Archive
The Blasphemer
Click image to go to a larger version.
Carrie Ann Baade was nominated for the prestigious United States Artist Fellowship in 2007. Her work is featured in Metamorphosis 1, a survey of top contemporary Surrealists including Ernst Fuchs, Alex Grey, Laurie Lipton, Chet Zar, Kris Kuksi, and Brom. Carrie is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Florida State University accompanied by her singing, polydactyl cat. Read more about her and view samples of her work at her website, and check out the recent interview at Hi-Fructose Magazine. Prints of some of her paintings are available from her Etsy shop.
Letters to My Father
Each one had to be edited,
every ambiguous word excised.
How pungent words were!
My mother’s eyes
traveled the page —
down, up, left, right,
regimenting each line.
Mustn’t offend him.
Mustn’t say
something he might mistake.
If I spoke of an ocean voyage,
described myself as putting out —
my God, I’d named myself a harlot!
I made promises, took oaths.
Oaths became curses
in the crinkles of his mind.
He was a wordsmith too. His hand —
the right one — blessed,
pulled its object close.
The sinister left one
drove the sculpting stiletto in.
After him, how could I trust
tenderness? The best he gave me
was when he called me a cat,
said if you dropped me
from the 7th story,
I’d land on my feet.
No small feat that!
Thanks, Dad, for my sense
of ambiguous language.
Thanks, even, for the thumps
on my wet clay that felt like blows.
Your hand crafting finished me.
I am your best poem.
Read me.
Download the podcast
Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld has been published both nationally and internationally in journals, books, and anthologies and on the Internet. A former SMU Press editor, SMU English instructor, and Navy missile analyst, she has also done poetry therapy with forensic patients at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and has made and maintains three websites for JewishGen on perished Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.
Directions’ Introduction
How to despise a word
so much you inscribe
it on your forehead every night
before going out to the bars
so you won’t have to say it.
How to hide behind a sign.
And then, how just to hide.
How to despise a word
so much that when uttered
you immediately need a gimlet.
How to hate a word so much
you write it on thousands of pieces
of construction paper
and rip them up
while watching reruns of Friends.
How to surreptitiously cut
your word out of every dictionary
at your “neighborhood” Borders.
How to burn a word anyway.
How to laugh inappropriately and off-key
when anyone intones it.
How to change its meaning
by forming several on-campus focus groups.
How to still have it stab you.
How to kick its referent
around the block
so you wake with sore feet
and ripped shoelaces.
Francis Raven (website) is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His books include 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005).
Looking for an Oracle
Spool it on out for me: where to turn left,
the bananas to pick, the men to catch,
the men to ditch, tell me when my nails
will break and the roof will fail,
tip me to gossips and scratched-out phone book names,
list out my losses (hearing gone in ten years,
the loves I’ll bury),
line them up so I can swallow them all
without the coil of worry —
choice never stopped the clots in anyone’s veins
or the smooth sky pressing down,
and I want my days laid flat,
my facts splayed out, a plan, a map,
to the last damn chicken bone
that sticks in my throat.
Amy MacLennan has been published or has work forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, River Styx, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Folio and Rattle. Her poems are forthcoming in the anthologies Not a Muse from Haven Books and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press.
The Taut String
by Joe Hyam
Put your ear to the hollow stone and see if you can hear,
In the corners of the town or in the dark and lonely house,
In the country of your head, where unstoppable rivers flow,
The childrens’ prayer that you trust no more, but can’t forget,
In the nursery of the rhymes that break upon your sleep.
For you may fear the hidden voice that only the dead can hear
And the shapes that change and chatter in the cave of sleep,
The words repeated, counted off like beads, lest you forget,
Where in the country in your head, tides of reason ebb and flow
And flood the foundations and secret places of the house.
Words winged with messages so cruel you struggle to forget,
That multiply with tiny feet and gnaw the timbers of the house,
That destroy, with spells and curses, the precious cave of sleep,
That cackle in your ears all night to make sure that you hear
The cries of people drowning in the headlong rivers’ flow.
Cup your ear, though, to the stone, in case you should forget
Kind words that open and close, like magic, the doors of your house,
And promise treasures and relief, bring calmness to the rivers’ flow,
Its provenance and destiny in the estuaries of sleep
Where whispered words come and go, sometimes, too soft to hear.
“Ring a ling” the voices go with spells and riddles through the house,
What they mean you do not know, but still they flow as rivers flow,
Down in the dark, where it is cold and, therefore, you must forget,
The whispers and promises of love; or you will never sleep,
The whispers which you cannot trust, and dare no longer hear,
But dread, for they wander free like burglars in the house.
Whatever are they looking for? What do they want while you sleep?
They move the furniture and dance to music which you cannot hear.
Stand tiptoe and pirouette and hope that you’ll forget
How fast, how cold, how unstoppable is the rivers’ flow.
Again and again, in the same order, the same words, you hear,
In the stone, in the taut string, in the timbers of the house,
Carousing in your head where the tides of reason ebb and flow.
