Recently Published Work
What follows is a sample from our recently published Summer 2009 edition of Clare.
Brent Fisk
To Love and Cherish
How many shallow graves
mar the fields and woods?
The long grass holds secrets well,
whispers to the hardened bones
it cradles just below the loam.
As the day bleeds out, a dusky breeze slips up
like a woman in a crinoline dress.
The corn looms above the road
and giant humming towers fence the land.
And there in the evening kitchen,
a balding man lets his eyes go soft,
remembers buried treasure
as he kisses his sons goodnight,
dismemebers the old monsters lurking
in the black closets of his past.
His handswork the tension from the knotted
back of the woman who will say one day
that she loved him blindly,
her inadequate door closing on strangers
who want to know all about the man she can't quite picture
digging holes in the woods.
His fave in family photographs
hovering above her children's.
His eyes, their eyes,
their soft breathing, his soft breathing.
E. Louise Beach
Snake
And the great dragon was cast out,
that old serpent called the Devil...
Revelation 20.2
You've named me: malice,
malignant ripple on water and earth.
You've said I am death,
I say I am nature, made
secret, evening in a nest among hens,
foe to frogs harrumphing in a pond.
Isn't it enough I scrape flat-bellied, slide
among dead leaves and dung?
Like you, I want to linger in the sun,
calligraphy on a country road.
My tongue--bellweather--senses
wind like a finger, reads disaster.
Hither thither. Uncover.
Cold stone: my prison. Fear: my cell.