Archive
Not For Nothing
Most eyes are looking for other eyes.
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Love Your Disease
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Winter solstice – rain sleeping in the clouds.
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The large majority of the time, we are just comparing the size of our idiocies.
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So so-so!
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Where do you hide in an empty room?
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There’s too much of everything.
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The planet grows bluer.
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I’ve got more dark corners than a circle in the night.
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be as humble as a door
as humble as a toothbrush
as humble as
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Skindrinking the breeze…
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Wind-grabbed / star-washed / drizzle-rinsed / night-dried
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If you want to laugh, look at the back of your knees.
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The big dream is smaller than us.
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…clouds, moods…
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The immense desire to be the water itself – where the clear ocean rests in warm pools over ancient rocks.
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I’d climb out of this hole, but I can’t feel the sides.
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Every dream with a soundtrack!
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I’m still afraid, after all this time, to write that list of the words I overuse.
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Killing the spider, you become more ugly than the spider is.
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Now noting knowing nothing.
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i am where i be
i be where i am
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Couldn’t see the face for the eyes…
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There’s nothing above loving.
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Just before you die you will suddenly be very young.
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I take your point until it stops me.
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Matt Hetherington is a writer and musician living in Melbourne, Australia. His most recent collection is I Think We Have (Small Change Press, 2007). He is also on the committee of the Australian Haiku Society. Some current inspirations are: Amon Tobin, Grant Caldwell, and plain old sunshine.
Life Stuff
Fragments are essential to my poetry and my art. I ofttimes partner poems with collages. Thoughts taken from my poem, Collage, delineate the mystery:
I gather dabs of life-stuff around me. They come in a drift,
or singly like snowflakes. Moments fall in my ears; their music, sometimes discordant, although mostly remembered as harmony.
I trim each chance to one-inch squares, line them up on my canvas, seal them—
a portrait of self. My family admires my effort, or mocks it—
this impulse to control past and present. Yet, I persist. Translate half—
or twice as much—of every emotion into these small paper pieces.
Bright hues—purple, hot pink, mango, bitter green, azure—tangle in my hair, in my art, blind my other eye. I edit images into these fragments, rearrange, attempt to appreciate
this life, this urge. Ampersands, seashells, bird nest, rocking chair, moose, spiral, moon. And words: The heart is the hub. Go there. Roam in it. I am.
So. Look at me now. A scrap-monger in a world of dots and words,
confetti of my life a swirl ’round my head, while the unremembered fall away—
fall upon my bare feet which tap and twirl without notice.
gaye gambell-peterson (website) never tires of piling words on a page or sticking bits of stuff onto a canvas. Frequent recognition in both the art and poetry worlds only encourages her. Two chapbooks feature her poetry and her collages: pale leaf floating (Cherry Pie Press) and MYnd mAp (Agog Press). She likes sticky mac’n’cheese.
Falling from the cycle
I will speak. You will hear me someday. I have read enough books and played with enough guns to know that this can’t be it. There’s always that last bullet that you don’t manage to miss. And you fall, hoping that this is the fall that saves you. I remember falling from my cycle. It would be the same. That sudden change of view and the distinct touch of the road. I don’t remember my fall. Is it the same? Do you also die missing the moment that kills you?
Do you go from alive to dead without dying? Do you understand your death only after you’ve finished dying?
Saudamini Deo, a literature student, is an amateur photographer and writer (of sorts).
Intricate Sky
a solitary egret
flying low under an intricate
sky of live oak branches
yesterday I couldn’t stop worrying
today I can’t stop making plans
June is the season of sober brown grackle mothers
followed by begging fledglings fatter than they are.
One stuffs a bug in the gaping mouth,
another turns her head away again and again,
pretending to ignore her squawking chick.
someone yelling outside near midnight
but I can’t hear what they’re saying – 82 inside
and still too hot outside to open the window.
with summer we choose a little more
comfort, a little less connection.
Visiting my dad last week at the “home”
I looked out the window at an orange butterfly
in the purple Mexican petunias while
a 103-year-old man sleeping with
his jacket drawn close against the air conditioning
woke up, muttered “I’m cold” and went back to sleep.
childless, I wonder if anyone will visit
me if I outlive my strength…more
a sadness than a worry today
when I can’t find my faith in God’s mercy
I put my faith in surprise
carefully caught
and brought from house to garden
the tiny lizard…
my arm
up
runs
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Kris Lindbeck is a professor of Jewish Studies who writes Japanese short form poetry on Twitter (@KrisLindbeck). She is working on a book of poems and short essays about women in the Bible. Her twitter poetry is collected at klindbeck.tumblr.com.
Black and White, 1943
tricycle beside the front porch,
May air filled with lilacs, peonies in June,
rain barrel collects soft water for washing hair;
hide and seek behind the second-hand sofa;
black Singer sewing machine,
pink nighties, doll clothes,
flowered curtains, apple-box dresser;
welded pipe swing-set painted silver;
teeter-totter plank board over a sawhorse;
snowmen, flyer sleds,
flooded backyard ice rink;
trash fire in an empty drum;
oatmeal sprinkled with brown sugar,
warm milk-toast for fever;
Eno’s Fruit Salts on the radio,
“Keep happy with the Happy Gang,
Keep happy, start your day with a bang…”
Woodbury cold cream,
white tipped shaving brush;
crocuses and shooting stars,
meadowlarks and robins;
the rutted road to school,
“Run, Spot, run,”
purple hectograph, blotters,
ink wells, broken pen nibs;
the Saturday matinee,
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,
the Pathè News rooster
stretches and crows,
tanks roll across the screen,
followed by Looney Tunes.
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Author’s note: “Black and White, l943,” is a collage of memories of Royalties, Alberta, a town that ceased to exist when the Turner Valley oil boom ended. Our family lived there during World War II.
Patricia L. Scruggs is a poet, artist, teacher, mother of two and grandmother of three. A Southern Californian by way of Colorado and Alberta, Canada, her work has been published in Calyx, OnTheBus, Spillway, Rattle and the anthologies 13 Los Angeles Poets, Deliver Me, and So Luminous the Wildflowers.
qarrtsiluni 