Behind the Drapes, poem by Roz Levine (Half New Year Poetry Series)

BEHIND THE DRAPES
by Roz Levine

Every Saturday night
As a middle school kid
I tucked my ugly self
Between two layers
Of living room drapes
Peeked from the window
Watched romance unfold
As beautiful Rosalie
With her beautiful blonde hair
Placed her arms around the neck
Of her beautiful blonde boyfriend
They pressed one beautiful body
Against the perfect symmetry
Of another beautiful body
Kissed and kissed and kissed
While I stared from behind drapes
Wondered if anyone, anywhere
Would love me like that.

IMAGE: “The French Window at Nice” by Henri Matisse (1919).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Roz Levine is a Los Angeles poet who has written poems since the age of eight. After retiring several years ago, writing became her number-one passion. Words have helped her navigate cancer and helped her maintain her sanity in a not-so-sane world. Her work has been published in various venues, including On The Bus, Forever in Love, Deliver Me, The Sun, Pulse, Cultural Weekly, and Poetry Superhighway.

Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Body Doubles, erasure poem by Wm. Todd King (Half New Year Poetry Series)

BODY DOUBLES
by Wm. Todd King

The lively ones
made age-old stories come to adolescence
as they took their licks with an iron hot hand,
each mistake and threat
a screwed up handful
of wrinkled ills tucked in with tape,
a throwing of wonder
in a land full of strange creatures
that picked up the annoying habit
of rolling over in half-naked thought.

SOURCE: “Body Doubles” by Wm. Todd King is based on page 63 of  I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action (Ballantine, 1998).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wm. Todd King is a Poet and Regulatory Compliance Supervisor living in Kentucky. He is the recent finalist in the Found Poetry Review’s Dog Ear Poetry Contest, and a participant in 2013’s Pulitzer Remix project. His works have appeared in STILL, the Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology, Life’s Vivid Creations, and Found Poetry Review.

Branch Library, poem by Edward Hirsch

BRANCH LIBRARY
by Edward Hirsch

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy
who perched in the branches of the old branch library.

He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks
and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor,

pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching
notes under his own corner patch of sky.

I’d give anything to find that birdy boy again
bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon

with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles,
radiating heat, singing with joy.

SOURCE: “Branch Library” appears in Edward Hirsch‘s collection Special Orders (Knopf, 2010), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “In a Land Far Away,” painting by Carol Berning. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote the national best seller How to Read a Poem. He has published eight books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.

Staying young, quote by Franz Kafka

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” FRANZ KAFKA

Artwork: “Flowers” (1964) by Andy Warhol

When You Are Old, poem by William Butler Yeats

WHEN YOU ARE OLD
by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Painting: “Blue William Butler Yates,” acrylic on canvas by Frank Cullen. Find prints of the portrait at fineartamerica.com.

teenagers down the shore, poem by win harms

teenagers down the shore
by win harms

memories of the ocean
sweet spring sweat trickles down my forehead
the sand stings my legs, as a crosswind
creeps up from behind
the salty sea is cold, numbing my bare feet
i hear my friends giggling ahead
and i laugh for no reason at all
you look at me and smile that secret smile
and for one moment we are alone in this
i can’t remember the taste of you
but i know i’ll understand you again
i get higher with the thoughts of days to come
we are sleepy with excitement
last night is so incredibly far away
we were older then, parading like sophisticates
we are young again, spinning in the sun
the past doesn’t matter and
the skeletons don’t feel like dancing
i am mapping out my life
and i want to see you there
with your eyes sparkling like the sea
we walk the boardwalk with the wind in our hair
creating everlasting impressions in time

Photo: “Summer Down the Shore” by funflash, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (16×20 metallic prints available at etsy.com)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: win harms is a poet living in France with her professor husband. She hails from the state of the cowboy poetry contest, but she has lived pretty much everywhere, including many psych wards, and considers herself a survivor of the struggle. The chaos has ceased and now she spends her time doing needlepoint and laundry, but longs to share her words with the world. As of last year, she left her roaring twenties, and is now feeling fecund and free. “Teenagers Down the Shore” and other poetry by win harms appears in the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology, available at Amazon.com.

Stickball, poem by Daniel Romo

STICKBALL
by Daniel Romo

Summers were a never-ending 7th inning,
and games stretched into the next day
when the sun no longer lit the cul-de-sac.

