Clover
“A thousand doors ago when I was a lonely kid in a big house with four garages and it was summer as long as I could remember, I lay on the lawn at night, clover winking under me…..”
—Anne Sexton
Musty Dusty
Sephoric feelings from the musty, dusty attic of the 90’s, a trillium of gold speckled leaves a-glimmer in the au tout afternoon floating through the moxie ocean door…some little XOXO sign of “GOOD LUCK BEAVER”——those pretty fortunato efforts of making the whole thing move ever more slowly on a tribal day such as this, when the round clovers are swimming wild, and the artist’s neon paint is still wet, perfumed with freens, libertine magic and samurai weeds. So heavenly and arch-villain to be writing your own crazy poetry on a vernal spring day such as this when the ripe islet of good clean lines from an old verse reader may inspire and make your tender nostrils quiver with rainy-day zen.
A quixby bilge of lousy sea-monkeys, and yielding to the infidelity of some skip-and-jump pet rocks in their blue boxes in my youth has made me a goodie-two-shoes—- afternoon baiting for old chum school memories left wholly intact in the freaky gum wrappers in my lefty warding shoes, which even then were a painful size seven. Skippy clown-shoes which rushed the horse-shoe hour, and dreamt of dubious pressed pennies, bee-bop turn-tables, and encrusted violas with a snub canto nose; BLT was a phrase that made me laugh with bon vie grammar and left my insides hurly-burly with an oddball, seize-the-day hilarity; fake roses on the high clef mantel shouted with Alice in Wonderland she-bop in the vixen night, eurhythmmic thorns piercing the horns of the imago in which the misky words in their own right would sit, floating in the secretive closet.
Tattooed words for a motley bag of surprises on a spring day when nothing matters but the sound of the rattle snake hissing, or the throbbing ocean, which will suck you in with its automatic waves of noon-time ergy; as the years rush in, the lawless paradise covers you with its thick, whimsical fog, urging you to confess, and sing, Dance, oh lucky spirits, dance!
— Carrie Chang, editor