FIRST EDITION
February 2011
___________
Published by Fearless Books at Smashwords
© 2010 by Fearless Books
Smashwords Edition
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Photography
Kelly Puleio
The Fearless Poetry Series editors wish to express their appreciation to our dedicated and discerning Submissions Readers for their generous contributions of time and energy: Eve Aldridge, Alan Bern, Jaime Eckerman, Linda Hull, Tiffany Lantz, Lisa Tabet-Chavez, and Wendy Patrice Williams. All the poems in the Fearless Poetry Series are evaluated without names, credentials, or lists of previous publications attached. We seek the finest contemporary poetry in English without regard to other criteria.
The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.
—VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables
TABLE OF CONTENTS
All photographs by Kelly Puleio
Foreword • SariFriedman
As to the ultimate meaning of it all • Bruce Bawer
Tired • Cara Yelland
Trembling Toward You • D. Patrick Miller
PHOTO: unknown road
Dark Nectar • Gina Valdes
Because I Am Tactful and Lewd • Rick Kempa
Potatoes • Katharyn Howd Machan
PHOTO: castle peak
The Dream of Love • Sari Friedman
Come to Me • Stewart Mintzer
Love Poem • Linda Nemec Foster
Twenty-four Hours • Myra Sklarew
On Discovering Joy • David Knopfler
Third Base • Sari Friedman
Seduced • Jeff Walt
A Blonde Woman • David Eye
Beauty and the Beast • Sarah Brown Weitzman
Love Set Free • D. Patrick Miller
tile sex • Monica Lewis
PHOTO: untitled
He Who Killed the Bear • Sy Safransky
Married Saturday Morning • Brad Johnson
Flowery Branch Guy • Karla Linn Merrifield
For my parents living on the planet Gimmel • Alan Bern
No Other Light • Ginny Lowe Connors
PHOTO: brother
General Semantics and the Moles on Your Back • Christina Lovin
The Neural Basis of Love • Myra Sklarew
A Course in Miracles • Sari Friedman
Thirst • Edward A. Dougherty
Love me • Claudia Serea
Malibu, January • Bruce Bawer
Rendez-vous, Halfway this Time • Marsha Mathews
Sixth Sense • David Knopfler
Persian • Christina Lovin
Likeness • Charles Hansmann
A season of rose-hips • Christine Kieltyka
First Kiss • Rob Spiegel
Ode to Our Toothbrushes • Robert Burnside
PHOTO: Switzerland
This Night, This Road • Rick Kempa
The Wayside • Jeff Walt
Crazy Arms: Earlene Remembers • Margaret Benbow
PHOTO: fine print
The Revision • Ed Werstein
Dream Girl • Yvonne Strumecki
The Streetwalker • Janet Taliaferro
Dream of Tangles • Alan Bern
Detroit Sends Gorilla to Chicago • Therese Becker
Suspended Animation • Lyn Bleiler
Snowdrops • David Knopfler
Supply Man • Maureen Tolman Flannery
PHOTO: Lexington
Zippers • Karen Loeb
Intermezzo • John Smith
Yellow Rubber Gloves • Mary Kolada Scott
Harold in Love • Ginny Lowe Connors
These Final Years • Wendy Patrice Williams
Where Angels Gather • Rob Spiegel
Bare • Teresa Middleton
San Marco Square • Judith Bader Jones
In Retrospect • Kathie Giorgio
Hibiscus Persuaded • Katherine MacDonald
Cell Phone While I Was Standing
In Line At Starbucks • Susan R. Norton
St. Patrick’s Day • Carol L. Gloor
The Hedonist’s Apprentice Sails
to Long Point • Jacqueline Lapidus
Meeting You • Eve Aldridge
PHOTO: one
Laundry Love • Susan R. Norton
Music/Dream Seven • Joan Gelfand
Lemon and Lavender • James Bettendorf
Paint • Evie Groch
Folk Singer • Richard Roe
Late Night • Teresa Middleton
First Kiss • Betty Benson
Serenade for a Red Planet • F.M. Nicholson
Godzilla Meets the Mona Lisa • Therese Becker
Champion • Adele C. Geraghty
Sunrise on the Covers • Robert Spiegel
PHOTO: boots
Fearless Poetry Series Information
FRONT COVER PHOTO: rooftop
BACK COVER PHOTO: Venice
FOREWORD
WHAT IS LOVE that some people race from it, some die without it, and a few recreate it in art? With love you’re like that little old lady who lifted the Volkswagen that slipped off a tire jack, trapping her grandson. You’re Herculean. Abundantly alive. Lost and found. You hear the mermaids singing. You become impervious to pain… or simply happy.
