Archive
underneath is snow
“we were thinking of our bodies as snowsuits instead, thinking this would make us pretty.” (Click on photos to see larger versions.)
February Day Trip
That we didn’t, after all,
go anywhere that day
hardly matters, looking back.
We discussed it in each other’s arms,
weathervaned the state,
considered lakes, obscure museums,
unknown and nearby towns,
and mind-explored some routes
to be later found, or not,
on the toast-distracted map
unfolded over what
was fast becoming lunch.
Next there were the tasks
we ought to do before
we started out:
the laundry,
email,
something we’d forgot.
All the while the sun,
which always plans ahead,
rolled on its grudging round,
Time’s chariot.
And yet,
we traveled, looking back.
by Susan Donnelly
What the Forest Said
Tell me.
Which part?
All of it. Any of it. Just—something vivid.
–
I was walking.
Yes?
And there were two deer.
Whitetails?
Yes, whitetails, flashing alarm. They heard the dog. I didn’t tell him; he was looking for a good stick, something nice to throw. The deer flipped their tails and danced away. I could see reflections of yellow beech leaves in the eye of one of them, turned toward me: she was that close.
–
Tell me another.
I don’t know what to tell you.
Please.
–
Bobwhites.
What?
Six or seven of them, exploding from the underbrush with wing-beats so loud I ducked. The dog ran so fast he ran right out of the orange t-shirt I put on him to differentiate him from bear.
Bear?
It’s bear season. They’re shooting bears.
Oh.
He treed them.
The bears?
The bobwhites. They were furious.
I bet he was proud.
Very proud.
–
You’re going to leave, aren’t you.
Yes.
Soon?
Probably. There isn’t much left.
There is. There could be—
Shhhhh.
–
One more. Tell me one more.
–
Once I walked into the woods and there was only one way: further in. I walked and walked, and I was fierce and beautiful and brave and resourceful and I had many adventures, but I was getting tired. Very tired. I couldn’t walk any more, finally; I couldn’t be fierce and beautiful and resourceful and brave any more. Also? I was bored with myself. With all of it. I dug a fire-pit, lined it with stones. I gathered wood, and made a fire. I was so hungry, but I had nothing to eat and I was too tired to do anything else, so I sat by the fire and watched the flames. I figured I’d probably die of starvation eventually, but really, the flames felt good and I couldn’t think what else to do. A stag came out of the forest, walked right up to the edge of the fire across from me. We looked at each other for a long time, and I thought: how beautiful. After a while, he lay down across the fire and split himself open, his blood steaming in the coals. I ate his flesh, and was restored.
That didn’t happen.
No?
No.
–
–
I saw a peregrine eat a bat today.
Yeah?
–
–
You’re going, aren’t you.
I’m going.
–
I have an idea.
Yeah?
When I go, just look away.
–
Okay.
–
–
Now? Should I look away now?
The Supper at Emmaus
just over,
Caravaggio’s Christ
stood in the Tube
dressed in jeans
and shapeless jumper
holding a jacket
for his girl.
by Irene Brown
Note: I wrote this poem in 2005 after having been to the exhibition Caravaggio: The Final Years at the National Gallery in London which included his painting The Supper at Emmaus. This year, I came across and read the Salley Vickers novel, The Other Side of You, which featured the painting in its theme. I saw it again drawn in chalk on a Florence pavement by a Texan artist, Kelly Borsheim, and her students.
Our Rowdy Pack Song
a hay(na)ku*
dented
moon, wheeling
just like me.
synaptic trash
caught sweet
in blue-violet mercies
roaring,
glory-headed girl,
smashed diamond skies
tilt,
tilt a-whirl,
twist and all-fall-down.
dry
river coursing
bloodstream’s ancient dreams
sashay
into beatitude
unravelling like me,
glistering
somersault into
infinity’s unformed matter
—is
that fire-
eating the open door?
or
peat-y fingers
down my throat?
i’m-a-ring-’round-rosie-girl,
a hot-blue-star
unhitched and free-wheeling
one-of-seven-sisters,
a pleiade,
bartering my soul.
unbolt
this cage
of inkblue heaven
drown
my mercies,
fill my mouth,
cast-me
deep beyond
the oh-so-watchful stars,
deepsky,
non-stellar objects
wheeling lopsided within.
by Holly Anderson and Caroline Beasley-Baker
Download the MP3
__________
*Hay(na)ku is a 21st century verse form invented by poet and publisher Eileen Tabios, who launched the first Hay(na)ku challenge to the world at large via the web on June 12, 2003 (Philippine Independence Day). The “traditional” form of a hay(na)ku entails:
- A tercet: 3 lines.
- A total of 6 words: 1 in the first line, 2 in the second line, and 3 in the third line.
- There is no restriction on syllables, stresses, or rhymes.
Then, in 2007, Tabios issued an online invitation to poets to join in groups of three or more to create “chain” hay(na)ku with each tercet moving between voices as in a conversation or a traditional “parts” song. “Our Rowdy Pack Song” is a poetic duet that loosely interprets the form.
