I heard a Beehive in the wall
When I was trying to sleep—
Incessant Buzzing at all hours
Precluded counting Sheep.

My swollen eyes were red and sore—
The clock said 2 AM—
I wished the Sun would break his bonds—
Ushering Morning in.

I took a Hatchet from the hutch
and hefted it awhile.
Though it might make an awful Mess
I’d end this thing in style.

The first stroke broke the paper cells—
The second set them free—
And now I’m wrapped up in the rug
And cannot see to See.

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Robbi Nester lives and does yoga in Southern California and blogs at Shadow Knows. She has a chapbook, Balance, forthcoming from White Violet Press with illustrations by Nina Canal. Her manuscript A Likely Story is currently in search of a publisher. Robbi writes, “I am very interested in parody in a theoretical way, and indeed a number of years ago wrote a dissertation about Nabokov, focusing on this very element of his work. I wanted to think about the nature of the relationship among texts in a parody and what they mean, as well as investigating other kinds of literary play.”

(With apologies to T.S. Eliot)

“What do I think about the way most people dress? Most people are not something one thinks about.”—Diana Vreeland

Let us go then, you and I,
To our desks at Vogue against the sky.
On the thirteenth floor you caption clothes:
Go-the-distance cotton
Punctuated with sexy sheer hose.
I insist on commas
And tell you what you say;
I am the Copy Production Chief by night and by day.

At Vogue the women come and go
Talking of Giorgio di Sant’Angelo.

For you there will be time
For a hundred visions and revisions
For you are not the one
To wait until midnight for the new repro
To come down from being typeset.
Indeed there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
You’ll duck into the beauty closet
For all the Bobbi Brown Essentials
You can apply.
And as you run through my office
On your way to dinner you’ll say,
“Look at this cute little passageway!”
So how should I presume?

At Vogue the women come and go
Talking of Giorgio di Sant’Angelo.

I have known the eyes already, known them all:—
At the elevator,
Locking on my Chanel knockoff,
My Snickers bar,
My Duane Reade discount drugstore bag,
Sprawling on a pin
They know I got from the giveaway bin.

Was it worthwhile,
Throwing off my shawl,
Turning toward the writers to say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what you meant, at all”?
They thought me
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.
They just wanted to dish about
Johnny Depp on the loose.

I grow old…I grow old…
But my friends are all at magazines that could fold.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I see a young fashion assistant reach,
But then decline—
“Too much sugar,”
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

We have lingered in the hallways at Vogue
By beauties so afraid of lines they never frown
Till Vanity Fair calls, and we go to work for Tina Brown.

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Donna Levine Gershon’s poetry has appeared in storySouth, Literary Mama, and Kakalak 2007: Anthology of Carolina Poets, among other publications. She was first runner-up for the 2007 South Carolina Poetry Initiative’s Single Poem Contest. She now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she works as a freelance editor.

after Sylvia Plath

119. Poem for a Birthday

It’s inconceivable I’m alive:
I’m not the feline: thirteen times
I’ve died or,

rather, tried to. This smack of baskets
vivid as Truvada
thwacks the thistle’s

prickles
at a morning,
at a birthday. Cornflowers,

cornflowers
for a birthday.

123. The Hanging Man

His solar system’s revolving in my hands:
at one thumb’s edge the Red Spot claws and spits

(my blood flows like a bow across four strings);
the other stump’s its molten golden mandrel.

I sure can tell your lot as well as Holst.
Am I the Son of God to think such things?

148. Wuthering Heights

The horizons wring me like abbots.
Abbots’ cold, dark hands,
sharpened by history, tighten round my throat, choking me.

The one space higher than this is Heaven.
In the distance, commissions needle
distress on hallowed ground, a ground unmoved.
Black trees throw God-awful shapes
like witches fuming at their stakes. The trees
stalk closer, closer to the kitchen.

A folklore’s heart,
dripping with confusion, electricity:
the horizontal orange slots of sockets, off, on …

the laying on of pockmarked hands on elements …
This apartment
is a socket, is a sock, is a windsock.

