The island of Oahu is home to poet Alice Folkart. Between hula lessons and ukulele festivals she writes and volunteers as an administrator on Perfect Day 4 Poetry and the Internet Writing Workshop. Many of her poems and short stories have been seen in both paper-and-ink and cyber-literary journals over the last ten years. A cat, a musician husband and revision of her first novel fill her spare time.
Spring 2011
Table of Contents - Vol. VII, No. 1
Alice Folkart
The gypsies have come to town,
parked their trailers
and RVs
in a vacant field
down by the gas works,
strung clothes
lines between the hulks,
hung their wash to dry --
scarlet, purple,
gold, royal blue,
even black and white
fluttering prayer flags
in
the salty, tropical air.
A disheveled crone hunches
over the
stub of a cigarette
in the open door
of her rusted teardrop trailer,
behind her, in the shadows,
an elaborate altar to the Virgin,
votive candles, plastic roses,
and Mary, serene, eyes cast down,
blue cape flowing around her.
Unfiltered halos of Marlboro smoke
mingle with sweet incense.
Somewhere someone plays a guitar softly,
a
tea kettle whistles. Two little boys
run barefoot toward the harbor.
The gypsies have returned
bringing my fortune with them.
Big Brown Belly
Mr. Big Brown Belly
sips a can of Bud Light
out of a brown
paper bag,
balances on the railing
by the Salvation Army Thrift
Store,
sizing up strolling tourists and locals,
deciding, between
swigs,
who would be good for a handout,
a buck for another beer.
Warm tonight -- no shirt,
his enormous belly, brown,
smooth as
polished koa wood,
a nine-month protuberance
hanging over the top of
his dirty jeans.
"Spare change?" he asks,
looking sweetly at the
respectable Midwestern couple
in matching Aloha outfits loud with
Hibiscus.
They ignore him, he's not their idea of Paradise,
consult their maps and continue toward the park,
which, after dark, is
full of men like him.
Mr. John Chase,
gray of hair, gray of face,
wrapped in rags,
toting bags,
swollen feet, across the street
shuffles slowly.
Mr. John Chase
inches along, his walker four-prong,
nails thick
and black, so curved
I want to clip them off,
but I don't scoff at
him
as he stumbles along.
Mr. John Chase
died years ago, yet
still appears
in the creekside bushes and has for years
since he came
home from war
and wasn't anymore the man he'd been.
That's our sin,
not his.
He hobbles along toward his final night.
It isn't fair,
it isn't right. He goes slowly.
© Alice Folkart
