by Lisa Alden

Got
the
new
insurance
card.
Flimsier
than
the
last,
this
one
with
perforated
edges
and
thin
enough
to
blow
away
on
a
cough.
Takes
up
little
real
estate,
makes
it
easy
to
find
a
credit
card
when
the
doctor
bill
thuds.

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Lisa Alden (website) is a babymaker rooted on the Pacific coast. Her poetry has won a couple small awards and appeared in a few magazines. She loves being in the water and prefers sunny days.

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by Harriet Brown

in my forties I forgot how to sleep
the sun rose and set and rose and I
wandered the house like a madwoman
my eyeballs were hot in my burning face
I would never be young again

I roamed the house, weeping
I was full of a feeling my body
remembered from childhood
my mind beat in waves, my skin
radiated heat from the inside out

in the mirror my hair had that same
little flip on one side that would not
lay down, that would never lay down,
as if that unplanned curl was all
that was left of my small and tender self,
my small face alive in the camera’s
fast-blinked eye

and aren’t we all like that, really—
burning and love-crazed
in the night, so relieved
when the light finally comes back
that we’ll do anything at all—
and we do—to keep it?

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Harriet Brown’s poems have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Indiana Review. Her nonfiction appears in the New York Times and a slew of other magazines. She also writes books: her next one will appear in September 2010, and will be a family memoir about anorexia. She’s an assistant professor of magazine journalism at Syracuse University and holds an MFA from Brooklyn College in poetry. She has a blog called Feed Me!

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by Sarah Busse

“I’m on fertility drugs,” she says.
The sun along the ground like knives. “We still want
a second child and now

I’m on fertility drugs and angry all the time.
I dream of burning houses, smashing—” she keeps her eyes
on the line of trees—”people.”

This is where coyotes live. Knowing that,
we’ve brought our daughters out in boots, fleece, mittens,
to splash in snow, puddles

of slush and thaw. They lob a nerf. We stand the wind
as the girls tumble the hill, get up giggling. Grit in the eyes,
the sun starts down.

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Sarah Busse is the co-editor (with qarrtisluni contributor Wendy Vardaman) of the poetry magazine Verse Wisconsin. Her chapbook, Quiver, is available from Red Dragonfly Press, and chapbooks are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press and Desperado Press. She lives with her husband and two children in Madison, Wisconsin. You can find her online with a bunch of other cool poets at bookthatpoet.com.

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by Delbert R. Gardner

The medical profession is,
We all agree, quite laudable;
But certain of their practices
Are somewhat less applaudable:
For instance, when the doctor says,
“Let’s take a look inside;
A simple test will help us find
What treatment to provide.”
So like good patients we submit
To experts’ ministrations;
But “simple tests,” we find, have need
Of complex preparations:
Instead of just one enema,
They give us triple unction–
Plus a fourth one on the table
To help the X-ray function.
And then the “look inside” becomes
A prolonged stare instead:
We’re photographed in every pose
But standing on our head.
The scientific appetite
For data’s near unslakable,
But after twenty pictures
Any more would be untakable.
When diagnostic tools at last
Bring treatment of the matter,
To say we’re “radiating health”
Is hardly idle chatter.

Download the podcast (reading by Theo R. Gardner)

A veteran of World War II, Delbert R. Gardner (1923-2008) taught college English for twenty-one years before returning to government service as a writer/editor for U.S. Army training materials for fourteen years. Over forty of Dr. Gardner’s poems and stories have appeared in publications such as The Literary Review, Poetry Digest, American Poetry Magazine, Provincetown Review, Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit, The 2009 Rhysling Anthology, and Christian Science Monitor. His nonfiction credits include the book An “Idle Singer” and His Audience: A Study of William Morris’s Poetic Reputation in England, 1858-1900. More information is available at www.gardnercastle.com.

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by Tori Ellison

Click image to view a larger version

28″ x 22″ 1998
Monotype with serigraph and lithograph on Rives BFK
From the print series “The Spaces Between” (see the portfolio on Ellison’s website for a statement and description).

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.

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by Diane Wakoski

For instance — the morning after snowfall, when
everything has the centered hack
of obsidian and white, clouds still covering the sky, without shadow.
Then, absence of color intimates
knowing and
alchemical possibilities.

If that morning, still puffed with the snow
draped on branches, were
shone upon, sky’s delphinium globe
swimming out of cloud-cover,
the little branches now dipped in
Tiffany-ice,
it would lose immensity
under my lids.
Now the
gold and green and orange snow blowers and shovels
would come out, a reminder of
worldly destruction; the kids in red gloves would
dirty the world with snowballs, the car mufflers
would blow out a column of assertive, lively particles,
some perhaps staining the snow blue. Even the light itself would be
cheerful and lose its sonority.
Edward Weston’s peppers — wouldn’t you shudder
if they were green? Would you ever want to see a Greta Garbo
film in color?