My brother’s knuckleball was an
experiment in flight pattern,
a taunting array of speculation:

                   juking and jutting,
       a hovering slow-dance
                                 inventing new steps
the batter could never learn.

My fastball was a humming blur of rocket science.

And whoever made contact deserved to
commandeer the moon.

The neighborhood kids were filler.

Portuguese soccer-playing
perpetual strikeout victims
always stuck out in right field,
because they were more skilled with their feet
than with their hands.

Today it’s the bottom of the 9th inning.
Two outs.

And we are dreamers posing as fathers
reminding our own children,
“Point your toe to the target.
Keep your elbow up.
And follow through on the pitch.”

Today I remember belting an old tennis ball
over the neighbor’s roof
into his backyard,
gliding around makeshift bases
with glorious fists raised
as if God was pulling our hands. 

PHOTO: “Stickball equipment” by Debbie Dell, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

“Stickball” appears in Daniel Romo‘s poetry collection ROMANCING GRAVITY, available at Amazon.com.

teenagers down the shore, poem by win harms

teenagers down the shore
by win harms

memories of the ocean
sweet spring sweat trickles down my forehead
the sand stings my legs, as a crosswind
creeps up from behind
the salty sea is cold, numbing my bare feet
i hear my friends giggling ahead
and i laugh for no reason at all
you look at me and smile that secret smile
and for one moment we are alone in this
i can’t remember the taste of you
but i know i’ll understand you again
i get higher with the thoughts of days to come
we are sleepy with excitement
last night is so incredibly far away
we were older then, parading like sophisticates
we are young again, spinning in the sun
the past doesn’t matter and
the skeletons don’t feel like dancing
i am mapping out my life
and i want to see you there
with your eyes sparkling like the sea
we walk the boardwalk with the wind in our hair
creating everlasting impressions in time

Photo: “Summer Down the Shore” by funflash, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (16×20 metallic prints available at etsy.com)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: win harms is a poet living in France with her professor husband. She hails from the state of the cowboy poetry contest, but she has lived pretty much everywhere, including many psych wards, and considers herself a survivor of the struggle. The chaos has ceased and now she spends her time doing needlepoint and laundry, but longs to share her words with the world. As of last year, she left her roaring twenties, and is now feeling fecund and free. “Teenagers Down the Shore” and other poetry by win harms appears in the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology, available at Amazon.com.

Staying Young, quote by Franz Kafka

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” 

FRANZ KAFKA

Artwork: “Flowers” (1964) by Andy Warhol

Key to the Highway, Poem by Mark Halliday

KEY TO THE HIGHWAY
Mark Halliday

I remember riding somewhere in a fast car

with my brother and his friend Jack Brooks

and we were listening to Layla & Other Love Songs

by Derek & the Dominos. The night was dark,

dark all along the highway. Jack Brooks was 

a pretty funny guy, and I was delighted

by the comradely interplay between him and my brother,

but I tried not to show it for fear of inhibiting them.

I tried to be reserved and maintain a certain

dignity appropriate to my age, older by four years.

They knew the Dominos album well having played the cassette

many times, and they knew how much they liked it.

As we rode on in the dark I felt the music was,

after all, wonderful, and I said so

with as much dignity as possible. “That’s right,”

said my brother. “You’re getting smarter,” said Jack.

We were listening to “Bell Bottom Blues”

at that moment. Later we were listening to

“Key to the Highway,” and I remembered how

my brother said, “Yeah, yeah.” And Jack sang

one of the lines in a way that made me laugh.

I am upset by the fact that that night is so absolutely gone.

No, “upset” is too strong. Or is it.

But that night is so obscure—until now

I may not have thought of that ride once

in eight years—and this obscurity troubles me.

Death is going to defeat us all so easily.

Jack Brooks is in Florida, I believe,

and I may never see him again, which is

more or less all right with me; he and my brother

lost touch some years ago. I wonder

where we were going that night. I don’t know;

but it seemed as if we had the key to the highway.

…from Mark Halliday‘s poetry collection Little Star (William Morrow & Co., 1987), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Mark Halliday is an American poet, professor and critic. He is author of five collections of poetry, most recently Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008). His honors include serving as the 1994 poet in residence at The Frost Place, inclusion in several annual editions of The Best American Poetry series and of the Pushcart Prize anthology, receiving a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, and winning the 2001 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.