Archive
Seating Arrangement
We come into the arena from behind
to a crescent moon of folding chairs,
numbered on each back like runners.
It’s a scene we’ve entered a hundred
times before, organized first by tier,
then section, then row. But this is not that place. The seats fit no logical flow, two 5s side by side, a zig zag of 7s, some numbers coupled with letters like I1 or E53C. But not all. This makes no sense at all until that moon slides behind a cloud and I see it’s no longer an arena, we’re in a holding pen jambled with huffing gray stallions, haunches slick with panic. These ponies aren’t supposed to be broken but I know that won’t stop you from trying, already bringing out the bridles in your mind, herding the docile in consecutive order, the wild ones sent to the rack or the slaughter. This is the way the world works best, even if some of us are pulled apart, left with no place to sit.
Cathryn Cofell has made most of her limited fortune in the non-profit sector and is a sucker for a good cause, meaning she’s easy prey for a needy arts, social justice or mental health organization (no phone calls, please). Her latest project is a collaborative CD called Lip that combines her poetry with the music of Obvious Dog. Her fifth and latest book is titled Kamikaze Commotion, also a fitting descriptor for her poetic style, personality and parenting prowess. You’ll find the poetry in places like MARGIE, Oranges & Sardines and NY Quarterly, but you’ll have to travel to Appleton, Wisconsin for a look at the latter two, or visit cathryncofell.com for a glimpse.
A Mask Called Nothing
by Amy Pence
So we enter the dog days—summer
its bedraggled undergrowth, feasting
insects, spiders spinning, unspun.
Everything swarming to the grand ticking
surface: verdure & verdant—a plentitude,
identity leaks from our faces, a carnival
of exiles: subversion, ecstasy, anarchy,
apathy, masochism—listless and rogue.
Then finally, “nothing”: its jade eyelids
around sockets, skin textured—
wind in the bestial unknowing
genuflects to an embarrassment of days.
Unloosed from the Dark, a lowly coming—
all the names unleash their quiet.
Amy Pence’s collection The Decadent Lovely will be published on November 23 by Main Street Rag. Recent poems are in New Writing, The Oxford American and Many Mountains Moving. Fiction is online at All Things Girl and Storyglossia. Her exploration on the phenomenology of Emily Dickinson is forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle. For more, visit her website.
Face Recognition Collage
by Lucy Kempton
Click on image to view at a larger size. (It will probably then require a second click at most screen resolutions.)
Lucy Kempton is British, living in Brittany with husband and dog, and sometimes teaching English. She blogs at box elder — subtitled “meanderings of a displaced dilettante” — and the microblog Out with Mol. She is currently engaged in a call-and-response-style, online collaboration with British blogger (and qarrtsiluni author) Joe Hyam called Questions. She co-edited qarrtsiluni’s Water issue with Katherine Durham Oldmixon.
Between the Notes
They’re not trying to be rude, or cruel, the kids, laughing and chattering while he plays the oud on stage. To be fair, the music is difficult for Westerners to hear, even though he carefully explains its differentiating features: the maqam, so much more complex than 12 tones, zakhrafat more intricate than the Baroque, and an awzan unintelligible to our unsophisticated ears, with 10 and 7 beats stressed in unexpected places. And though he tries to involve the audience, teaching them to clap 1-6-7 out of 10, they don’t seem to get it. By the end he’s more then a little irritated and begins to sound like a middle-school teacher rather than a Grammy-nominated world musician. You can waste time. Or you can learn something. He plays a song composed while touring Southern France, another for a festival in Madrid, speaks lovingly of the warmth, blue skies, dazzling beaches. Wonder what he’ll write after his blizzard-bound weekend in Wisconsin, separated from the takht trapped in Detroit?
Meanwhile, at least thirteen teenaged girls keep getting up and down in their seats, leaving the theater and coming back in while his fingers fly up and down the fingerboard finding pitches not allowed in our music — casting them out, calling them flat or sharp. And the teachers also mill about, on the pretense of settling their classes, who, apparently, have not been told that the music is for them, that the performer in the spotlight can hear and even see them when he shades his eyes, that this is not a television show.
Wendy Vardaman (website) is the author of Obstructed View (Fireweed Press) and the co-editor of Verse Wisconsin.
