welburn. All rights reserved.


SIX ON A STOOP we were all young kids back then, on the lower east side of new york, and in the summer time we sat outside on the stoop, watching the people pushing and shoving, and the pushcarts, and the garbage, and the noise… and we would make fun of it all, like little brats often do…there were six of us, all of us full of beans, for instance, little red-haired betty, with white stockings, sticking her tongue out as people walked by us, and saying stupid things, like nyah, nyah, nyah… there was irving, about ten years old, small, black hair, who made up songs as people walked by, and we all laughed as he pointed out people, and then there was harry, who lived in the same building, about eleven, and played a trumpet so loud we banged on his door… he would sit on the stoop with us and make noises with his mouth, like a trumpet…a real goof ball… in the summer time, when it was so hot, we made the stoop our meeting hall… we chewed gum, hit each other playfully, and threw things around, and that’s how the summer went for us…nobody gave a darn about tomorrow…we were just kids…in poverty… years later, as it does, one of us became a dancer on broadway, another became a famous song writer, and still another an orchestra leader, the other three never amounted to much, though they tried, because you can’t really get anywhere, sitting on a stoop on the lower east side, no matter how much you try ED GALING Pennsylvania Copyright (©) by Ed Galing. All rights reserved.


AN UNEXPECTED CALL Gone much of this February day To the annual health fair in the mall It was good to return to the warmth And comfort of home in the afternoon. Seeing the blinking red light on the phone I pushed it to hear there was one message. It said, “This is Nancy, Glen died peacefully This morning, I was right there by his side. I have taken care of the funeral expenses.” As I listened to every word from Nancy, I hoped she would leave a number. She went on to say in a soft voice… “The weather is bad so I can’t get back Off the hill. I’ll have a memorial service here this Sunday if the pastor can do it.” And, that was it, the message from Nancy. How I wanted to be able to contact her… to gently let this bereft stranger know she had called the wrong number. BEVERLY TAYLOR West Virginia Copyright (©) by Beverly Taylor. All rights reserved.