A Lesson Learnt
by Wendy Burtt
in the spirit of Mark Twain
“I betcha hunderd bucks you can’t make it back here in a minnut.”
“He’s the fastest horse in this barn. I betcha I can too.”
“Go ahead then if you think he’s so fast.”
Reachin’ down, I gave Kane a pat. “We’ll show ‘er.”
“Alrigh’ then.” We turn’d towards the field. “You time us.”
“How do I know you won’t cheat?”
“You callin’ me a cheat Tammy Flynn? I ain’t no cheat! I’ll git down off this horse and thump you one!”
“Aww go on then. Yer jus scared that stupid horse of yours ain’t that fast!”
“You count. Once you git to a hunderd, you start countin’ ta sixty. I’ll be here in flash!”
“Awright then, go on.”
Kane and I started down the hill to the bridge crossin’ the crick, then cross’d the flat pasture. We come to another hill where the path cut through the Osage Orange and Sycamore trees to the Back Forty.
We kept walkin’ down the strip of weedy land flanked by trees and the cow fence to the north. He started prancin’ and a-flaggin’ his tail in the air and actin’ real proud and fancy like. I wrapped a big chunk of his black mane round my hands to help keep my seat. My bare feet clung to his sides, and my knees hung real tight behind his shoulders. He bounced and hopped all the way to where we couldn’t go no further and then I pulled him up. I hunkered down a bit and tightened my grip on his mane and then spun him real fast! He took off like a runaway train!
The monkey grass slapped at my legs as we whipped down the lane. The trees blurred to my left, and the cows scattered away to my right. The reins didn’t do no good, so I just clung to his mane like a burr. The wind stung my eyes and tears a-streamed, makin’ rivers down my cheeks.
We launched up the hill and come out onto the grassy field. I grinned and whooped, and my boy just run harder. I could see the barn now, Tammy a little dot wavin’ at me. We flew over the bridge and up the hill. As we clattered into the lot, we scattered the sleepin’ horses, a dirt cloud risin’ behind us. I quivered in excitement as I looked at Tammy, her hand wavin’ away the dust from in front of her face. “How long? He did it didn’t he?”
Tammy looked kinda sheepish like. “Yeah he did it. I made it ta 53 fore you got ta the gate.”
“I told you so! You didn’t think he could do it, but we showed you!” I crowed my delight and gave Kane a hug ‘round his sweaty neck.
Feelin’ cocky, I reached down and slipped the bridle over his ears. “Here, take this.” As I leaned over, Kane suddenly whirl’d away to his left. I dropped the leather and grabbed his mane. “Whoa!”
But that ole’ horse didn’t listen to me. Instead, he took off through the lot and run back down the hill. I grabbed his mane tighter and hung on, but couldn’t do nuthin’ ‘cept hunker down. Instead of crossin’ the bridge, he leapt over it. He swung a wide arc to the right, and galloped down the hill and turned left. Skimmin’ the tree line, he run all the way to the corner of the field where the path led back towards the cow field. Instead a-goin’ down the path, he turned and run up the hill again. Seein’ where we was headed, I thumped him with my heels and got him to run faster towards the barn. “Go on then you ole mule. You wanna run then go on!”
He gallop’d all the way up into the lot, skiddin’ to a stop at the gate. I was fair to shakin’, and clean outta breath. “You see that? Tammy he run faster than before!”
“You better git off then. Why’d he do that?”
As I went to slide off, dangit if that horse didn’t bolt again. He wouldn’t let me git down, instead run off on exactly the same trip. So help me I swear that horse was a-laughin’ at me! I ain’t lyin’! We run down the hill, jumped the dry creek bed, and run the circuit to the left this time. He turned right up the hill, run cross’d the bridge, and back into the lot. I didn’t have no words for Tammy, and she didn’t have none for me. Our eyes met real wide and scared-like. I reached a shiverin’ hand down to pat Kane on his neck; now I ain’t a liar, but that horse took off again!
This time, the other horses followed us down the dirt hill. I could barely hold Kane’s mane, and my legs was so covered in sweat, I nearly fell off fifty times. Kane had his head stuck out low and his nostrils flared. He looked kinda angry, and his eye gleam’d. He run through a grove a low hangin’ branches and one caught me unawares and sliced my chin open. I got the scar to prove it, honest.
