Author: Theresa Smalec

Installment 15 features two poems by Eileen Hugo. Both pieces travel in transitory directions and offer quick but lingering glimpses into acts that are only supposed to last for a short time.   *** Car Kissing in the Rain Rain drops made circles and moved down the windows in small rivers that branched out and down to the hood of the car heavy rain drummed the roof and our pulses it was steamy outside and in with the curtain drawn passions escalated but this was car kissing     nothing more *** Leaving From the car window I see the road that leaves this frigid town. It only goes south past one school, one store with a gas pump and one dingy church. Curls of acrid smoke bunch into a dark haze that stays trapped above your cliche house. Porch railing broken one car on blocks surrounded by scattered remains of the stand-ins you have used up. I don’t see you when I pass by I wave anyway. *** My name is Eileen Hugo and I am a poet. I am retired and doing all the things I love. I have been published in the anthologies Southern Breezes and The Baby Boomer Birthright, and most recently The Taste Of Ink, a collaboration of poets from Mid-Coast Maine. I also served time as the Poetry Editor for The Houston Literary Review. In April of...

Installment 12 brings together a poem from Fred Wah’s So Far (1991), and a new one, “Columbia Clutch” (2018). Both poems enact impending shifts, abrupt unearthings. Matter breathes, reveals, holds our attention. Yet the latter piece also attends to the double-edged amalgam of awe and harnessing at the heart of our interactions with nature: “Roll on Columbia, roll on/ Your power is turning our darkness to dawn.” (Photo credit and copyright: Halcyon Ploss) *** Spring Geography Things appear suddenly not new but as they remain left over from the winter for example. dead logs caught in the brush at all angles a breathing pushes out of them a picture in the warmer air sings to the surfaces of our skin and eyes a handfull of dead fingernails I love you today like I have never before fingers and hair. dead logs heads hands twigs sticks leaves grass the suddenness and warm air shimmering off the hood of a green 47 Dodge pickup mountains come out of the clouds the road down to the lake [SF :38]   Columbia Clutch some rust maybe or an old tire on the shore but internal combustion makes no sense the shape of the current isn’t diesel though the trains get grade geology all comes down to history the nation an imitation locomotive rolling stock ‘ol “Roll On Columbia” time traces depth never thought of a...