Archive
Surveillance
Stand in the street at dusk,
watch the mother emerge,
the ring-tailed rodent with the eyes of a thief.
Remain convinced she’s watching you.
Expect the scratching, the midnight hiss
as she returns from her stealthy sojourn
through the rotten tomato, orange peel, cold
pizza glory of your neighbor´s garbage cans.
Her long fingers roll her food
like a gambler worrying dice.
Each morning you find a trail
of pencil thin paw prints across
your porch, on the window sill.
What did she spy?
Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Surrender (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry is forthcoming in Thin Air Magazine, and has appeared in journals including The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, The Bark, Alimentum, Gastronomica and Inscape. Her poem “Origins” was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize. Ellen is a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship.
The Shepherd
At dusk the shepherd brings his sheep
up the street, high above the coastal
highway in a suburb of Athens. He
does not greet passersby on motor-
bikes or driving fast cars. He’s headed
toward the fields on the mountainside,
where houses rise like white stones. I
hear the sheep bells first, distant chimes
softly echoing, then louder, and suddenly
bleating, and then the staff prodding the flock
on with brisk taps on the ground. But
mostly, the shepherd simply walks along,
as if I were the one trespassing, as if he
had owned this mountain long before any
of us ever came. And perhaps he did. The
sheep crowd one another along the sides
of the street. The houses lean like tall
figures shadowing the small cotton balls
moving over sunburnt fields. I don’t
think there’s enough for the sheep to eat but then
I remember the hόrta the old women pick
in the vacant lot on the corner.
I had thought they were weeds. I didn’t know
they could feed so many. The shepherd
moves his sheep past my sliding doors.
He glides/guides them down the street.
He disappears with the sun falling
from the Acropolis on a distant cliff.
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s book, On the Altar of Greece, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award, received a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and other awards. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Bitter Oleander, CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Cimarron Review, Feminist Studies, and The Massachusetts Review. Visit her website at donnajgelagotislee.com.
Via Negativa
Hyeres
You can’t write a poem about cats,
some professor said some time ago,
so this is not about them and how
they might run this old city that slopes
down to the Cote d’Azur and draws
in the sea. And, why should anyone bother
to describe the water either, blue beyond
blue, what Plato would have called the color’s
essence. So, this is not about how
each yard in the Cite Medieval has
at least two chats—landed gentry—
black, white or gray typically
but also the occasional yellow
or brown, though these latter figure more
in alleys, les chats ordinaires,
sleeping with legs or tails draped over walls
built during the time of Francis the First,
Charles of Anjou, or Julius Caesar.
You can’t write about them, even though
they’ve been here since the Phoenicians,
maybe, and if that’s the case they might
have been chasing rats onto triremes
from Egypt itself, mother of all
their unmentionable kind, perhaps.
Nor should you describe how they stroll
on the Avenue du General De Gaulle
past Jeff de Brugges and other fine stores,
tails erect, on the lookout for good deals
like everyone else. In windows, on stoops,
you can’t mention their toilettes or their naps,
or the occasional rendez-vous, either
courteous or, it must be said, sometimes rude.
All this having not been said, as they
are beneath some people’s notice, one might not
want to add that we, being human,
are beneath theirs, as well, and thus stare
with the same perplexity some of us share.
J. Stephen Rhodes is a Presbyterian minister and theological educator. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Windhover, and Tar River Poetry, among others. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (Wind Publications). Among the mammals he has recently seen at or about his feeders (supposedly for birds) are squirrels, chipmunks, a rabbit, a shrew, deer, and two quite rotund raccoons.
Mourning Dove
The curve of her small head belies
the waddle of a body she settles
under the spent lilac. Black eyes
ringed blue take in the corner
garden where I sit with your letter
on my lap. She paces, pauses,
intermittently lifts her tail to reveal
a shock of white. I click my pen
and she erupts — a whistling ascent,
tail pointing, stretching. If I were
a hunter, I’d have taken her by now.
She’s so easy on the ground.
Louisa Howerow’s latest poems appeared in the journal Rhino, an anthology, War of 1812 Poetry & Prose: An Unfinished War (Black Moss Press, 2012) and as a small collection Voices, Choices (Phafours, 2012).
Autumn Equinox Creature Song
by Uche Ogbuji
Summer is receding out
Shape up to yell “Shoo!”
The leavings of trees whip through the breeze
And garnish the crumbs we strew;
Away rats: “Shoo!”
