You were a sky-gazer, a cloud-watcher,
seeing within those steamed puff-pillows
the forms of fabulous beings.

Just now I saw a fisherman, his white head
turned away, his finger flung
behind him pointing at infinity.

His rag-rolled head streamed to the west,
clothes rippling in the high sky-wind.
And when my lazy eye looked again

he morphed into a huge ornamental E,
whose top lintel was a crocodile’s mouth,
snapping at the blue. This too bleeds,

feeds into a sterling pound sign. You
must have spent afternoons on your back
gazing at patterns forming and merging,

dissipating where the mind dragged it.
You took your pigments and pulled them,
your art fixing a borderless sky inside

a broad high vault, peopling the heavens.
Ah, Michelangelo, I know why the sky
became your backdrop, why it is that you

loved shades from azurite to smalt to cobalt blue.

by Barbara Smith

Download the MP3

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Splitscreen Ghosthunter turned the universe inside out. Not on purpose; it was just a dream that got away from her. When Splitscreen woke up the grass, trees, mountains, moon, planets, stars, and galaxies were all nestled within the confines of her skin, humming along like a little machine. Her capillaries, veins, heart, lungs, flesh, and bones were all on the outside, like jellyfish floating in an infinite sea of blood. Far out on the horizon she sensed the remnants of an ancient singularity, her first heartbeats, thrumming insistently. Inside her the voices began. The tiny people started talking to her.

by Mario Milosevic

Download the MP3

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

by Dorothee Lang

If you can’t see the movie, you need to download Flash (or click through
from email or feed reader).
Alternatively, you can download it and watch it on the player of your choice,
or try this side road link.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Download the podcast (67.7 MB)

Subscribe to the feed

This is an experiment. We’re hoping it will be the first of many bi-monthly productions, but that depends largely on what kind of feedback we get (we don’t get statistics on downloads). Will you download and listen to it, on an iPod or otherwise, or listen to it on-site? How could we improve it? General and technical suggestions are equally welcome. Leave comments here, send us an email, or join the discussion at our Facebook page.

Duration: 1 hour, 14 minutes
Start times of selections:
1:11   Lucy Kempton & Katherine Durham Oldmixon — issue summary (read by Dave)
3:00   Lana Hectman Ayers — Volume
3:30   Eve Rifkah — born in the year of deluge
5:10   Jessamyn Smyth — Bathe (read by Beth)
6:45   Christina Pacosz — White Heron Wading
7:50   Luisa A. Igloria — What We Ate After Passing the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins
9:55   Allan Peterson — Waterspout
10:35   Fiona Robyn — Aldeburgh Beach
11:35   Nancy Gandhi — Lost at Sea
12:40   Diane Gage — Fish Face
13:45   Susan V. Facknitz — Flotsam
14:50   Lisa J. Cihlar — Far From Any Ocean
15:45   David Graham — Ashes to Ashes, Water Over All
17:05   Pia Taavila — Waste
18:05   Ellen Goldstein — The Rain Walkers
18:45   Janet Yung — Watering Hole (read by Dave)
24:10   Tom Sheehan — Korean Echo
25:25   Nathalie Boisard-Beudin — Water that Was
27:50   Penny Harter — Camping in the Drought
28:45   Celia Lisset Alvarez — Restrictions
30:25   Juliet Wilson — Rainy Season (read by Beth)
31:10   Marion McCready — Looking Beyond
32:12   Nicholas Y.B. Wong — Transformer (read by Roger Phang)
33:28   Paul Dickey — Walking on Water
34:50   Scott Wiggerman — Baptism
36:07   Robert McGowan — Ascent (read by Beth)
37:22   W. Joe Hoppe — Crawdad Creek (read by Dave)
38:27   Rebecca Ellis — Everywhere You Look is Luck
39:10   Christi Krug — Water Rites
44:38   Lisken Van Pelt Dus — Self-Portrait as Aquifer
45:30   Tim Lockridge — A Brief Meditation on Movement (read by Beth)
46:37   Robin Davidson — August Garden (read by Beth)
48:36   Brent Goodman — Crank Bait (read by Dave)
49:50   Kelly Madigan Erlandson — Deep Subject
53:53   Michael Milligan — Swimming Lesson (read by Dave)
55:07   Diane Kendig — Sippo Lake (read by Beth)
55:51   Gill McEvoy — Rain Dancers (read by Dave)
56:57   Wanda McCollar — untitled (read by Dave)
57:42   Pamela Johnson Parker — Shuckswich Road (read by Beth)
59:08   Robbi Nester — Picnic at the Big Lady, Quabbin Reservoir
1:00:37   Ed Higgins — Week’s Rain
1:01:25   Lynne Shapiro — Replenish
1:02:15   Lisken Van Pelt Dus — The Lake Isn’t a Life
1:03:20   Monica Raymond — Inside Leviathan
1:04:50   Charlotte Mandel — The Mollusc World
1:06:25   Angela France — Intertidal
1:07:10   Marly Youmans — A May Flower
1:08:35   Gerard Wozek — Merman
1:10:02   Joe Hyam — Dry (read by Dave)
1:11:07   Allan Peterson — That Element
1:11:47   Robin Davidson — April Storm (read by Dave)
1:12:55   closing comments

