qarrtsiluni

Writers often lean on what they see. For this issue, we challenged contributors to build up a world in scent, taste, touch, sound, or any combination of these. We asked for imagery — a clear, active connection with the world. As Wislawa Szymborska said in “Conversation with a Stone”: “Even sight heightened to become all-seeing/ will do you no good without a sense of taking part.”

We got… scales, petals, cloves. The wet insides of living creatures. Jackknives, fishhooks, claws. Days and nights, in one way or another aware and present. People large and immediate; people small in a wide, living space. A sense of beginning and ending and putting to bed…

– Katherine Abbott and Rob Mackenzie

Katherine Abbott (Spring Farm Almanac) recently graduated from the MFA program in fiction at the University of New Hampshire. She’s had fiction, poetry and nonfiction published — in the Comstock Review, Entelechy International, The Fourth River, and The Berkshire Review, among others — and accepted for an upcoming anthology, The Farmer’s Daughter. Previously she was Associate Editor of the Berkshire Advocate, an independent weekly paper. When she gets away from her desk, she plays recorder with a fiddle jam group and climbs trees with her cat. Prior to guest-editing this issue, she contributed work to the Ekphrasis and Lies and Hiding issues.

Rachel Barenblat (Velveteen Rabbi) is a student in the Aleph rabbinic program. Her most recent collection of poems is chaplainbook (laupe house press, 2006). Wood smoke, good toffee, and making pickles are a few of her favorite things. Rachel is qarrtsiluni’s most prolific contributor, with eleven pieces in the magazine to date. She also served as co-editor of the Opening in the Body issue.

Polly Blackley lives in Yorkshire. Her work has appeared in Smiths Knoll magazine, and she recently won a poetry competition run as part of the WEA Yorkshire and Humber’s Create07 Festival. Her previous appearances in qarrtsiluni were for the Education, Short Shorts and Lies and Hiding issues.

K. Cohen’s work previously appeared in the Come Outside and Ekphrasis issues of qarrtsiluni. She stores some of her sketches online, here and here. In lieu of a bio, she writes,

There is nothing like a happy ending.
There is always something like a path.
Hineni . . .

Claire Crowther (publisher’s webpage) has been writing poetry for about ten years. Her work has appeared in various print and online journals, including Ambit, Great Works, PN Review, poetry p f, Shadowtrain, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Natalie d’Arbeloff (Blaugustine) is a multi-national artist and writer living in London. Her latest book is The God Interviews, which first appeared as a comic strip on her blog. Previous books and limited editions are shown on her website. This is her ninth appearance in qarrtsiluni.

Dick Jones (Patteran Pages), a drama teacher and musician, has been writing seriously for the past 20 years. His poems and short stories have been published in a wide range of magazines, both on- and offline, and he is currently preparing a selection of poetry for submission to publishers. This is his sixth appearance in qarrtsiluni.

Lucy Kempton (box elder) is British, living in France with husband and dog, sometimes teaching English. A displaced dilettante and prosaic spirit, who may yet entertain poetic angels unawares. Her photos also appeared in the Ekphrasis issue.

Rob Mackenzie (Surroundings) is a Scottish poet. His poetry chapbook, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005. He blogged about his experience guest-editing this issue here. Last year, a poem of his appeared in qarrtsiluni’s Education issue.

Gill McEvoy (homepage) is published widely online and in magazines. Her first chapbook, Uncertain Days (Happenstance Press) is now sold out.

James Midgley’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Rialto, Smiths Knoll, Stand, Iota, and The New Writer, among others. He volunteers as gallery director for poetry of deviantART and edits the poetry journal Mimesis. He blogs at one last wild / enjambement.

Finnish-Canadian artist Marja-Leena Rathje (website) has been contributing to qarrtsiluni since the first issue. Her printworks have been exhibited throughout Canada and internationally. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Rachel Rawlins (frizzyLogic) is currently very excited by meditation, knitting and spreadsheets. This may change. She drinks very expensive coffee which she can’t afford and is hoping this will change. She loves taking pictures almost as much as she loves the dog, the cat and the boys. She also contributed work to the Ekphrasis, Short Shorts, and Science as Poetry issues, and helped edit the Lies and Hiding issue.

