ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

FOUR POEMS
by Daniel Nester


[Fresh from the philosophy]

Fresh from the philosophy
department I lay out
all my writings like
some security blanket --
so many certainties
hulk down this hallway
makes me a nervous
and uneasy secretary.
But for now these print-outs
reassure me, especially
the poems you’ll never see
dear reader -- One thing
I love about my
unfinished tracts is
my putting square
brackets around the title --
A first line copied and bolded
as if I work through
my own undiscovered
juvenalia right here -- as if
the first lines jog the ears
of a scholar couple
from a college press --
watch them snuggle there
with my galleys in some
wide-eyed decade. Maybe
I’ll be remembered for
using informal contractions --
how in a time of poems
with strange and formal
Star Trek-like
formal exchanges
I at least rallied
to toil the world back
to conversation --
not strung out down some
vast corridor offices --
but rather a chat
with a nervous man
who lives like a child.

Effusive Letter to a Friend in Crisis

They're taking bodies from graves tonight,
As they do every night, and
Psychic toddlers find

Surprised road crews
Hidden on lunch hour
And offer them pieces of fruit.

You say you might not want to exist
Where the purest effects of your life
Can't bask under a full spread of stars.

Whichever the case, the sweet hum
Of this earth continues, Darling--
The high tweet of nerves,

The low drum of blood,
Both out-octaved
By a single crow.

Those kids don't know any better.
Neither does the crow.
No one's told either to hide behind trees,

And no one gets used to the white lights between stars.





Melodramatic Self-Portrait in Dead of Winter

I don't want to say this coldly, but nothing happens with me.
I see my hands move, and at times I adore watching them
gesture wildly, but nothing happens. I could be on Lower Broadway
on a Saturday afternoon, flailing away, and not one German
puts down their bags to watch. So there's much work to be done.

What I mean to say is I've tried--I've tried to save my hands
up for special occasions, for that one vital sign, to try to have my own
crude way of saying things. My dreams of shitting in my childhood house,
for instance--In these dreams, I'm not a child, I'm a full-grown adult
squatting on a newly waxed kitchen floor. A few transfigured
dirt-filled dreams like this could move one to gesture, I guess,

but almost by accident. In this way, my words are cold,
just as yours are. I, I who have nothing but premature fruits in spring,
plucked early and tucked under my neck, as if they could be nuzzled
and used at some later, warmer date. I see all these legs on one crowded street
and know the world will wait for me. Spring will soon come, the gloves will be off,
and my hands will catch up with my head. Then I'll move my hands where I want.

Odysseus' Scar

When I come home from a long trip
my wife feels my forehead,
touches my scar from right to left.

She doesn't know how it got there
but knows to check.
When I get home

I'll strum some chords by the fireplace
and eat a bowl of sugared cereal.
As with most trips, I didn't learn anything-

and I try to take some lessons home,
as they say. But I can't reconcile the dream,
the outside's syntax of wonder

with the near-hugs of boys
I grew up with. We're all so thick-skinned now!
And the kisses we had up in the tree forts--

remember? The girlie magazines stashed
under trash bags? The rain finally soaked them.
Night fell through a potholed clearing

and I fell on concrete steps, running, bleeding.
All this bitterness of want and sleep
moves in versions of death, where all

anything is about, ever,
is escaping the town where you were born.
When I get home from a long trip,

I grab my guitar, play some cowboy chords, feel
the rosewood neck, sit on the couch
and lie down with my lady.

I will stroke the stubble hairs
on her thighs, and look into her face
for a long, long time.