Archive
The Charmed Life
by Susanna Rich
It takes nothing — talent nor courage —
to be a sleeping princess
in a house of glass — Tiffany doves
floating in door lights, gold
-camed windows, panes that mirror
interior lights over outer darkness.
Things break only from others’ use —
etched flutes and tumblers; the crystal
witch’s ball hung to ward off evil;
Murano lamps; silvered walls;
the central vacuum…
Glaziers come, like charioteers,
with ladders and Unrue racks
to unscrew old strike plates, bleed
the furnace, crawl on their bellies
amongst toads and kittens
transparent in the walls. This is living
in the sky, in the full neon of the sun,
glitter of stars, a store of Magic
Ginger Ale — phosphate bubbles
unreleased — the aspic mold of pansies,
the heart-shaped ice cubes for guests
who bear their envy, to the altar
of you… For a spell to be a spell,
it must be broken — the rescuer must be
disguised, the rescued must seem to sleep
in a life of liquid suspense — perfect,
cold — waiting to be shattered…
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Susanna Rich (website) is a 2009 Emmy Award nominee for the poetry she wrote and voice-overed for Craig Lindvahl’s documentary Cobb Field. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Television Daddy and The Drive Home (both from Finishing Line Press); the 2008 Featured Poet of Darkling Literary Magazine; and a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing. An internationally published poet and prose writer, Susanna tours the one-woman audience-interactive poetry experience Television Daddy, and is in production for The Drive Home (opening in 2010). She is Professor of English and Distinguished Teacher at Kean University in New Jersey, teaching such courses as Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and 20th Century Women Poets.
ARKEO 4
Click on image to view a larger version.
ARKEO #4
archival inkjet and collagraph on paper
81 x 61 cm. (32″ x 24″)
For more information on this print, please see Marja-Leena’s blog post about it, and visit her gallery to see the rest of the series.
Marja-Leena Rathje is a Finnish-Canadian artist specializing in printmaking and photography. She is crazy about weathered rocks, prehistoric art and the archaeology of past, present and future. She lives and works near the sea and the mountains of Vancouver and has exhibited widely, both internationally and in her local region.
A Language of One
He uttered
tainted ellipses,
guttural sounds
empty of syllable
so his words
were other than
I had ever heard.
His yaw, jive and
garble mimicked,
it seemed,
a marred parrot.
Seated in the back
corner of the
subway car, he
was in continuous
self-rejoinder,
chortling,
purling, braying.
Everyone else
out of it.
We locked glances
as though at any
moment, madness
might commit fury
and send us
running for our lives.
But the man
paid scant attention
to us as he followed
the thread of his
conversation,
come 2nd Avenue,
out of the car.
Allen C. Fischer, former director of marketing for a nationwide corporation, brings to poetry a background in business. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, and Rattle.
November
by cin salach
Spell for the Undoing of Prayers
Let go the hands that fold me, let go the tongue that tells me
the trees the creek, they know, they will speak me now
Let go the house that holds me, let go the family that calls me
the moon the sun, they know, they will hear me now
Let go the name that follows me, let go the voice that carries me
the ocean the stones, they know, they will sing me now
Let go the sex that begins me, let go the veil that becomes me
the ground the breeze, they know, they will reveal me now
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I leave my signs of leaving spread neatly across the floor announcing
I’m leaving
to architect my own body
in the smooth ache of arch and bridge the red belly of fly and seed green of water
gold of wind stillness of pine and stone crawl of light.
I’m leaving
to hear my own body answer:
she is a wave, all the rest is negotiable.
cin salach has been performing and publishing in Chicago and around for over 20 years. She is both baffled by and grateful for online submissions of poetry. Actually, she is baffled and grateful by/for most things.
Call for Submissions: Health
We’re pleased to announce that submissions are open for the winter issue, which will begin publishing after the New Year. The theme this time is Health, broadly defined, and the editors are Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson (the links go to their works here at qarrtsiluni; see below for more about them). We’re having the submission period now, in November, to avoid the busy holiday season. The deadline is November 30th. As always, please refer to the How to Contribute page for general submission guidelines (and note that there have been several minor changes).
The editors have chosen a theme that should resonate far beyond the current health care debate in the United States:
We are interested in creative interpretations of health, which will of course include the health (or lack thereof) of the human body, but also of the mind and spirit, the environment, or the culture. How systems stay in balance, how one attains wellness, how we relate or respond to our own state of health and the health of others, and the extent of an individual’s physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope with his/her environment would all be fair game. Unusual health-related practices also intrigue us (serpents? psychic surgery?) as well as tales of spontaneous recovery. How much control do we have over our own health? Explore superstitions, regale us with symptoms, or simply make a well-written toast to our health — we’ll consider it. Keep in mind too that the etymological roots of health include “whole” and “hale,” but also “holy.”
Our limit is three poems or one prose piece per submission, with a 1,200-word limit on the prose.
Both editors hail from the American Midwest, and they’ve been friends for years. Susan Elbe is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press) and a chapbook, Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, diode, MARGIE, North American Review, Ocho, Salt Hill, Smartish Pace, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books). Among her awards are the inaugural Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize (Calyx), the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award, and fellowships to Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Susan has served on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and currently serves on the Council for Wisconsin Writers Board. You can learn more about her and her work at susanelbe.com.
Kelly Madigan Erlandson is the author of Getting Sober: A Practical Guide to Making it Through the First 30 Days (McGraw-Hill). Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in Best New Poets 2007, Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, Plains Song Review, Terrain.org and Prairie Schooner. She has been a writer-in-residence at Jentel Artist Residency Program and the KHN Center for the Arts. Kelly was awarded the Distinguished Artist Award in Literature from the Nebraska Arts Council in 2006, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2008. She has worked as a licensed alcohol and drug counselor in Nebraska since 1983. Visit her website at KellyMadiganErlandson.com.
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Don’t forget to join the qarrtsiluni news group on Google if you want to receive these announcements via email. We’d also like to emphasize something we mention in the general guidelines which some contributors seem to overlook: if you don’t receive an acknowledgment note within two days after you send something, assume that we didn’t get it and re-submit. If you still don’t hear anything, try sending from another email. If you’re submitting via the Contact form, please be sure to type your email address correctly. Sometimes we can find the correct address by Googling, but there was one guy who submitted to the current issue who we never were able to track down — and we wanted to publish his essay, too! Finally, please make sure your email is set to accept messages from qarrtsiluni(at)gmail(dot)com. Getting an automatic reply telling us we have to jump through extra hoops to communicate with authors makes us very grouchy indeed.
If this is the first you’ve visited the site in a while, be sure to check out all the great stuff we’ve been posting for the Words of Power issue — and stick around, because there’s much more on the way. We look forward to hearing from you soon.
—Beth and Dave
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Music: “Solo Fumo Yerba,” by Doctor Inferno — find more of their music at the Internet Archive
This episode of the podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike licence, in conformity with the requirements for using a “share alike” work.
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