ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Assimilation

Listen Kevin,
I too once believed
that Portuguese workers stole
jobs from the Irish, forced them
off the docks and out of the mills,
in southern New England.
But it was all a hoax,
another line
fed us by our fathers,
Irishmen and Scots,
too proud to beg for work.
They didn't want those jobs
any more than you or I would;
they wanted better clichés
for their children.
When the "good life" eluded them,
they invented prejudice,
being predisposed
to the bigotry
of immigrant families;
and I'm certain the Portuguese
say the same thing
about the current crop of settlers,
who have supplanted them,
from the islands, Asia,
or South-of-the-Border.
It's the old American saw,
first spoken by the Wampanoag
after Thanksgiving
with Standish and the Pilgrims:
"There goes the neighborhood."

                          —for Kevin Bezner



Creptsedge
I awoke in our ghosthouse, alone.
The room musty and the sheets stained with self-love.
To open the window, I had to lean across the half-empty bed.
The bay breeze was full of our misfortune.
Our love fell dead away like blood draining too quickly from the arteries.
Yesterday we walked out where the water meets the sedge.
I tried to disavow the creeping sedge, but the cord grasses whispered,
       "Fool."
You tried to balance yourself on little tussocks in the marsh,
but your toes couldn't gain purchase, were useless from self-abuse.
The dun-color of the salt-stained sedge matched the color of your feet.

How ugly your feet were, gnarled like pitch pine.
When I told you this, you didn't react, too self-absorbed.
There was a chill in the air; autumn, or not autumn—
the end of summer.
      It was also the end of our story.

A parting. Devoid of sorrow, absent drama.
I walked alone to that ditch where the sedge had colonized a dirt scar.
In that opening by the dry tide-pool (where we had once had sex,
each of us thinking of someone else--), at last self-aware,
I felt the sedge gather in, as if it were creeping, inch by inch…




Hoarfrost & Rime
(or, Life Above 60 degrees Latitude)

Hoarfrost and Rime will soon embrace
devil's club, spruce, and kinnikinnik,
sharpening autumn colors in fading light.
Now the last blueberries, overlooked
by dozing bears, await Raven's bidding;
now tundra swans gabble and "woo-ga-loo,"
bespeaking summer's too-swift passage,
as the sun lowers its angle over river and tundra,
over those of us who call the Great Land home.