No.
Some beauty is created out of dimness,
and this I must remember in future times, when my hospital bed
will throb with the white of a morning after snowfall, the white
still almost dark because the clouds remain to cover
the sky. Let me celebrate an inevitable approach
of dimness, which I now am able to recognize
as final beauty. Let my seemingly ringless hand,
lying on the pristine sheet, reveal
the invisible philosopher’s stone I’ve always
worn on my marriage finger.
Let me remember light is only
indicated by lack of light and my closed eyes
thus behold
the alchemical chisel of black and white.

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Diane Wakoski’s new book, The Diamond Dog, will be published by Anhinga Press this spring, 2010. 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 Dick Jones

Each morning they organise your bones
into the wheelchair, stack you leaning
out of kilter. Thus I find you, wall-eyed,

feather pulse and mouth ajar. This is
a stillness you are learning as silence
silts up your blood. I name you: ‘Mum’,

I call, quietly at first, as if this were
only sleep and you might resent the passage
interrupted. But your shade is walking

a broken road on the far side of dreams.
I keep my coat on, lean in the doorway,
breathing in the alkalines and salts

that are your presence in this world.
Beyond, through narrow windows, rain
drifts like smoke. The trees shift

their high shoulders, hefting their leaves
like heroes. I can see the lift and fall
of their evergreen breath, the slow,

dispassionate pulse. Such senseless beauty,
propping up the sky as if there were no
tides turning or falling stars, no ashes to dust,

no time at all. You speak — a half-word,
cracked in the middle. Syllables drift
like fumes. Somewhere in that steam

of meaning, the filaments of memory:
the horn’s tip of a lover’s moon,
a song’s dust, the eye’s tail catching,

not quite catching, doorway phantoms,
window ghosts. Grief crosses my mind:
its hydrogen release — from local pain

to lachrymae rerum, all in one ball
of fire. Easy, it would be to cauterise
this lassitude, here against the lintel,

watching not the rise and fall of your
fish-breath, your insect pulse, but
the immortal trees beyond. Too easy;

but death looked in and turned away,
indifferent, and now it’s down to me,
the blood-bearer, to wish away your life

for you. The house ticks and hums.
A voice calls out, thin and querulous;
another coughs. I turn down your light.

There, against the window, dusk outside,
you are becoming your shadow
cast against the shifting of the trees.

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Dick Jones blogs at Patteran Pages and has placed poems in such magazines as Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review,  Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles and Other Poetry.

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

by Arlene Ang

Teeth start out as milk.
What is the child if not an etch
on the kitchen wall? A vertical growth,
as in chocolates and Rice Krispies,
as in the higher the object is from the ground,
the more it acquires velocity during the fall.

The caries begins as sweetness,
a stray kitten mewling to be allowed in.
From enamel to root, the tooth
is consumed. Only later,
the awareness of destruction surfaces.
Pain illuminates the skull. Then amputation.

Afterwards every night begins
with denture fizz, the removal of self-
recognition before the mirror. How the lips
part as if from happiness, trapping
the loss deeper into the face.

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Arlene Ang is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. More of her work may be viewed at leafscape.org.

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

by Ron Czerwien

My father keeps shifting
positions, searching for some relief.
From my spare room he calls out
nearly every hour. Each time
I cradle his boney frame
we move together, by increments,
from head to foot and back again
on a rented hospital bed.
I feel his vertebra in the palm of my hand.

The tips of my fingers recall
every delicate bone lifted
from the open bellies of Northern Pike,
Blue Gills, Small Mouth Bass.
Scales on my face and chest,
I scrape the cutting board
with my bloody knife. A pile of entrails
and fish heads. Skeletons
with clinging bits of flesh.
I wrap everything in the local paper
and throw it as hard as I can
in the direction of a gully
slit from end to end by darkness.

At night I wake to his sighs
as the small hands of raccoons
peel back the yellowed newsprint
his skin has become. They run
his bones between their teeth.

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Ron Czerwien is the owner of Avol’s, a used and out-of-print bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. His poems have appeared online in Moria, Shampoo, nth position, and other journals. The questions most frequently asked by his customers can be found here.

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

by Katherine Durham Oldmixon

Our false fins agitate motes
in turquoise sunbeams, in salt
currents that sluice oils
from our skin into the waters

where mantas raise their velvet wings
near a chorus of nun-gray angelfish,
as the shadow of a nurse shark
passes before our masked eyes.

Rush-hush — waves moan above
our bodies, above the delicate life
of brittle starfish we watch crawl
over beds of coral bones.

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A former qarrtsiluni co-editor (with Lucy Kempton), Katherine Durham Oldmixon (website) recently edited a special issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review dedicated to ekphrastic poetry. Her chapbook Water Signs, a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Award, was released in January 2009 by Finishing Line Press. Katherine lives healthily and happily in Austin, TX, with her husband, Arturo Lomas Garza.

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