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Volume 3 Number 2 • Fall 2011

Robert Jacoby

Stars Fall Nude
In Summer Nights

Stars Fall Nude

stars fall nude shine on you
so soon becoming me
simmers the softly sea
pink run light shellworks
my breath to breathe
rhythms our body use to rhyme
of habit residual full
our sidereal God bathes me in your incense
your eyes pool my blood
for suns' fusions pulling blood
thin time without point and time
shooting stars barreled veins pull
the universe from my Christ-like heart
pull the universe through my very very vein
where the universe ends
to re-born me in bones
re-created in your throat.

One unsaid sun flares
fluttering seemingly endlessly
horizon upon horizon upon horizon
cheating time through gravity's bend and me, the awful observer of

a star falling willingly.
A star falls nude.
Fall now.

In Summer Nights

window screens sieved night-cooled air and cricket's lull
far off train whistle, waning,
wistful,
my father sat smoking in the backyard in his Adirondack chair,
thoughtful arc of cigarette tracing
secrets harbored from God and men.

Robert Jacoby pursues happiness in Maryland. His most recent poetry has appeared in Welter, riverbabble, Slow Trains, and The 2 River View, among others. His book Escaping from Reality Without Really Trying:  40 Years of High Seas Travels and Lowbrow Tales, a memoir-by-interview of a 61-year-old life-long merchant seaman, will be published in Fall 2011 by Cloud Books (excerpts have appeared in Alice Blue Review and The Oregon Literary Review). His first novel, There Are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes, is seeking a publisher. He is at work on a second novel, Dusk and Ember; a book of poems, Stars Fall Nude, from which these poems are selected; and another nonfiction book, a memoir-by-interview of a friend whose wife was killed in a pedestrian traffic accident in Washington, D.C. in April 2010, and the aftermath and recovery with his two young sons.