Archive
Anna Atkins
to her father
from Periodicity by Iris A. Law (Runner-up)
Something of you
still slips through the keyholes.
A whining in the pipes, or wind
nudging the leaves
of the mulberry tree—
I bristle, hearing your boots
at corners, but round them
to find only spiders, mice
sniffing at crumbs on a sill.
I’ve been poring over your
shelves of pickled things,
looking for a wisp of hair or smear
of oil, small evidence of your hands
on these jars. But their walls
remain crystal. The pupil-less
bodies rise in their fluid, bump
dumbly against the glass.
I’ve locked my folios away, will live
a little while in the darkness of this room,
the curtains drawn. Lately, I’ve found
the color blue to be untenable alone.
Iris A. Law is Kundiman Fellow and a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame. She edits the online literary magazine and blog Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry and currently works as a teacher of college composition.
The Peace Movement
from Inchoate by M. G. Stephens
Take care of your side
of the street. Be kind.
Ask how others are,
and listen to their responses.
Listen. Listen.
Stop talking, and listen.
See the stars and moon or,
in daylight, the sky above,
the trees below, the birds.
The birds: listen to the birds.
Listen to what the birds
have to say. Drink green
tea, take walks, read
for at least two hours
every day, write down
random thoughts and ideas.
Eat well. Sleep. Love
yourself and others.
Take care. Be well.
Note: This poem originally appeared in Deadly Writers Patrol magazine.
M. G. Stephens has published eighteen books, including the novel The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (“a great, great book,” says Roddy Doyle) and the essay collection Green Dreams, which Joyce Carol Oates picked as one of the notable American nonfiction books of the 20th century in Best American Essays of the Century. His poetry frequently appears in literary magazines in the U.S. and the U.K., and he is completing a long nonfictional work about downtown New York in the 1960s.
Truth About Margaret
from Chain Down the Moon by Carolyne Whelan
At Nana Kate’s 90th birthday party, a woman from The Home,
Margaret, insisted I ought to move to Hollywood.
You are a movie star, she told me, and she wandered
to that place the senile go for comfort, the created past.
She and I, both in our early twenties, playing the roles of sisters
in a feud for the same man. Perhaps my father standing nearby,
perhaps her long-dead husband who still visits daily.
Nana Kate smiled every time I sat by her that day—
she knew she ought to be happy to see me, whoever I was.
All the other strangers and returned dead relatives told her so.
I remember this now, reading a Bukowski book I picked up
at a garage sale, 25 cents. It looked like it had been read once, half-way.
It’s old Bukowski, crotchety regretful Bukowski bloated
with women and shoes under the bed, with an ugly life
and finally after all those years a wife he maybe loved.
Not my grandmother’s life, though I can’t say
the truth about Margaret. The two of us beaming down Mulholland Drive
big glasses and tiny, full purses, camera flashes, a night club.
Margaret whispers something to Tommy Dorsey, our song comes on,
In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Sinatra with that longing look,
our fans, our love.
She thought I was Hollywood beautiful.
My father tells me she was neurotic, movie stars can’t have tattoos
or piercings in strange places, so many visible mistakes.
But I believe in multiple truths. That somewhere Margaret is still young
and wild and sane. Old people can still know beauty, can still find it oddly.
Inside their own sad faces, inside the faces of those they want to love.
Carolyne Whelan (website) currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a legal secretary, writing instructor, and freelance-anything. Her first chapbook, Glossary of Tania Aebi, was recently published by Finishing Line Press.
Messiah auditions Saturday
—local headline October 20, 2006
from Messiah Auditions Saturday by Nancy Devine
Willing to cast against type
Petite blonde female, hearty Asian male,
gay, straight, transgendered, etc.
Prior messianic experience unnecessary,
probably not even helpful.
No water-walking, stigmatas, rising-from-the-dead
required. Should be able to bake as well as break bread,
turn wine into water and vise versa; heal the sickening,
the sick and tired. No dress or tech rehearsals. Ever.
Unlimited comp tickets, great dental benefits, 401k possibilities.
Must be willing to work nights, weekends and days.
Leave your SAG card at home.
No fuss-budgets, nay-sayers, molly-coddlers, politicians.
Past work as psychopomp, amateur or professional, a plus not a must.
Stage fighting, mime, dance training, singing… all the same.
For more information, visit a website or, better yet, close your eyes. Call.
Note: This poem originally appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection Volume 9, Edition 5 (May 2007).
