The Zingara Project

Tag: Sugar House Review

  • Clemens Kalischer by Mark Jackley

    In his pictures of people arriving from Europe after the war,
    his subjects are bone tired.
    Some are slumped like luggage,

    a few of them fast asleep. They are watchful in their dreams.
    Most look to be as ancient
    as an elephant’s eyes.

    They too escaped the hunter’s gun and will never forget.
    They are dressed for the occasion
    in suits and ties, dresses.

    Two girls on the dock are
    whispering and laughing, beaming like the secrets
    of a morning star.

    —

    Mark Jackley’s poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, Fifth Wednesday, Talking River, and other journals. His latest book is On the Edge of a Very Small Town. He lives in Purcellville, VA.

  • as dandelions popped by Nanette Rayman

    Tonight, from a distance, I saw my real life
    smiling and walking across the avenue with bells
    on, a sound sweet—for her—like the birds chirping
    at the last moment of Layla. And without a sound
    the blue-green brush strokes of sad altostratus
    clouds crosshatched the whole sky. A cassowary
    lost its quillish feathers in New Guinea, feet left
    to kick anyone in its path and a fortune-teller
    heavy with turquoise in a long flowing skirt looked
    at me for a long moment. On the other side
    of the Atlantic,  the Isle of Hebrides took
    on sun and people cried, weathered houses
    tilting in the wind, and eyes hooded by hands
    ready to caress wives and husbands as I sat
    down floppily on an old bench as dandelions
    popped, as pink pansies blossomed fuchsia,
    resigned and overwhelmed as the human soul.

    —

    Nanette Rayman, author of Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty and Project: Butterflies—Foothills Publishing. Winner of the Glass Woman Prize, included in Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010 is published in Stirring’s Steamiest Six, featured in Up the Staircase Quarterly. Other publications include: Sugar House Review, Worcester Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Little Rose Magazine, Rain, Poetry & Disaster Society, Pedestal, DMQ, carte blanche, Oranges & Sardines, Sundog, and Melusine.