Volume One, Number
Three
December 2009
Dark Lady Poetry is an online literary
magazine, with a focus on poetry. With an eclectic taste,
anything goes, and we encourage up and coming writers in their
pursuit to be read. Good words are always
appreciated.
Happy Holidays! Number Three is here, and is
very proud to be ornamented with exceptionally adroit authors.
December’s issue becomes home to the words of a well crafted
poet from Kennydale, Washington, Judith Skillman, and
Ivy Torres, a wistful writer also
well known as Hedra Helix. Benjamin Neal brings an
impressive poem to the table and Dark Lady is
also happy to have Clifford K. Watkins,
Jr. and California poet, Micheal
Padilla.
Due to a high volume of submissions and a
marvelous amount of readers, issues will now appear on a
monthly basis, with new issues live on the fifteenth of every
month.
Thank you again, to our readers and
contributors. We still have room in the upcoming January Issue.
Check out the submissions page for more
information.
Be sure to check out the new subscription feature and receive
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contests, and future events.
Judith
Skillman
Such a Long Life
Ivy
Torres
Seeded
Lizard
Jerky
Tribulation
Benjamin
Neal
Sweat and
Steel
Clifford K. Watkins,
Jr.
Fiery Graffiti
& Stars
To Fathom
Tranquility
Clear-headedness
Michael
Padilla
The Deeds That
Define Me Never Find Peace
Judith
Skillman
Such a Long
Life
After
Jack Gilbert
At
first it is just the salt-taste of bridges,
the strangeness of
animals,
the orange horizon
scrawled
by winter sunset. We take this
lineage in,
and it gives us back our own,
like Bluebloods
persecuted in a forest. We come
to be afraid
of limned windows, the
strangers
behind blinds, the streetlights
haloed
by myopia, the past pulling all
our fathers
into hunger’s single crib. The
more we stare
at the moon, the more we see its
pockmarks
and pits, seas and valleys where
once
the surface was undisturbed. In
this
we are like the children we
bear,
who give back their
immortality
as if it were nothing more than a
coin
to be thrown in a well after the
one wish was made.
With little more than half a
moon
and the rain-gnawed spit-misted
sun,
we come of age in order to bear
luster,
to beat our short arms
against the swath of blue-green
that hovers
in the brevity between earth and
sky.
Ivy
Torres aka Hedra
Helix
Seeded
Storm season over, stooped they
trek
the long dusty
road,
arms up, shielding
eyes
red of potato blight
anyway,
drippy noses looking hewn of
mushed together pieces of bread dipped in milk,
and you may not notice
me
but I am one of
them.
And I am suffering.
*
I trudge, head bent.
Attention strictly kept to the
corner of my mind still vividly alive.
Whom I shuttle kernels of
corn,
edible flowers I pick covertly
from the shoulders
-butter,
I send all fat nutrition straight
to it.
I keep my hope dreaming
there
heavy upon plump violet
pillows,
fanned by exquisite long lashed
women.
I arrange it late dates with the
lankiest of strange breathed boys,
in olive groves grown thick in
temporal wormholes where consequence looses all hold and my
imagination can wallow and waft and keep its own in
time,
deliverance declined for the ruby
heart of a moment, wild still, unquestioned.
These boys transmuting into fine
minded friends and fine sense of self. Clear memories of stance
and pages and pages and books of inspired passage made during
long nights when new talents are discovered, to be cemented the
next morning in the brightness of the sun.
Most days, while the body of me
toils foot after foot in front of the other, this is the piece
that waves me on, promising persistently, a way.
-Don’t know how it is I got so
un-solid, really.
Life’s sand slipping through my
grasp once a fist grabbed from a beach of endless
possibilities. It feels empty in my hand,
just now.
The holes in the world today,
somehow winning.
*
And yet,
unquestionably,
I still see hope in tomorrows
equilibrium.
I conjure little boys in blue,
and little girls in pink.
Populate my landscapes drawing
them clutching in both hands jars of herbs and spice that once
rained from the tiny top holes turn to black shiny seed that
when they touch the soil spring forth unquestioned fertility
from lands unintended.
Surprise flowers x 7 arising in
the nodes of the leaves folding forth from sinuous vines, bees
buzzing in from far off lands coming to pollinate the fruits of
my temporary sorrows -as I watch with stubborn pride, praying I
recognize the yield.
I chew my lips until salty blood
runs to flavor in flavors of yesterday the sustenance of my
promised tomorrows,
and I chase the freedom of my
children skipping across their meadow
my mind telling me we are set out
as so,
“So do not give it
up.”
and to follow.
Lizard
Jerky
Go.
*
Lay down like a lizard in the desert
belly-up on the pave
sun above
cars speeding down,
refuse the water
'cus yer crazy.
I'll pick you up in a week
an put you in my pocket
where you'll promptly break in half.
Stiff,
lizard
jerky.
Tribulation
These
days, past twilight, the tender tears do my walking if I need
them to,
the sand between my
toes
as magic -time travels my feet
and then my body, to new years eve, when I was three and my
father was lost in a canoe on the ocean.
