Leavenworth Writers Group

THE TRIO

Painting by Charles Curtis Blackwell, and front cover art for the winter edition of TRACKS #3, an anthology of the Leavenworth Street Writers Group.

Email me, >brennan.don@gmail.com<, about purchasing a copy of the anthology for $5. Here is a sample of what you will find there:


DUMB-LIPPED PETRIFIED MOMENTARY SETBACK BREAKS ITS SILENCE
by Marsha Campbell

Our homage goes out to you next time the fire our sun
drills holes in our pupils thus obliterating the need to see
whilst our ears pick up the least pin-prick or tinsel dance
upon the drumbeat of our hearts a drama so self-filling that we know now now our need to write to flex that head muscle.


Forget what animal I am blinking and hah-ing like the desert corpses of defeated mice covered in sand. Tonight won’t be just any night, Bringer of songs, Harbinger of Peace – my fear goes out to thee. I cannot speak but I can lie wasting away too many bodies’ unprecedented musical incidentals shiny white spirits punctuated by obstreperous mobs, nor will I seek out scintillating territorial surprises.

Reading you is taking messages and losing them, taking and losing, taking and losing…How could you not answer my intermittent cries for help but intermittently, like, they say, two ships that pass in the night?


My ship has sails that are made of silk. Without the edge of the world to slip off what direction do we flow in?

Oh, happy industry, my fellow man, this writing be! How jittery this exercise inside of me! You laid the law down with a wooden pen that was your gift to me, Amen.


by o.d.ludyeh
metamorphosis

a caterpillar catapults form a leaf on the moon
to a meteor in a mist,
there to weave its astral womb
a butterfly flits fleetly along the orbit of mars,
its swarthy wings swashed with a nebular catarrh


high in a bastard tree atop a steep lunar dune
a spark in an egg inscribes its shell with the runes
an eagle sears circles about peaks rougely charred,
its pennae pasted with the sediment of stars



from a grub of blue flame
from an ovum of white fire
spawned in the heavens
into flight burst two desires
sovereigns of space,
crowns jewelled with suns,
they flap silent thunder wings
to the clap of the big-bang drum

ON TRUE LOVE
by David DiGangi

What do I know of love?
I’m humbled by the question

I can tell you what I’m drawn to – I can speak of that which keeps me coming back

Is love like a basket that holds our treasures

Or is love like a tapestry
or a Buddhist mandala forever growing
for ever changing

I have no answer

I only know what I love.

The word love pops up over and over

Love as sensation
Love as a mammalian instinct
Love as a flesh desire

I’m sure I loved Willie Mays
on a Saturday afternoon

I know I loved Nat King Cole all through the night

I love Van Gogh for what he painted

John Denver makes me cry singing of love for Colorado

Grandmother on Life by George Wynn

My grandmother Bronislawa
Remembers playing in the park
In Cracow with her children
It is a very white night
She is in the graveyard
Of dreams eying every
Green leaf dying to twist each
Leaf into a Star of David
Inscribe her hands with
Something of the Hebrew
Alphabet into a prayer for the dead
Her impressionistic artist's mind rolls
Out the colors yellow, purple and red
Which do not fit on the canvas
Of her very black soul
Within where everything
Has already been said

SCRAPS by Ringo

Named for the bribing by store-owners of foot-patrolmen to curb shoplifing, the Tenderloin will always be remembered for its economically oppressed, cops on the take, trash in the strteets, dealers and pimps on the corners. The bright lights of the burlesque, like electric gumdrops, are the only eye-candy in this barren neighborhood.

AMERICAN PRISM
by Ray Valdez

I arrive in America,
I see myself in a mirror,
but not as I appear …
Rather, as I really am.
The nakedness!
The lion mane of long hair!
There, in my mirror image:
the natural rhythms of life.
But I’m imprisoned in
armor …
reflecting armor
imprisimed in refractions
of American Indian Time.

1967 REVISITED
by Charles Curtis Blackwell

Nostalgic yet real enough to be touched with eyes closed

Right on!

