JERUSALEM IN SNOW, 1/10/2013

by Maryann Corbett

Image source: Occupied Palestine

The pious author of the book of Job

lacked maps of isobars to show him where

pressure allows the tongues of wet, warm air

delicately to probe
the hill country, tickling at slippery flows

where winter chill has settled on the height

of Zion. In his poems, only the might
of God breathes down the snows,
pure as surprises. What the psalm observed,

the morning news reveals: a world scrubbed clean.

Changed utterly. Pristine.

The stones of the Old City softened, curved;
old habits stalled; and humankind’s false starts

brought to a standstill. Ancient poets see

how snow grants us new vision, so that we

dream of our own changed hearts.


Maryann Corbett is the author of Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012) and Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. She has been a winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a finalist for the Morton Marr prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and the Able Muse Book Prize. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals in print and online, including River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Literary Imagination, Measure, Subtropics, and The Dark Horse, as well as in a number of anthologies. New work is forthcoming in PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Barrow Street. She lives in St. Paul and works for the Minnesota Legislature.

FOR THE REPOSE OF SOULS

by Carol Alexander

A Berkeley, CA vigil held to remember the victims and families of the Newtown, CT, massacre. Photo: Jeremy Pollack/Creative Commons

A pair of peafowl floats down from the trees,
the wan hen and florid cock picking their way
while the river slowly slips back in its banks.

The boy in his tall wading books creeps after,
licking rust from the muzzle of his gun.

The juddering of a turquoise fan perhaps will be
as close to flame of phoenix  as spirit will draw.
But we were born in fire, and to fire will come.

The woman with the small communion dress
rocks in her chair in her ordinary room
room with its proportions rudely skewed;
shocked feathers of the peafowls gently float down.

With their saintly calendar of woes,
country men and women walk in sober twos.

Still the shops stay open; trees blink red and green,
children dash across the street, cars swerve,
we hear the Morse code of the coming snow,
birds in starry park all the news that we can bear.

A pallid smoke in its helix twists and frays,
as if to question who to go and how to stay?
You mummers in a masquerade of death
shoot off your pop guns, begging cakes and ale.

Neither the country nor the quiet grave where we lay
our old ones down in the lightness of their years,
is this cold town where we have just begun to pray.

But unicorns and little maids remain entwined
(in sable trees an archer waits and strings his silent bow).


A writer for trade and educational publishing, Carol Alexander has authored numerous children’s books, served as a ghostwriter for radio and trade publishing, and taught at colleges around the metropolitan area. In 2011-2012, her poetry appears—or is scheduled to appear-- in literary journals and anthologies published by Avocet, Boyne Berries (UK), Chiron Review, Cave Moon Press, The Canary, Danse Macabre, Earthspeak, Eunoia Review, Fade Poetry Journal (UK), Fat Daddy’s Farm Press, Fried Chicken and Coffee, The Mad Hatter’s Review, Mobius, Numinous, OVS, Red Poppy Review, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, Sleeping Cat Books, The Whistling Fire, and Write Wing Publishing.