Joe Hyam lives in Tunbridge Wells, UK. He was a journalist, but now spends more time writing poetry and growing vegetables. Every day at Now’s the Time he posts “three fine or strange things, which, day by day, give me pleasure, and which I hope will amuse and give pleasure to others.”
Bird Transformation
Harvey E. Parker is a visual artist who teaches Gifted and Talented in four public schools. His interests include mythology, history, maps and books. Most of his work is currently in ATC (Artist Trading Card) format, the only requirement being that the finished piece be 2.5 x 3.5 inches, the size of a standard playing card.
The Killer Poem
by Paul Stevens
One day I’ll write a poem so wild
It will knock you off your perch!
You’ll pick yourself up from the floor
Weak-kneed and cross-eyed, lurch
Towards me wailing, ‘I must have
That poet — give him to me!’
See, that’s why I write and write
And write this poetry.
Paul Stevens (MySpace page), formerly of Leeds and Harrogate, late of The Strand, has taken up permanent residence in the Seventeenth Century where he may be found at the Mermaid Tavern, roistering intemperately, waving a tattered copy of The Flea broadsheets.
I am waiting for the right instant to say your name
by Peg Duthie
I have torched battalions of straw men
in my quest to spin an ending to my liking.
I have cajoled seeds into uprooting secrets
before they are even drowned or buried.
I have fleeced both witches and sailors
and clothed empresses with newsprint veils.
I have given nothing away, although
many who partake of my measures fail
to recognize that everything bears a price.
I learned this from you. Your prints form a ghost
under everything I touch, a phantom
under every map I sketch, and once
I cease to care about what left’s to lose, I
will free you from the lump lodged in my throat.
Peg Duthie (website) shares a house in Nashville, Tennessee, with a small piano, a large dog, and a drawerful of knives. She blogs at Chrysanthemum.
He Gives Me My Nahuatl Name
by Susan Elbe
for Francisco Alarcón
August 7, 1994
I, myself am not bird,
my bones, not hollow
easy flutes for song.
I, myself am not snake,
my skin not silver
husk that sloughs me new.
But I, myself am the green
voice jabbering
down the fields. My palms
push sky, reek of sun
and I cadence
the night with whispering.
I, myself take to ice, brittle
with rime, shimmy
in dry wind — chicome, chicome.
Note: Chicome is the Nahuatl numeral 7. In Aztec mythology, Chicomecoatl (“Seven Snakes”) was the Aztec goddess of maize. She is sometimes called Goddess of Nourishment, a deity of plenty and the female aspect of corn. Her symbol is an ear of corn. Source: Francisco X. Alarcón. Other sources say that Centeotl, the Corn God, is the provider of the Spirit Soul (Teyollia) for days with the numeral 7 (chicome). There is a lot of crossover between Nahuatl and Aztec mythology.
Susan Elbe (website) is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror and a chapbook, Light Made from Nothing. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals, including Blackbird, diode, MARGIE, North American Review, and Salt Hill. Her work has also been widely anthologized, including in A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books).
With Kelly Madigan Erlandson, Susan is the editor of qarrtsiluni’s Health issue, currently accepting submissions through November 30.
Tricks
by Zoe Polach
We had a list of all the things that were important. It was a long list, but not too long, because it was very carefully edited. Thrift was on it, and wearing pants, and so was keeping good records. We’d made too many mistakes to forget that one.
One day at the end of winter, we were debating over lunch whether we should add something to the list. In the middle of the discussion, a stranger wandered in. We asked her what her name was, where did she come from, but she just smiled and asked politely if there was enough to share. We said, of course there is (hospitality was #14), pull up a chair and help yourself.
We continued talking, and the stranger listened attentively. At the end of the meal she thanked us for our kindness. She was a wandering magician, and she wondered if she might pay us back by putting on a little show. We said, we love a good magic trick, what’ve you got?
With great ceremony she pulled out a deck of cards. They were bigger than your average playing cards, and we thought they had different pictures, but we couldn’t quite make them out.
After shuffling them with all kinds of fancy flicks of the wrist, she fanned the cards out face-down and offered them to the nearest person. Take one, she said. He did, and turned it over. It read, simply, #20: paying debts. He read it out loud, and everyone looked at each other.
The magician took the card back. This is my best trick, she said, proud and a little shy. She traced the letters on the card with one long finger and they disappeared under her touch.
We wanted to be polite, but we didn’t understand. She said, you’ll see it if you try again. This time the card read #14: hospitality. As the word dissolved we felt something, a feeling whose name we couldn’t remember. Maybe we’d better see it again, we said, sitting up in our seats.
We erased our portraits, too, and our mortgages, and lots of things that people believed in. And every entry on our list had gone up in smoke before we were done. We felt better than we had in years.
When we were finished, we told her that after all this, we had to know her name. She said, I forget, I’m sorry, was it important?
Zoe Polach is from the Maryland suburbs of D.C. She started as a freshman at the University of Chicago this fall.
qarrtsiluni 