Long Island Sounds: 2009

An Anthology of Poetry
-From Maspeth to Montauk
and Beyond-

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Next you will find a selection of this fine poetry anthology, edited by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan with Edmund Miller, Allen Planz and Peter Thabit-Jones.

This work includes 212 poets, 157 from Long Island, 4 from Upstate NY, 24 from NYC, 10 from other states in the Union and 17 from other countries: Canada, China, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Panama, Romania, and Wales.

As George Wallace states "When you consider the breadth and scope of the field of writers that represents, there´s good reasons to claim that pound for pound there is hardly a region of this country (USA) that has fone more for poetry and prose than Long Island."


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Here´s the selection. Hope you enjoy it.
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RUSTING - David B. Axelrod

Rust populates
those parts of things
that are not touched.

Others are oiled by
fingertips, or polished
by the brush of cloth.

Deeper crevices decay.
Even the thickest
iron will grow porous.

For ships there is
comfort in dry-dock,
welders´ arcs of light.

For me, waiting
and wasting. Unlike
love, entropy is slow

.:::

PERFECT PITCH - Byron Beynon

I´m reading the club manager´s letter
inside and intimate room
overlooking a bay
where colour change at a secret pace;
he once shared a space
with Dizzy Gillespie,
a story of perfect pitch and smoke-
filled notes, informing me of how
the jazz trumpeter
once listened to him shave,
the almost-contact of his face
in the cold mirror of light
as he told him something real,
shelled a musician´s car his way,
towards the sound he´d never forget,
that the electric razor
held him calmly in his right hand
was in E flat.

.:::

MUSIC - Kathaleen Donnelly

The low notes of a cello
settle in my solar plexus,
fill the air between beats,
cushion all other sounds;
make me want to lie
supine on the earth´s floor,
in the grass, on the sand,
look up
from the line along the bottom.

.:::

PHYSICS LESSON - Tom Romeo

How polite
The particle of light
It waves
as it goes by

.:::

MOUTHING GOD - Kausalya Venkateswaran & Pramila Venkateswaran

I love the word seed
in Sanskrit -beej.

I roll it in my mouth:
It travels from my pursed

lips to stop short
of the roof.

My tongue barely holds
it before it vanishes.

Seeds are magical;
how they sprout

an entire pantry
to feed a world

created from
an original.

This sound I
pronounce

is the first sound
that holds millions

of facsimiles,
multiverses, theories.

It feeds its singular syllable
to this frivolous verse.

Translation from the Tamil by Kausalya Venkateswaran

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