Centrifugal force

Start in the center and move toward the edge.
Born of my mother, I’m moving that way.
Stones on the landscape are sometimes engraved.
    People I’ve moved with—all moving that way,
pausing to sigh on the narrowest ledge.

Once I pretended that I was a judge,
verdict and sentence my privilege to say.
Robed in that power—such power to taste—
    mercy or penalty, my right to say.
When the game ended, the rules had not budged.

Orders I give should be begged from the knees.
Centrifugal force preempts my request.
    Comfort my journey, I pray from the knees,
me and my loved ones and all of the rest.

Dr. Charles Charlie Martin

One of the city’s marginal,

laughing in genuine mirth,

passed me going the other way.

That was last week.

Today a barefoot woman

roared at Market Street.

I had my face on,

and I didn’t know (often)

what I should do.

That’s part of urban life:

how busses are big red ads

and a busy street is a zoo.

It might have been the laughing man

who defaced the photo

where suddenly my feet

stopped: a doctor, stethoscope,

magic-marked red mouth,
neat black hair and bowtie,

and wet, beating heart

held on his fingertips

beneath the texture of trample. 

Unipedally Riffed

Left,
Left,
Left, left, left.

I left
Jeff Taft
bereft by a cliff.

He sniffed,
miffed
that I stiffed him in the lift.

I laughed
'til I coughed
as I rebuffed his guff.

Our theft
was deft
staffed by Steffi Graf.

He cuffed
me on the cleft,
and that's when I

Left,
Left,
Left, left, left. 

Edge talk

Broadway Kearney Trochee

Crystal Hot Sauce

Urban Curry

Bloody Mary

Hunan

            Cuisine

Happy Donut

Public Parking

Little Szechuan

Open

            For Lease

Garden of Eden

North Beach Movie

Dancers Discount

Secret

            Boutique

"North Beach Film Shoot," by Matt Jones

hyperpresent

Words open into libraries.
My cognition leaps easily.
How do fingertips apprehend
this instant fractal teleport?

Heart and Soul

So you can play, and play for hours,
linking moves as in a swing dance,
an improvisation that sounds
like a song you've heard more than once—
though culture has put that song down.

You risk disparaging glances
as you start to boom-de-ah-dah.
Say you haven't tickled them since
grad school back in Arizona—
your fingers find their old power,

madly snap appoggiaturas;
fancified melodic forays
ring the teeth of the rusty saw.
Boogie-woogie on yesterday's
abandon, bouncing every ounce

of self-aware grown up away.
A can of worms: "Oh, do you play?"

Deep thoughts

Dolce accelerando

By the time I get to North Beach, my skin is sliding against my skin

It’s late spring and hot, and the only thing I need is gelato—

Kahlua with dark chocolate chunks and chocolate-covered almonds—

so cold—milk coffee caramel thick, licked in the shade so slow.

I scrape the bottom, and I get up to walk back downtown.

I decide to have a cookie, too. I am so

vanquished that later I also gulp a peach

and feel that falling compulsion I know

from bodysurfing at Sandy Beach.

In salt surge and sugar siphon,

I stand and stroke while each wave

eats me up, foraging,

back-bending creature,

pushing the verge,

pushed below

one large

urge.

Craig Damlo

The limeronnet

There once was a bottlenose whale

who had wings thrice as long as her tail.

She could break from the sea

quite effortlessly

and sail through the heavenly veil

while scouting the waves for sea kale.

Her home in the firmament

became semi-permanent—

she only splashed down to avail

herself of some calm in a gale.

But in the clear weather

she stretched out her leather

and flew where the air was so rarefied

(leaving dozens of pilots quite terrified).

by Ashley McFarland AKA copperarabian

Δ

“Sailor’s delight, maybe,” she snides,

“but those clouds are menacing weird.”

We lose west a couple seconds,

and our internal clocks spin wild

as though we’ve driven since midnight

instead of since noon, and the sound

of breakers becomes Atlantic—

and we’ve gone back several decades.

“Like a storm’s coming in.” She checks

the rearview, the speedometer.

“Maybe it’s apocalyptic,”

said absently as infrared.

“Maybe those clouds,” she extends rock-

and-roll fingers, “are the heralds

of The STORM of ARMAGEDDON!”

We drive a while, pass a schoolyard.

“Probably just the regular kind.”

Smells like Spirit

In an aboriginal

unified field theory, Sound,

the primal all-belly, churns

every vibration around

wind-blown halls of a conch shell.

Matters foment and rebound,

karma chasing chemicals

to holy transformations

making not just sound but smell,

wafts mixed in air and airborne

wavelengths of primeval salt—

ferric, uric, sulfuric—

animate material.

Gas breath in solid music,

prime reason in primal cause.

That’s why your nose, mute and quick

is your wisest oracle.