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Inside Pre Rup
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Angkor UNESCO World Heritage Site
Cambodia, August 2008
Elizabeth Kate Switaj’s first book, Magdalene & the Mermaids, was published in 2009 by Paper Kite Press. She has also published a chapbook, The Broken Sanctuary: Nature Poems, with Ypolita Press. Her photographs have appeared in GUD and Carpe Diem Review, as well as on the cover of Boxcar Poetry‘s 2006 anthology. Her photograph “Recycling in Zhengzhou” won Folded Word‘s “Freight: What Are You Carrying?” competition. She is currently an Editorial Assistant for Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. For more information visit her website.
Curriculum
The iron cord caught fire;
uncertain motions of the day
turn sharp, compelling.
A close call burns off
film that veiled sight,
reveals color, redresses
the situation in scarves
and saris, gold threads in
silky hues of earth and sky.
There’s nothing tentative about
the grass except its tone,
in transit toward summer green,
shifting through shades
in the artist’s palette,
altered by sun or shadow.
Names are motes in the I
of the beholder, must be
unsaid in order to see. The grass
has nothing to say but itself.
Philosophies are built
in the corkscrew of years.
For slow learners, Nature
reviews each year from
the ground up, patient
as a first-grade teacher,
going from letters to words
around the seasons, yet
unconcerned, detached,
a zen master, saying look,
look again, see for yourself.
God is green and gold.
Ellen Roberts Young, a California native who spent almost 40 years in Pennsylvania, is now part of the writing community in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her chapbooks, Accidents (2004) and The Map of Longing (2009) are published by Finishing Line Press. In addition to numerous journal publications, her poems have been anthologized in The Wisdom of Daughters and Orpheus and Company.
Lauds, Summer: An Antiphon
It never grows old, this sun rising here
every morning
As much as I ever wanted
anything, listen:
birdsong, a dying language
Practice
its rise and fall, its
loss, familiar
as the body
You can never
get close enough
to the ground to pray
Long blue heron, sunslant
on the underwing
armfuls of butterfly weed
and orange
Holy, holy this morning, here
and gone
Jeanie Tomasko is the author of Sharp as Want (Little Eagle Press), a poetry/artworks collaboration with Sharon Auberle, and Tricks of Light (Parallel Press). She lives near Madison, Wisconsin and works as a home health nurse in the Madison area. She and her husband, Steve, grow garlic, eat garlic, give away lots of garlic and enjoy the outdoors, venturing out often via foot, ski or a couple paddles and a seaworthy canoe.
grandfather on God and Richmond
I just ain’t sure about God.
They say divinity’s as slippery as truth these days:
harder to pin down than a riversnake.
Take,
for example,
the downtown silhouette
from across the Manchester Bridge
on a winter’s early evening, the
moon just shy of full, blushing
behind lit twelfth-storey windows, the soul-eyes
of a city half-wrapped in rivermist
and dinner plans, grinning teeth
of January jack-o’-lanterns reflecting
over rock and rapid.
Or
Fourteenth and Main
on a rainy rush hour, drops
spilling river-ward through traffic light
and streetlamp, tires
leaving splashmarks across
the footprint of cavalry and
slave.
Better yet, walk with me
through the whispers
at Belle Island, where the voices of fallen prisoners
haunt the college kids sunning like
sea lions out over the rocks.
When autumn comes,
the waters will rise in waves, creeping up
on the empty beer cans and cigarette
packs, washing them down
past Chapel Isle and the ruins of the Confederate boatyard
as the river runs home.
When
I’m dying,
take me to the old hospital
where McGuire’s successors taught
medicine with stolen bodies; no
chain-linkedSaint-named designer cure
for this oldheart. Andwhen
I’m dead
take me to
Hollywood
and a spot
where I can see the river
from a grave
without a cross:
I still ain’t
too sure about God.
Joanna Suzanne Lee has never been formally trained in any kind of writing, thank you very much. She can, however, dissect the brainstem of a neonatal mouse or diagnose your lower back pains. Her first full-length book of poetry, the somersaults I did as I fell (iColor, Richmond, VA), was released in January of 2009. She writes (semi-)regularly at the tenth muse.
Cathedral forest
by Steve Wing
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Steve Wing lives in Florida and has been a frequent contributor to qarrtsiluni. More about him can be found here.
2011 Pushcart Prize nominations
Thanks to all the qarrtsiluni readers and issue editors that offered suggestions on nominees for the Pushcart Prize this year. As usual, it was virtually impossible to settle on just six items, but here’s our list:
“Between Us and the Slow Fall” by Susan Elbe
“I Heard Their Wings Like the Sound of Many Waters” by Marly Youmans
“Suspension Bridge” by Kenneth Pobo
“Qavak Songs” translated by Nancy Campbell
“My Cellies” by John Purugganan
Our congratulations and gratitute to the authors.
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