Soundclip at beginning and end: “Ranger,” freeware by CycloidSound Productions [beware pop-ups], found via Flash Kit. Clip of water dripping courtesy of PacDV.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

We were wetted by the voices and the visions, touched by water in contact with so many others, as we spent these days and nights listening and reflecting.

Reflecting, what impresses is the swell of diverse and multiple perspectives — emerging, prominent, echoing. It’s no accident we both traveled to seas during this time, swimming in immediate experience and the mediated perceptions of others. That we are on other sides of our watery planet also brought dimension to our selections.

Selections, it finally came down to: what we hadn’t or had already scooped, netted, drank, bathed or slept through. We found ourselves often gurgling, gasping. Like thirsty street bathers at a fire hydrant, we would surface stunned, say, yes, no… of course an acceptance or a refusal had as much to do with where we were in the drink as how sweet the spring.

And the springs have been sweet and various — baths, baptisms, swims, rain, fog, ice and snow, deaths and births, mythical and natural water creatures, historical and personal encounters with the element, lakes, rivers, streams, seas, tubs, pools, spigots, puddles — or the absence of water, droughts, as well as floods — and from all over our blue-green earth, including Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

We are replenished and hope you are, too.

out over aquamarine,
like pelicans,
our bills filled with good things

— Lucy Kempton and Katherine Durham Oldmixon

Click on the contributors’ names to see all their publications in qarrtsiluni to date. Please note that journal and magazine links are now restricted to direct links to online works by the author or artist in question. For books, we now link to Open Library pages whenever possible, and encourage authors and readers to contribute to this open-source project by adding books or editing existing entries.

Celia Lisset Alvarez has two collections of poetry, The Stones (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006). She lives in Miami, Florida and teaches at St. Thomas University.

Lana Hechtman Ayers (website) lives in the Pacific Northwest with several tuxedo cats. In addition to publishing Concrete Wolf Chapbooks and Late Blooms Poetry Postcards, she is a manuscript organizer and workshop facilitator.

Jeffery Beam’s The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969 – 2007 has just been published. His other works include Visions of Dame Kind, An Elizabethan Bestiary Retold, and the online book, Gospel Earth. His CD, What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems, was a 2003 Audio Publishers Award finalist. Life of the Bee, with composer Lee Hoiby, continues to be performed on the international stage and can be heard on Albany Records’ New Growth. His photographs are just beginning to be published and he had his first one-man show in 2006. Beam is poetry editor of Oyster Boy Review and a botanical librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Nathalie Boisard-Beudin is French yet currently living in Rome, Italy, working by day as in-house lawyer for the European Space Agency and by night scribbling furiously, with results being published in the multi-national anthology Wonderful World of Worders (Guildhall-Press) in 2007, Six Sentences, Crime and Suspense, Micro Horror and Pen Pricks Micro Fiction.

Patricia Bralley (Seeing for My Self) writes, “Early on my father, a chemist, taught me that water is ‘the universal solvent.’ He neglected to mention how very Zen it is. Today, I try to combine both of these elements, the scientific and the spiritual, in my life. This tends to make me something of a Zen-Taoist molecular geneticist. It also causes my attention to alternate between the enzyme dancing within a drop of water and this Ocean of Silence called consciousness that I seem to be submerged in. (Where is a good set of gills when you need them?)”