For the second volume of the Fearless Poetry Series we’ve collected some of the best new poetry about love, longing, and desire, from lit-porn to romantic elegies. Some of our contributors are published in prestigious literary magazines; others are unknown. But Venus herself would appreciate these poets, who range from sexually promiscuous barflies to lovers who celebrate “the breakthrough of pure joy” to those who are seduced by “this slow-burning that fills me completely.”
We hope you find Touching: Poems of Love, Longing, and Desire to be a roadmap to the only thing that actually matters. — Sari Friedman
BRUCE BAWER
As to the ultimate meaning of it all
As to the ultimate meaning of it all,
We know just what we know. We can’t know more.
Somewhere far away there stands a door.
Somewhere there hangs a solitary key.
The end is near. The end is always near.
The end is all around us, every day,
In every cell of your body, in the rosy
Cheeks of your children playing in the yard,
In the strong bronze arm of your lover, safe in bed,
And in the house on fire, where the body
Of someone you love burns like a Christmas log.
And yet love happens, blooming as if from air.
CARA YELLAND
Tired
I’m tired.
Tired as a whore’s mascara.
Tired of amateur barfly psychology and
Watching the ice melt and
Overflowing ashtrays and
Waiting for someone and
The surfeit of cheap perfume and
Old Blue Eyes on the jukebox and
Strange dick and
Elderly juniper sadness and
Sitting alone and
Making wishes that don’t come true and
Trying so hard and
Wanting and
Being
D. PATRICK MILLER
Trembling Toward You (for Sari)
I’ve had the shakes for a couple years now —
waking up in fear that all was lost, that roots ripped out
and exposed to the chill air of aloneness would dry
and wither to nothing. And then there could be
no replanting, no new life fed from the earth,
no place in the orchard, no home.
Blown about in the winds of too much change
I’ve spun like a papery leaf, quavering to touch down
anywhere
before being blown off again, weightless and mad.
For all I knew, I would be shaking forever.
I was getting into it.
But I had it all wrong. A smile that dazzles,
a leading turn or two in the dance, and a bashful
list of twenty questions changes everything.
A beam of pure springlight has shattered my woozy,
self-indulgent autumn, pre-empting the dark winter
I had planned to spend buried in some cold roadside slush.
In this sudden warm ambiance, the shakes not only
feel different, they have a whole new history.
From the first quake of seeming loss to today’s
quiver of anticipation, they were always predicting
the breakthrough of pure joy. I just couldn’t see
what was coming, that’s all. Little did I know
I was always trembling toward you.
GINA VALDES
Dark Nectar
Sundays, women roast cacao
seeds at mercado Tlacolula:
women who long for their men,
working in California.
They grind the seeds to powder
on volcanic stone, as they’ve done
for centuries, the dark aroma
filling the clear Oaxacan sky.
We ride home on a rickety bus
singing boleros all the way.
Then brew chocolate de agua,
the pleasure of kings and peasants,
with honey and vanilla,
that black orchid.
Under the Zapotec moon
your body glows, a shade between
honey and cocoa. In your mouth
I savor the bittersweet
nectar, hold the spell
on my tongue.
RICK KEMPA
Because I Am Tactful and Lewd
In Grandma’s basement, let’s fuck
on something that doesn’t squeak,
cuz she’s not snoring like she’d
snore if she weren’t listening.
