Visiting Cave Creek
A poem by Nicholas Messenger (Editor's Choice)
You lose a tooth, your tongue works in the hole.
There’s no more disrespect in it than this. A stroll
along Cave Creek, where, back in nineteen ninety-five
it was,
all those young people tumbled to their deaths.
In all this time I haven’t visited: Because?
...of a conviction that I would find nothing here.
The precipice is only high enough for one intake of
breath,
though eighteen people taking it at once draw out
the agony of falling out of adolescent nonsense, over
years.
Life clutches, tries to climb back up through urgency.
And that it fails in such a charming place, with a
devout
hush in the forest and a fervent threnody from the
resurgence,
doesn’t dissipate the violence. Excluded, waiting with
the rescue teams,
I know they fell from a much greater height than it
now seems.
Fall 2006 Poetry:
READING HOPKINS IN PALOS VERDES
by Andrew Demcak
REFLECTIONS ON WRITING by Jann
Burner
THEY BUILT A WALL AROUND THE OCEAN
by Lily Bower
VISITING CAVE CREEK by Nicholas
Messenger
PUBLISHER'S NOTE and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
by Benjamin Bucholz
THERE IT IS by Hannah Price
GEOMETRY AND A LETTER by Laura
McKee
SENEGALESE GROVE by Holly Day
AFRICA by Kathryn Wagner
DEFINITION OF A TREE by Christine
Hamm
AFTER MY NAME IS SPOKEN by Meridith
Gresher
SHAPES IN THE AIR by Carolyn
Syrgley-Moore
NEITHER FISSION NOR FUSION by Ed
Tato
CLEAVINGS by Hank Kalet
A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS by KC Wilder
WHAT YOU WOULD CALL A LOOSE GHAZAL, I
REGARD AS
ANOTHER SMALL, BUT NECESSARY, STEP TOWARD RECOVERY by James
R. Whitley
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