Nancy Devine (blog) teaches high school English in Grand Forks, North Dakota where she lives. She co-directs the Red River Valley Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project.
and we at bed and purest
from a lazarus by morgan downie
for me all purest leaves
that may a mountain move
with each morning will we
pleasures make, of buds
and buds that be, steep
the sing of gown valley
to the shepherd in gold
and in this flower morning
this kirtle of delights
the embroidered straw
a fragrant, fragrant
madrigal of thee
the wool of each
shall be gold to me
morning dances myrtle
groves my love
and we at bed and purest
morgan downie lives and works in the leafy lushness of central Scotland. His collection stone and sea is available from Calderwood Press. He can be found at his website.
at the Piggly-Wiggly in East Nashville
from all origins ask why by Irène Mathieu
“a wummin always afta a man money!”
he says as tripe unfolds under plastic wrap.
rabbit loins look like chicken
beneath fluorescent glisten.
“where you put my money, wummin?”
she fumbles, tense.
three teeth two few,
baseball hat cocked back,
he relishes the scene he’s making
between 99¢ Cheetos
and 20%-off gum.
ice crystals pack
frozen burgers, frozen pizza,
and the man behind the glass
restacks, his hands reaching
toward me on the other side.
sugar is more than
its carcinogenic substitute;
everything costs. he clamors,
“a wummin always afta a man money!”
I think of his cells
blinking toward eternal pause,
insulin receptors rewired,
a heart that emerges,
both hands up, tired,
an ECG frozen
in a lipid prison.
history’s always after
a man’s vitality,
a woman’s vibrancy.
too much black and too little money,
and you could get frozen right in your tracks.
Irène Mathieu is a second-year medical student at Vanderbilt University, where she is embarking on a career in global public health, activist medicine, and social justice-oriented primary care. Irène has been writing ever since she was able to talk, and her published work can be found in The Lindenwood Review, The Caribbean Writer, Muzzle Magazine, Damselfly Press, Magnapoets, Haven Magazine, and 34th Parallel. She was a finalist in the Jane’s Press Stories Foundation’s 2010 poetry contest. Irène’s photography and a painting have also appeared in print, in 34th Parallel, The Meadowland Review, and Hinchas de Poesía.
Summertime Locker
from From the Grey by Susannah Lior
When they took me in
under wings of prestige, white feathers
glowed like new
shelter sprung from darkness
I thought I had found
home in a park picnic
with the seniors,
older siblings I never had making
hamburgers and lemonade
On the grassy hill,
afternoon idols clutched
stories of hallway hijinks
like war medals or
debating trophies,
prizes plucked from memory’s shelves and
pooled with their comrades’
for a richer treasury —
On display behind glass, small
museum in the school foyer,
it was a show they curated laughing,
arms grappled like hoops of steel.
The stories that didn’t fit:
edited out
of the yearbook
The public record of portraits:
laminated name tags, matching faces
for wearing to lockers
Little fish in my summertime locker —
last gasps ballooning, deflating a
see-through sandwich bag —
breathed the last
idea of home
out of me;
I was submerged in a sea
of pulled faces,
dead girl’s float
where schools of guppies swim by
in cafeteria formation:
no vacancies.
This is the place
where enchantment with the stars
ends, and we
must begin:
break-and-enter
in this sallow
hall, school of eroding
Edwardian brick, asbestos resting
three feet thick
in the walls,
the city’s best and brightest swimming
upstream to arrive
This is the place
where the stars in my eyes
are gouged out
where I begin to doubt
the best in me,
where the smell of the threat and Lysol
teaches me hate,
drowns me in waves.
Susannah Lior lives in Montreal, where, in addition to writing, she sews, pets stray cats, and studies law.
The Discreet Charm of Prime Numbers
from The Discreet Charm of Prime Numbers by Gail Segal
1.
Sky that promised to fall
hangs on, not clear of its pick
on the wheel of color.
No cars, no buses,
trucks asleep
in the highway stops
and they call this morning?
2.
You think of nothing
but death and its probabilities.
When the mind relaxes, drifting
to weather or fashion
you are called back by numbers
on the door of the hotel room,
or numbers on the cabana
at the beach, or the young man
at the next table
bereaved by his bride
dying in her sleep. You are sure
it belongs to you as nothing
ever has, to hold and to have.
3.
The night will fall out
with mint crushed in a glass
over lemon and rum,
mermaids lounging by the pool,
men with puissance toasting — what?
the moon, of course, full —
and you will wear sandals glittering
with rhinestones, the night
with its long table of candles,
the heat lamps,
an orange buzz like people
milling about sharing
what’s left of their faces.
4.
Rumors stir — a woman
set in motion by
a “system of vibrations,”
the story events of her life,
a “map of endless resonance.”
