Skyline Magazine Online Poetry Winter 2008

Poets in
Volume 1 issue 2

Jacob
Erin-Cilberto

Karen
Kelsay

Terry
E. Lockett

Gale
Acuff

Patty
Mager

Marc
Carver

Alice
Wong

DYLAN IN REVERSE

Jacob
Erin-Cilberto

let the Tambourine
Man
rest on the sidelines,
i have smoked my last horizon
down to
the nub of my index finger
too arthritic to dream
i point at what
could have been
waving an accusing imagination
that stretches
through a song
with notes following like the tripping seeds
of a
flower child
enmeshed in a foliage of nostalgic weed

sip
the air
pungent
playful
it waits for me
to be young
again.

jacob erin-cilberto is a poet and English teacher
living in Southern Illinois. He has published work in several small
magazines and journals since 1970 and teaches poetry workshops for The
Heartland Writers Guild and the Southern Illniois Writers Guild...He has
been nominated for the pushcart prize in poetry for 2006 and
2007.

PARISIAN PURPLE

Karen
Kelsay

Crowning the realm
of his lavender-walled
apartment, Christmas decorations twisted
and
looped along coving--in July, as though
time had ceased six months
earlier

when his girlfriend had abandoned her gifts
and moved
to Italy. Only a delicate wistfulness
remained, as if she were
enfolded

into the hush of pastel. Evenings, we melded
into café
walls on mime-speckled street corners.
My afternoons dissipated into
chapters

of Travels With Charlie, his only English book.
We
drank espresso in Versailles, and ate baguettes
wrapped over chocolate
bars. At Montmartre

he bought me flowers to match my sundress,

and we followed each flight of stairs, until morning

swallowed us in a labyrinth of lanes.

Returning to America, I
strung ornaments
under my window ledge and carefully balanced
his
picture above garlands that curved

around my bookshelf, like the
Seine. Before dusk,
sunrays angled between my curtains
while eerie
shades of purple glinted across his frame,
and time
stopped.

Karen Kelsay
grew up near the Pacific, and loves writing poetry about the sea. Her
poetry has been widely published in various magazines. She is the author
of Collected poems by Karen Kelsay, and a chapbook, “A Fist of Roots”
which will be published next year by Puddinghouse Press. She lives with
her husband in Torrance, just a short distance from the beach, where she
still looks for writing subjects and inspirations.

HERON

Terry E.
Lockett

Look there he said
in the dark
as it swept up from gray mist
riffling black water to
haunt
distant banks I could not see.

Years later I'll
think of the rising
our eyes locked on it gliding
trailing wings
before they turned
to the motion of other things.

His
cigar smoke haloed his hair
his voice warmed like brandy
until I
felt no chill- in that moment
even the shiver of stars was
stilled.

Terry E.
Lockett was raised in Toppenish, Washington. She has provided services
to foster children and their families in Central Washington for over two
decades.  Terry was the winner of the 2007 Yakima Valley Allied Arts
Juried Poetry Contest. Terry has had recent publications in Whispers &
Shouts, Birds On A Line, Poetry Super Highway, Words-Myth and will also be
featured in Weber: Journal of the Contemporary West.

SEASON'S GREETINGS

Gale
Acuff

Father's outside, touching, and talking to,
the
Christmas pine we planted years ago
when we were father and son, not
son and
eighty-year-old child. No, that's not quite fair

--his
Alzheimer's has made me forgetful.
Through the window I watch him
mouthing words,
repeatedly. He calls the tree Santa.
I'm Rudolph,
he's saying. Pleased to meet you

--he puts out his right hand to
shake a limb.
You're looking well, he says. I must go now.
Please
give my regards to
your family.
I leave the window so he won't
see me

keeping an eye on him. I take his chair,
beside mine, and
pretend to watch TV
--the forecast calls for light rain. He sits
down
for a while, and when the rain begins, goes

out into it, as
so often he has,
to return
to say, What a
lovely
day.
He'll walk over
to me to shake my
hand
and introduce himself. My name is

--then laugh. Ha--it's on
the tip of my tongue.
Oh, well--what's your name, anyway? I'm
your
son, you know, I say. I'm your boy.
That's nice, he says. I'm right
pleased to meet you.