Lisa J. Cihlar lives and writes in rural Brodhead, Wisconsin, with her husband and too many cats to count. She has had poems published in Word Riot, Wicked Alice, Salome, and other journals. She was selected a runner-up in the 2007 Wisconsin People and Ideas poetry contest. Her favorite way to spend a day is to write a poem in the morning and pull weeds from among the tomato plants all afternoon.

Carrie Crow is a New York City based photographer. Her work can be seen in the latest issue of Inscribed [PDF, 6.75M] and at baron & the crow, an ongoing collaborative project with poet John Greiner, and she has work forthcoming in the the online magazines Burst! and Sein und Werden.

Robin Davidson is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Downtown. In 2003-4 she served as Fulbright professor of American literature at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her poems and translations have appeared in such American literary journals as AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, 91st Meridian, Words Without Borders, and Literary Imagination.

Heather Dearmon (webpage) was the ecstatic, first place recipient in the 2006 South Carolina Poetry Initiative and The State Newspaper’s Single Poem Contest. She continues to bask in her glory, despite how it may annoy her son. Her husband doesn’t mind, as long as she’s smiling.

Since Paul Dickey’s previous appearance in the Education issue, his work has appeared in various journals including Southern Poetry Review and Cider Press Review. New work has just been published in Rattle, and is forthcoming in Sentence and Crab Orchard Review.

Anna Dickie is a photographer based in East Lothian, Scotland. Anna came back to photography after years away raising a family and working as a policy officer in the UK Civil Service. It became a passion again when she was recovering from breast cancer treatment. In the last three years she’s won or been short listed in a number of competitions, including having a shot hung in the Scottish Parliament, as part of a touring exhibition on the theme of coastal erosion. She also writes poetry, though this is a more recent love, and has had two chapbooks published, Peeling Onions, a series poem about coming through a cancer diagnosis, and Heart Notes, just published by Calder Wood Press.

Lisken Van Pelt Dus is a high-school teacher and martial arts instructor, raised in England, the U.S., and Mexico, and now living in Massachusetts. Her work can be found in Conduit [pop-up], Main Street Rag, The South Carolina Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Umbrella, and other journals and anthologies, and has earned awards from The Comstock Review and Atlanta Review. A chapbook, Everywhere at Once, is forthcoming from Pudding House Press.

Rebecca Ellis lives in southern Illinois. She has most recently published a poem on a bus as part of the Metro Arts in Transit 2008 Poetry in Motion project in St. Louis. She is a supporter and former board member of the St. Louis Poetry Center. She edits Cherry Pie Press, publishing a series of poetry chapbooks by Midwestern women poets.

Kelly Madigan Erlandson (website) is the author of Getting Sober: A Practical Guide to Making it Through the First 30 Days (McGraw-Hill). She is a 2008 recipient of an NEA Fellowship.

Water is Susan V. Facknitz’s element. Although an inland-born New York State child, she was parched until she found the sea in Virginia. Sailing is her passion, deferred for now for a life in the Shenandoah Valley where she has a job and three beautiful merchildren.

Angela France (webpage) works with challenging teenagers and, for relief, makes her brain leak out of her ears by trying to write poetry. She is enjoying middle age and is spectacularly bad at housewifery.

Laura Frankstone (Laurelines), painter and passionate travel sketcher, is represented by Somerhill Gallery of Chapel Hill and Durham, NC. Her work is included in collections in Europe and the US. She was the only American represented in the 8th Biennale de Carnets de Voyage in Clermont-Ferrand, France in November, 2007 and several of her sketches are included in the just-published book 1000 Artist Journal Pages, edited by Dawn DeVries Sokol.

Diane Gage (webpage) intends to start blogging any day now. She has new poems in Memoir(and) and the final edition of I-70 Review. Her poems have also appeared in Letters to the World: Poems from the WOM-PO Listserv, Poeisis, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere.

Nancy Gandhi is an American who lives in Chennai, on the southeast coast of India. Her long-running blog, under the fire star, features figurative and literal sketches of life in India. You can follow her microblogging on Twitter.

Ellen Goldstein was raised in Central Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Three Candles, Wicked Alice, storySouth, and Mid-American Review, as well as in the anthologies Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains (Salt Marsh Pottery Press) and Letters to the World: Poems from the WOM-PO Listserv. She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts, near the confluence of three tidal rivers.

Brent Goodman is the author of The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, No Tell Motel, Diagram, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Puerto Del Sol, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere; a complete list of links to his poems online may be found in the sidebar of his blog. He co-edited our Nature in the Cracks issue with Ken Lamberton.

