Two Days to NaPoWriMo

As usual, I will be posting my poem-drafts here from the beginning until the end of April, and then they'll all disappear due to the magick of the interwebs fairies. I may occasionally send you to other blogs to see what's up there, too. I'm having a difficult time getting into the right groove for this year. It will, considering the family's health, be the worst year ever for me to keep up, so I'm giving myself a head start and posting a draft tonight that I wrote a few days ago. I want to be a couple poems ahead of the game, so I don't stress when I miss a day, as will do. This one needs a new ending, but I haven't seen it yet. :-/

Dowsing

The forest for the trees, he said as the cows lowed.
The sun dropped behind the mountain in blue-orange fire.

First you sit a minute to clear your mind,
he said, and plopped down on a chunk of granite.

Closed his eyes. I watched his eyelids tremble and still.
Best is wood, he said finally, hold a forked branch

with a hand on each side of the fork and relax your
palms. Soon you'll feel the water pull at you like

a real strong wind. After a few moments he said,
this wood's no good for witching water. He straightened

some wire hangers into elongated L shapes with a belt tool.
Now here you hold the small bit of the L in each hand.

Hold them in front of you till the bars cross. There's
your water. He closed his eyes. My father with us

closed his eyes. I kept mine open to see the wires
cross into an X. Mark the spot, he said. And went

to his knees slowly to thank the Lord. My dad
lit a cigarette and sighed. Uncle Marty handed me

the military shovel, olive-green with purpose.
Now dig, he said. There's your wellspring.

The ground soft and loamy. I dug and dug.
Eventually we drilled, and found nothing.

Comments

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Corey Mesler

I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,

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