Fall 2021

The Irish Writer Leaves Home

by

by Carmen Mason

How does one explain the perfume steaming
from a timid wrist
the musky scent
the flash of a white instep
Not love    not perfect flesh
but the shame of needing
a giving up    a giving in
a consummation that transfigures
for the moment
that transcends
for the moment
How can I tell my sleeping son
his mother was as brief
and as amazing as a shooting star
on a still    clear    miraculous night
that my leaving like this
without goodbyes
after spitting those acid words
into her questionmark
of a ruined face
is a refusal of everything
that warns me to stay
persist    make do
I am no longer a son of Dublin
There is a world out there
that will now    soon
make me delirious
with its musky
midnight breathing    its
ejaculatory fires
I am in need my son
in demanding need to go

Here is a kiss goodbye
I’ve been writing prose and poetry since I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.

 

 

 

 

The Artist

by

by Carmen Mason
When you start   everybody and everything
 
           is there with you    past   present   friends   family

critics   strangers    and all the greats

the empty brain-washed canvas

brushes    oily rags

paintswirls on the palette

waiting

or     the empty pages in  your head

words   flit  like

hummingbirds

           
then finally

all leave one by one

you’re  all alone

and   then

if you’re lucky

really lucky on this day

 you leave too


I’ve been writing prose and poetry since I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.

 

Surfing

by

by Carmen Mason 

Pythagoras lived when kids
didn’t wield box cutters and guns
or stand on lines for free condoms
missing class
when fuck-you shirts weren’t even
dreamed of by
lovehaters and childhaters
When homework wasn’t necessary because
each moment was an assignment for life
He lived when the parts still equalled the whole
and the whole was a holy thing
He    then Empedocles and later
Euclid believed the
world and all its matter mattered
and Pythagoras suggested that if you don’t get it right
you can come back and try again
in Samos or some other place and
body-state     say a fish or a goat
or a flea or Shanghai

To be brief     Pythy
opposed the taking of life
the eating of flesh or anyone who killed
or prepared animals for diet

So I think all these drive-by shooters
babyburners     peoplerapers
mindmarauders    ethnictrashers
racelashers     fuckshirt peddlers
drug and craprap hustlers
should die     just die     then come back and try again

I’ve been writing prose and poetry since I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.

 

 

 

Legacy

by

by Barbara Marwell

Footsteps in the sand
Erased by the wind.
Footsteps in the soil
Washed away by the rain.
Climbing hills, walking difficult trails.
We are but a flicker in time.

Brought love and joy to some
Good deeds, comforting words,
Sometimes unintended hurts.

After us live our children
Carrying on good lives.
Then their children
Generations and generations to come.

Will they walk a loving, giving path?
Might there be an artist in some future line of mine?
A poet, a painter, a novelist, a sculptor
A scientist, a philosopher?
As many possibilities as I can dream.

One whose work will endure
Whose footsteps will not be washed away
By wind or water.
Whose flickering candle brings light
to the world.
Imagining that legacy gives me joy.

In the far far past, Barbara Marwell was an English major with a concentration in writing. After spending her professional life as a psychologist and finding yet another incarnation  at LP², an assignment from David Grogan’s Guided Autobiography SG, triggered this poem —  a glance backward and forward.

 

 

 

 

 

look, how beautiful

by

by Rosalie Frost

a small, square tan cardboard box
containing a coil of film
found at the back of a drawer
after my mother died —-
scuffed, bruised, corners crushed,
stamped in German and Hungarian
“persons unknown, return to sender.”

a small, square tan cardboard box
containing a coil of film
sent by my mother in 1944
to the brothers she left behind,
to whom she continued to write
as penance, as hope.

a small, square tan cardboard box
containing a coil of film
shows my mother, a flower drooping from her lapel,
shoulder length waves of left parted hair,
picture hat tilting the other way
rocking me, lifting me,
thrusting my fat perfect nakedness
toward the camera as
her lips open and close —-
look, how beautiful

My creative writing is not tied to anything in any of the professional lives that I have lived. Writing comes out of my life-long devotion to reading beginning at about 7 years of age. That was when my parents took me for the first time to enroll in the local library, where they had to sign a form promising the librarian that they would be responsible for the privilege accorded me of taking care of books, including borrowing and returning them on time. Sometimes, I would stay in the library to peruse those curious adult books without any pictures, just pages of big words I could sound out but never really comprehend. My imaginative life grew and just seamlessly morphed into writing —-

Garden Snails

by

 by Rosalie Frost

As I leave my house late
in a headless rush, I yet would
stop to kneel down and gaze at
snails crossing my path —-
their beautiful houses carried
on their backs — banded
spiral knobs, no two alike —
parti-colored periods or, if
their soft heads and necks extend,
exclamation points.

Once, while gazing out my window
after heavy rains, smiling as
my concrete driveway hosted
a slowly moving parade of garden
snails exuding soothing slime to
smooth their rough traverse —-
I saw a tiny hunchbacked
crone all in black, seemingly out of some fairy tale
—- or maybe just the old country —-
stop on the sidewalk opposite my window,
smile as I did at the migrating groundlings separating us,
hunch her back down further,
scoop all of them up into plastic bags
spelling out words in cursive red saying
thank you and have a nice day

My creative writing is not tied to anything in any of the professional lives that I have lived. Writing comes out of my life-long devotion to reading beginning at about 7 years of age. That was when my parents took me for the first time to enroll in the local library, where they had to sign a form promising the librarian that they would be responsible for the privilege accorded me of taking care of books, including borrowing and returning them on time. Sometimes, I would stay in the library to peruse those curious adult books without any pictures, just pages of big words I could sound out but never really comprehend. My imaginative life grew and just seamlessly morphed into writing —-

 

 

 

Et in Arcadia Ego

by

by Rosalie Frost

Such intense and persistent longings
for what we did or who we were
before this pandemic:
wasn’t life more antic,
with less panic?
Such nostalgic longings may be unwise —-
long-ago, old tales in many lands
tell of preturnatural worlds where
irrevocable acts cannot be unmade.