David Graham (home page, Graham’s Poetry Library) has published two full-length books and four chapbooks of poems, most recently Stutter Monk (Flume Press). With Kate Sontag, he co-edited the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf Press). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, in print and online. He lives in Ripon, Wisconsin, where he is a professor of English at Ripon College.

Penny Harter (website) is published widely in journals and anthologies. Her recent books include The Night Marsh (WordTech, 2008), Along River Road, Lizard Light: Poems From the Earth, and Buried in the Sky. Her illustrated alphabestiary, The Beastie Book, will be out early in 2009 from Shenanigan Books. She has won three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as an award from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award. She lives in Summit, New Jersey, and visits schools for the New Jersey Writers Project.

Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online literary zines. He lives on a small farm in Yamhill, Oregon with a menagerie of animals including an emu named To & Fro.

W. Joe Hoppe’s first full length book of poetry, Galvanized, is available through Dalton Publishing. He teaches at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. HAPPY GOOD SUCCESS FORTUNE THANK YOU.

Joe Hyam lives in Tunbridge Wells, UK. He was a journalist, but now spends more time writing poetry and growing vegetables. Every day at Now’s the Time he posts “three fine or strange things, which, day by day, give me pleasure, and which I hope will amuse and give pleasure to others.”

Luisa A. Igloria (website) is an associate professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University in Virginia. The winner of numerous national and international creative writing awards, she is the author of ten books, including Juan Luna’s Revolver, due out in November from the University of Notre Dame Press, which won the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry. Her next-to-most-recent book was Trill & Mordent, from WordTech Editions. She blogs at The Lizard Meanders.

Lucy Kempton, one of the two editors for the issue and a frequent contributor to the magazine, was profiled in the Call for Submissions.

Diane Kendig (website) has three chapbooks, most recently Greatest Hits, 1978-2000. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Colere, the minnesota review, poemeleon, Babel Fruit, Umbrella, Mid-America, and Slant, and several new anthologies. A Midwesterner at heart, she is currently writing out of place in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Emma Kidd (portfolio, ben conservato) is an Australian artist/photographer/illustrator currently living in France.

Bobbi Kirk (website) is a full-time artist living on the central Oregon coast. She says, “water is certainly one of the main themes and inspiration for both my digital photos and fiber art work.” She blogs at Beading at the Beach.

Christi Krug (website) has been a frequent contributor to Personal Journaling and Writers Digest, and her fiction and poetry have appeared in Insight, The Fossil, Bumbershoot, and Umbrella (also here).

Anne-Marie Levine is a former concert pianist, poet (three books), nonfiction writer, and visual artist (last show: Sarah Lawrence College last February). She lives in New York. Please see more of her work at her website.

Tim Lockridge’s work has recently appeared in Redivider, Anti-, and Verse Daily. He blogs at and everyone and I stopped breathing.

Charlotte Mandel’s seventh book of poetry is forthcoming from Midmarch Arts Press. Her other titles include Sight Lines (read sample poems on her webpage) and two poem-novellas of feminist biblical revision — The Life of Mary and The Marriages of Jacob. As an independent scholar, she has published a series of articles on the role of cinema in the life and work of poet H.D., and studies of May Sarton. She teaches poetry writing at Barnard College Center for Research on Women.

Wanda McCollar is 76, has taught English for 50 years, and is still teaching as a DL AP Eng teacher. She has poems published in Del Sol [pop-up] and Perehelion, as well as in several anthologies, including Letters to the World.

Marion McCready lives in the west coast of Scotland and has been writing on and off for a decade. She has poems in the current issues of Poetry Scotland and Snakeskin.

Gill McEvoy (webpage) is published widely online and in magazines. Her first chapbook, Uncertain Days, was published by Happenstance Press.

Robert McGowan’s fiction, personal essay, and art criticism are published and forthcoming in prominent literary, nature, and art journals, including American Craft, American Forests, ArtPapers, Blue Mesa Review, Dos Passos Review, The Fourth River, Skive Magazine: The Short Story Quarterly (Australia), and South Dakota Review. “Ascent” is from an ongoing essay collection called Beech. Robert lives in Memphis.