Something ecumenical that funnels in intensity.

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Stuart Barnes is arranging the manuscript for his first book of poetry, and writing his first novel. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Literature, Philosophy) from Monash University, and intends to study screenwriting or editing and publishing in 2013. Other poems have recently appeared at Otoliths and Overland. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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Four self-portraits, more or less in the manner of four Old and New Masters I admire and envy for all the ways in which they are unlike me: Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, Bacon — all burning with single-minded dedication to their work while I flicker and flit.

Painted digitally in 2006 on my Wacom graphic tablet as part of a series posted on my blog, Blaugustine.

*

Born in Paris, raised in South America, USA and Europe, Natalie d’Arbeloff lives in London and has dual nationality, British-American. Her father was Russian, her mother French. Her alter ego is the cartoon character Augustine and her blog is Blaugustine where she sometimes interviews God, among other celebrities. See her website for more about her work as a painter, printmaker, book-artist and cartoonist.

after Richard Lovelace

My breast is no chaste nunnery
unless you fondle nuns.
I thought you’d passed on gunnery
for thighs, and breasts, and buns.

Don’t tell me honor is your goal.
You’re out for blood, of course.
I do regret the hours you stole.
Dick, go kiss a horse.

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Journals publishing Janet’s poetry include Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’wester, New York Quarterly, Tendril and Poetry Australia. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she has taught at Texas A&M University since 1969. She has co-edited two anthologies, Odd Angles of Heaven: Contemporary Poetry by People of Faith and Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry and is the author of The Celestial Possible: Wallace Stevens Revisited. Her most recent poetry collection is Emily’s Dress (2004, Pecan Grove Press).

with apologies to James Agee

Now we have come to the long descent that takes possession of the green slope nestled in the amethyst icebergs of peaks through the repeated Zs of the path where dust rises, plays, settles, repeating in rhythm to the successive passing feet. A lingering yellow winks sparsely from the scattered gentians wandering and searching in the angled meadow, neither flocking to us nor fleeing. Our feet walk through shadows, clouds surveying, until they follow one, a red kite, wings in circumflex, two eyebrows raised in a question for what the prairie will produce. Voices are silent; the click of the nailed tip of a hiking staff on a rock, the soft, muffled tide of a canteen; the tin ticking of the loose buckles of a backpack. Dusty patches of path; muddy patches of path, chocolate and greedy for our boots.

We imitate the dance of skiers, drifting down in their balletic diagonals with our one pole to balance, to turn us. The kite finds its mouse; the shadow shrinks and corners of eyes see the eyebrows frown. The mouse searches a hole, a log, in the instants before the talons fold. Then the mouse meets the feel of flight for the very first time. The gentians nod complacently and gaze. The mouse’s tail flicks, twice, thrice, as the kite’s tail fans, flinches it delicately back into its gyre. The silence salves anew. The sun bathes us as if we were babies and the blue that it climbs, sliding its round back along the vault, between or along the missing ribs of implied arches, fondles the eyes when the eyes rise to it. They scan the narrow tan track as well to navigate the root, the stone, the lacing elbow. The navigation sometimes slips: a boot thuds, a cleat grates. But yet no words are spoken as we wind back downward into the world: the leader, still hoisting the shoulders of an army career, braking at each step; the sisters, one mostly silent, one mostly talkative, both quiet now; my good friend’s nephew, too mischievous for a slope so far from base; my love, dark hair reaching to red from a week of the sun’s reiterated rays. And I am winding too, down to laundry and schooldays and books, and try to take my eyes to all the amethyst icebergs as they roll backward behind the green slope, the beeches joining branches and marking the vertical, the Zs that hum as they cradle our feet, the winking gentian. But they search elsewhere also: for the kite gone to its banquet, for the sharp crest separating Spain from France by a worm’s slime track, the mist gathering in like a hungry flock, gleaming white right then; for the designation with the thump of a staff of the arrival at altitude, the huge cirque opening just beneath it and the northern wheatear scolding us for interrupting; for the herd of Pyrenean chamois, grazing to our left as we rose, anxious for their sanctuary, to our right, muffled urgent thunder arrowing down one meadow slope to leap the frigid coursing brook and paw intently up the other, the babies’ double-time hooves keeping up with the mothers’; the utter, present, cottony quiet of the globe once the tents were closed; the stiff swinging of the tent flaps on mornings when frost still defied day.

