by Steve Meador
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Lithia springs, east of Tampa, Florida, dumps its clear, 72°F water into the 83° turbidity of the Alafia River. This separation continues a couple hundred yards to a bend, where the two blend and flow to the Gulf of Mexico.
See the previous post for Steve Meador’s bio.
by Steve Meador
There are no cherry or oak bouquets,
no earthy or blackberry aftertastes.
Cost analysis and income streams
drift to the bank in a glycerin wake.
Cell phone tones travel at the speed
of light to Saturn where they bounce
off rings and get redirected to Pluto.
Terror and misery have crossed borders,
lie at the doorstep, reside in the remote,
but remain in dry dock at home. As do
Hemingway’s words of rougher seas.
Here, a damselfly in distress is plucked
from water the color of a healing bruise
and placed on a tawny iris, to dry its wings.
Two water striders skate in a winner-take-all
race. The loser gets the belly of the bass
lurking near the roots of a rotting stump.
A moccasin slides through pickerelweed,
chasing the plunk and whisk of my paddle,
but will cower and retreat at the first taste
of brine that slithers in from the Gulf.
Ahead, ripples and sunset form a horizon.
Steve Meador’s book Throwing Percy from the Cherry Tree, released by D-N Publishing in 2008, was an entrant for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He has been widely published, resulting in several Pushcart nominations. Pudding House released two of his chapbooks in 2007.
by James Brush
Gauzy cirrus wisps
burn off early with the stars;
a dust-choked noon sky
glows orange like dying leaves.
Desolate and desiccate,
burned by blistering cold,
wind-scoured deserts remember
where water used to flow.
Eroding winds pile dusty sand
in ever-shifting dunes;
in a hazy salmon dusk,
the diminished sun sets blue.
Two moons’ clear light sweeps a sky
under which only robots sleep
beneath one brilliant blue-hued
evening star on whose surface
you’ll find me—in the driveway
out to get the paper, a moment to admire
that ruddy wanderer in retrograde,
that rusty blood drop in the sky.
James Brush (blog) lives in Austin, Texas where he teaches English in a juvenile correctional facility. His poems have appeared in various places online and in print. He published his first novel, A Place Without a Postcard, in 2003. He has been fascinated by Martian landscapes since he saw the first Viking images in the mid-1970s.
We’re here to entertain each other
and find someone to share a name, right?
My body moves my mind around now
on prescribed walks. The cleared wooded lot
I thought meant construction, new neighbors:
since learned the landowners were just bored
with city life, came up one weekend
to make some noise. I should mention love.
Together, around the corner, we’ve
never seen our place from this distance.
Brent Goodman (blog) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Brother Swimming Beneath Me (2009 Black Lawrence Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Zone 3, Gulf Coast, Court Green, and elsewhere.
(May 9, 1960 – October 5, 2009)
Frigid night, tramping through a grove of young birches, then — fairy tale you!
Vintage, grey curly-lamb coat — shrugging it off, rivers of hair undone.
You threw blazing light: blue comet flashing wild, pulled into your orbit.
We drank red wine until our lips cracked black telling stories through the night.
Yes, the hair was a carnival, a conniption that framed your fierce soul.
Winter day’s diner lunch where we toasted delicious men we’d enjoyed.
A Supernova Remnant releases heat inside the Milky Way.
So apt a definition of you and your hell-for-leather mission.
Mentor, muse to many, your own painted photos hung glowing — at home.
You heard music with your body, huge heart and wide-open awareness.
Your truest sister: Euterpe, muse of music, ‘Giver of Delight.’
We danced to 60′s Ethiopian bands under summer night sky.
How you loved bliss-state love, so ready for love to smack you once again.
SriPraPhai, your fave: too many Thai plates, laughs, bottles of Yellow Tail.
Radiation round, you ate three bowls of my chicken soup, hungry day.
In hospital you drew kohl round your eyes, then ate fresh-picked blueberries.
Six episodes of ‘Hung’ back-to-back, suburban dad is pretty hot.
The morning bath: long bones emerging from the garden of your body.
Lipstick, kohl crayon, multi-button japanese dress, warm scarf — car’s here.
