Featured Author of The Month
Selected Poems By: William Doreski
(Author of the Month)
Plum Tomatoes
The plum tomatoes you’ve grown
on the oiled deck of your condo
taste as rich as Italy itself.
A sly wind topples dead trees
in the woods where I’ll hunt mushrooms
this afternoon. Maybe you also
will scout for boletus under pines
near the pond where two months ago
a child drowned so deeply his father
didn’t miss him for a week.
Maybe you’ll see that sad child walk
on the pond’s ruffled surface,
hear him call his beer-soaked father
who forgot he had a child to watch.
This evening I’ll top a salad
with your tomatoes and slices
of mushroom fresh from the woods.
Washing it down with a brand
of vodka you avoid because
not Russian, I’ll feel the miles
between us ripen as the wind,
without decreasing, renders
our names in a dozen languages
it has learned from all the children
walking oncorrugated waters
and from all the fathers coughing
those drunken sobs of regret.
The Lines of My Hands
On the trail ahead a porcupine
nibbles a twig. As I approach
it bristles like a burr, its eyes
two pinholes burnished with fear.
When I halt a pace away
it calms to focus on the twig.
Overhead an airliner scars
the cloudy light. Manchester
to Chicago, a flight plan
familiar as the lines of my hands.
Behind me a civilized spoor
any good tracker could follow
to this moment of stasis.
The third-growth forest withholds
comment. After days of rain
mushrooms erupt as slowly
as the dawning of a new idea
while five thousand miles away
the war gnashes dozens more dead.
Between this scenario and that,
an ocean rises one inch
a decade, sure to slop over
into the world’s favorite cities.
At last the porcupine looks
hard enough through the blur
of its nearsighted world to decide
I’m too absolutely present
to ignore. With a slush of quills
it turns and sloughs toward the brush,
a black and gray rustle of matter
almost inanimate as stone.
Now I shuffle forward so gently
the further unfolding of the trail
through autumn’s first yellow leaf-fall
frightens no one, not even me.
Editor Comments: Here is someone who writes better than I do and should be excluded for that reason alone. Do you have any idea how this makes me feel? This gentlemen is selected for a reason: wonderful imagery that touches, then, goes beyond. I knew when I read the title to the first poem I was hooked. Look for his works anywhere you can find it. William has most recently appeared in Notre Dame Review, Poetry Salzburg, Ars Interpres, Natural Bridge, and South Carolina Review. He has published a critical study entitled Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors (1999) and a new collection of poetry, Another Ice Age (2007).