qarrtsiluni

by Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson

We were thrilled to have the opportunity to edit an issue of qarrtsiluni. It was both challenging, in terms of volume and time, and highly rewarding.

Our hope was to focus on and highlight health — both the radiant, full-bodied, energetic variety, and the various ways health is impaired or depleted. We struggled to balance the issue, hoping to equally include pieces that celebrate the joy we experience in health and that explore the grief in our disease and dying. We were continually surprised at how difficult this was, as the majority of submissions we received focused on ill health.

We wondered why the focus seemed more on our dis-ease than on our vibrancy. Is it that we use writing to, as Gregory Orr says, “(sing) the pain back into the wound?”

Gregg Levoy, in his book Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, says that writing is really only the mode of transport. “The true calling is whatever we hope to draw to us through our art, what we want it to bring to us.” Perhaps all this writing about our dis-ease is meant to bring wholeness to us.

On the other hand, the visual art we received was much more focused on the positive aspects of health. There were many photographs, paintings, and mixed-media pieces full of harmony and joy.

We have no answers, only more questions. Art in all its forms holds much mystery.

We thank all of you who submitted. It was an honor and a pleasure to be allowed into your aching hearts, your quirky minds, and your love of life and this Earth.

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For bios of Susan and Kelly, see the Call for Submissions post.

On the Scree by David Trame

The Ground Left Me by Brent Goodman

In the Middle of the Night by Pat Daneman

Mt. Nebo, Arkansas, late August by Brent Fisk

At the Hour of Your Death by Karen Stromberg

Passing by Richard Jordan

Flight by Robin Chapman

Aliens Among the Brittle Stars by Katherine Durham Oldmixon

Scales by Ron Czerwien

Devour by Arlene Ang

Still Life by Dick Jones

Some Beauty Needs a Dimness by Diane Wakoski

Bloom by Tori Ellison

An Inside View of the Patient by Delbert R. Gardner

Girls on the Slide by Sarah Busse

Revelation by Harriet Brown

Peaked by Lisa Alden

Sharps (remix) by Stu Hatton

Panic by Wendy Vardaman

Case Study by Heather Reid

Loving My Daughter in the Mountains by Marjorie Saiser

Which came first, health or feeling good? by Steve Wing

What is Health? by Monica Raymond

What the Horoscope Says by Rodney Wood

Homeopathy for the Nation by Joseph Harker

On Suzanne by Holly Anderson

I Should Mention Love by Brent Goodman

Visions of a Healthy Planet by James Brush

The Old Man and the Kayak by Steve Meador

Lithia Springs by Steve Meador

there by Peter Schwartz

In/organic Transmissions by Patricia McInroy

Materia Medica by Heidi Hart

La Virgen de la Candelaria by Lisken Van Pelt Dus

Healing Buddha by Katherine Durham Oldmixon

Gloriosa by Heidi Hart

Sarcoma by Marilyn L. Taylor

The Dog as Healer, the Snake as Cure by Jeffery Beam

Body by Rachel Barenblat

Between by Thomas Ferrella

Hospital at Night by Una Nichols Hynum

After James Tate by Martha Deed

Advice from the Robot Scientist’s Daughter by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Psych Ward by Dorianne Laux

Diogenes Syndrome by Maureen Jivani

Here’s To My Legs by Marjorie Saiser

Thick Socks by Sara Parrell

Salamba Sirsasana 1 — Headstand by Robbi Nester

Breathing by Brent Goodman

Visiting the Burn Unit by Lisken Van Pelt Dus

Systems by Colleen Coyne

Ice Babies II by Aine Scannell

Still, Life by Catherine Jagoe

Jitters by Robin Chapman

Relics by Sherry Chandler

Cold Blood by Lynnel Jones

Prairie Potholes by Sara Parrell

Recovery by Brent Fisk

Transport by Monica Raymond

X-Dress by Tori Ellison

Medicine Poem for Holly by Alison Townsend

Ash by Lisken Van Pelt Dus

The Swing by Richard Jordan

Perspectives on the Geographical Cure by Dan Lear

Hole in Me by Aine Scannell

Gloves & Dark Glasses by Diane Wakoski

The Breath of Life by Jeff Klooger

Beluga Spiral by Joy Harjo

Psalm by Catherine Jagoe

by Catherine Jagoe

I pause in the airport parking ramp alive
with the avid conversations of sparrows
celebrating the ordinary.