I break from trailing the new memories as we break from the trail and settle in the last corner of the green blanket before we tuck ourselves into the gathering woods. Our mats are spread, our last provisions are spread, we perform the vanishing of final traces of sustenance and offer the cheese, the semolina, the doses of powdered milk, the carefully treasured chocolate bar. I boil the water and drink the tea carefully; the metal cup jabs at my lips as malignly as it can. I drink slowly, in little sips, knowing that the last sip leads to washing, the washing to packing, the packing to taking up the load, lighter though it is. Not knowing yet about the last gems I will also pack: a grey donkey nuzzled to an old black horse with white whiskers; a glimpse of a curious but reticent fox; a nightingale deciding to rehearse after hours; beeches ceding to pines and footfalls like perfumed sounds of harvesting.

Oh, of course, we do crave it, the base, the laying of the loads, the coffee beans ground and drowned, cooking smells caressing our nostrils from an oven. But the sinking from the ridge is also a shrinking from the true trajectory of cleansing and an acquiescence in personal pollution. I sigh against the return to the too-complex, too unmigratory me waiting on the other side of a door with a lock on it that I will be soon to unlock and step through, that I will still know to unlock and step through despite the stiffness of the tent flap marquetried with frost and its swing welcoming out.

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Maude Larke lives in France. She has come back to creative writing after years in the university system, analyzing others’ texts, and to classical music as an ardent amateur, after fifteen years of piano and voice in her youth. Publications include Naugatuck River Review, Oberon, Cyclamens and Swords, riverbabble, 52|250, and Sketchbook.

After Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In the middle of the bench there was a black patch and cane
there was a black patch and cane in the middle of the bench
there was a black patch and cane
in the middle of the bench there was a black patch and cane.

I’ll never forget that young veteran
clenched in my unblinking eyes.
I’ll never forget that in the middle of the bench
there was a black patch and cane
in the middle of the bench there was a black patch and cane.

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Joe Zealberg, MD attends an ongoing poetry workshop in Charleston, South Carolina with a group known as “The Long Table Poets,” under the direction of Richard Garcia. This is his second appearance in qarrtsiluni.

We don’t remember when we first talked about guest editing an issue of qarrtsiluni — we guess it must have been back in the spring of last year. We threw around a whole bunch of ideas before settling on Worship as the theme, and it feels like we have lived closely with it since then.

We do have a sense that everyone is involved in some act of worship, although we don’t always use that word to describe those acts. We were curious to see what people made of the theme.

We expected more people to come from a secular position than did in the end, or perhaps we are reading something spiritual into the many poems we got in praise of small things and in praise of the natural world. We did glory in nature in this issue. Many of the poems had a sense of reaching beyond nature to something more ineffable, whatever that might be.

We particularly enjoyed the many pieces of work that took something worldly and showed us something sacred about them.

The standard of submissions was overwhelming high, and the number of submissions were high as well. Right from the start we recognised how subjective a process editing is, and we also recognised that not everything that was good was going to make it into the issue (unless we wanted to take a whole year’s worth of posts).

Looking back on how we did choose the pieces in the issue, we can see that we were looking for something which brought form and spirit together. Some of the writing we received was beautifully crafted but felt in some way hollow. Some of the poems were full of heart, but clumsily executed. (There weren’t many of these, as it happens.) We were looking for writing that was both full of something and beautifully written. We think the writing and the images included in the issue do just this.

