Lynn Strongin
	A WAR’S GOING ON Silently,            a battle-like scurrying, Fighting that swaggart, braggadocio mofo dishes misery.            Saint Grit, we have come to illumine it:             this unlit room If Sweet Pea ignores me, I must let her be Between the dumb-waiter & the dumbfounded children watching Papa leave home, Army hat packed, wedding ring still on hand Mercury turns retrograde. The day I first believed In another life of free-floating anxiety                        crossing the Rubicon I was a hospital porter                        throwing out last year’s flowers: I saw hospital-staff thorns Wetlands mirroring surgeries, white foxes a capture, an urgency like happiness I scored musical notes              scrolling down. Great houses in the background:             rippling satin smudged glass windows banked a soft fire            s grandmother setting out silver before  mute grandfather two strokes having taken silver speech away from an immigrant from Romania, a research chemist distilling eternity-mercury, silk & thin. LABOR DAY WEEKEND                         I thirst & hunger to be part of the painting: Sweet pea’s Scottish family coming Me the Jew exiled. She is camera-deprived: My girl            Sun thin as bicycle spokes, blue spider web ink lines on white linen where I jotted poems as a kid sullying auntie’s bed linen in a dollhouse room wallpapered dormer ceiling clear glass beads the Book of Knowledge everything a child didn’t want to know:   Make shift olive leather             in my own home was better than her sandpapered neatness our family was ruined            like a ship in a bottle. Among the loved  lost                         I would not come last. The labor is in the leaning toward the Saint Dirt Elementary school choir air-brusht fire                        copper & mineral fire Lord dirt yard blowing like a bugle thru the hard yard.