I tells you that’s soul, I mean it’s got enough soul to shout
AH-MEN!
Man, what chew say!
I ain’t seen nothing like it before;
Soul bellowing, blazin’, I mean set the stage on fire.
blazin’ brother, smoke and fire!

That’s right, see, see, cause you know, day say where
there’s smoke there’s fire

But see her drippin’ sweat, I mean she was soakin’ wet;
Shit man,
just like pussy, in the middle of the mood, Baby!

Shit! Tell her to cry for me, where’s she at?

I don’t know ‘bout dat, all
I know is she touched my
soul too.

New Genesis
by Dominique Leslie

God creates, Moving across the face of the water of nothingness;
Holy winds,
Holy Spirit,
Breath of life,
Creates life.
Nature creates,
Holy Spirit moves across the face of the Water;
Wind across the waters,
Creates ripples.
Moving out in concentric circles;
The Grand Spiral.
The dancer creates,
Holy Spirit moves across the face ofthe Water;
Dervish in devotion,
Spirals in, spirals out.
Breath of life moves them,
As they create a prayer/dance.
The artist creates,
Holy gusts, geists, whirlwinds move across the face of the Water;
From the depths swirling emotions,
Holy Spirits, Holy winds,
Breathe life into each work of art.
The Spirit moves across the face of the Water,
Creates this poem.

MEDITATION
by Janie Dickens

Have you ever sat
Or envisioned yourself
On a mountain top
Without someone breathing
In your ear or casting a shadow
Forever more over your
Soul, your being?

Wow, the sunlight is great
But the celestial power
Is better.

The god spirit, the
Metaphysical delight
Of all of
Nature’s creatures.

Keep on looking for the
Light

NIGHT LIGHT by JJ Rush

To diminish you is
To diminish me
Yet without your love
I couldn’t be.
This has nothing to do
With what you do
The whole eye shuts
And the world is new.

SISTERS by Patricia Anne Walker

We live, love and run from each other
Effervescence of perfume
Three cheers for sisters to sing
For the church, Ali and The Sun King
Down Larkin Avenue
Here comes the Sun King
For families, naturally, and apart and gray
Desert sands singing for the last soul
Lost as sisters on the way home

EBONY LOVE
by J.B. Saunders

Sweet mounds of ebony flesh,
Gyrating thighs,
Pleasing to the eyes,
Ooo girl, you’re something else
Movement as fluid ass,
Easy woman … a bird gliding …
Through the skies
Pleasing to the – do it girl
Gently entwined
Umm … you are mine.
Our bodies, our minds, together
Let us not part – never
Here my head rests
Betwixt two succulent breasts
Trapped between gyrating thighs
Pleasing to the eyes
Captivated! Never leave me …

WHAT WORDS ARE
by Carlos Ramirez

Words tumble, descend and lie
like insects pressed against supine books

Connected to one another like washed
garments hung along the world’s outdoor
clothes lines

Nuances emerge from their beholders’ breaths
like spit and stars shooting arcs across
the winds

What aren’t they, aren’t they …?

Water borne coins at the marketplace of
everyday’s dance of survival.


tg by Don Brennan

in these gratitude days we steep and grow
strong as herbal tea just off the tree
boiled creamed sugared
waiting to be tasted, cooling in a moment
that rises to a tired man’s lips

the life we sip scalds the tip of the tongue
singing to our rested bones that
joy is the burden we have sought since
the ancestors lay themselves across death’s
barricade and brought us here

and here we are, nowhere else, hearing the horns
the strings the bugaloo drums as we swallow
our brew more sacred now than we have ever
known her to be in her delerium, calling us to the
weighted down table

sauces dripping, stuffings stuffed, children on the
gallop into a living space where voices cram our
ears with uninvented poetry, shouting out love’s
unthinking nonsense in the only rhyme a heart
knows how to feel without bleeding

in these gratitude moments when rage is teased
into subsiding, when fear submits to hoarse laughter
and paws the air like a puppy begging for more, the
world’s current evils cower briefly in faithless
corners, leave us in peace.