Katie Raynes just finished her MA in English Literature. She likes to write fiction, draw, and analyze characters from Elizabethan plays. She blogs at Elaby’s LiveJournal.

Jonathan Sa’adah’s photographs often deal with people and political/social topics. His favorite places to photograph are streets and within shared lives.

Claire Sharpe’s poetry has appeared in a number Canadian and UK magazines, and her essay “Tove Jansson and the Divided Self” was published in a scholarly collection entitled Tove Jansson Rediscovered (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, September 2007). Claire is constantly trying to find ways to integrate and preserve creativity in the context of the wider world. She is currently combing eBay and Toronto pawn shops for a second-hand SLR film camera.

Barbara Smith (Barbara’s bleeuugh!) lives in the Republic of Ireland with her six children and partner. Doghouse Books have recently published her debut collection, Kairos. Her work has been published in Europe, the US, Canada and beyond. She is currently enrolled in the MA in Creative Writing programme with Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, truly making her a ‘Cross-Border poet.’ Listen to an interview with Barbara here (mp3).

Jessamyn Smyth (website) is a Vermont writer in several genres, and an occasional college professor, director, and producer. Her work has been published and/or honored in American Letters and Commentary, The Best American Short Stories 2006, and several other online and print literary journals. She is working on at least three books right now, and lives in the wild with the animals.

Born in Budapest, 1948, George Szirtes (website, blog) came to England as a refugee following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. His dozen books of poetry include The Budapest File, An English Apocalypse and Reel (all from Bloodaxe), the last of which was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2004. He has also published several books of translation from the Hungarian, including The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems of Agnes Nemes Nagy and The Rebels by Sándor Márai. He has edited a number of anthologies, including New Writing 10 (with Penelope Lively), published by Picador, and An Island of Sound (Harvill, 2004).

Ray Templeton is a Scottish writer and musician, living in St. Albans, England.

MB Whitaker (Find Me a Bluebird) is a musician, graphic designer, and editor living in the Northern Rockies of the United States. One of her poems was included in qarrtsiluni’s Finding Home issue. Her band, The Heard, has their most recent CD available here.

Jill Crammond Wickham (jillypoet: mom trying to write) is a writer, artist, teacher, and mother, not necessarily in that order. She has had poems published in a variety of journals, including Other: Seven, damselfly press and Blueline. Her latest project is Fertile Ground, a site where writers can come for writing prompts, inspiration, technical/instructional info, publishing opportunities, and an overall sense of community.

An Edinburgh-born poet with a scientific background, Colin Will (website, blog) now lives in Dunbar. Former Chair of the Scottish Poetry Library, he now chairs StAnza, the poetry festival held at St. Andrews, Scotland every March. His fourth collection, Sushi & Chips, was published in 2006.

Tony Williams (blog) has published in a number of print and web magazines. He lives in Sheffield, UK.

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Image by Rachel Rawlins

Try to imagine death as a phone call. Say
you have just called your mother or the friend
you met last week before you went away,

and say they answer just at the perfect end
of a perfect life, as the moon rises full
of a benign pearly joy that should portend

more joy, just as the tide begins to pull
away from you and that is the very spot
on which you die, in that calm, most beautiful

of places; and say you die, because it’s your lot
to perish by the sea, though it catches you unaware
at the time like a possibility you forgot,

because why after all should you have gone there
but for the possibility of a moon full of joy
and not a death you could meet just anywhere;

say that you know it takes a moment to destroy
a life, to snuff out the moon and the sea and the sand,
to become a distant speck like the dark buoy

bobbing on the tide, to be far from firm land,
a kind of human flotsam, or a space
between constellations, an invisible band

of sky, the weeping memory of a lost face
in another’s grief, the friend, the mother, the pet
left puzzled by your absence; say the trace

you leave behind fades in time as people forget
your precise dimensions and the exact
pitch of your voice, that the vast internet

of the imagination registers you as a fact
without context, swimming in the immense
indivisible particularity of a compact

universe beyond summoning, say that a sense
of loss can be anticipated and is so,
or has been, as a whispered confidence

from one part of your brain to another and you go
round knowing all this for ever, my darling,
as do I, as does the voice saying yes, I know

in the poem, would that be at all consoling?
Say it were so: say it to the moon and to the ear
listening on the phone, to the waves rolling

towards your feet in the darkness, to the fear
of falling and let it go, my dear, let the rain
fall, let waves lap, let the invisible appear.

by George Szirtes

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A gracious moon, neatly illuminating whole galaxies,
little suburbs even, spreading before you.

