Archive
Control
by John Vick
It was an army of bishops. It was an army. It was a religion. It was terror on Earth and terror after unrepentant departure. It was a cavalcade of irrationalities played out as monochrome duty — scrap the artists — scrap the journalists — scrap the trade biographers. But no one spoke until the sieve clogged with rape — felonious and torts a gogo — the kind one pursues like an unwilling ascent of K2, questionable even as to status, painful as to personal likeability.
Sales skyrocket on water from Lourdes, and the grotto’s river of disbelief runs strong in response to futures’ investments. Nothing like mad men to take over the immersion of that which was created at the time of hurling rocks and sun worship. Production was cut out of the picture. There was still no need for words. Creation. Production. Immersion. And the exclusion of all reflective, recording, and resonant. The way of give me that and I’ll take one of those things I don’t need resounds in a Socialist’s yurt, as Victoria Falls seems convenient for a spontaneous picnic.
He always said, “beatnik,” and didn’t venture into preferred nouns of kindness, progressiveness, and legitimacy. There was a way of going mad. There is a way of going mad. There will always be. And fortunes come like singing Waltzing Matilda, in grammar school; the feeling of internationalism. The feeling one might sing The Internationale while a child falls to sleep after stories of individual honor, team strength, independence and interdependence. No harm in vanilla anxiety, yet no need to feel wrong, either. It wasn’t meant to be painted on that hobby-horse or etched on the origami crane. Nothing lackluster, nor artistic self-distain.
John Vick was born in Mississippi. His family moved across the continent to Canada in the mid-60s, and when he was 11, he moved to Oklahoma with his parents and finished high school. Since then, Vick has lived in Texas, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He served in the military for two years in the mid-80s. He’s placed poems in a variety of journals, and his chapbook Chaperons of a Lost Poet appeared from BlazeVOX in 2009.
Sea of Stars
by Dick Jones
They will require,
should I return,
that I give name
to all the things I saw.
Even as I feed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I share
my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they will question
in quiet voices,
seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.
As now their aerial voices —
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans —
whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation
like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,
lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes, speculating
my parabola by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.
Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes — long black
sargassos drifting, planet wrack
and flotsam, dereliction.
And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.
Dick Jones blogs at Patteran Pages and has placed poems in such magazines as Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Westwords, MiPOesias, Three Candles and Other Poetry.
Gaining vantage point on Ulysses Grant Memorial, Obama Inauguration
Washington DC, January 2009 (click image for a larger version)
Jonathan Sa’adah’s photographs often deal with people and political/social topics. His favorite places to photograph are streets and within shared lives.
My Brief History of Crowds
My first impressions of crowds were the hems of overcoats, hands reaching down, dark trousers, and skies jigsaw blue or else filled with umbrellas. The sidewalk was punctuated by black shoes like a thousand unsynchronized metronomes.
Later, packed waiting rooms. At train stations, at airports. Hospitals. Long stretches of contiguous but discrete waiting. Today we’re in a kitchen sounds from infomercial TV suspended above us, which some people are watching with an abstracted air. Others try to read, or flip idly through magazines. Many sit at a slight angle, trying to avoid shoulder contact with those next to them.
Sometimes the crowds are part of the point. Sporting events, for example, or concerts.
Loud. LOUD. Rahhhhhhh. GO. Roar of the pack animals, roar of the arms lifted. I’m bewildered for hours afterward. In the parking lot, mounting panic. Eventually I learned to pay attention, make a note of the car’s location, physically if necessary. Carry a pen.
Where have the tightest crowds been? I have a memory of being crushed in a crowd surge — but no memory of where or when… Clamped by the shoulders, I was lifted along by collective will, pushed and pressed into whatever shape the crowd commanded. Surrender was my only option, but it was also sweet, a release, a melding of my ego into the whole. Gradually the sense of compression, of mutual pressure, changed to discomfort. My memory stops somewhere during that transition. A bellow builds, and then goes silent.
Aloud, aloud, crowd. Nowadays I like to be alone, quiet in my home. Even the highway traffic below in the valley annoys me now. And yet I still like to go to cities. I like to enter them by train, tunnel further by subway, burrow into the city’s heart. There’s a thrill to rush-hour travel underground, everyone going somewhere, this man with his chest to your back, this woman clutching her small son’s hand as he squirms against your leg. Cities with subways dig deep, rise high, live three-dimensionally, crowds swarming across levels, between levels. My favorites are London and New York, but almost any one will do.
