Mote

When she turned her gaze upon me,
I was a mote of dust
caught in a beam of sunlight
I was huge and beautiful
and bright.

I laughed and danced
and shone.

And when she turned away,
a cloud moved across the sun
and I was extinguished.

-Keith Trim

Who Are We?

Into the past
I go like a stranger
to discover why at night
I lay alone as a child
waiting for the front door
to slam, my father gone
to night-shift work,
and my mother, Marie, to enter,
unable to sleep, and tell me
tales of childhood
war, pursued by those
who, as she spoke,
seemed to enter the room,
Gestapo men in leather coats
who ordered me to pack
and descend to a waiting truck,
for I am still going to Auschwitz
though a grown man in 1998
I am still boarding the freight,
crushed against numbed, frightened
Jews and Gypsies and Russian
soldiers and homosexuals
crossing frontiers to be gassed

I am her, in my heart,
though I am six feet two
and two hundred and ten pounds
and have played college football
and served as a soldier
and have scars from fights
with knives and jagged
bottles smashed on bars

I am still her, little girl,
hiding in chicken coops
and forests, asleep on dynamite
among partisans
I am still her, brushing teeth
with ashes
from the ruins of nations
gutted in war

I am still her brown eyes
and black hair of persecution
foraging scraps of thistle soup,
a star-shaped patch
sewn to my shirt

I am still my mother
every day in the streets
of New York or San Francisco,
the chimney skies glow and swirl
with soot like night above
a crematorium, or the Bronx
incinerator chute where I
threw out trash in a brick
darkness shooting sparks

I am still her in the streets
of Berkeley, walking among
sparechangers, dyed-hair punkers,
gays in stud leather, Blacks,
Mexicans and Asians

I am still her rounded up
among poets and thieves
and politically incorrect
social deviants
on sun-drenched sidewalks
in the Mission and the Haight,
Greenwich Village, the Lower
East Side, or anywhere the weird
congregate in tolerance

And every day in this age
of intolerance,
in a mental ghetto
affirmed by the homeless,
I pass the dying
with the loud ring of my boots,
ashamed to think that perhaps
my heels are the last thing
they heard
Every day I am a
survivor of AIDS and poverty

Every day I sit in cafes
watching tattoos turn to numbers
and I grow angry
I want America back
I want America to be
the home I never had

And you, who are you
if you hear my voice?
Who are you, stranger
if you read these words?

Who are we
who stand threatened
in these times of darkness?
Who are we, condemned to die,
who do not know ourselves
at all?

-Alan Kaufman

another night has slid by me without sleeping a wink

well maybe i fell into the keyboard twice
but no more than that and for some reason
i'm still going to be fine - today

so it is saturday and i've been
awake since thursday morning...

and the crickets’ legs have fallen off
waiting on me to shut my eyes
and i toss them in fire
just a bit
crunchy and hot
and i like the way they ooze
upon my tongue.
and i saw parrots flying
in the middle of the city
of bridgeport
and i knew overlapping
was possible.

and yesterday i did not think
i'd miss the night
but i did.
and here it is daybreak
and my eyes are just as tangoed
as the day before.

and i wonder...
if the scientists are right -
we need to sleep to forget
in order to remember better
and i have too many little details
still stuck in seat cushions of synapses
and they are gluing up the pathways
and i can't remember the big things anymore...
like how not to fuck up a friendship.
like how not to abandon your guts
like how not to listen to your dick
when your head is flying straight
for a change.

-Maggie Shurtleff

Since a girl and another century

I've been waiting. I also exchange my innocence
for a profitable iris and two words.
I've a dress of color and a puppet of borrowed conscience.
I've sat down to graze sheep and I've walked alone
through the alleys of some neighboring town.
I've breathed the rain on the faces of the gargoyles,
its polished brilliance in the teeth of the shore.
I've gone where there's room and I've also
hoped from the pockets of passers-by.
I've dined at the port and slept
with the ghosts of those full of hope
and the colonels of war.
I've known the solitude,
the whale calf that sleeps
in the conquests of the wind.
Belive me: I've been waiting. I still don't know
what for, definitely.
Let autumn begin.
Let Penelope finish her shroud of love
an elegy of papier mache
a medieval dance piece
an arm that isn't mine
a cat for my sister
a bear's claw
a house on the hill
a forest
a heart

-Anisley del Carmen Miraz Lladosa