Black car, grey rain — you said you love rigor, difficulty, hate jam bands.
Bottomless chocolate eyes, brows arched like a bird wing: brand new beauty.
I’ll paint my lips a rich, hard red again in your memory, darling.
Author’s note: Allen Ginsberg westernized the haiku (sometime in the early 90′s I believe) — he kept the same 17 syllable-count but set them out in a single sentence. He called them ‘American Sentences.’ I’ve written these about a fiercely vibrant friend just lost to lung cancer, and despite the ravages of the disease and the nuclear fallout from western medical protocols, Suzanne retained her essential, flame-lit core to the very end. That is, to me, a form of health that cannot be taken from someone no matter how vicious the attacks.
Holly Anderson’s poetry and prose has been anthologized in Up is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press), The Unbearables (Autonomedia), and First Person Intense (Mudborn Press). Her limited edition books Lily Lou (Purgatory Pie Press) and Sheherezade (Pyramid Atlantic) are in library collections including MOMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Anderson’s lyrics can be heard on Consonant (s/t), Love and Affliction (Fenwayrecordings) Mission of Burma’s VS, OnoffOn (Matador), Jonathan Kane’s Jet Ear Party (Table of the Elements/Radium), and various other albums.
Drops of foxglove and fish oil in the water supply.
A diet of artichoke and split garlic to keep the roadways clean,
and cups of jasmine green tea for conservation.
Zazen every morning for freedom from technological distraction,
and valerian to soothe the sensationalized brain. Plenty of
St. John’s Wort for the unemployment rate,
with a deep-tissue massage of the inner cities.
Tinctured rhino horn defusing the manias of the street.
Acupuncture needles at state-capital pressure points, smoldering
smudge stick of white sage against the corruption of officials.
Yarrow to detox the sluggish rivers of waste that run
the continental length and breadth of the body, but feverfew
and fresh ginger for the stagnation of industry.
Ginseng for the symptomatic economy.
Sweet sagewort to counter the pulse of that executive greed.
Chinese cinnamon to crack the glass ceiling of sexism,
yohimbe wine to blur the lines of hate, and a bit of skin color
blindness with fresh-squeezed juice of celandine.
Quartz crystal on the throat to cleanse tarnished historical karma.
Sagebrush to always be reminded of how we came
across those oceans, with star anise charms for luck.
Cold chamomile tea for systemic anxiety.
Artemisia the reawakening of a new and different Dream.
Comfrey and wolfberry to knit all the pieces
back together.
Joseph Harker is the pseudonym of a foolish twentysomething, lately located on the East Coast of the US. He dreams more than he ought to, scribbles less than he wants to, and is a textbook Libra in just about every way. If you’d like to bother him, it’s best to visit his online demesne at naming constellations (but do mind your step).
by Rodney Wood
it says carrier bags make me nervous
it says I dream of birdseed hanging
above gnomes and a lake of roses
it says the breakdown won’t help
it says I’m waiting for something
better to come along, like another day
it says love is a valley of dead things
it says I can withstand high winds
and am not afraid of grotesque stones
it says I strain myself in a bad way
it says soles are worn and slip easily
but my feet want to dance out the door
it says I will be involved in replacement
it says the new moon makes me flexible
and it says someone will weep for me
Rodney Wood lives in northeast Hampshire and has recently been spending his time writing poems about gigs — everything from thrash metal to Tibetan monks — that he’s seen at the local arts centre. His work has appeared in many magazines, including, this past year, nthposition, Stride and Sunk Island Review.
Originally written as a response to a survey for the ArtCraftTech conference on health and wealth held in Manhattan in December 2009.
What is health?
Health means being basically alert, functioning, joyous. Having access to the capacities of one’s body. Not doing stuff that will degrade it. A healthy human has found a way of being in the physical world that matches his/her spiritual and emotional needs and aspirations. Not everybody needs to be a karate blackbelt, but the person who needs to be, if they’re healthy, can learn to be. If they’re not healthy, something stops them — ideas of limitation, fear, or the actual deterioration of the body/mind. Health means the organism retains the capacity for learning, some plasticity. A healthy person has the capacity to take in information/input/contact with the world, and to respond and modulate on the basis of that information. And a healthy person is willing and able to work with what they have, to optimize, rather than lamenting some ideal state they lack.