We thundered ‘round that field, and the dust rose in a fog behind us, up the hill, and into the lot. The horses all slid to a stop, buckin’ and rearin’ and carryin’ on about their fun. Kane pulled right up at the gate again. His sides was a-heavin’ and his nostrils was a-flared so wide the bright pink insides glared in the sun. Great gobs of white lather dripped off ‘im. It fair flowed offa me too. I daren’t move, so I stuck tight, a-huffin’ and a-puffin’, a-shiverin’ like a leaf. Tammy’s eyes were wide as dinner plates and her mouth hung open in a silent “O” of amazement.
Finally I slid down, and laid a shakin’ hand on Kane’s neck.
“Well, you weren’t a-lyin’ Wendy. He shore is fast.”
Wendy Burtt writes from her home in Chicago where she lives with her fiancé and daughter. Her work can be found in Mindful Metropolis, Shark Forum, Common Ground, and DOPE magazine. And “A Lesson Learnt” is true, she swears!
O great maritime bears
(an experiment in imitation of “Ye white Antarctic birds” by Lisa Jarnot)
O great maritime bears of Sauchiehall,
you parade of great maritime bears, you paviors
with great maritime bears and drums and great
maritime bears you paviors, oh and you the
paviors and bears I follow behind the parade of
paviors and bears and intolerance, you the bears
maritime of the confrontations and the metal
uprights, you the uprights of intolerance, the intolerance
for the uprights, you the despiser of the metal
and me and bears and others too and
drums, and you the drums, and you the forthright
intolerant bears and me, and you and the
confrontations yet maritime, and lager and
thronging great maritime bears and you the
flutes and accordions and uprights the metal
uprights maritime, and you the uprights and
drums, and him the one I hate, and those who
do not hate me, and all maritime intolerance, and all
the bears and drums and also on the paviors
maritime of this intolerance.
Download the podcast (reading by Dani Adomaitis)
NO BIOGRAPHY. BEGIN: MARIE MARSHALL IS A POET OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US READ THE POEMS.
After Cycling Near the Lake Inside a Glassed-in Room I Open Su Tung P’o's “The Terrace in the Snow”
By the time Friday just disappeared
We were all gazing at the grey
Circling the sliver of our moon.
Somehow we thought Exjaafjallajokull’s plume
Might have drifted out that far.
Now all of northern Europe
Has floating ash so sharp and hot
No one dares fly into grit like that.
Awake for hours, I open blinds
Of where we sleep when
We can’t rest past the last late shows.
Outside all the birds are tuning
Up for full fledged orchestra and chorus.
I pick up all our
Limbs and leaves and half eaten
Apples that have landed on our deck.
The light comes later to our back forest
Burning off the damp spring fog.
We can then count on
Crows to awaken all the drowsy
Dogs to push us out of bed.
The air is thick with pollen dust.
Daffs and jonquils bloom in every yard.
We’ve spotted big black flies
Who arrive before the tiny ants find our little home.
Pretty soon I’ll be deep in dirt
So we can feast on summer.
It’s too soon for sun bathing.
My legs still ache too
Much and I wonder what I’m
Doing trying to still write.
We’re locking the doors more
If those murderers try to find us
Once again.
DeWitt Clinton is the author of two books of historical poetry and six chapbooks. His poems and essays have recently appeared in Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry (Lynn Rienner Publishers), And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century (Ashland Poetry Press) and Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (Oxford University Press). The above poem is from a new adaptation of Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1971); four more poems from the project were published in the November 2011 issue of Cha. Clinton writes, “I’ve tried to honor and respect these classical Chinese poets by resetting/adapting the poems to the contemporary Great Lakes city of Milwaukee.”
