Issue #26.11 A Triple Issue: Luca D’Anselmi, Alan Altany, and Laurinda Lind
Three Poems by Luca D’Anselmi
Tomatoes
We’ve brought tomatoes by to help with the pain
in her chest. They’re healthy raw. I won’t complain
that they grow unasked for in our yard,
pull lattice off the porch, crawl through bars
on the doors, or have that metallic aftertaste.
They’re heirlooms, hearty, with thick flesh shaped
around four interlocking chambers.
We tried to rip them out last September
and I bent my shovel on empty helmets
buried under them, the size of stomping buckets,
and massive bones with charcoal marrow
as if they were consumed inside somehow.
But the vines grew back. Our yard is overwhelmed
with more tomatoes than we can eat ourselves.
Poetess
Cancers grow in my mother where I did.
Stone fetuses who clamor to be fed.
They cry for milk and honey in their tea
just how she likes it. Should I slide a reed
into her throat to pour them what they want?
I hear them gurgling up poems they found
half-written in her heart where it’s still warm.
They plagiarize. Should I threaten to call
the hermit from his pillar in the sky
to curse them from her with his hairy hands?
Or should I plead? Stop, stop, little brothers,
stop, you do not know what you are doing.
Should I deceive them, like the poets do,
who always mingle half-lies with half-truths?
Why won’t you see that she’s already dead?
You cannot take her life away like I did.
Dormition
If you can’t sleep, count the twelve tall men
whose long, painted hands are missing fingers,
then count the flowers caught in porcelain
vases by her feet. The thick scent lingers,
though after three days she still seems asleep
on the hard slab, almost as if she can
arise and greet the brightness that proceeds
forth from the corner, where a six-winged man
descends, kisses her, and takes a tiny child
from her mouth. Its face is like her face.
Held tight now in his motherly embrace,
it coos, clings to his burning breast, and smiles.
And then they’re gone. Her face grows greyer.
Count the tall men leaving one by one,
past the dark threshold, into the brilliant doorway,
their foreheads catching fire from the sun.
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Luca D'Anselmi holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Bryn Mawr College and teaches Latin and Greek. His poetry has recently appeared in The Hopkins Review, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. More at lucadanselmi.com.
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Three Poems by Alan Altany
Poems to God
No. 11
To be as useless
as a bird-in-flight
or as pointless
as random beauty
echoes idle wisdom
& latent imagination
acting without action,
doing nothing at all
with nothing undone,
an invisible weed
by a busy pathway,
moonlight floating
on a still pond,
a tattered banana
leaf silently flapping
in a summer breeze.
May I be as latent
as an unwritten poem
& as graciously useless
as Your holy emptiness.
No. 15
They say You are crazy
in love with each of us
even ego-infested me
madly willing to abandon
Yourself to ungodly ugly
suffered compassionate
descent into grotesque
humanity without delay
in divine embarrassment
& absolutely innocent
wisdom of the heart
willingly betraying all
godliness & propriety
to be born as a blood-
throbbing baby boy
destined for pure dying
& of ungoding Yourself
in infinite humility
loving us to death
with insane sanity.
No. 28
Unbelief as no rare stranger
a random dark night’s visitor
crowding out Your silence
with broad bandwidth static
in momentary intellectual
intimacy with atheism’s
bleak & stalled absurdities,
a transient & traumatic
dystopia of profane Sundays
like beauty turned ruthless
& hope morphing towards
a circling inferno of despair
for all who dare enter there.
Giving a certain sympathy
with the plight of unbelief,
my bouts of rejecting You
as consuming as they were
bashed through vacuums
of an always abandoned,
always orphaned universe,
springing so improbably
into a strange faith in You,
nascent & ancient at once.
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Alan Altany has BA & MA degrees in Catholic theology, and a Ph.D. in religious studies (University of Pittsburgh). After an academic career, he is a semi-retired, septuagenarian professor of Comparative Religions at a small college in Florida, USA. In the past he has also been the founder & editor of a small magazine of poetry (The Beggar’s Bowl), a high school teacher, factory and lawn maintenance worker, hotel clerk, novelist, delivery truck driver, etc. He has published three books of poetry for a series, “Christian Poetry of the Sacred”: A Beautiful Absurdity (2022), The Greatest Longing (2023), and Intimations (2024). His poetry has been published by Tipton Poetry Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Valley Voices, Sand Hill Literary Magazine, The Hong Kong Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Montreal Review, and others. He writes with the steadfast support of his golden retriever, Zeke.
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A Poem by Laurinda Lind
Guarded
My grandmother was sixty-five before I could speak and by then she had braced for every bad thing, a closed circuit of cloudy worry, like
kids could be annihilated wading in water over their knees or crossing the road alone even out in the country, where we lived. But now that I am wary
too, I’ve found what made her flutter so, her city’s early 1900s newspapers still readable online, the many drownings they had in her day dug in, as they were,
at the edge of the dark river, and stories about souls sent on by technology no one as yet understood. She’s gone now, but while she was still here I wish
I had seen how scary it is just going forward, that she was taking her best stand against everything that is going to get us at the end.
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Laurinda Lind lives in New York's North Country, close to Canada. Some of her poems are in Atlanta Review, Xavier Review, and Spillway. Her first chapbook, Trials by Water, was released in summer 2024 (Orchard Street Press). She has won four international poetry awards.
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