By starlight you can see space mothers tucking
tired space babies into bed, pulling

rain-washed, softly worn clouds
up under alien chins.

If you listen by starlight, stand quiet
in your backyard, you will hear a symphony

played on Saturn’s rings, maybe a cool
salsa beat out upon the core of Venus and Mars.

If you reach between the stars, part them
with your hands like invisible curtains and peer inside,

you will see families, maybe one just like your own,
fluctuating in the motion of everyday life.

Their starlight is your living room lamp,
their backyard is your rooftop, their music

the hum of your one, continuous long breath.
To this space family, your children seem to be tucked

in by a worn blue sky. Your lives are as distant,
as untouchable, as a single branch on a fallen down tree.

by Jill Crammond Wickham

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Fog covered the Tor and instantly lifted.
Sodden towels dragged
on a washing line. A woman shook
her door curtain. Its strips bunched
like hair. A Tshirt hung
heavy on the waist of a barefoot girl who swung
a flip-flop in each hand. A pregnant woman protruded
from her kitchen, faced the vicious hail as it beat
even bleached jeans to darkness on thighs. A man in a dhoti jerked
back from wheel splash. Wind and thunder groaned
at each other. Our trees swayed.
On the Sweet Track huge elms stood
calm. Heat loosened
like teeth. The Levels were still.

by Claire Crowther

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……….Love, mainly; that thing that’s been strip-mined
by bards in adolescent coffee-houses and dusty agoras
for millennia, their scrolls monuments to glorious failures
of words to convey what it feels like to notice
……….the visible pulse on the inside of his wrist
(such shattering vulnerability in that spot,
the inner workings exposed, close to the surface
……….anything could happen,……….realizes the heart in response,
my god, anything, to this beloved);…..or the hollow between
her shoulder and collar bone, an explosion of beauty
so devastating the bottom falls out of the world
……….(she will leave me, sooner or later, but please god, let it be
later, just a little more time here in this hollow
……….where all is right with the universe);
or the daily catastrophes of witness that bestow
moments of grace;…..when the young man,
usually assured, stumbles and blushes, trying to speak to you,
……….and for a moment, you fall in love with him (he is never again
a stranger, after that); or when the young woman becomes radiant
……….under your praise, knows for a moment that she is brilliant,
and you love her urgently, happily, then;……………when your friend,
……….after a year and a half of waiting, calls and says: the adoption came through!
She’s preemie, three pounds six ounces, she’ll be okay, she’s perfect,
PERFECT, we’re telling her ‘pork up, Peanut, pork up…’ my god, we’re so happy,
……….and you cry, and laugh, and play the message twice,
and write the baby’s name in gold pen on a post-it note
and stick it on your refrigerator,……………or you receive a letter
……….from an absent beloved who, in spite of absence, makes your world
a better place with words spread across the page like coconut shavings,
like chips of obsidian and bloodstone and granite and apricots and honey-trails,
words that craft planets and sweetness you can live on for months,
……….(forever, really);……………or a stranger’s hair,
lit by sun, reveals itself to be comprised of no less than
one hundred colors…..and you die a little, because of it;
……….and your friends laugh at you, and call you hedonist,
a seeker of pleasure, a basker in beauty, but you know
it is worse than that, much worse:
……….it is that ……….in spite of all your craft and skill
you will never say it quite right……….though you will bloom
and die and cut back and bloom again in the trying,
and you will have joy because of it,……………it is that
……….in fact……………you have no skin,
and your heart — that stubborn, obstreperous organ — wears itself
……….on the outside,
trying incessantly……………in spite of everything……….to speak,
……….and you know, secretly,……….that though you will fail,
you will never get it right,
……….your hungry words…..will be enough.

by Jessamyn Smyth

Direct link to the mp3.

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by Jonathan Sa’adah

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We pause for a moment,
stifling sound,
tuned to our cycling and
recycling blood,
meshed,
lead-heavy,
drinking breath,
impossibly boundless and still.