Raccoon rattles our dumpster lid,
Coyote prowls the avenue,
Black bear breaks wind from the turkey we binned;
Blaze the spotlight: “Shoo!”
“A mountain lion!” shrills dusk rumor
From the spooked school janitor crew
While timber wolf ghosts and bison by hosts
Stampede our dreamy “Shoo!”
Can’t shoot up bobcat shadows:
Ordinance rules out the .22;
However accursed they were here first—
Famous last words: “Shoo!”
Uche Ogbuji (website), born in Calabar, Nigeria, lived, among other places, in Egypt and England before settling near Boulder, Colorado, where he lives with his wife and four children. Uche is a computer engineer and entrepreneur whose abiding passion is poetry. His poems have appeared in sundry journals, and within the last year in The Raintown Review, IthacaLit, Unsplendid, String Poet, Mountain Gazette, YB Poetry, Scree Magazine, Victorian Violet and Shadow Road. He is editor at Kin Poetry Journal and The Nervous breakdown.
Skink
The morning sun casts a square patch of light
Aslant our small backyard. My pyjamas hang
A shadow from the line, still in the still air.
Over the pavement cracked with weeds
The ants scurry, not unlike the back-and-forth
Of human life; never straight in line,
Their curlicues describe a welcome home,
A meet-and-greet, a touch-and-go,
An au revoir and Gott sei Dank.
Through that crazed milling, the skinks
(No longer than my index finger)
Slink under garden hose and dandelions.
Unaware I watch from our ragged doormat,
Their wriggled lives unfold like blades of grass
In the lightest summer breeze.
I suggest we weed the path
And instantly regret the change I force
From skink infested wilderness to civilized banality.
Francesca Sasnaitis is a Melbourne-born writer and artist, currently based in Sydney, where she is completing an MA in Culture and Creative Practice at the University of Western Sydney. Her poetry most recently appeared in Visible Ink 23, Verandah 27 and ETZ 02.
Wildlife graffiti: Hummingbird in Oaxaca, Mexico
by Steve Wing
(Click image to view a larger version)
Steve Wing lives in Florida and has been a frequent contributor to qarrtsiluni. More about him can be found here.
Recognizable Trappings
Flesh and metal collide
road kill sets with asphalt
The small mammal bones
I dug up last fall
one cervical vertebra
one miniature femur
one blackened fossa
Back to one
is
the hope I pin my life on
is
brushing my daughter’s hair
tasting your mouth in mine
raking the dirt with my bare hands
Written on the bones of the dead
is knowledge free from pain
is the hieroglyph for hope
Katherine Glatter is returning to writing poetry after many years’ hiatus. She has been a massage therapist since 1988. She moved from to Amherst, Massachusetts in 2000 to become a teacher of the Alexander Technique, completing her training in 2003. She has always loved words as well as the workings of the body, inside and out. She is also a Sacred Harp singer, a pursuit she took up after moving to New England.
Nocturne (VI)
from the Bed Bug Diaries
Like a good hit man,
we know when to lie
low, when to disappear
for months on end,
how to blend invisible
in crowds, slip hidden
into cracks and fabric
rips, rest along metal
spirals in foam, avoid
the fuzz, St. Anthony’s
medals of lost-not-found:
gone to the mattresses.
Joanie DiMartino is the author of Licking the Spoon (Finishing Line Press) and Strange Girls (Little Red Tree Publishing). Along with writing and performing poetry, she hosts the monthly Soup & Sonnets Salon for Women from her home in Connecticut, which is finally free of bed bugs.
Syntagma
In Athens, the old gods still sleep on marble
Artemis bares her belly to the sky
while Hephaestus slinks near taverna kitchens,
seeking the ovens’ warmth.
Aphrodite flirts in the crossroads,
wandering streets and boulevards,
She will prance and preen for treats from sugared fingers,
and slip from scent to scent.
Poseidon paces the square
too long from the sea and too restless to seek it.
He bays for rain and guards the puddles
Tridentlessly protecting tiny, dirty kingdoms
Zeus pads the perimeter
lounges beneath the cypress, laps from the fountain,
far from Hera beneath the orange trees,
Her Hesperides still fragrant, her eyes closed to the exhaust.
Dawn Nikithser has been writing since she could hold a crayon in her babyfat hand. She is pleased to say that both her handwriting and her ideas have improved since then, though she will still use a crayon if nothing else is available.
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