Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume One
November- December 2025
Vestibule, poems by Stephen Haven.
Vestibule
We volleyed white against his pickup.
rushed him as he hawked Sassafras spring
in 5-gallon jugs. Fired a round against
the rag-tag shop he ran from his old trailer.
In blue coveralls, rubber, knee-high boots,
he’d King Billy Goat Gruff out the door.
Our quicksilver leapt its bed where those
wooded paths hit blacktop. He was always
game to chase us. Long elementary
chain-on-tire months, we’d Rambo also
hoods that rang in fishtails. Larger rigs
drummed the kettles of their empty beds.
Jake brakes hissed. Teamsters ditched
the warmth of their cabs: We nimbled the vigil
of all their candles but still they followed,
hunted me all the way through the idyll
of my first college inter-term. One last time
a shock of snow stunned a four-wheel drive.
I fired from a bridge straight down at him.
He morphed into a heat-seeking missile,
thundered beneath the railroad trestle.
Some long-gone trouble hopped the curb,
bit the track, two fat tires spitting gravel,
two thumping against the ties. Crazy Fucker,
I muttered as I looked over my left shoulder.
Yes, I ran. I was afraid of a man who played
chicken with the ghost of a late-night train.
Up the ladder of that 5-alarm fire, nestled
behind a rooftop railing, I peered down as he
swung his ride into the Sahara of that yard.
He eased a scarred silence from cab to ground.
When he looked up to the mute god in me
where he couldn’t see, the dim-lit quad
squared a ring around him. Then he took
some steps with his arms only. Boots and jeans
trailed a groove in the ground behind him.
From his elbows in the one good light
the quiet never broke but it was breaking
Christ-like on the aluminum and the ice.
I had no slight to offer the haunt he suffered me.
In that refracted silence I was fairly sure
deep inside himself a boy cried out.
In the absence of a word, both boys heard.
I wondered where he’d been, if he ever
bludgeoned what bludgeoned him. Then snug
in my twin bed, just as it was always said,
the chancel of sown sin, faithful as the moon,
lumbered from the roof of that white vestibule,
lit a candle in the dorm room dark, hushed,
shushed, watched me as I watched him, and for
the longest time, hawked me from that height.
CERAMIC REPLICA, QUEEN ANNE’S
CHAPEL, MOHAWK VALLEY, 1712
The wire cross thin as a syringe.
Seated at your desk you lean
across it, barely see it, touch
the blinds, leach the daylight in,
the mission your father’s parish
quickened, your eye almost
grazing that miniature tip,
the small, fired clay your father
saved, cherried in the wood
of his last study. You hold it in
one hand, the gray stone, the black
hinged door, Queen Anne’s Chapel,
1712, etched above that entry,
nine white windows split
into quadrants, a silent copper bell
tiny in its still tower. Keeping a low
profile, above the absent call
to Evensong, the wired right angles
of your near miss, a soldered clip.
Unglazed in the bottom of that clay
penciled in your father’s script,
250th Anniversary, 1962, Made
by the Brotherhood of St. Andrew.
The Iroquois grew skeptically near
apples in white flower everywhere.
The Revolution torched them,
harbored in that one burnt mission
dead Brits, dead priests, praying Indians.
Pick your poison, Johnny, pick it well,
Yanks and Union Jacks, hold them
like a gem to the cataract
of your one good eye, then shut
its brother, baby, pray for your
burnt site. How strange
to think you might have been
struck in the lens by your father’s
life-long gig! Each bedside chat,
each shut-in, each drive to teach
literacy in one prison, the devotions
of a life, and somewhere
in the burnt offering of this desk
the legacy of your own
familial touch. Razing that stone,
blood glazed in your father’s mold,
you rub the smoke and mirror
of that show. A gentle ghost
trickles up. You spirit
your way home, wish yourself
a corporate million, soot choking
the flowers near the watchtower
commanding your kitchen.
Somewhere in the potter’s fire
it’s you yourself you must marry
with your one blind eye, the father
you prayed by, this crazed bisque,
the Queen’s saved silver grown
strange and flat, leavened by the stab
of a small gray cross.
