Questions Asked Knowing Why

     by Ted Fleischman

You'd think you would...
It'd be easy
like sitting or thinking
or nothing.

But the house...
You are committed to its stifling heat.
Your heart tells you,
Your heart tells you its despair, like the last time...

You'd think you would...

Here the house fire rose

     by Gus Gustafson

Here the house fire rose,
the hearth fire rose on Xmas Eve,
arms and shoulders of a companionable
being warm and guileless energies linked
with quick tongues to secure good memories,
moments that might be counted on to hold
real promise in the face of Fate.

The small fire behind the andirons
on the hearth refused to flag, to gather
gracefully into shards of oak, become hot
coals, dying embers. Instead they
grew, those arms and shoulders flexing,
reaching, swelling up to search the chimney where
unguarded fragments of wooden framework leapt
at the chance to become more than aging relics
of earlier seasons, where sparks and stars
danced with then blanket of black for ages.

Four ire engines arrived in five heady minutes
to douse oak hopes, and rough gloves
opened raw flashes in weathered brick and mortar.
The night was fine, and neighbors came out
bare-armed or in shirtsleeves for glimpses
of what could have been tragic but
was kept small by quick calls and expert action,
a fine light drama of an entertaining evening.

Two months after the firenight's defying
defeated phoenix finally starts restoration
of the fireplace. But, no, not classic
firebrick and mortar with full-
fledged chimney rising
to the harvest moon or Big Dipper--no!
Human lungs, especially old or damaged ones,
hate the taste and abrasiveness of what's
breathed in on smoggy Berkeley nights and days.
Thus the City has recently decreed no new
wood-burning fireplaces will be permitted.
The seven-veiled dance of flames to be tamed
to natural gas, the chaste and companionable
fuel fit for a life of quietude, with
the occasional thrill of a night star
shooting no one, simply breathing in,
and then Out.

The Future As A Pear

     by Mark Taksa

Imagining the taste of her pears,
I entertain the naked girl with a story
about a bird that lands by a window,
balances on one foot, and carries a flame
in the other claw. Her smile is the chiseled ice

of the president’s lips. Love, I urge,
is a painter who brushes a fire into a cold thing.
She yanks her coat over her shoulder, proves
love is more than artful brushing.
If you are a lover of the body,

you will recognize that sting I feel,
which I felt in some other city
on some other afternoon, when I drove
by a biker, and that sting pushed my eye
to an opening under her dress.

My future is the amount of my mouth
on the naked girl’s pear. I tilt my arms
like wings and push out my words, hoping
to compose a fable the nude craves
as I balance on one foot.

Napoleon At The Fish Market

     by Mark Taksa

The judge studies the fish as if it were a constitutional issue.
We reach for that same fin, as if it was the last cocktail
at the fund raiser for the plaintiff for love.
Imagining her own lips in the smile over my book
of recipes, the judge promises to let me buy the halibut
if I come to her chamber to teach her to cook.

The fish dealer takes the ice from under the fin
and drops it into his cocktail. He inhales
as if the fishy odor is perfume and says
Napoleon loved a woman with a fishy odor
and bought her the best silk, would
have paid the high price of this halibut.

The tightness of the judge’s jeans
reveals her path of judgment. From her gaze, I guess she is judging
whether the hand she waits for me to stick under my shirt,
in the pose of the emperor, should slide under hers.

When I was a kid I was schooled by an old tire I stole.
Its explosion announced my bad grade.
When my buddies drove away to witness the girls
wiggle on the boardwalk, I patched rubber—
so I buy the halibut without knowing its price.

Con Artists On The Beach

     by Mark Taksa

Tricky as a magician draining beer
into a false bottomed mug, I empty coins
from hands of gamblers into my pocket
open to a hole under a palm tree.

I carry a satchel of dollars.
My mind wanders like a bony bird
among briny carburetors on the beach.

You winked to show me the other
players' hands. Now you swim from the daffodils
of your dress, on waves my eye transforms
into a bed of cash that cannot melt.

Fuck honesty! You play a banjo,
singing that only the artist of the trick
strokes the vulture perched on a Buddha.

The Question

     by Judy Maher

She wonders if she slipped unstrung
into a rock-bottom stream under aspens
would she trouble herself to get up
or let the water flow her
like icy earth blood?

Or if she overdosed on bitter pills,
then wavered among visions and revisions,
would she call 911—
Help me, I’m failing and not getting up,
afloat on feathers of everafter
and what could be better?
Truth is, her body would decide.
It would thrash and retch,
comb its hair, change its clothes,
wander off in search
of chocolate, a Springsteen song,
orgasm, a mountaintop.
Truth is, her puny self
is lashed aboard an animal.
Tooth, nerve, tissue—
the living stuff of her—
ramble her days without her consent.
Oxygen and appetite are in charge.
Yet who can say she does not know
that where her body goes
is where she wants to go?
She wonders how she can bless
this relentless bone-beast which,
even warped and wrinkled, snuffles
with lolling tongue and ardent eyes
over the brink of moment, then
moment, then tomorrow,
until at last it too is done, undone,
and lays her down with a whisper,
Now I say enough, now I say we rest. enough, I say . . .
Now rest.