Michael Milligan has worked as a construction laborer, migrant fruit and grape picker, homestead farmer and graphic arts production manager. He took his MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington Writing Seminars, thereby joining the masses of writers with degrees of dubious cachet.

Lucy Morris is an explorer, anthropologist and humanitarian worker. She is based in London, and works for an international aid agency supporting projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lucy is usually found carrying either a camera and/or notepad. She writes a work blog.

Robbi Nester teaches composition classes to mostly unwilling freshmen at Irvine Valley College in Irvine, California, and recently started blogging at Shadow Knows.

Edith Oberley began her career teaching and writing. After publishing two medical books, she co-founded a non-profit company and a medical education firm. Both organizations are dedicated to improving the quality of medical care and advocating for patients, and have generated many publications. She blogs at Bitterroot and Bergamot, named for wildflowers native to Montana and Wisconsin. The focus of her blog is on “pristine places,” beautiful areas that nourish the spirit and must be preserved. Many of her photos have appeared in environmental publications.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon, one of the two editors for the issue and a frequent contributor to the magazine, was profiled in the Call for Submissions.

Christina Pacosz (webpage) has been writing and publishing prose and poetry for almost half a century and has several books of poetry, the most recent, Greatest Hits, 1975-2001 (Pudding House, 2002). Her work has appeared recently in Jane’s Stories III: Women Writing Across Boundaries, Pemmican, and Umbrella. She has been a special educator, a Poet-in-the-Schools for several state and city programs, and a North Carolina Visiting Artist. She has been teaching urban youth for the past decade on both sides of the Missouri/Kansas state line where she lives with her husband.

C. H. Paquette (C. H. Paquette Photography, Wabi Blogi) is a designer, builder, gardener and photographer.

Pamela Johnson Parker (Pamela’s Musings) is a wife, mom, and transcriptionist/ editor, an adjunct creative writing instructor, and a brand-new graduate of an MFA program in poetry.

Allan Peterson is the author of two books: All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize) and Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Press Prize), as well as four chapbooks. Recent print and online appearances include: Gettysburg Review, Bat City, Salamander, Iron Horse, Segue, Caesura, Compass Rose, Poetry Daily, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. A generous selection of his poetry and visual art is featured at Panhandler [PDF]. He is currently serving as a guest editor for qarrtsiluni’s Transformation issue.

Bethany Pinegar is a third-culture kid, amateur photographer, writer in progress, food lover, scuba diver, and travel-related adventure junkie, and has recently returned from eight months as a willing worker on organic farms in southern Europe. This is her first submission of photographs and videos to anything… ever.

Marja-Leena Rathje (website) is a Finnish-Canadian artist who lives and works in the Vancouver area. Her passions are printmaking and photography.

Monica Raymond, who was selected as a 2008 finalist in poetry by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, is in the process of moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Minneapolis to take up a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights Center there.

Eve Rifkah’s chapbook At the Leprosarium won the 2003 Revelever chapbook contest. Her book on the life of Suzanne Valadon, Dear Suzanne, is forthcoming. At present she is a professor of English at Worcester and Fitchburg State Colleges and a workshop instructor.

Fiona Robyn’s first poetry collection is Living Things, and a book based on her daily blog a small stone is now available. She lives happily in the country with her partner, cats Fatty and Silver, and vegetable patch. Visit her homepage at fionarobyn.com, or catch up with her this month on her blog tour in support of her new book.

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

Aine Scannell (blog) is a professional contemporary fine artist. Brought up in Ireland, she lived in London and recently moved up to Edinburgh, Scotland. In addition to her main blog, she also posts work at Aine Scannell Print Workshop, and blogs about “an experimental approach to printmaking with the technology that is available to us now” at Tradigital Printmaking.

Lynne Shapiro is a teacher and writer who lives with her husband and son in Hoboken, New Jersey. She’s had work published in Terrain.org, Hiss Quarterly, Switchback, and Mslexia. She is currently writing her first YA novel.

Tom Sheehan’s Epic Cures won a 2006 IPPY Award, and A Collection of Friends was nominated for Albrend Memoir Award. He has nine Pushcart and three MillionWriter nominations, a Silver Rose Award ART and the Georges Simenon Award for Excellence in Fiction. He served in 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1951. He meets again soon for a lunch/gab session with pals, the ROMEOs, Retired Old Men Eating Out, aged 92, 80, 79, and 78. They’ve co-edited two books on their hometown of Saugus, MA, sold 3500 to date of 4500 printed and he can hardly wait to see them. His pals will each have one martini, he’ll have three beers, and the waitress will shine on them.