Each pulse comes flooding.
We’ve passed here before;
once I heard music,
once there was rain,
once we found shelter,
once we had time.

The seconds are spilling
unbearable sweetness;
moving’s unthinkable,
waiting is pain.
Lost in a minute,
matter and mind
we are moved again.

by K. Cohen

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Standing at the edge of the pumped-up bed
she puts her fists into his back gently
but firmly, working the muscles.
She opposes them with deep down pushes,
waiting for the creak and scringe of ligament and bone,
feeling a way into his injury, his scarred layout.

Sounds of crackling and popping like bubble-wrap
drift with disembodied conversation.
‘When the pain eases, tell me,’ as thumbs
quest into knobbles, the central roots of a spine.
‘Yep,’ means a stronger digging in, a longer track
back to the feeling of no-pain, when the nerves

quiet to a hum lower than cars shushing by,
on the wet road outside the window. Sitting up,
he sees a chart plotting the nerves of the body,
a lattice shawled across shoulders; bright yellow
rivulets that trickle into streams threading down
the ruby, skinless torso. Even physiotherapists
like classical poses.

by Barbara Smith

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by Katie Raynes

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Can’t find wolves round here — you’re convinced
you can, and not just when the wind shakes its muzzle.
The body-parts in the garden become familiar as ferns,
as does the turn in the stomach: the affirmation
of each organ as meat. They are piecemeal puzzles:
the black bean of a mouse’s gall bladder, a hunk of pork.
Howls spread from the paddock, racket the angles
of your bedroom until you come-to quietly,
pack hound through the copse of your duvet,
remembering dew on your feet, that dream of leaving
chunks of meat on the lawn, tripping through a furred circle
of curdled milk left for a cat you haven’t seen in weeks.

by James Midgley

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It was the dream where the neighbours came round to say
They had a badger in the garden –
Dreadful and endless opening of doors
As the dogs slipped their leads –

But a banal reconfiguration
Of an incident that actually happened:
The sudden darkness of the skies
Above a country where powers are abroad

And real to my quickening heart.
It was not a “sighting.” It was the air thickening,
A power narrowing its eyes.

by Tony Williams

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Detail of painting (oil on wood panel) by Natalie d’Arbeloff

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To catch a fish, breathe in the firmament,
Consider finality before you begin
Threading fly on thin filament.
Then find a seam where life slides
From one slippery dream to the next and cast
Lightly, with the current, never splash.

Inch your line out in a silvery arc,
Sinuous as love doubling back on itself,
And lay it fine on the shimmering drift
Where it listens for the swift nip of a question — a mere
Twitch between fingers — you must answer.

No time for doubt, pull steadily, pull,
Pull, keeping tension constant — spattering drops,
Splitting wave, breaking light, the slap
Of sudden weight on the gritty shore,
Where you must heft a rough stone
Without hesitation in one well-placed, final thud.

*

Eating a fish is not like catching a fish.
This is the brutal grace of hunger.
This is getting close to the bone, into the teeth.

With the fine blade of your knife, slit the
Silken underbelly straight
From anus to jaw and, as the scent
Pricks your nostrils, slide your finger in
Below the spine and strip the body’s cavity empty
Of its soft parts, washing it clean of blood.

Now, you may choose to fill a pan with
Butter and garlic, or clean bark
From a lean, green stick and thread the body
Onto its narrow bier to roast over coals.
But wait for the tail to curl and the flesh to sing
Before your teeth sink in, before swallowing what begins to be you.

by MB Whitaker

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Dry earth spits dust, puffballs release spores,
tiny brown smokes. I remember hearing
the first welcome rattle on cabbages,
how the waxy leaves grew globes
of magnifying water, each with a dazzle
just above the lower margin. I looked
for the sunsource, found it in a patch
of brighter sky.