It’s a homing, for one thing, but it’s also a kind of protection. No one makes eye contact or says hello, and though they don’t do that much in rural New England, either, in the city it’s different. There’s no awkwardness in staring through someone, even at them. Come to think of it, sometimes you do actually make eye contact in crowds, but it’s a detached version, as if through one-way glass. That’s why I feel least exposed in a city, in a crowd, even though that’s where it’s most likely that someone is observing me.
I’m stuck in the age-old quandary: I want to be part of the crowd and I want to stand out from it. I want to push my wheelbarrow along with the rest of the foot traffic, and I want to crow like a cock above their heads.
Fortunately, crowds judge not. They take you in whenever you show up — always room for one more — and let you go without a murmur whenever you leave, closing seamlessly behind you. I step in less and less.
Lisken Van Pelt Dus is a poet, teacher, and martial artist living in western Massachusetts. Her poems can be found in numerous journals, including Conduit, The Comstock Review, and Main Street Rag, and her first poetry collection, Everywhere at Once, was published this year by Pudding House Press.
Or When the Police Come
With the new world cornered, we can
better appreciate the laxity
of the Sabbath. Here the drummer
who sits on the drum does not play
for you.
But the women—turbans twisted on
in the required colors—
dance until the streets
are black.
Jenna Cardinale is the author of Journals, a chapbook from Coconut. She lives in New York, where she often writes poems about New Orleans.
Jesuit students, Évora, Portugal
by Steve Wing
Click on image to see a larger version.
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.
The Suffering of Others
You can protect yourself from the negative
energy of a crowd by envisioning white
light surrounding
your entire body. Imagine this light
enveloping you.
Imagine this light
filtering out the suffering of others, the pain your body
is prone to absorb as its own.
Imagine this light
as your shield, your womb, your favored skin,
your dearest armor,
your police dog, your invisible
fence, your power word, your safe house.
Imagine this light
filling you, traveling
from the soles of your feet into
your spine, through your core, and when grief
howls in with a vengeance, when you are
bowled over, in fact
bewildered, by the failure of this light,
after the blow
of betrayal, you might well say,
you might well understand,
that it was never Them at all.
It was never feasible: no skin no light
no prayers save us for we have,
all of us, swallowed
ourselves, and contain
only one another.
Kristen McHenry is a Seattle-based poet. Her manuscript The Goatfish Alphabet, one of two runners-up in qarrtsiluni’s 2009 chapbook contest, was recently published by Naissance Press. She is the creator and facilitator of the Poet’s Cafe, a poetry workshop for homeless teens. She can often be found napping in front of the TV, her poetry journal as a prop. Kristen blogs at The Good Typist.
Commute
Morning-dark and chill Friday
May, Thursday June, November
Monday, we ride the train.
It’s what we do, how we go.
Each day, we ride the red line,
sometimes the blue.
We are breasts, ass and womb,
bloodless crone, girl-child
green, a bound wife.
We carry baggage—
crammed backpacks and totes
that overflow, purses that bulge
with jars of war honey, lullabies
antler-carved, tins of bitter
jasmine, cunts of bone.
We bring with us what we must.
R.A. Dusenberry lives in the Pacific Northwest with a cat that isn’t her cat. She loves to garden, hates turnips and is ambivalent about plaid. She is also the Art Editor of Soundzine.
On Our Way
Click on image to view a larger version.
Tama Hochbaum (blog, website) is an artist/photographer living in Chapel Hill, NC. She is represented by George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco.
One of the Many
Janis Joplin’s gruff voice screaming to the hordes
I wanted to live in her screams
We sat in your day-glow room plastered with posters of Hendrix
Bohemians and Beats barely passé
I wanted to live in full-surround-scream—
Led Zeppelin, The Doors, in mad love with Morrison
We basked in the Bohemian equivalent of our generation
Life magazine photos of Haight-Ashbury
Led Zeppelin, The Doors, how I loved Jim Morrison
Ragged cut jeans, everything bright
Reminiscent of photos in Life magazine
We sat at Café Reggio, watched kids like us on MacDougal
Ragged cut jeans, tie-died bright
World of runaways
We sat in Café Reggio watching the natives
Never wanting to go back to Queens
This world of runaways
Your room plastered with posters of Hendrix
We had to go back to Queens
Like Janis Joplin we screamed, on the subway to the hordes
Julene Tripp Weaver lives in Seattle. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails her Blues, with poems inspired by her work for 18 years in HIV Services. Her poems are published in many journals and several anthologies, including Hot Metal Press, Gemini Magazine, Chicken Piñata, Outward Link, Blossombones, The Smoking Poet, Drash and Future Earth Magazine, and in the anthology A Dream in the Clouds, featuring art inspired by the 2008 Presidential Election. Her first full size book will be published next year. She does wordplay on Twitter @trippweavepoet.
qarrtsiluni 