Prize-winning photographer Anne Morrison Smyth (website) grew up in Ripton, Vermont and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to Belchertown in 1999 after living in Amherst for 30 years, where she raised her four children. Anne’s love for wildernesses of all kinds informs her work with an intimate, unflinching celebration of the diverse small realities that create a larger truth.

Jessamyn Smyth (website) is a writer of all genres. She lives in the woods with the animals, where she is currently reading submissions as a guest editor for qarrtsiluni’s Transformation issue.

Pia Taavila is a Professor of English at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. Her collection of poems, Moon on the Meadow, was published by the Gallaudet University Press this spring. Recent work has appeared in storySouth, The Southern Review, PoetryMagazine.com and The Bear River Review.

Scott Wiggerman has published one book of poetry, Vegetables and Other Relationships (Plain View Press, 2000), and been published in dozens of journals, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Windhover, Midwest Poetry Review, Spillway, Poesia, and Concho River Review. Most recently, he has been published in the anthologies Queer Collection (Fabulist Flash, 2007), The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), and Only Connect (Cinnamon Press, 2007). In addition, he is one of the two “cats” (i.e., editors) of Dos Gatos Press, which publishes the Texas Poetry Calendar, now in its eleventh year.

Juliet Wilson blogs at Crafty Green Poet and has had poetry and reviews widely published in the UK small presses and online.

Steve Wing (webpage) says, “Born in Iowa, I left as soon as I was old enough to walk, fulfilling a need to live near the ocean. I don’t want to take myself too seriously as an artist, because there is an element of chance, of accident, in everything I do. An element of gift.”

Nicholas Y.B. Wong teaches literature and film studies in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He is now striving his best to overcome the writer’s block which has arrived for a few months uninvited.

Gerard Wozek’s first collection of poetry, Dervish (Gival Press, 2001), won the Gival Press Poetry Prize. He teaches literature and creative writing at Robert Morris College in Chicago. His most recent book, Postcards from Heartthrob Town (Southern Tier Editions, 2007), is a collection of short travel stories.

A seventh book from Marly Youmans (website, blog), Val/Orson, is forthcoming from P. S. Publishing in 2008. Set among the tree sitters of California’s redwoods, the story takes its inspiration from the legendary tale of Valentine and Orson and the forest romances of Shakespeare. Her prior books are: Ingledove; Claire; The Curse of the Raven Mocker; The Wolf Pit; Catherwood; and Little Jordan.

Janet Yung lives and writes in St. Louis. Short fiction has appeared in Writers On The River, Foliate Oak, Terrain and Flashquake.
__________

photo: Pelicans at Isla Mujeres, by Arturo Lomas Garza | haiku by Lucy Kempton

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(Click on image to view at larger size.)

by Anne Morrison Smyth

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I lie on a bare mattress watching
blades of the ceiling fan slice lightning,
bat it in pieces from wall to wall,
fireworks in the room’s night sky.

I am thinking of you, and Habermas,
and of the logic of lightning,
how reasonably nature behaves
catapulted from sky to earth

to the rooms of human sleep,
and how unreasonable I am—heart-lens
awake in the dark, filtering nature’s design—
to feel in the pulse of rain pelting the window

your fingers of weeks, months ago,
still tangled in my hair.

by Robin Davidson

Read by Dave Bonta — Download the MP3

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(Click on image to view at larger size.)

by Emma Kidd

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the one after Earth, after Air,
after undercutting Colorado
and making unapologetic ruins,
after tugging on the moon,
after Fire, and remembering
some of it disguised
as winter in the fridge,
shaggy and crystalline,
stiff with fish:
that one,
what I was most of while alive

by Allan Peterson

Download the MP3

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You know it best only when it’s lost,
In contraries, in opaqueness, in fire and dust,
In the taste of salt on dry lips, and thirst
Crusting as you forage in fissure and cavern
For its trace, remembering the fingers of the rain
That stroked your head, and the thin paths of coolness
They left, and the thoughts of mist and long grass.

Deep, feigning dead, the seeds stand by.
The lizard and the scorpion quiver in the heat,
While, in their blood, the tall flood stacks up.

by Joe Hyam

Read by Dave Bonta — Download the MP3

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