As well as the written word and the striking images, we also included one of each of another form, and we want to give them a special mention here. The first is James Brush’s video poem “While Sitting in Church.” The combination of words images and sound lifted the poem to something greater than just words on the page. The second is “The Key of Joy,” a piece of music by Caitlin M. Daphtary (music), Zackary Sholem Berger (lyrics), and Rachel Dudley (vocals) that we were very pleased to feature.

We’re really happy with the final issue. It’s also been wonderful to live with the poems these last few months, to have them breathed into life by the readings that each poet (and in one case, Dave) gave. Thank you so much.

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For bios of Kaspa and Fiona, see the call for submissions.

Ghost Money by Jenni B. Baker

Remedies For A Long Winter by Laura E. Davis

A Morning of Orange Hands by Lawrence Wray

Hamburger Jesus by John Sherman Lathram III

Praise by Sheila Black

Beatitude by Sheila Squillante

About the Laying-On of Bricks Not Hands by Nancy Flynn

While Sitting in Church by James Brush

Doxology by Sherry Chandler

Fresh Start by Erik Svehaug

silence by Paul Bilger

Driving to Juniata by Katherine E. Young

winter escapes by Daniela Elza

Love Rondeau by Mary Peterson Johnson

Q’ran study by Michaela A. Gabriel

A Red Sky by Rosemary Starace

On a Thursday, Like Any Other Day, I Try to Take Good Care of Things by Penelope Scambly Schott

Odds and Ends by Joseph Harker

behold the minotaur by Theresa Williams

In praise of zero by Joe Hyam

The Open Bible Baptist Church Hymnal, Sword of the Lord Publishers, Murfeesboro Tennesee by Lynnel Jones

the artist’s hand by Marja-Leena Rathje

The Widow Discovers the Secret of Leona Canyon by Lenore Weiss

AKA Annie by Holly Anderson

Rest by Cynthia Cox

The Key of Joy by Caitlin M. Daphtary (music), Zackary Sholem Berger (lyrics), and Rachel Dudley (vocals)

Between Us and the Slow Fall by Susan Elbe

Dance of the Doves by Donna Coffey

“I Heard Their Wings Like the Sound of Many Waters” by Marly Youmans

“One Nation Under Me” by Brent Goodman

affirmation by Carol Beth Icard

Without Ceasing by Rachel Barenblat

The bells done rung by Shann Palmer

Notre Dame interior by Adrian Thompson

You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy by Hannah Stephenson

Calculate by Andrew Bailey

[Every green growing] by Robin Chapman

Cathedral forest by Steve Wing

grandfather on God and Richmond by Joanna Suzanne Lee

Lauds, Summer: An Antiphon by Jeanie Tomasko

Curriculum by Ellen Roberts Young

Inside Pre Rup by Elizabeth Kate Switaj

Bandit by Andrea O’Brien

Paint Him Beautiful by Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

Suburban Vespers by Lucia Galloway

Here For You to See by David King

The Book of Infrequent Prayer by Lois Marie Harrod

Worship by Heidi Garnett

Seeds and Stars by William Kelley Woolfitt

Homecoming Sunday by Regina Walton

The Sacred by Monica Raymond

wrestling with god by John Medeiros

About The Box On The Front Step by Rina Terry

You As White Wall by Rose Hunter

Sitting With by Dorothee Lang

Sleep by Catherine Ednie

Confession of Faith by Julie E. Bloemeke

Hypatia by Colleen Abel

The View by Nancy Scott

Where Father And Daughter Are Seekers by Uma Gowrishankar

Confession as Show and Tell by Jill Crammond

Desert Dead by Lois P. Jones

Easter on the Charles by Richard Wile

Shimmer by Kathleen Hellen

Teresian Wells: Grief and Insurrection by Kate Falvey

Worshipping at Woton’s Throne by Gordon Smith

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Gordon L. Smith is a landscape photographer and poetry lover in southwest Utah. He writes, “Religious terms are often used throughout nature to describe nature’s effect on man. Any visit to Woton’s Throne in the Grand Canyon will be a sublime experience.”