洞月亮 Cave Moon Press November 2017

FEATURED POET: Carol Alexander’s poetry appears in anthologies including Broken Circles (Cave Moon Press), Through a Distant Lens (Write Wing Publishing) and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 1.  She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in numerous print and online journals such as Bluestem, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, The New Verse News, Southern Humanities Review, and Soundings East. She is the author of the chapbook BRIDAL VEIL FALLS (Flutter Press). HABITAT LOST is Alexander’s first full-length collection of poems.

                                       



DEAN STREET

By the bus stop, dayshift workers gray-skinned in the April chill, stand lean marbles, granites, samples carved with exemplary names.

She’ll have eaten dinner, girded with a bib, in the last fastidious shafts of 
light. Our talk was of the flowering crabapple tree,
its quivering, avenging burst of bloom.

Rain blurs into bluestone snow the heft of ancient dolerite. And the fire-tipped shadows of dusk curtaining the windows of the hall have frightened her.

The bus, its exhalations choked with grime, is bearing down. Even now, I can’t describe for her the weight of this unwieldy, this inhuman thing.


BALANCE

You write, this is not fun. Two rockets arc above Tel Aviv
and in the streets, sirens and rubble. I forget you for weeks at a time
until you write about a trip to Mount Hebron, bellflowers, mignonette,
the grandchild’s bit of tooth, a logy rock agama in the sun.

I hope you’re getting a balanced view. There are bodies in red rags,
pensive cups of coffee after dawn, the drawing heat of the day.
Ordinary death proceeds with its modest civilities, prayers in shul.
In Khan Younis, a family shatters like a crystal cup; no prayer
will bind flesh to soul, no cool wind tame the burning of the coast.

Tell how it is for you, a garden with tall weeds, a son in the hills.
On your land, figs are slowly ripening despite the spider mites,
despite the lack of rain, the sirens louder than a mullah’s call.
Heat underlies the very ground where traders shook out silk.

You hope the dusty rocks and rags will be reported truthfully.

You hope, worried by tomato rot, to grow old

WRITE YOUR POEM

Modifiers. Do your modifiers create focus for the reader or focus for an English lit major?
Adjectives.  Adverbs.  Create a picture for the reader.  When we used to use SLR 35 mm cameras we had control of the focus?  Focus your poem for the reader.