Issue 03 Poetry

Meeting Julie Christie at the Flower Booth at the Sunday Ojai Farmers’ Market, August 3, 2003

By JOCK DOUBLEDAY

 

from The Ridiculous American

 

Julie stands alone looking at a cornucopia of flowers. She is quite a bit shorter than one would imagine, and younger looking too, very fit, with dark brown bangs, tastefully blonde-streaked, fringing her sunglasses. She wears old green cotton pants (cargo pants?) and looks nothing like a movie star.


 

Jock: Are you Julie?
(She doesn’t turn. Should I leave this person who might not be Julie alone-— and who also may be Julie and is not turning around because she just wants to look at flowers? Probably. But I did bike all the way into town to talk to her. A few moments of courage-gathering. A trifle louder.)


Meeting Julie Christie at the Flower Booth at the Sunday Ojai Farmers’ Market, August 3, 2003
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In This Island

By MICHAEL JOYCE

In this island human corpses are not buried and do not putrify, 
    

    but are placed in the open and remain without corruption.

Here men see with some wonder and recognize their grandfathers,
           

           great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers, 
                      

                       and a long line of ancestors.
   

     —Topographia Hiberniae, Giraldus Cambrensis (1220)

 

I have seen them in other guises, in dreams or along wind-blown streets here and across the sea

where they go by with a nod or sometimes not, benign or monstrous, familiar passers-by

and now it is I who pass before them where they recline, still upon the rain-polished limestone,

each in his own bed

In This Island
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Girl Scouts Visit the FBI, circa 1975

By JANE SATTERFIELD

 

Fox’s series the X-Files starred David Duchovny and Gillian 
Anderson as FBI
agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully


Lights fade on this snow-erased suburban street as our screen flickers with roadside
bombs & body count. News is another stalled front,

a season past its prime. The house rattles with gale-force winds & Doppler radar
promises more.

Girl Scouts Visit the FBI, circa 1975
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Family of Strangers

By JANE SATTERFIELD

 

for Deborah Tall (1951—2006)
Baltimore, 2006


 

Not cool for September so we walked
slowly, slowly to cross the still-green campus
gold-struck in morning’s light.
That’s the kind of phrase I’d have used,
years ago, an undergrad arriving in town
the same year that you’d left.

Family of Strangers
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