They make this half-deserted hangar
musical as a cathedral, open to the air,
full of light and shadows, cool spaces.

I see our house when it was a great skeleton
of yellow wood, the roof ribs of whale,
green light of summer in the rafters.

A wasps’ nest falls from the heft
of the silver maple. I hold
this fine grey paper from the sky.

I sing and sometimes sound fills
my mouth and throbs there, my throat
an instrument, my ribs a soundboard.

I swim. I keep my head low
in the water, thinking of seals’
breath, swivel, drive, flip, glide.

I endure the clamor of children,
ground down smooth by it like shingle
clattered and worn on the strand.

I plant wormwood, sage.
I snap asparagus spears,
split the wood from the green.

The mock orange that I tried to kill
is drenched in blossom, tipsy.
Again, its scent undoes me.

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Catherine Jagoe is a poet and translator. Poems from her chapbook Casting Off (Parallel Press, 2007) have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Poetry Daily. Her translations include two novels, one from Spain, That Bringas Woman (Everyman, 1996) and one from Argentina, My Name Is Light (Bloomsbury, 2003). She recently finished translating a memoir about the Arctic from Catalan into English.

by Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo (website) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation. Her seven books of poetry, which include such titles as How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses, have garnered many awards. Her latest publication is a young adult/coming of age book, For A Girl Becoming. She performs nationally and internationally with her band, the Arrow Dynamics, and has released four CDs of original music. Winding Through the Milky Way won her a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009.

by Jeff Klooger

If life is this easy, why haven’t we lived
until now? With each breath
the body expands, and we
expand with it, from the untouchable
core of our unchanging self
to unreachable limits
of compassion.

The rhythm is so simple
a child could learn it. It sings to us
and we sing back, a tune of air,
expelling strife and sorrow, inhaling
peace and light.

If tears come, they are a blessing,
a farewell to demons we once loved
but now no longer care for.
Laughter, too, may surprise us, announcing
joy we did not know we had.

In silence, we find an end to searching.
At home in the moment,
we know that here and now
nothing is missing, everything
is just as it is.

If we are not
what we expected to be
we are at last
enough
even for ourselves.

Music: Prem Rawat Maharaji’s Wordcortado (Open Source Audio collection at Internet Archive)
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Jeff Klooger’s poetry has been published in his native Australia and internationally. Recently his work has appeared in Eureka Street, The Daedalus Review, TEXT, Numinous, The Argotist Online, The Stinging Fly, Harvest, dotdotdash, and Otoliths. His other interests are music and philosophy. His book on the ideas of the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis was published in 2009.

by Diane Wakoski

How did a great Red-tailed Hawk
come to lie — stiff and dry —
on the shoulder of
Interstate 5
Her wings for dance fans
from “The Dead By the Side of the Road,” by Gary Snyder

I saw the doe
placed so carefully, fanned out,
the embankment scrolling upwards,
in a pose she could not have assumed that way.
Silk-scarf ivory, sere limned against winter grass,
eyes still glossy as polished jasper, her delicate hoof extended like
a lady’s ungloved hand, she must have danced
across Jolly Road, and some driver-poet,
like Bill Stafford, got out
and puzzled about her fate/ Isadora
Duncan, leaping in the
Athenian Hills
with her Grecian chorus of young
boys, sandaled Aphrodite of Kopanos Hill —
she might have been there, watching in a toga-d pose,
but I, wearing dark glasses and passing by
the next day, was presented only
with a dead deer, not the dancer she
might have been.

What gloves do we wear when removing a
fallen deer to the verge
of the road? Ivory, sere,
silk or suede?
Could it be
that they are the gloves of invisibility that wrap
our dancing feet,
our hooves splayed out
as if they were Isadora never-caught in the scarf
of her longing, only leaping?

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Author’s notes
Isadora Duncan captured 20th century imagination with her innovative dancing that featured a return to Classical Greek forms. She helped set a healthy fashion for artists to go “natural,” wearing sandals as part of that gesture, and of course she died famously, riding in an open car, her long scarf trailing in the wind, only to get caught in the wheels of the auto to strangle her.