I
Orpheus, the magician and musician
escaping upward from hell, Eurydice
in his wake, turned around
and gazed back, losing all.

II
Eden’s benevolent god in a deathless
neverland banished disobedient creatures
whose descendants idealize a sinless existence
set within a false pleasure garden
where benevolence masked
truths spoken by a snake.

III
Mortals yearning to escape from
their unhappy, all too much
damaged world, are lured away by
Arcadia’s pastoral, idyllic landscape
seen within a shimmering sound
growing at the corner of one eye.
Into this unspoiled world dreamed
into being by gods and demi-urges,
mortals find refuge elusive:
rugged mountains with no footholds,
vast green forests where
light has little purchase,
roaring rivers and streams
never calm enough to ford.

Entering Arcady by misadventure, mortals
are drawn everywhere and nowhere by
a strange music played by Pan, who rules here —-
a rustic god with body neither
goat nor man but both, yet so
beloved by all on Olympus for playing
such sweet songs on his reed pipe —-
songs that if heard by trespassing mortals
cause them to walk in endless circles
with no way back but madness.

 

My creative writing is not tied to anything in any of the professional lives that I have lived. Writing comes out of my life-long devotion to reading beginning at about 7 years of age. That was when my parents took me for the first time to enroll in the local library, where they had to sign a form promising the librarian that they would be responsible for the privilege accorded me of taking care of books, including borrowing and returning them on time. Sometimes, I would stay in the library to peruse those curious adult books without any pictures, just pages of big words I could sound out but never really comprehend. My imaginative life grew and just seamlessly morphed into writing —-

No More Dreams

by

by Mark Fischweicher

Dead of winter

xxxxxxxAll the leaves are brown and
xxxxxxxthe sky is gray

Pine needles carpet the woodland trails,
and, with its monochrome horizon,
the landscape unfolds and,
even as the days
begin to grow,
you never know where
the moon will be
but that the sun will rise above the barren trees
seems likely for a few more years,
or centuries, or maybe
a millennium or more, but,
at least, this year, I think
that spring will come
and so will summer

and so, for now, to keep them happy
every other morning, I fill the feeder with nuts and seeds and tasty
bits of fruit
and watch for black-capped chickadees
and purple finches, and
dark-eyed juncos,
and maybe one or two black-backed three-toed woodpeckers
or just a few, a trio or a chorus if they will of some black-throated warblers
with something smart to say or
mourning doves or all the Cardinals and their families
come to church just for the day
till evening when I take the feeder in
as once a bear had come in from the woods behind the house
and bent the steel pole it hangs on
like a twig, but
it is not the birds I think of now
who spend their days here, dependable as sun.

No dreams for me
My only two nocturnal visitors are just the two opossum that
come looking for the nuts and seeds and bits of fruit their feathered friends
have scattered in the grass and fallen snow.

I watch for them
am pleased when they return,
old friends should never be forgotten
I shave with Toby’s brush,
badger,
not so unlike opossum,
but he, no,
he will not return.
Ancient peoples, plagues and parents,
no monuments for these,
Perhaps some footprints in the snow will prove that they were here
and as it always seems,
the path leads to our home
welcoming the darkness as it falls
within it
A quiet comfort before the sleep I take alone,
and I,
with you beside me,

all aflutter

Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.

 

The Worst Seat in the House

by

by Stewart Alter

Fidgeting and uncomposed,
His coat in the way,
He wanted to leave his seat
When the performance began
To join the actors onstage.
He was drawn to the radiance
Of sequenced moments
And exposed intentions
Through lines ripened in memory.
He wanted to be a presence
Close enough to hear their breaths
Rounded into words—
Not, as he now heard,
Coughs in the assembly
Of shadows, in the role
Of the distracted, eavesdropping
On half-completed scenes.
His thoughts mingled and astray,
He turned them toward the vague
And disturbing muttering,
So bitter and blistering
And untransformed by artifice
That he was unsure what to say.
He wanted to leave
The darkness,
But someone had to stay
In the audience, to watch
And to listen,
With no role to play.

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been writing poetry and painting intermittently before, during and now after a long career in business journalism and corporate communications.

Sleeping

by

by Stewart Alter

I know nothing about my snoring self,
The loud beast whose breathing chills the village.
I have never heard myself, but have been told
My snoring is the terror of the night.
I know myself only as the dreamer,
Master of the quiet and private signs
Who slips nimbly through night’s animation.
But I have become the cave of the dragon
In which each day ends, the legions of Rome
Milling restlessly in the colonies, threatening
To stir up all laws and languages.
I know myself only as the dreamer
Who was prepared to face the senselessness
Of my own discomforts, not those I imposed.

I wish now that I had known success
Was the blessing of sleeping silently—
The foxhole fellowship of hiding unheard
Together for weeks to surprise the enemy,
The lovers’ afterlude when satellite minds
Regain their orbits in expanding space.

For I had envisioned a different end for myself:
Old man beneath a broad suburban tree,
Lying on my back, and pedaling from leaf to leaf
Until I reached the sky,
I would return outside one evening
To climb and doze off, undiscovered
Until a few mornings later,
Casually I would be spotted,
Huddled in the branches,
Dear old eccentric.

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been writing poetry and painting intermittently before, during and now after a long career in business journalism and corporate communications.