The scene is topped with clouds and steam, blurring
an archway where a pair of crossed hands emerge from a leaden egg. I find it to be my very own, the only lead egg I'll ever birth. The soft metallic shell peels away like damp pages, laid round upon some neatly patterned cobble stone. It is lit gently from within. The handy egg is rolled to the foot of a wrought iron gate and wrings darkness through its wrought iron fingers. The end.

Cypresses

a woman is hanging from a blind woman's clothesline. Sleeves
emptying their raised shirts. The edge of the road is a raised shirt lining the sky. Other women are preening crows along the roadway, the way the sky is preening the road all folded in the clouds. Cypresses had stolen an old man's hat when he came upon the line. The women were originally young of hand, had clasped books in their linens. Quiet were the nightbirds in their dresses, aroused was the old man in the cypress. All were afraid of eachother, the slightly nudging wind. To navigate toward attempts would be fruitless. Unless the cypress tops could be seen as fruit, and they could, being all clustered with the foliage of men and women and their linens. The evening is the master of levitation, is threadbare fruit, says the old man, to the horizon line, watching it squirm.

Albert Flynn DeSilver received a BFA from the University of Colorado and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the author of six collections of poetry and runs The Owl Press. He teaches throughout Marin and San Francisco with The California Poets in the Schools Program. He has also taught at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, at The College of Marin, and thanks to grants from Poets & Writers Inc, at many senior centers throughout Marin County. His work has appeared, or is due to appear, in ZYZZYVA, New American Writing, Hanging Loose, VOLT, Rhizome, LUNGFULL!, Fourteen Hills (SFSU Review), Tinfish and Big Bridge (an on-line journal of the arts). He lives in Forest Knolls, California.

 Albert

 Flynn

 DeSilver