(Grandpa we won’t think about.
Even if I hollered when we
came instead of biting at
the pillow Grandma made, he
wouldn’t dismount from his dreams.)
When we don’t go to town with them
to eat prime rib, I’ll holler until
the horses bolt, and the hawks kick
the fattest chick out of the nest,
and the brahma bull comes bawling
home, and the greyhounds leave the cats
alone, and the mice spill out of
the loaves of hay, and the wind blows
and blows and blows us all away.
KATHARYN HOWD MACHAN
Potatoes (for Eric)
It’s the way he slices
clean potatoes, boiled just
soft enough to fry in oil
with salt and onions:
she’s known a dozen men
who can’t compare. They might
add pepper, garlic, even
splashes of paprika red
as midnight lace; but none
have had his fine musician’s
hands, the flick of wrist
that works the spatula
in perfect time, preventing burn.
He knows the kitchen
of her dreams, all right,
and fills it up
with simple spices he’s aware
will flower in her mouth.
When he carries her
the polished platter, heaped
with feast for eye and tongue,
how she sings in praise of fragrant
food as good as winter sleep,
his love waiting at the table
for her to raise the fork and eat.
SARI FRIEDMAN
The Dream of Love (for Patrick)
Before we met I saw you in trees, in fast-running streams.
I felt you in storms and the pulsing of veins under skin.
Your message came through in the comfort of sounds:
in rain, the clatter of typing, kind words.
Because of your heat, I survived crossing the frozen field
and the promises written in sand,
all the sunrises that broke open too soon
and the mornings after.
The night was too large; I could not rest…
I called out for you in the dark. Held out my hand through the years.
Always knew that I’d find you. Always knew I was yours.
STEWART MINTZER
Come To Me
with your evening skin crusted
with judgment and song.
Come to me muddy
with the residue of old storms
and all your thoughts of love done right.
Bring your reservations,
the lover you go to most in the dark,
your false smiles, roars,
lineage, ache for the truth.
I’ll bring sadness, scuffed black shoes,
stuffed pockets in floppy pants,
all the times I’ve closed the saloon of evening
looking for a woman to put me to sleep.
I’ll bring my old recipes for disaster and heart,
prayers of waiting rooms,
spotted hands that have
lost the keys that unlock night.
We’ll meet in a simple room
to sing the bruisings whole,
write fire,
and rest.
LINDA NEMEC FOSTER
Love Poem (for Tony)
She discovers she is in love
almost by accident, tripping
over his body in bed, finding
strange underwear between the sheets.
She must now readjust her habits:
no nightgowns or 11 o’clock news,
take off the glasses, don’t
forget the Pill. This list
grows long, thick, cumbersome
until her mind becomes heavy
and her neat, square jaw softens
into an indistinguishable but loved
face. Perhaps she should dye
her hair blond or red
or blue — some tangible evidence
she didn’t completely sink into him.
But it’s useless. When he comes
to her again, tonight, she will open
the door, shed her dress, take her
once solid heart and place it
in the deep, quiet well of his hands.
MYRA SKLAREW
Twenty-four Hours
I had twenty-four
hours
to erase
from your body
the crust
of this world.
Chaval, Pity, you said
and we unwrapped
each other
like unlacing
the threads
which bind together
the pages of a book,
our hands touching
and going away again
like touching a town
on the map
in the morning
and then being there
at nightfall.
DAVID KNOPFLER
On Discovering Joy
Joy is a smooth skinned girl with eyes like a dream
She has travelled with me always in my poems
I have bequeathed her my past and my future
All my dedications — all my love — all my want.
She is two parts angel and one part woman
More than Muse, more than a lover
She is kindness up in the broken cloud
She is eternal love and hope incarnate.
She gets me with the same love we credit to God
And there is no need of God when you find her.
SARI FRIEDMAN
Third Base
almost home
bases loaded
batter slicing air