Jump over to 2River next week for the Fall issue of The 2River View, with new poems by Lenny DellaRocca, Judith Barrington, Rebecca D’Alise, Karen Donovan, Gary Dop, Marcel Gauthier, Marjorie Maddox. Christine Marshall, Carolyn Murdoch, Barbara Schwartz, and Lauren Shimulunas. Meanwhile, here’s a teaser:
Bird Café
Lenny Dellarocca
There was a dusty bird finished with everything,
evening stirred in the trees
and the figs were never consumed.
Above the noise of conversation
at the sidewalk restaurant,
I overheard a man say something
about the Café Verona. I wondered
why my ear tuned to just his words
in the miscellaneous air,
why my eye sought out that bird
sleeping among elms and wrens
as if nothing on earth mattered.
These were equations to me,
physical realities
caught by chance in nonlinear
verbatim by the formula
which sends art out among chaos
and finds a place for itself.
As if all possibilities had been
ruled out
except that bird
and a voice saying Café Verona.
There was, and could not be,
anything else in the world.
Muddy Bank 