GlitterPony#4

www.glitterponymag.com

poems from:

Christopher Stackhouse
Robert Ostrom
Philip Byron Oakes
Amanda Nadelberg
Andrew Morgan
Bonnie Jean Michalski
Karyna McGlynn
Paul Klinger
Yvette Johnson
Scott Hartwich
Jonathan Doherty
Ryan Daley
Dawn Corrigan
Sara Blaylock
Joseph Bienvenu
Joshua Bolton
Sean Burke

Allegory of the Hippo

Such a variety of hippies that an untutored observer
might be blinded by love, might be blinded by the bright
life of every different one. Some drew out their long hair
and lived in it, nesting. Some drew from the soil
something oily and locomotive. Some were dizzy
and making ever larger circles. It was chaos, it was
dangerous for children who didn't have the bright soul flower
to guide them inward. Rumors spread
of their ferverent purple tubors, of their disdain
for flight school, optical systems, and privacy.
According to local peevishmen, their total body weight
exceeded all measure and was mostly bionic.
What kind of hippies were these? Once,
hippies lived in the great river in the Savannah.
It was chaos, it was dangerous for children, until each day dimmed
and hair and dirty hands grew pacified by the moon.
The banks were calm then. Each night they made a stew
of river water and roots, and the children
lined up for their share, satisfied that wildness
like all else will pass from the world congealed,
as it were, outside of the purveyor's vision of poverty.
The littlest rustling raised an ill-timed awareness of
a perfectly baked sweet potato, left behind on the banks to
lure the untrussed in a gumbo. Along the banks of the great
green, greasy Limpopo river where a gnash was whiting,
where all comers would be servered, the hippies paged
through waterlogged volumes, reliving their mythic transmigration,
their strange happenstance. Before there were safety muglets,
there were whited sepulchres and a long, slow, hotly disputed
foreign border leading them home
to the sickle moon, where hippies are shadow rabbits
reaching painfully with servered hands, reaching paper-thin
for a small bit of tinder that is just like them. This process of likeness--
long fibers on a mesh screen-first bathed, then colored and taughtened
with five metal combs. The community was striated. Those
pacified by the moon remained so. The rest--stringy,
starlight, sepia, and acid--became photographs
and an era ended.

by Wendy Burk, Anna Fulford, and Bonnie Jean Michalski

You are None Less, I am Prone to Blur.
for K.S.

You shush about that very creamy room. Never
Spackled a day in your life. Have you?
You rigid yourself to fit the window frame.
You pretend to have no arms.
You should jump in, stop me if I am unkind.
I barely know you enough. After some twenty years!
If your life could take place in the twilit south.
Many there might fancy your clip-clopping way.
You’d mauve every so slightly in the moist sun
and find a radio station just the right speed
for thinking. Do you prefer an era of music
to the others? I hope a slender pace would enliven you,
not leave you more fatigued. Stop trying to read maps.
Regionalism is an amorphous spatiality. Just think
what a dry heat might have done to you!
It is not without concern that I steer you
this way from the rust belt.

Pearls with a Double Clasp

by Wendy Burk

Don't underestimate the clearing.

It's all about the human figure making contact

with the small circle of light.

Those wide eyes...I thought you were

human...but you didn't blink.

I want you to know: as long

as you are alive at this latitude Orion will

be with you winter nights.

So give her the necklace:

no one knows

and no one knows

and no one knows.

Dear Erin,

I am a cauldron. Not a pot.

Sincerely, The Cauldron-Pot

goatlike

Had you the eyes of a goat,

they would be almond, half-green, half-

yellow, an almond

shape to them. Were you

less as you are, cat-like, a brush

head, sad, sad, un-

goatlike.

-Robert Creeley