From Earth Records
You sign your name, and live, as long-term guest,
the economics of the domicile:
the highest prices start where views are best.
Light has status. One pays for space and style.
Descending from these peaks, the roofs begin
to terrace out across each marked-off plot.
The postcode scores the loss or draw or win.
Sometimes the height is shared, and sometimes not.
You’ll find the horizontal villa, or
the block of income worry, standing tall.
A bench in central London costs no more
than dangerous nights, a policeman’s wake-up call.
In any case, the place that’s always free
is where the land breathes out, becoming sea.
*
A different kind of music sprays the pavements
in the summers of economic booms:
trained violinists play for unit payments;
grandmothers, graduates amortize rooms.
The raising of the GDP includes
sales of Sleeping Beauty by teenage boys
in stations; seminars that teach the moods
suited to business, the interview ploys.
Private coaches are the sleeker design,
the comfier; brighter the books and shops.
The local film moves quickly into line —
the new heroes: brick-faced boxers and cops.
The higher prices crush the ticket crush,
and chums count less. The new pavements are flush.
The Steel
Entrance, Bethlehem Steel Plant (click photos to view at larger size)
Empty Lot and Towers, Bethlehem Plant
These black-and-white pinhole photographs show how the iconic Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) steel plant — “The Steel” to those who worked there — appeared in 2005. The sprawling complex sat dark, rusting and abandoned behind chain link fencing.
The plant, which closed in 1998, had fueled the economic engines of the 20th Century, providing the ribs for battleships, skyscrapers, bridges and the interstate highway system. This year, part of the historic site has been developed into a Sands Casino and Resort.
While some of the lesser buildings have been bulldozed, the blast furnaces and several other core components remain. The Sands has said the tall furnaces will be repainted and illuminated with “architectural lighting.”
by Steve Rago
The New Economy
The rattling cans fell silent and the rattlers
stiffened to attention, equidistant,
as if on military display.
On the clearing’s far side, a massive hangar,
slabbed together with corrugated iron,
stewed in the sun’s gut.
One door, no windows. “You live there?”
Laughter churned through the ranks.
One woman spoke,
“This building is the last hope for Speckland,
a hut of refuge for its people,
a slim dignity.
Here, those forced into tiny squats in Leith,
twelve to a room, with only Speckish
supermarkets
for nutrition, can now find fulfilment
and five-minute toilet breaks
while studying
the language of Shakespeare and Thatcher
by selling off last year’s mobile
phone technology.”
At that moment, the door opened and a shock
of ragged men, women and children
tumbled out,
sharing cigarettes, pulling open Kraft lunch boxes
and cans of Coke Zero, setting
alarms to vibrate.
“For six pounds a month, you can feed
a child a week of recycled meat.
For twelve,
a family can be trucked out from the city.
For five hundred, your name
will be immortalised
in Speck City on a plaque of solid aluminium.
Please give generously, we rely
on your gifts.”
Patty-Cake
The moment she knew she’d conceived she made two decisions: no doctors, no birth.
“Baby,” she said to the cluster of 15 cells adhering to her uterine wall. “Forgive me. It’s a harsh world. I can only think of one way out.”
Every cell of their collective body agreed. At the end of nine months there were no contractions, no birth.
By the end of the first in utero year he slept through the night and drummed on her lower left rib if he wanted a shot of caffeine. He liked reruns of Myron Floren on the Lawrence Welk Show and did not care for Chinese food.
She filled with song. He learned to crack his thumbs in time to her voice, a double-jointedness which ran through the family on her father’s side.
By the third year she began to thin. Lying nude in the backyard dosing them both with Vitamin D, she noticed how translucent her flesh had become, the centerline full of white striations pulling and stretching like a seam coming undone.
In the dome of her belly, two small hands pressed, and then between them, a face. Even pale and waterlogged, his hair a floating nimbus, he looked exactly like her uncle Vinnie. She smiled. The boy smiled back.
His finger with its long curled nail followed the path of a crow over the dome of his world, leaving a flush of pink in the fluid.
She called her sister, said she was leaving a present in the backyard. The sister said she’d be right over.
When the sister arrived, the boy, sitting upright in the pelvic girdle, was playing patty-cake in a small puddle of amniotic fluid, tears streaming down his face from the pure brilliance of the day.
by Karen Stromberg
Download the MP3 (reading by Beth Adams)
Sojourn
Saint Alphonsus instructed his followers:
“Take only what you need.” Retreating into
the desert, he lived for three weeks eating
volcanic ash, waiting on Uriel’s command.
After twenty days he was flame, his mind,
the arc of sky. He no longer felt his toes
scraping hot sands. He walked unharmed
past rattlesnakes, blended into copper hillsides,
drank from arid sage plants. The ascetic turned
into wind, moving effortlessly over mountains,
branches of tall cypress. Years later, clerics
found his rotted sandals, placed them as a relic
amid hair and purported bones of local saints.
Believers still come to place their hands
on the worn insteps where Alphonsus stood
looking into the archangel’s eyes. Supplicants
touch desert dust to tongues, reverently bow,
attempt to cast off everything but their marrow.
qarrtsiluni 