At Sea (Bridget Schwartz)

Whenever I'm on a body of water, whether crossing the bay in a ferry or in a swan shaped paddle boat in a shallow pond, I'm reminded of my childhood wish.  My nine-year-old self fully expected that Prince Caspian of Narnia would sail up in his ship, The Dawn Treader, take me on board, realize my superiority over all the other nine-year-olds on earth and marry me. I imagined living with him on his ship, the dragonhead on the prow, the red and white striped sails, our cozy cabin with a hammock that we would share.  My imagination was not able to get past the "share the hammock” part, but dwelled more in how I would learn to pee in a chamber pot while the sea rolled the ship around.  I would do this without spilling and without waking the Prince.  I would travel to the edge of the sea and meet Aslan; I would do so many wonderful things in that groovy land that I didn't ever have a Plan B.  Now I'm a receptionist in a highrise and look out at the sea all day--the Dawn Treader never comes, but I do get catered lunch.

Bridget Schwartz has a fantastic apartment.

Open Windows (Rob Dalton)

brushing teeth in evening

light, losing the edges

of things, the clarity

seeping into shadow

and the trees holding

absolutely still —

at home with leaving

light to wane as it will.

and to think: millennia

heaved past while life

did what it would

in what light was available,

before the binary code

in the windows of houses

signaling their passage

through the deepening dark.

Rob Dalton of Karass writes.

At Sea (Amy King)

It's Hers, This Mine I Mine for Black Apple Butter

They’re just leaking ocean
carbon into the harbors of green,
algaeic marshes where the dow dips
deep and the cradle stems blue
root up to us.  It all bends:
my spine, the mucked blood
through my black-bloated heart
that thud-thumps and turns
the tides into rolling
sea slugs on sand never asking me
over to dine on sandy tar balls
poised by the searing tan lines.  
We burn as pretty and gruesome
as the liver of Dr. Frankenstein.
I grew up by lakes and ponds,
not seas nor gallons of turtles & pelicans.
I've never chewed the task of their flesh
or war painted beaks or piled my barrels
with their bones. But I do, I hand rant
and roll and ride in my limos and ask
for more when the escargot grunts
down the slide of my throat,
when the fish meat sticks
in the craw of my larynx,
when my gills start to melt
with the grit of my gout,
my buckets of ale and
rotting vegetable wells.
My fork digs hard,
my spoon jackhammers
and I never slow down
the thrum of give-me-more belly,
drilling out loud. Crude is the stroke
of this life, these hearts pounding hard,
whether human bird crab or frog.
They beat against one, the earth on fire,
her blood belching out on the floor
just so, all over everything now.
So begins the tide of crossing things out.

Amy King is a poet and teacher.

Sweet Things (Leslie Jamison)

Where I work, we sell guilt. We sell chocolate cakes, carrot cakes, red cakes, blue cakes, big cakes, small cakes, dark cakes, light cakes. We sell cupcakes. We sell biscuits with oozing cores of strawberry jam. Every so often I’m asked: Do you sell anything savory? This is a place where the notion of eating for function—eating for anything but sheer, gratuitous, useless pleasure—has been expelled so that it doesn’t have to be reckoned with. A local eating disorders clinic brings its recovering anorexics to our tables. They choose slowly, painfully, deliberately. They choose single cookies, the smallest ones in diameter. They do not choose cupcakes. I can forget their faces but not the way their hands flutter by their sides—pointing, choosing, retracting.

I work the kitchen and the register. I make and then I offer. I scoop sugar from bins the size of park benches. I decorate thousands of cookies a week. I wear a pink shirt and a high ponytail. I sweat. I get paid nine bucks an hour to give people permission. I really shouldn’t, they say. I say: you should. I say: go ahead. Occasionally they ask: Do you have anything low-fat? Why keep the pronoun gender neutral? It is always she asking this question. And she always wants me to say no. She doesn’t want the choice. She wants me to permit her this indulgence—you deserve it; no really, you do—so she can permit herself. Put another way: our glass case is full of small acts of forgiveness. I forgive them for these chocolate croissants and pecan sticky buns, these sugar-dusted biscuits and their blood-red jammy hearts.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Gin Closet.



Rafael Ungson

Rafael Ungson Design