Cetus
Whether I go annealed to the oyster’s demesne, but for the lack of an inner tester, the most discrete but intimate counterpane, is unknowable; yet here staves one of bone, inside the one of muscle, another scarf to wrap around my own inner flensings, and here another in my moving hand, of same blood but of blood removed, if all colors be but a version of the volume of that bibled sea which pulses hidden within us, the red sea, the blue sea (wheresoever the sun’s coin travels, its disc on a round orbit, spending our watch and watchfulness); whither I go, across the latitudes and longitudes of my nether-nexus, warping and woofing invisibly ‘neath the skin of the ever sine and cosine uncritical ocean, tell me then and there that the ocean is not a living breather absolute, when as its radical equation we observe the ritual geometries of the gams of Leviathans? Euclid spells geometries; Archimedes levers the globe with a measurement of shadow; Heraclitus bespeaks the river’s ever-flowing soul. Who will ever apprehend sufficiently the failing lights and vitals of the sea to preach the ever-looming watery yarn of the sperm whale? Who will stitch the ever-wounded skin of the cutting waters? Each weave of the sea is invisible; every atom beneath our copper-bottom hulls is a prairie where spacious grasses wave in long undulance toward the nucleic almighty brow. Our hearts mouth the rivers whose tributaries flood the brain with breath; and what man’s soul is not soothed by the sight of the vaporous exhalations of the whale, the tester of smoke which is neither smoke nor texture nor skull? There is he; he is there; he gams in his own eras. He has descended a sounded hour by the watch and then he rises to breathe our breath again. Are not our souls thusly fed with an invisible wind, thinner than the brine of our aqueous dreams? Do we not see in the workings of rain into rainbows the breach of divine color into the firmament? The ghostly hours in the deep of dark thoughts: on these we feed our solitudes and nourish our hopes for ghosts, whose specular vehicles motion us toward faith in the power of our levers and irises and pupiled brains.
after The Whale.
Theodore Worozbyt’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Image, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Quarterly West, Sentence, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online, Verse Daily and The Best American Poetry. His first book, The Dauber Wings, won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and his second, Letters of Transit, won the 2007 Juniper Prize. Scar Letters, a chapbook, is online at Beard of Bees Press [PDF]. Objectless Fragments, a new chapbook, is forthcoming from Apocryphal Text.
Art Crime Bulletin
by Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch
Cecelia Chapman (website) is an artist and filmmaker living in Northern California. Jeff Crouch is an internet artist in Texas who blogs at Famous Album Covers and Nothing and Insight.
A Hamlet Soliloquy by Dorothy Parker
To be, or not to be—
that is the niggle.
Which is the nobler:
to suffer or giggle?
To sleep perchance to dream?
If therein’s the rub,
‘might as well sip gin
and drown in the tub.
Mortal coil, whips, scorns,
bare bodkin and more—
this pale cast of thought
is such a deadly bore.
Carolyn Moore’s three poetry chapbooks won their respective competitions, as has her book-length collection, Instructions for Traveling Light, pending publication from Deep Bowl Press. She taught creative writing, literature, and critical thinking at Humboldt State University (Arcata, CA) until able to eke out a living as a freelance writer and researcher working from the last vestige of the family farm in Tigard, Oregon.
Limits
by Nancy Scott
after Borges
Of these streets full of potholes, there’s more
than one where I’ve blown out my tires,
and knowing it, I blame the politicians,
who, always on the verge of losing
the next election, don’t care to make
my ride a smooth one. So many politicians
with no limits, who in this country have we,
unknowingly, said goodbye to for good?
As the next election nears, and claims,
counterclaims, and smears leave only
bitterness to savor, is there, perchance, just one
who will emerge and surprise us?
With a world in foreclosure, I find detours
at every intersection. Even the guy ahead of me,
turn signal wildly blinking, has a spare tire
mounted on his trunk.
The sturdy grey Corolla is, I fear, the last car
I will own. Not one road will miss us
that I’m sure, but I hear a newly paved one
runs past where the burning bushes bloom.
Nancy Scott (website) is the author of five books of poetry. The most recent (2011) is a chapbook of ekphrastic poems, On Location, published by March Street Press, and dedicated to her grandfather, who emigrated from Russia in 1907. The poems take a whirlwind voyage from Russia to Latin America to Afghanistan, Hungary, England and America. She is also the managing editor of U.S.1 Worksheets and an exhibiting artist. All of these achievements have come about since she retired in 2004.
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