Call for Submissions: Translation
The editors invite submissions of poetry, short fiction, essays, visual poetry, photography, artwork and video for a translation-themed issue. The deadline is December 6 December 31, and the issue will begin to appear online after the New Year. All submissions must be made via qarrtsiluni’s new submissions manager.
In addition to work translated into English, we encourage a universal interpretation, including though not limited to movement between and within cultural fields and from signifier (code, symbol, signal) to signified (message, meaning, transcription). Translation being inherent in all acts of writing/reading, both semantic and non-verbal, we are interested in short, non-academic essays relevant to such readings and mis-readings. Please also send adaptations, definitions, conversions, and homophonic translations. Text submissions should not exceed three poems or short prose pieces, or some combination thereof, for a maximum of three single-spaced pages in .doc or .rtf format.
For translations, include originals, permission status, and a bio for the original author as well as your own. Translations from any language are welcome. We look forward to reading or viewing your work.
—Nick Admussen, Nathalie Boisard-Beudin, Nick Carbó, Alex Cigale, and Ayesha Saldanha
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Nick Admussen is a Ph. D. candidate in Chinese literature at Princeton University, preparing a dissertation on contemporary Chinese prose poetry. His translations are forthcoming in Renditions, and have appeared in Cha magazine; his original poetry has appeared in magazines like the Boston Review and the Kenyon Review Online, and his first chapbook is due out this winter from Epiphany Editions.
Nathalie Boisard-Beudin is a middle aged French woman living in Rome, Italy. She has more hobbies than spare time, alas — reading, cooking, writing, painting and photography — so hopes that her technical colleagues at the European Space Agency will soon come up with a solution to that problem by stretching the fabric of time. Either that or send her up to write about the travels and trials of the International Space Station, the way this was done for the exploratory missions of old. Clearly the woman is a dreamer.
Nick Carbó is the author of El Grupo McDonald’s (1995), Secret Asian Man (2000), which won the Asian American Literary Award, and Andalusian Dawn (2004). He is the editor of three anthologies of Filipino literature: Pinoy Poetics (2004), Babaylan (2000), and Returning a Borrowed Tongue (1995).
Alex Cigale‘s poems recently appeared in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains, and North American reviews, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, 32 Poems, and Zoland Poetry, online in Contrary, Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n, McSweeney’s, and are forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving and St. Petersburg Review. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, in The Manhattan, St. Ann’s, and Yellow Medicine reviews, online in OffCourse, Danse Macabre and Fiera Lingue, and forthcoming in Crab Creek Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.
Ayesha Saldanha is a writer and translator based in Bahrain. She has translated a wide range of Bahraini fiction and poetry. Some of her translations of Gulf poets will appear in Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry to be published by Garnet Publishing/Ithaca Press in 2011. She blogs as Bint Battuta.
Editors’ names link to their work in qarrtsiluni, where applicable.
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This issue is a first for us in three respects: it will represent qarrtsiluni’s very first foray into publishing translations; it’s the first we’ve tried to work with a team of more than two issue editors; and it’s our first experiment with a real submissions management system. If you’ve submitted to other publications that use the same system, Submishmash, you’ll need to log in with the same username and password. Otherwise, you’ll create a new account as part of the submission process. Most of our general guidelines remain the same, and are included on the submissions page.
Please let us know via email (qarrtsiluni [at] gmail.com) if you experience any problems with the new system. We’re cautiously optimistic that it will help us keep better track of submissions, and we’re pretty certain that contributors will appreciate the ability to log on and see how their submissions are doing, but we’ll see how it goes. For more about the service, check out this interview with one of the lead developers.
We hope this call for submissions will prompt some imaginative responses from past contributors and expose us to the work of new authors and artists as well. Best of luck to all.
—Beth and Dave
what holds (us
by Daniela Elza
crow.d I
as a child I would hear them at dawn in my bed on the eighth floor (imagine them) all huddled around chimneys and TV antennas in a chorus high above the winter city. at such a tend.er time I could even hear them through the thinning walls of dreams just before the first high heels clatter onto the morning pavement.
crow.d II
we weave our destinies daily with a scream and a rattle a whine and a coo a caw and a cackle. among the city’s n.eon signs humming homing us in. crooning from warm beds from cedar lined nests cradling speckled eggs. when we chopped the trees down and offered you dumpsters to dive in back alleys to raise your young what do you choose to line your nests with?
crow.d III
they perch behind my ear. nest there in my hair. their carrion breath permeates the spaces between. temples full of r e s t l e s s wings. the place turns so b.lack I could mistake it for :grief:
“All the words, all the silences disguised
as words, adrift between us and the unsaid.”
