We hid amid the swaying fields of sugar cane
when Castro overthrew that fool, Fulgencio,

you in your libidinous red dress that kept
all the men of Plaza Vieja very happy, every day
a procession after the bullfights and the executions;

I think I was dead every morning I was without you,
the statues of the city cold, but I understood them,

at night we drank and danced and then we retired to watch
all the old cars going fast under the trestles,

In the daytime, I worked right near San Cristobal,
trying to write like Hemingway on our old typewriter,

Come and sit with me in the gnarled
palm of the cypress tree – half a dozen
trunks grown from one root – and I will tell
you my plans. There are those who
walk with caves dragging at their feet;
for them we shall be the flashlights.
For those with masks around their necks
we shall bring the mirrors. Language
as beads on a finite string: like, love, loath,
we carry them with us and hurl them
at the silence, which shrinks and expands
with each death, every tiny birth.
Laughing, you tell me cypresses
cannot grow up here. I am alone, then.

No cacti do needlepoint
among pine, ash and birch.
Winter builds ice sculptures
on the lake. Hands cold
from shoveling, we listen
to Wayne Newton sing of
summer winds.

Kenneth Pobo won the 2009 poetry chapbook contest from Main Street Rag for his manuscript Trina and the Sky. In 2008, WordTech Press published his book called Glass Garden.

The mind's cupboard empties.
Soon, a yeasty warmth

rises until you see
the bread was always done.

Mark Jackley is the author of three chapbooks, most recently "Cracks and Slats" from Amsterdam Press. His first full-length collection, "There Will Be Silence While You Wait," is forthcoming from Plain View Press. He lives in Sterling, VA.

Soon she moved to Baton Rouge,
where lost souls washed up
from New Orleans, some of whom
perhaps would also greet the day
clutching their ribs, bobbing
tearfully as morning
bled into the bedroom like a slow,
quiet flood of words.

Like dew on the blades, you
infuse life - gently
surrounding, remaining
still on the
surface -

Nurturing,
touching in -
burning off when it gets too
hot, but always

Reappearing after
evening draws its
mantle of forgetfulness
around us.

Images on the floor beneath the door
and I know Daddy's home.
The television is on,
I put my hands on the door and feel
voices along the wood.

Eyes by the keyhole,
I see Daddy sitting in the chair—
black boots laced, dog tags, keys, and hat placed
on the table next to something I cannot
see. The key blocks my view,
I dare not push it through.

He eats in the chair, he sleeps in the chair
in that room and for years,
he doesn't know
I am there.

bearing marks of fire
and rain, slinks
from the wood to eat
shadows from my salty hand?

Moonlight silvers
the trees, nothing
stirs.

Who has sent
a message leaping
from its blazing
tongue? Silence
laps at our ears.

When tides plague this
suffering shore, who will sing
the broken choirs of night?

bones, the scalpel and the pen.
Each nail, each wrinkle on the knuckled

skin.
Every home
swung onto trees. These are the blind
days of spring, the broken days of leafy
mud and rag.

I am searching for your lips
and the secret tongue
you hide in the pockets of moon.
I have followed you home to a door in this wall.

In an instant you are
gone, sunlight on glossy leaves and then
silence.

Squirrels wrestle in their heavy nests, sky stretches and yawns
and again the earth fools us, somersaulting
out where brushes swish in silent caverns of dream.

Young then, I poured a bottle
of water onto my mother’s grave
thinking she would grow
out of it: death, the ground, her sad
sleep

each year I came
back to the mother-tree

its branches
like chapped hands
holding snow
the crushed leaves

her feet busy
in the dirt writhing
for water

and sometimes I poured
it, sometimes I
did not.

Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the Iowa Writers'Workshop. His work
has appeared in or is forthcoming from Ampersand, Apple Valley Review,
"Best of the Net 2007", Blood Orange Review, Contrary, The Cortland