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Winter Melt 2009
Suzanne R. Harvey
Micki Myers
Daniel A. Rabuzzi
Bryan Mitschell
Abha Iyengar
Willie Smith
Patricia Wong
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Stephen Drew
Alex Nodopaka
Patrick Carrington
Mannequin Envy in memory of poet and artist Douglas Gamrath
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M.Frost
Winter 2006
Directions
Follow signs to the cemetery
where daffodils endure spring
in bright coats of rain.
Turn left at the driveway
marked by a tombstone.
A woman waits for you at the house.
Her dog is dying.
Through her screen, you can smell
fresh-turned earth.
Join her at the back door, staring
at yellow spots that break the gray.
Intermission
The old man beside us is shushing his wife.
A man and a woman in the front row
fall asleep. The symphony dies to a cough.
Light returns, with polite applause.
The man and the woman jerk to life.
The bathroom is mobbed. Martinis
are a warmth in the gut. The memory
of music is like that also, reaching
around the lobby in a dream. The habit
of silence falls away, releasing a din, and in
its themes and variations sound human
horns across the reedy distance of the mezzanine.
Lights flash. The old man will shush his wife
again. The woman and the man will remember
the noise of horns in their dreams.
Drums and gongs resume.
Applause.
Drums.
Broken Mirror
Lives also can be shattered this way,
like your own, when you look
into the face of someone on the sharp
edge of loss, her own fracture points
obvious as a hammer.
Laundry
on the door w/ red thumbtacks,
a rug once oriental thru whose incanted patterns
the mesh of its underbelly wears out,
metal skeletons inside the walls, almost filthy
the great silver knees of exhaust pipes like
some titillating glimpse up a dancer’s skirt
(she’s sitting, girlish, w/ her knees together,
one teasing foot crooked away), then
in comes the cart, rusted replacement
for the wheels that skidded on black ice
all the way thru the concrete median
on xmas day, mesh bags filled w/ the length
of a long-distance dissertation, outlines
of some systems theory stretching its seams,
the daughter-in-law lost to cancer,
as if she could be found w/ the detritus
of socks, among the sweepings of collected lint
in this room’s grimmer corners, everyone gone,
empty now, all i can hear is the power grid’s
awful humming, the low clothy thumps,
some rush as the machines expel dirty water,
replenish themselves again w/ the clean.
(from Advice to Young Veterinarians, a series):
The Milk Fever
My favorite, he pounded
the steering wheel.
When you arrive, they’re dying
all over the place. But
by the time your tires
burn the drive, they’re
alive—no
not just alive
but right as rain, thumping
tails against their sides,
chewing cud, knocking
heels against the cow pail.
Unless, he said then.
Unless, of course, and mind—
this will happen from time
to time—you kill ‘em
with your calcium, powerful
stuff, sure as nails in a
coffin, once in a while
one will kick the bucket.
2005 M.Frost
"When not writing, I work as a veterinarian in Pennsylvania. My has appeared in numerous venues, including Potomac Review, APJ, Nimrod, Pemmican and Philadelphia Stories. My first chapbook, Cow Poetry and other notes from the field, will be published in December by Finishing Line Press through their New Women's Voices Series. It is available through my website."
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