—Robert Bringhurst
crow.d IV
I hear the black charred voice of all the words from the c r o w ns of trees it is here among all the silences disguised as words that one raven speaks among many crows. only the water a.drift between us reflects as we cross everyday back and forth from the city (its skyline call.igraphy) to perch in the st.ark branches of memory and the unsaid w.here we are blind. * yet in between is where (we float our meaning.
crow.d V
from this far from this end of the field p.ages flutter into memory ) ) ) with my eyes half closed even the gallows looks (as if it has always been t.here. crows take turns passing on sharp- eyed secrets. the letters— faceless. ink caught heavy in the mind’s gravity. named crows turning white. as black snow falls on deaf ears.
Daniela Elza (blog) has written with and around crows for more than a decade. The crows remain a mystery to her. She know, for sure, they have a lot to say. She has decided to put them in a book and let them sort it out. Daniela’s work has been published in over 42 print, online, and peer-reviewed publications. Daniela is the recipient of this year’s Pandora’s Collective Citizenship Award.
Moving Koi
by Gordon Smith
Click on image to see a larger version.
Gordon Smith (website) is a Southwestern internist physician and a part-time landscape photographer who’s also a lifelong poetry fan, and says he continues to read and compose poetry during inspired moments.
Of Ten or More in a Room
by Scott Owens
One will be thinking of dinner.
One will be humming a Pretender’s tune
in her head. Two or more will look
out the window and think of something
they’ve forgotten to do. If you’re lucky
two will be hanging on every word.
The rest will be so sad
they can hardly keep their faces on.
But one, one will be writing a poem
so beautiful you can see trees
in her eyes. Flowers will bloom in the corners
of her mouth, and in the crease of her forehead
the knowledge in that moment that says
Right now, I care for you all.
Author of six collections of poetry and over 600 poems published in journals and anthologies, Scott Owens (webpage, blog) is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College.
Fashionista
I’m dazzling fashion baby, fashion whore.
Corsets hide my emblem, my tattoo,
a mirrored magpie. It will be on show
as fashionistas lurch in gladiators.
A magpie’s eye lets me accessorize.
I love the sequins, have the gift of bling.
My breasts get seasonal repackaging
(the plumed god requires sacrifices).
I die for sparkly zippers on ripped denim.
What else is there to love in the time of cholera,
but Miu-Miu’s bondage bows, of tulle in silver,
the must-have bliss-dream in her store, a gem?
I’m all about the Look, finding the Look,
how I look in the mirror, seeking what I seek.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Claremont, California. She started writing when she was 9, and majored in German Lit so that she could read poetry for credit. She is yet another cat-loving feminist anti-war grammar prescriptionist for solar power. Her poems and photos have appeared in O Tempora!, Superficial Flesh [PDF], the San Diego City Works Press 2008 anthology Hunger and Thirst, New Verse News, The Dirty Napkin, Lilliput Review, Umbrella, Poemeleon and Off the Coast. She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize.
Nite TV
Click on image to see a larger version.
“Nite TV” was taken at near 2:00 a.m.; the image on the TV is my solitary view of a crowd demonstrating in Western China. In the past few years, I have been keeping a photographic night diary of those moments when I awaken and the world has rearranged itself in ambient moon/cityscape glow and, occasionally, the radiant flash from the TV. The photos are then digitally retrieved from the suffused glow or flash to balance light with the ‘unseen’ and reveal whatever grainy life/landscape exists in the black surround.
Caroline Beasley-Baker (website) is a visual artist and poet. She learned to recite her first poem, a traditional Scottish song, when she was 16 months old, sitting on a barstool next to a gorgeous gloved and hatted woman in a family bar in downtown Kansas City, Missouri: “I am a poor little orphan, my mother is dead, my daddy’s a drunkard…” Subsequently, she has known an inordinate number of poets and writers and storytellers. Her poems have been published in MungBeing Magazine, the MOM Egg, and qarrtsiluni, and her ‘chain’ poems done with Holly Anderson and Lisa B. Burns will be published in a chain poem anthology by Meritage Press later this year. She has also received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting, and her sets for choreographer Bebe Miller have been collected by the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University.
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