“Bill Stafford”: See William Stafford’s poem, “Travelling Through The Dark.”

Diane Wakoski’s latest book, The Diamond Dog, is now available from Anhinga Press (see the review in the Christian Science Monitor). She is the author of more than twenty collections of poems and continues to teach at Michigan State University as a University Distinguished Professor.

by Aine Scannell

(Click on image to see a larger version.)

Silkscreen and collagraph

30 x 30 cm or 12 x 12 inches

2009

Aine Scannell (first name pronounced Oy N yah) is an Irish fine artist printmaker residing in Scotland. Her art work is generally located in the realm of the personal with imagined hybrids and ciphers and incorporating symbolic references. Her work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally, and was recently featured in the publication Printmaking at the Edge by Richard Noyce. Visit her website and blog.

by Dan Lear

I stood that morning with my back to the Atlantic
feeling tall. My shoes had been in six oceans.
My shadow etched a line across America.

By West Virginia I was smaller. Above straight
walls of rock the sky was a circle
I held in my arms.

In Kansas I saw the overpass twelve miles
before I reached it. At 80 mph
I stood still and disappeared.

I swelled and burst in the desert of New
Mexico. The dry air
sucked me brittle, a seedhusk losing seed.

By Needles I was too thin to matter
when the car broke down. I walked back to town
afraid no one could see me.

Finally, Monterey and my chest to the Pacific,
expanded like an eclipse.
At noon the sailfish lept into dark.

I was surprised to find you, still in me,
the same size you were when you left.

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Dan Lear writes in St. Louis, or wherever else he happens to be.

by Richard Jordan

Ramsdell scales the ancient ash behind
the woodshed, takes a swig of Jack then flings
the bottle high. An hour ago he watched
a blood sun rise through cobwebbed panes
by his mother’s childhood bed, his arm gone numb
from supporting her neck all night as she strained to catch
the banter of barn owls and coyotes.

He thought it would be easy, a token visit
to the vacant family farm then back;
but in St. Joseph’s his mother’s eyes had misted

as she told of an August day when she was
almost twelve, of how she pushed her younger
cousin higher and higher on a swing,
and how her cousin stretched small toes to split

a thunderhead. So Ramsdell teeters now,
reaching for a sturdy limb to hold
a rope, a tire, skin and bones,

and a failing woman’s final chance
to harness wind and sweep the earth away.

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Richard Jordan is a PhD mathematician who works as a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His poetry has appeared most recently in The Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, Redivider, Two Review, and on the Verse Daily website.

by Lisken Van Pelt Dus

Forty feet up the ash tree,
branches begin to splay from the trunk

curving off toward light of their own.
One forms an almost perfect arch

and on its crest — an apple,
green and slightly shriveled, but intact.

It’s worthy of Magritte, no apple tree
in sight. We’re lunching on the deck

with my stepson who’s just lost his mother
when we notice it: apple as apparition.

Apple as praise for possibility, apple
as balance in abandonment. It’s Dan

who sees the squirrel retrieve it, later.
The fruit’s as big as the animal’s head,

but he leaps with it across chasms,
without hesitation, as if the air were substance.

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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.

by Alison Townsend

(For Holly Prado Northup)

All day, as the surgeon
opens your back to repair it —
adjusting each vertebra, unbending
the curvature of pain time
has slowly put there —
I keep a vigil on the couch
with the cats, bending
over my students’ essays
the way you bent over my words
twenty years ago or more,
talking about the importance
of the spine that runs through it all.
So that ever since I have sought
that ladder of notched,
articulated bone, threading
the cord of words through holes
that in a deer’s body
are shaped like hearts,
listening under the surface
of each poem for what connects things,
what backbone holds them up,
both our mothers
dead when we were girls,
what we have had to bend and carry
heavy, lonely, strange, though we
bent and carried anyway,
spine the center, spine the axis,
spine a kind of tree in the body,
column of light we call spunk
or moxie or courage, what I invoke
from half a continent away
as you lie there, being cut open
and then stitched together again,
so that you may stand,
straight and tall as any tree
you choose to call your mother.

