Alan Britt

Fractured Birds

Moments like fractured birds

when I cannot speak.

The flight of my voice

from one human to another

paralyzed in quartz

or in sleep rumored to be sleep.

There are moments

& there are no moments—

tiny husks of time

fallen beneath my branches,

beneath the arches of my feet,

as another self dazes through camera shops

& supermarkets.

Verdant heads of lettuce

wilt on icy shelves.

Logic juggles my green atoms

as I chew through quartz.

Moments like fractured birds

when I cannot speak.

Osiris 2022

Marie-Christine Masset

La paix des arbres

Dans les arbres 

parfois,

les histoires des nouveau-nés

s’enroulent aux branches.

Il faut, pour les deviner,

faire la nuit ces rêves

qui traversent les flammes

sans brûler.

Alors seulement est-il possible,

sous la Constellation du Feu,

de voyager les uns avec les autres

et d’inventer, même

sans parler,

la Paix des Arbres où aller

sans brûler.

Osiris 88, 2019

Musings from Alexis Levitin

Meet you at the Osiris: a Parisian café in the American Wilderness

I live in the boondocks of upstate New York, just south of the Canadian border. From my deck I watch an Adirondack River flowing slowly towards Lake Champlain. For blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, Canadian geese, squirrels, chipmunks, ground hogs, deer, fox and beaver this is the place. For climbing mountains, kayaking streams, rivers, lakes, and reedy swamps, this is the place. For downhill or cross- country skiing, snowshoeing, autumn strolls on woodland paths, daily swims in local rivers and lakes, canoeing everywhere, if you can find a partner, this is the place, indeed. However, if you want to soak in culture, as you would be doing seated at a corner table at Les Deux Magots on St. Germain de Pres, forget it. You can’t get there from here.

Or maybe you can. For if you subscribe to Osiris, a modest, high quality international poetry magazine now in its fifty-second year, you might feel yourself part of the intellectual camaraderie of a Latin Quarter brasserie. Seated in your lonely abode in the American wilderness, when you pick up a copy of Osiris, you can nod with a smile of recognition at Simon Perchik, seated at his usual table with his usual café au lait. Across the way, you catch sight of Bob Moorhead, discussing graphic art and Post-surrealism with a wild-haired Frenchman on his third anis. Seated beside him is his wife, Andrea Moorhead, happy to be in the midst of the bustle, elegance, richness, and surging of languages, here in the café she established half a century ago. At the next table sits John Taylor, a long-term ex-pat writer and translator, married to and rooted in France, if not always Paris itself. And there’s the American poet, almost as old as you yourself, Paul Roth, publisher of Bitter Oleander Press, sipping from a straight-forward black coffee, steaming hot. And then you catch a glimpse of your old pal Gerald Chapple, seated alone with the ghost of the great Berliner Gunter Kunert, his long-term drinking buddy and intellectual confidante. And as you sip your hot chocolate, you revel in the languages flowing around you: the predominant French, of course, but also bits of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, and quite a lot of English, both from Americans and Brits. 

How happy you are, as if seated in Les Deux Magots or Café de Flore, awash with the music of multiple languages and the intellectual buzz of people who believe that ideas and art still matter. And you can have all this while dwelling in the loneliness of the vast American expanse. Thank you, Andrea and Robert, for providing a home for those who never feel entirely at home.

Patty Dickson Pieczka

EDITING AN OLD POEM

Lost in a place 

where angular words 

lodge in my throat,

half–formed thoughts

dust down from their stanzas

into a pile on the page.

A loose thread

of dangling participle

ravels the poem, opening 

a door in its wall

where sunlight shifts

over mimosa leaves,

emptying their veins

to the paper.

Patterns of shadow

and light soak in.

I wring out the page,

twist it until magic spills.

Vowels alliterate 

from the beaks of doves; 

the poem spreads its wings.

OSIRIS 96, 2022

Sylvie Poisson

Méditation 2 

Tes sourires, les lueurs dans tes yeux, tes tremblements emmêlés. Tous tes visages disséminés dans le littoral du temps, leurs teintes insouciantes, leurs poussières lourdes. Tous tes possibles inachevés, rivières errantes au creux de tes âges. Chacun de tes balbutiements pour arriver au chant. 

Quelques miettes d’enfance au creux de ta main, tu mendies pour réparer la mémoire. Le firmament tremble encore sous tes paupières. Tu cherches l’envers des heures de l’autre côté du crépuscule. La rumeur consolée de ton sang. Quelques brins de lumières au creux de ton âme, tu persistes à trouver des embellies. 

Tremblante d’exister, tu balbuties des mots venus de tes nuits. Tu sondes les ombres, ériges un pont que tu traverses, une douce brise répandue sur tes épaules. Le silence apaise tes égarements. Tu touches la beauté. Tu résides neuve dans l’instant. 

OSIRIS 94, 2022

Ray Malone

ÉTUDE 21

so we spoke, well into the night, of selves

mingling, meetings held in the mind, trying

to find a way through the words, to where

there were none, no one for what there was

to say: the blackberry, say, bearing the weight

of a poem, the distant fruit of forgetting,

the bare facts of being there, remember, your hand

reaching in to the bramble, the arch of thorns,

for the taste to come, and the trace that

lingered, long after the dark, of parting,

the stain fading: the light goes, the lack

remains, the music merely repeats itself,

my ear to it, but no more mine than the ear

that first heard it, reached up to it,

to draw it down to the touch, to the fingers

writing it, gently now, the promise between them:

we met, so the words say, somewhere,

in search of memory, the mind’s freight

dragged through the tract of days: we spoke:

of selves enduring the night’s silence

Osiris 96, 2022

Jean-Yves Reuzeau

Comment serrer le diaphragme

Nappes de sons. Salve de silence. Nuit dilatée.

Les danseurs s’éveillent à l’aube. Muscles tendus.

Dans un tournoiement de lumière. De souffle.

Les notes palpitent. Rythme infini derrière les yeux

Clos. C’est pour oublier. Écarter la mort si proche.

Pour passer un nœud coulant au cou du désespoir.

Car les matins reviennent. Les ombres s’absentent.

Nous sentons leur souffle peser sur nos nuques.

Leurs doigts insistants appuyer sur nos vertèbres

Comme sur les touches cuivrées d’un saxophone.

Là où nous cherchons une brèche dans la langue.

Un vibrato. Un mystère tremblant. L’écho virtuose

Des vertiges. Des arpèges. Le cri des instruments.

Osiris 85, 2017