A lot of health is about maintaining a healthy immune system — which means cultivating a fundamental attention to what’s good for one, what makes one feel healthier, and what makes you sick. That means not just noticing, but going towards what enhances your sense of well-being and away from what diminishes it.
A lot of systems look at health as a kind of balance between internal forces — heat and cold, black bile and yellow bile, etc. The trouble with these systems, in my mind, is that they’re basically conservative. They focus on adapting to the hierarchical nature of one’s society rather than working actively to change it. Ideally, healthy people would have such a wide focus that they could see all possibilities along the continuum of: adapting to the environment — changing the environment, and make a choice as to which is appropriate at any given moment. Actually, though, people, even healthy people, tend to cant one way or the other — towards adaptation or change.
I think that’s OK. That wide-focused person who can really decide whether adaptation or change is most appropriate in a given moment is so rare that we’d have to call that something bigger, wider than just health. So there’s healthy people who’re adaptors and healthy people who are change agents. Ideally, as long as the awareness and moveability are there, we can find some way to work together.
Health is linked to sustainability. A healthy human wouldn’t destroy the land they’re living on, or the water, or the air. He/she would be informed by common sense, by the desire to learn as much as possible about how things work, and the desire to keep the world a place where we can continue to live.
So, honestly, no matter how much people eat low cholesterol diets or work out or go to therapy, there are very few healthy people in the US right now. Maybe none. Our entire lifestyle is predicated on continuous, unceasing denial about the war economy and what we are doing to the environment, and a fairly high level of repression around responding freely to the things we experience and observe.
What is health care?
Health care would be care that helps people stay healthy if they are (or in the parts of their lives where they are), and return to it where they are not. It would totally vary depending on what’s needed — setting a broken bone, teaching people how to modulate their internal temperature, offering information about diet to the diabetic, listening and creating rituals of truth-telling and release for the abused.
As you can guess from what I wrote in “what is health?”, I believe health care would mean encouraging and teaching people to really pay attention to keeping healthy — which means noticing what strengthens you and what weakens and diminishes you, and going for the former.
A lot of problems which present as “health problems” actually are problems in people’s whole lives. I like Arnold Mindell’s book Working with the Dreaming Body on this topic. He argues that disease and symptoms are kind of “waking dream states,” pushing up the suppressed. They need to be worked with and the presenting problem needs to be encouraged to emerge, even amplified, not just pushed down.
As you can probably guess, I think most of what we call “health care” in this country is toxic. I stay as far away from it as is humanly possible.
Monica Raymond won the Castillo Prize in political theater for her play The Owl Girl, which is about two families in an unnamed Middle Eastern country who both have keys to the same house. She was a Jerome Fellow for 2008-09 at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, among many other honors and awards. Her poetry has been published in the Colorado Review, the Iowa Review, and the Village Voice, and her work has been selected for publication by every pair of qarrtsiluni editors for ten issues in a row now.
by Steve Wing
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Steve Wing (PBase gallery) is a visual artist and writer whose work reflects his appreciation for the extraordinary in ordinary days and places. He lives in Florida, where he takes dawn photos on his way to work in an academic institution. He’s a regular contributor to qarrtsiluni, as well as to BluePrintReview, where he has a bio page with links to some of his other publications.
Hard climb finished,
we clown on the tundra,
my daughter and I,
laughing. I dance,
the sleeves of my
too-big sweater swinging limp
over my hands. She pushes
the bandana over my eyes. I dance
blindfolded, happy,
the water in my canteen
sloshing with my spinning and twirling.
My daughter laughs
until no sound comes and she must sit,
voiceless, on the rocks to recover.
On this day
in this place,
the peaks standing watch,
I love her
and I can only dance it,
my old shoes quick as the feet of a deer
on the grasses.
Marjorie Saiser’s books are available from Backwaters Press. Saiser was named Distinguished Artist in Poetry in 2009 by the Nebraska Arts Council, and part of that award will be publication of a new book of poetry in 2010. Samples of her work can be found on her website.
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