He exits again, with an umbrella
that he
won't open--I'd do it for him
but he can't figure out how to use
it.
He's wearing my baseball cap, and the rain

has slowed to the
trickle of grief. I see
from the window the tree bowing to
him.
Father bows back and they fall into each
other's arms. Come in
for a cup of tea,

Father tells it--him.(I really couldn't,
Santa
says. I've got to be going
soon
--a forestry convention down
the road.
Next time, Santa says. I'll take a rain check).

Father
returns again, but not to me.
Well, hello, he says. You'll never guess
what
I've been doing. Talking to trees, perhaps.
Shut up, boy, he
says. Goddamn' trees can't talk.

Yes, sir, I say--they're better
listeners.
He starts to cry. Stop that sobbing, I say.
I'm sorry,
Daddy, he says. I got too
much imagination. Please don't make
me

pull my trousers
down. Please don't whack my bum.
I
won't, I say. Now I'm crying, too--son
and father and Winter sky. You
stop that,
he says, else I won't love you anymore.

Now come
outside and meet my friend, he says. I
forget his name but it doesn't
matter.
We got out to greet Santa. A pleasure,
I tell him. I've
heard so much about you.

Gale Acuff has had poetry published
in Ascent, Adirondack Review, South Carolina Review, Florida Review,
Maryland Poetry Review, Slipstream, Ohio Journal, Santa Barbara Review,
and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo
Nickel (BrickHouse, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and
The Story of My Lives (now at press).  Gale has taught university
English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.

MID-LIFE CRISIS

Patty
Mager

My husband's
midlife crisis
leaves me with a question mark,
no period.
This
test of patience,
leaves beads of sweat across my
upper lip,
the taste of gall upon my tongue.

I grow
unpredictable, moody,
tirelessly industrious.
My voice booms in
empty space.

Anger dissipates, my heart-break lies hidden,

but at what cost?  How old is too old
to begin a new
life?

Patty Mager,
a retired banker and investor, has been writing poetry for ten years.
Patty has been published in literary anthologies including The Elms,
Literary House Review, Skyline Magazine, SpinningS Intense Tales, and
Bottlecap Magazine. The Webster-Kirkwood Times did an article on Patty and
four of her poems were featured, she has been published in both the
American and Fort Worth Haiku Society Journals and was a nominee for the
Pushcart Award in 2008.

DEATH THE SEQUEL

Marc
Carver

when i am dead don’t burn me.
put me on all fours
and use me as a coffee table or a foot stool.
when i am dead put me in
the corner and adorn me with hats.
put a lamp shade on my head with a
little toggle rope.
switch me on and turn me off.
hang the laundry
off my ends.
“look he is making use of himself for once.”
when i am
dead squeeze me into a wheelchair and throw me from the top’s of
hills.
tie the wheelchair to the back of a car and drive me through
towns.
put a panama hat on my head and leave me in the park baking in
the sun.
when i am dead and start to smell and pieces of me begin to
drop and leave me.
throw me into the wheelie bin and jump up and down
on the lid.
“we have a body in this one boss.”
“it’s okay, it’s the
strange man from 28. he did not want any fuss. is he in the green bin or
the black?”
“the green bin.”
“oh no, he doesn’t want to come back,
you best put him in the black one.”
“he does not want to be recycled -
once was enough for him – that’s what he said.”

Marc Carver was born in 1966 very close to the
Thames barrier in London. He has moved extensively throughout the U.K. and
has lived in Germany for three years. He has been writing seriously for
about the last six months, combining writing with a full time job. He
hopes, more than anything, that you enjoy his work and that you can see
the humour that lay within the words.

TALES OF THE
MIRROR

Alice Wong

You have won another island.

Your lips gobble
faithless winds

And set sail into a Viking

Ready to cross
the gaudy equator to the other hemisphere

Where your god can see
you, where you can

Plunder its wild eaves and fresh
rains,

But your anchor surprises you as a chained

Ashen
albatross in half-mast,

No terrestrial friend.

Alice Wong, born and raised in Singapore, likes
writing about religion, the Absolute and the relations
of body and
soul.

Current Issue Home