And hearing of her,
you want to know what accounts
for her destroying
every concrete goodness
with a will to be acted upon
seized unexpectedly
by an agent of magnificence.
5.
You dream as if worn
by days of vacation,
his arrival, even in dreaming,
an intrusion upon a life
with the man you will marry
and you notice a glass
tipped to breakage, the wine
puddled beneath it,
a bed unfolds from the sofa
and he plants himself there
for a long stay.
Note: Section 5 originally appeared in Chelsea 80 (2006) under the title “Prime Numbers.”
Gail Segal is a poet, filmmaker and teacher. Her first book of poems, In Gravity’s Pull, was published in 2002. She teaches in the Graduate Division of Film at NYU.
Imprisonment: issue summary
by Ann E. Michael and Ken Lamberton
Imprisonment spurred many responses; the interpretations ranged from the literal to the metaphoric, as we’d hoped, and included meditations on its opposite: freedom. There were birds and bars and varieties of cells. There were visual images that summed up the sense of detainment succinctly and poems that led surprisingly to the sense of being ensnared or bound. We received submissions from people currently incarcerated and from others who have been in prison in the past or who have a loved one behind bars. Artists and writers expressed being imprisoned by relationships, or through physical limitations, or because of social or class barriers. Some of the submissions are full of rage, others of resignation, others, hope. We feel trapped, it turns out, by ourselves as well as by others. This is no surprise to a human being, yet some of the pieces we received were revelatory in their beauty or their honesty. We observed that few of the submissions dwelt on, or even dealt with, the punitive aspect of incarceration.
Interesting to consider: a relationship between this issue of qarrtsiluni and a previous theme, “The Crowd.” Imprisonment usually implies loneliness and isolation; but as the crowd issue paradoxically highlighted individuality, the theme of imprisonment seems, to me, to illuminate how common the sense of feeling trapped is: a thing we share, culturally, socially, psychologically. Being bound inherently awakens in us the desire to move — to struggle toward freedom. We learn, in that struggle, that freedom has as many forms as imprisonment does. When we feel surprised by something we think we know, understanding deepens. Editing “Imprisonment” offered that kind of revelation continuously. Many thanks to those who sent us their heartfelt work.
For bios of Ann and Ken, see the call for submissions.
Imprisonment: Table of Contents
Al Capone’s Cell by Don Schroder
The Organ of Corti by Jamie Houghton
Conversation Camp by Peter Wortsman
Sister of All Holy Kitchens by Kate Irving
My Gated Community by Maurice Eidelsberg
Get Off My Back, Saugus by Tom Sheehan
Admission Process by Louisa Howerow
How the Other Side… by Stephen Mead
Eleven Times A Loser, he said. by Rina Terry
The Winter I Went to Two Al-Anon Meetings, Realized I Didn’t Have What It Took to Love Your Version of Alcoholic by Nancy Flynn
Joseph Palmer’s Journal by Diane Kendig
Objects of Desire and Their Wrapping by Dorothee Lang
The Stick by Zackary Sholem Berger
At IGI Airport, New Delhi by June Nandy
Sentences and Corrections by James Brush
Freedom from Fear by Helen Overell
in a no-win zone by Evie Shockley
Goldfish and water lily under ice by Lucy Kempton
Awaiting Trial by Linda Stewart-Oaten
A Theology of an Autistic Body by Nicole Nicholson
Imprisonment–Her Residence by Nithya Raghavan
Vegetative detention by Steve Wing
We dressed like Muslims by Khadija Anderson
They Say the Spring Breeze Has Come by Nicholas YB Wong
My Memory Palace by Robbi Nester
The Babinski by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
Lock us up forever by Peter Ciccariello
Expelled by Ann Neuser Lederer
Petite Morte, a Verse Dance with Captions by Wendy Vardaman
Martin Luther King envelope by Chris Barnett
Lafcadio Hearn Leaving Kobudera by Diane Kendig
I Shall Not Kill This Symbol by Karla Linn Merrifield
Prague Prisoner by Bruce Dodson
A Blizzard for Grandma by Lynnel Jones
So Like a Cell by Susan Weaver
My Father’s Grief by Susan Facknitz
A Murder of Crows by Emily Severance
At The Door of No Return by Elizabeth Bodien
Balloon Boy, Later by Courtney Druz
To Save the Body and the Soul From Death, Damnation by Louisa Howerow
Two collages and a letter from an inmate by Jennifer Myers
Saturnalia by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
The First Four Days by Elizabeth Kate Switaj
Art from Bangkwang prison by Felix Cheremnykh
Inside Voice by Glenis Redmond
qarrtsiluni 