Tender like young bamboo
are
those baby memories of fear and
then the next day, of picking bittersweet fruit from sidewalk
trees and eating them anyway in smiles, cus' my pallet was
different. My tongue making stranger fractions when wrestling
words that sounded best on island breezes.
Little crabs my
playmates
and the sound of the beach
calling me home like a beacon
well trained on the taste, of
seaside contemplation.
Cus', though I was a
child
- I felt the water in my
life.
*
One day they said "Say
goodbye!"
So I waved, in my little girl
style.
Quick as a plane travels I landed
smack dab in the city.
Dreams of growing up needing
rapid adjustment, as the serpentine winds of life folding over
the before took me like jazz notes to somewhere
deeper.
Where suddenly, I spoke with an
accent.
You ask, then:
What happens to a prince married
to a paupers daughter when they step out of the lime light and
start to live? What happens to their child?
I’ll tell you:
Tears and tribulation, cold days
in the sun.
Benjamin
Neal
Sweat and
Steel
Early afternoon at a local garage down on the
corner,
And all the boys are
there;
I pull my old Chevy up to the
door.
“Back it on in,” says Don,
nonchalant.
The tools are assembled, the air
tank fully charged,
But if you’re a car guy, then you
know how it goes;
Everything is easier said than
done.
Some broken bolt heads, a missing
window motor,
The new door doesn’t latch quite
right…
But for every problem, there is a
solution – or a shortcut.
Now no handful of guys ever
gathered around an automobile,
But that there was a beer in
every other hand,
And a stack of empty cans growing
steadily taller.
The talk is all
testosterone,
All masturbation and American
muscle.
The spectators are shouting their
encouragements
Between frequent trips to the
john –
“Brace your foot right there, and
give it hell!”
After much cussing and grunting,
and a few busted knuckles,
The project nears
completion;
The final screws are screwed in
place.
The floor is swept, the tools put
away,
Everyone lifts their drink in
celebration of a job well done.
The topic of conversation quickly
shifts from horsepower to pussy
As loose talk is further loosened
by the steady flow of booze.
We pass the hours ‘til closing
time
Telling stories and laughing at
dirty jokes.
We shout and sing along as Elvis
croons
“Polk Salad Annie.”
And later, when Dave decides its
time to close up shop,
I glimpse them in my rearview
mirror as I drive away,
And I smile.
Gray and greasy, in all their
half-drunken glory,
Swaggering like sailors across
the lot,
No men anywhere, anytime, were
ever so honest –
And none were ever so full of
shit.
They are like the earth itself,
all crude and dirty,
All rough edges, raw and
unpolished.
They are the remnants of a proud
and ancient tribe,
A brotherhood forged of sweat and
steel.
Beneath their banner, engineers
and ex-cons,
Hippies and hillbillies, addicts
and alcoholics,
Are bound together, denying no
one
Who comes with wrench in hand and
willingness to work.
Clifford K. Watkins,
Jr.
Fiery Graffiti
& Stars
With a gait that yearned for
consolation
You descended into a vale with a derelict soul
Our eyes met as shields of armor vanished
Leaving my heart defenseless in absence of breastplate
And as your flour-hued flesh quivered
All the stars in your eyeglasses couldn’t remedy our
blindness
To Fathom
Tranquility
While his
faint voice reverberated in tedium
A craven mime scarcely hovered
above the abyss
With a roving psyche that
conveyed drafts of lunacy
Then on a whim the racing
thoughts
Were razed by the fleeting
blaze
Of an alluring star
And at that moment
He could fathom
tranquility!
Clear-headedness
Brisk with
sobriety
Imagining your awe-inspiring
aura
As I hopscotch through a kingdom
of heartwarming dreams
Savoring every morsel of your
creativity
Ecstatically feeding on your
words of truth
I no longer gaze farther than the
rain-soaked glass
Trying to fathom the intricacies
of your soul
For I'm at peace with
myself
And the coagulated ballpoint is
for now
A trace of a vanishing
planet!
Michael
Padilla
The Deeds
That Define Me Never Find
Peace
The deeds that define me never find
peace
Infamy rides behind misread
eyes
It is what it was before it was
me
I don’t need routine, I have
family
You know, the kind that
evaporates
At the first sign of struggle?
Yeah that kind
And my world feels like an
avalanche
With one hand on an inhaler and
one on my
Favorite brand of
smoke
Fifteen minutes into the italics
That spoke to me but was
only
An unwelcome apparition to
everyone
I tried to share a fleeting
moment with,
I finally was able to comprehend
the pressure
Of our crawl space flex its
testosterone fueled claws
Close in on my ‘so called’
comfort zone,
With its fortified
authority,
But I refuse to accept
it
My enemies died
And all was fine in my fairytale
mind
Just like the imminent
destination
Laid out before us, god and
all
Finality is not that complicated
anymore
This whole shit storm is just an
unraveling
Mess of wires, cords, and
discord
Overlapped, underappreciated, and
misunderstood
One over and under the other of
another
On a grid we call the
universe
A microcosm of
masochism
Unbiased and elastic
I am
one with it
And I’ve never felt
So hollow
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