Hated the childhood flavour, love it now
with butter, pepper, caraway,
allied to lamb and potatoes, and later
a double-glazed lie-down,
a watery recollection.

by Colin Will

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Was he still surprised by soft sheets, the accident
of waking every morning? Was it unexamined
or without words, confronted every day?
I see now, there was a silent place,
where he knew as he signed a letter,
contract or cheque, his name wasn’t carved
in grey granite; when steel had splintered,
it had wedged in elbow and legs, not the brain.
Was it sweet, or did he taste the acid? We were kept
well out of it — hedged around with easy talk
of comradeship, courage, careless hatred.
So we threw it back at him, condescending
to supposed indifference, scornful
of his lack of curiosity. But we were
wrong; and now that place is impossible
to find. Only understand it must have been there:
and it was sore, whatever else it might have been.

by Ray Templeton

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by Marja-Leena Rathje

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Known a fair number of them. Heard the first
squeak of them from inside a box or cage.
Watched them dart, look puzzled, scamper, wage
war on shoe-laces, yowling fit to burst,
mumbling of hunger, restlessness and thirst.

Known them draw blood from a fingertip. Known
them attack a flick of hair. Known them leap
off unpredictable ledges and fall asleep
on a doorstep as if it were a throne.
Known them like company but walk alone.

Known those eyes that search yours then grow bored
and turn into themselves, the world gone flat
as sadness. Known them fixed on the faint pat-
ter of rain or the spinning of an old record,
or shirt-sleeves dangling from the ironing board.

Known them asleep for hours. Known the grace
of their long backs arching. Known their mad
devil-possessed scramblings, their jihad
on anything that moves from place to place.
Known set expressions flit across one’s face

as if they were ghosts of thoughts or faint beams
of perception. Known them stretch out and purr
at the slightest touch of brush on tangled fur.
Known them hunched, lost in enormous daydreams
of killing and sexual capers. Watched their schemes

of world domination come a cropper when
distracted by a paper clip on the floor.
Watched them in two minds at an open door
unable to commit. Saw them expect ten
lives, not nine. Saw them hiss and sharpen

their claws on furniture so far pristine.
Saw right into their souls, or what I thought
were souls. Saw the dead things they brought
into the house. Saw them fat and thin,
and saw them end soon after they begin.

Have shared rooms with them. Fed them. Played a while
with the young ones. Have yet to see one cry
though sickening to death. Have seen them die
in old age. Have seen them crocked, immobile,
wounded, run down, left in a bloody pile.

Have known the names to which they gave no heed,
the names of spaces in the human mind.
Have known them hanker after their own kind.
Have known their stomachs blown out from pure greed.
Have known the loss of them. Their mirrored need.

by George Szirtes

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I sleep with the quarterlight
half open, tipped
like a questing lip
into the dark.

Night rain is falling
and the talk
is all of transformation:
black on black in threads

and swatches, gravity diamonds
heading south down window
panes; the air itself
partitioned into beads

and space. Fluctuation, shift –
this parcel of earth self-
ministers, self-heals. And I
bear witness whilst below

my body ticks backwards
like a novelty clock –
new times, new intervals,
deep secret bells and

slipping gears. Yes,
just outside, a skin
and filament away,
the heft of falling rain

in space, against
the leaves and on
the running earth
is like breathing.

by Dick Jones

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The rain is slipping them out of their ceremonies
to begin winter, her father walking the garden
threatening to cut down the bare plum
and pear, and her mother running
after, pleading that the trees
will fruit in summer,
her mother’s hurta
eaten together while they ask
the longest moon to scatter silver in
their hair at an angle so narrow that each
sees the bits of blackened iron stuck in grass
at their feet as cloves in the shining flesh of apple.

by Claire Crowther

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Photo by Lucy Kempton

the livid plum
has inspired

ascension to heaven
in love songs to Shiva

apologia that isn’t
for pleasures indulged

sexual metaphor
the world over

in poems and
brush paintings

made quick
and fierce

against tree trunks
the way it can be

sometimes
sweet

the way
bark prints

are left between
shoulder-blades

and legs sore
the next day

isn’t it
and the drip

the stickiness
of all of it

the decadence
of wet flesh

it’s true,
halve one

and you will know
all there is

to know
about women

place one whole
in your mouth

something learned
about men too

but turn wholly
with attention

to plum shape
flesh, texture

taste, swallow
with attention

and you will know
all there is

to know about
miracles of light

wrought in
stripped earth

and also about
the heart organ

how easily
bruised

how persuasively
flooded

how articulate
and subtle

fragile
regenerative

so soft
a ripeness

on attentive
tongue

by Jessamyn Smyth

Direct link to the mp3.

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