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Alison Townsend is the author of two books of poetry, Persephone in America and The Blue Dress, and two limited edition chapbooks. Her poetry and creative nonfiction appear widely, in journals such as Margie, Rattle, Arts & Letters, Fourth Genre and The Southern Review. She has won many awards, including a Pushcart Prize, publication in Best American Poetry, literary fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Flume Press Poetry Chapbook Prize and the Crab Orchard/Southern Illinois University Press Open Poetry Competition. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives with her husband on four acres of prairie and oak savanna in the farm country outside Madison.

by Tori Ellison

Click image to view a larger version

1997
Acrylic and mixed media on paper
From the print series “The Spaces Between”

Tori Ellison creates paintings, sculpture, prints, installation art, and theater design. A MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Jentel fellow, she is collected by the City of Seattle and Paul Allen’s Vulcan and has exhibited in 11 states and abroad, including Portland Art Museum, Bellevue Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum Gallery, and New York’s Grey Art Gallery (NYU) and PaineWebber Gallery. She studied at Cranbrook, Reed College, and School of Visual Arts (New York), and has written about art for the Guggenheim, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Seattle Weekly, Seattle Times, Oregonian, and Artweek.

by Monica Raymond

You were a fever but I wrung you out.
A fever’s operatic as a boat
rocked on high waves,
a liner, say. Plates slide,
and we catch egg-shaped
goblets in mid-air, and the captain’s daughter
barfs over the side,
but we tough ones ride it out,
even light up with a world-weary

snap, pickle ourselves more deeply
in gin or grain, unchangeable
as barreled herring,
cigar store Indian, those tanned while
still in the skin.
That would be, I suppose, a way of becoming
eternal.
Though actually I feel more like a husked
kernel,
a peeled grape, flayed like when
taking sunburn off—

wafer by fried wafer, scurf. Naked, the
air stinging
with the hurt that is health.

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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 eleven issues in a row now.

by Brent Fisk

The voices have not been silenced
in spite of the constant drip. A nurse asks
about the final game, the last desperate
shot disappearing in the air.

I go to the dark closet of my body,
feel the dream fabric hanging above my head
like a tattered suit. The incision
is a crack of light, a line
where the door to my body won’t close.

When they found Mr. Jenkins
dead on his kitchen floor, he sprawled
there empty-eyed, with a broken
glass in his hand and a mouth open to flies.
Two days of incessant screen door banging
before someone stumbled in with a shout.

I think of a stranger’s hands
slipping inside me. How many times
will a doctor make this cut
before he’s used to this sort of parting,
skin and fat and muscle fiber, hand steady
as the flow of blood?

I will wake in a phantom hour,
eyes aflutter, a strong wind beyond
the window glass, a controlled burn
of pain. My parents climb through the wall
of searing heat, everything wavering
through the eroded night except the trickle-whisper
of conversation, the warmth of hands
curious with love.

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Brent Fisk is a writer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. He has work forthcoming in Minnetonka Review and Rattle and recently published in Autumn Sky Poetry (not to mention more than 200 other journals he was too modest to mention in his submitted bio).

by Sara Parrell

scattered pockets of shallow wetland in the plains of
North America, now threatened by agricultural pollutants
and climate change

Hunters call them sloughs
rife with pintail, muskgrass
& loose-knit duckweed rearranging themselves
with every slosh, those nests & hens
radaring weakness to mink & skunk
nursing hunger in their dens. Some see
the way wet meadows slope less pure
after cattle run & atrazine,
lopsided zeal that kills frog, phalarope—
a dark soot on the face of America.
Some of us slept through, sloth-like,
unaware how much the land can take
before it needs help, loses hope, dries to desert
shot with salt & the godwit’s last solo.
Rise & quench this morning thirst. Dress for
a deep look in shallow ponds.

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Sara Parrell was awarded first prize in the 2008 Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading; Dancing Girl Press published a chapbook including her winning manuscript for the reading. She also won the Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine’s 2007 poetry contest. Her work has appeared in the Lake Wingra Morning anthology, Nocturne (a collaboration with photographer and musician Thomas Ferrella), the Wisconsin Academy Review and other journals. As a pediatric nurse she has practiced and taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. More recently, she works with children in the public schools. She lives with her husband Grayson Kampschroer in Madison, Wisconsin.