The Daily Double
You wake to find the world as it is
and know it to be a heaven. Against your
better disbelief the Earth as it is
and always now will be, and now forever
is again. You know that you have fallen
out of it, and here in your waking,
refreshed in an everlasting lastingness,
insects drill their malarial bills. Heaven is
the long thin oboes of mosquitoes
just as you never wanted it camping in
the Adirondack Mountains. Or else you
wake to a gaggle of geese, snow-white herons
overhead, herring spawning in a creek
so thick you might scoop those scales
in bunches with the cornucopia
of your thin hands. Or Shangri-La takes
you to 105 degrees, the antithesis
of anything that ever sailed
or soldered you. Between the pincers
of your thumb and index, you skewer
deer ticks by the dozens and still
behind one knee dementia buries
its necessary blackhead. You scratch
the concentricity of that target
then wake to the reality of your
absent father in one bare bulb.
Now who will crack your bread?
In a hunger so hot and heavenly
it all seems Earth again, power saws
revolve their circular hymns.
Once again, the early morning shift
hums as you thought you left it
rotting its $3.12/hour in a clock
you punched one adolescent noon
then fled the smell of stale tobacco
lingering forever among the plastic
chairs and linoleum of Building Six.
Now it is your mother who simply
dissolves to nothing again:
She is nowhere in the bone spurs
of your heavenly ankles,
nowhere on the loading dock
where each deathless blast stirs
the insomnia of this daily double.
You watch her picking gravel
from her corned feet, weighing
the pressure behind one retina,
detached from everything
she will never see, one wink
weighing the surgical click
of your scoped-out knee,
your patched hip waiting on
its lost bone, one gnawed metallic
thankfulness, long and round,
your Kaddish, your rosary,
your prayer rug pointed East.
Three Friends
He refused to shovel shit at the home
of his foster parents and would punch
dumb beasts square in the face until one day
he broke his hand. When he turned sixteen
by law they sent him home to the city
where violence marked him, chalked
silhouette shadowing even his absence.
We feared the sudden explosion of his
diminutive frame, as if the dominant passion
of puberty trumped scale, reason,
and the experiment of newly-grown bodies
blossomed its most beautiful barbed flower
in abandon only. Then one night
something happened, I don’t know: Snow
was drifting through one broken window.
Someone named Ross wanted to play
instead of Black Jack, Pinochle. A bottle
smashed against the plasterboard.
Brooks—all five foot four of him—grabbed
an old ax, swung once and twice, so drunk
that all he could do was miss, threw it down
and ran outside into the bloodless snow.
Brooks’s dog ran back and forth. Ross passed
out finally on the couch. I couldn’t stay
and had nowhere to go, so I went out,
along the river, through the sleepless night
all night and nearly froze. When I got back
at noon, Ross cracked a grin: “Where
the hell you been?” It’s a wonder Ross
didn’t kill Brooks then. Brooks just opened
another bottle, never mentioned the ax,
the scattered cards and broken glass.
They bit the hair of the dog that bit them
and laughed and laughed. I drank too.
Huddled in the corner, watching whiskey
help old friends stay friends, I grew older.
And warmer than I’d been that night
sheltering only in the lockkeeper’s doorway
while the frozen Mohawk broke up
and brushed by the long silence
of the Mohawk Carpet smokestacks.
© Stephen Haven
Stephen Haven’s fourth book of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was published by Slant Books in February 2025. In earlier form, The Flight from Meaning was a finalist for England’s International Beverly Prize for Literature. His earlier collections are The Last Sacred Place in North America, winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread, for which Haven was awarded the Ohio Poet of the Year prize; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, North American Review, Image, Salmagundi, Arts & Letters, The Common, The European Journal of International Law, World Literature Today, Blackbird, and other journals. His book-length memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk, was published by Syracuse University Press. With Wang Shouyi, Li Yongyi, and Jin Zhong, in 2021 he published the 300-page (Mandarin and English) anthology of collaborative translations, Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields: Poems from Contemporary China (Twelve Winters Press). He has received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. https://www.stephenhaven.com/