Archive
An Ode
A hot day. A muddy stream
weaved by twigs.
There you are.
Neither a swan nor a goose,
your neck still attempts some grace.
Too bad
you aren’t taken seriously.
If you’re going to tell a joke
involving an animal,
make it a duck.
Is it because of
your elongated beak?
Your monogamous habit?
Perhaps it’s the sudden quack.
The orphaned babies.
But you should have stopped
being funny
the day they coated
you bright yellow
and made you a toy,
for it would take
your plastic likeness
centuries
to biodegrade.
Long after you and I
die, little duck,
your clone will
continue
to haunt.
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (website) is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, UK. She is a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and the marketing director of Fleeting Books.
Good Friday Aria
A motley group of somber men and women
follow a crude log cross between stations
staked on neighborhood lawns, singing
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
In response, a pack of neighborhood dogs howl
a countermelody. As they carry the cross,
the cacophony of barks and yowls reaches
ear-splitting levels. The leader pauses to pray
We adore you O Christ and we bless you.
The dogs are silent. Only budding forsythia
dare to whisper. Solemnly, they answer
By your holy cross you have redeemed the world.
Moments later heads lift, the group shuffles
forward singing the next verse of the old hymn…
and the dogs begin to howl.
Gail Eisenhart’s poems have appeared recently in Cantos, Assisi, The Centrifugal Eye, The Quotable, The Oklahoma Review and in Flood Stage: an anthology of St. Louis Poets. A retired Executive Assistant, she works part time at the Belleville (Illinois) Public Library and travels in her spare time, collecting memories that eventually show up in new poems.
Coyote in the Backyard
One time when I was going along I picked up the newspaper. It was on the table in the coffee shop.
I looked at the headlines. Something about a someone selling a war. I did not read the article. There was a foto of a happy cheerleader on the front page. Well, I was in a hurry. And I just scanned the pages. Looking for who lied. Looking for who died. Looking for who cried. Nobody that I knew.
Right there on page 7. The bottom of page 7. The lower right hand corner of page 7. Section B, I believe it was. Was a small article of great importance. A Mrs. Jones had called animal control. She had heard a noise in her backyard. An annoying disturbance, it was. So she had looked out the kitchen window. And she saw a coyote running around the backyard. He was trying to get out. He was digging.
Dirt was flying. The neighbor’s dogs were howling. Her backyard was fully fenced. Fully fenced with chain link. The kind that keeps critters in and out. So she was surprised to see a wild beast in her backyard. So she called animal control. Mrs. Jones has a small house in the Russian bottoms.
She lives near Saint Casimir’s Catholic Church. She lives just off of Gordon Drive. She is retired. She is a widow. Mr. Jones use to work as a meat cutter for Swift. She raised a big family. And now she lived alone. And now a coyote had invaded her yard. And now she has called animal control. Well the article on page 7 goes on to tell us what happened. Bob Larson from animal control had taken the call. He was there in ten minutes. He had come in the small white pickup. He was ready. He had a gun. He had a rope. He had a bag full of stuff. He walked to Mrs. Jones’s backyard. The coyote was gone. There was no hole under the fence. There was no way for the coyote to escape. Mrs. Jones was sure that she had seen him. The neighbor dogs were watching carefully. Bob Larson had to file his report. Report of coyote in backyard. No coyote in backyard. Page 8 had a notice to be on the lookout for a peddler.
A door to door peddler with a beard. A peddler with a strong smell. A peddler trying to sell empty bottles. Last seen near Gordon Drive. Do not open the door for him. Call the police right away. So I finished my espresso. And then I drove to work.
Frederick Garber writes, “I am somewhat retired. My wife and I live in Mexicali, Baja del Norte, Mexico. Border city of a million or so people, twice as many pigeons, a fair amount of wild skinny dogs and over 300 Chinese restaurants. I won 4th place in a poetry contest maybe 15 years ago. Lucky for me only 4 people entered and my friend was the judge. Got a free pizza as a prize. I have also been published a few times in qarrtsiluni. Had a poem about dead pinatas published on Poets Against the War. Back in the 60s I knew someone who was studying at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. I cannot recall his name. But he had some great parties.”
Co-Evolution
“the evolutionary future is pathogens, pets, and guests”
—Rob Dunn, 2007
Count among domesticated species
the fruit fly, traveling with our pears,
banana trees, living 1000 generations
as tissue culture in our lab jars;
the house mouse’s several species,
adapted to wintering inside our walls;
our skin microbes, evolving under
the selection pressure of antibacterial soap;
the DDT resistant bugs and BT enhanced weeds;
and in the Petri dishes, plants adapted
to take up our heavy metals, salts.
Snakes with mouths too small
to eat the poison Cane Toads
will grow larger jaws. The breeds
of Labradoodle dogs will multiply,
the clones of prion-resistant cows diverge;
whatever the future fate of life,
the lice and viruses of the world are ours;
microbes will develop a taste for plastics.
And ours too whatever lives or dies
as we strip our forests or plant more trees,
mono-crop or companion plant, green
our roofs or pave the ground, trawl
the seas with nets of every size; what’s left,
pest, pet, or guest, has hitched its star
to us; what follows always logical
from the view of a genetic pool and its niche.
Robin Chapman (blog) is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Abundance, winner of the Cider Press Review’s Book Award, and The Eelgrass Meadow (Tebot Bach, October 2011). She is recipient of Appalachia‘s 2010 Helen Howe Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod, and Wilderness. She’s also a watercolor and acrylic artist.
Wild animals, come to the porch
to feed me. Oh please me
with your animals,
give your raccoon her mask,
play harp
in the dark, in the dark, in the spider
corners of the porch—
Your fingers!
and the columns, wrapped
in a tangle of yelps
and vine,
bring down the melodious roof.
Oh don’t so admire,
don’t add to desire,
oh weight of desire,
heaviest of moons,
what do you ask?
Rosemary Starace (website) lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a small city in the middle of a big, hilly forest. She’s the author of Requitements and co-editor of Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv, with Moira Richards and Lesley Wheeler. Her work has appeared in Orion, Blueline, Studio, and elsewhere, including other issues of qarrtsiluni.
Rattlesnake Bites Man in Walmart Garden Center
by Laura Shovan
He thought it was a stick lying on the mulch.
His fingers grasped what he thought was wood,
but too giving. A moment of cool, relaxed flesh.
A moment of muscles in reaction.
The startled rattler bit him — surprised
as the man to find itself at Walmart.
With his work boots, he tap danced
on the four buttons of its rattle, its sticky backbone
no longer than a school-child’s plastic ruler.
Officials reviewed security camera footage
to see how the snake could have got there,
but called it an isolated incident of nature.
Six vials of anti-venom and a diapering
of bandages. It’s the only treatment.
Forget cutting the bite open and sucking out
the venom with your hungry lips.
One bite, my fellow shopper,
and we are back to Eden.
Editor of Little Patuxent Review, Laura Shovan (website) was a finalist for the 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her chapbook Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone won the 2009 Harriss Poetry Prize. She edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program, for which she teaches.
Study in Tawny Brown
by Deb Scott
(Click image to see a larger version)
Deb Scott (blog) is grateful for opposable thumbs as she is not good at memorization. She dabbles with words and images on paper and iPad. She shares her Portland home with a variety of critters and one patient husband. A list of her published poetry, prose and art is here and includes some of her favorite places like qarrtsiluni and Right Hand Pointing.
The Cattle Egret
by James Brush
There’s a swagger in the way the cattle egret walks across the streets of this fenced and paved frontier, wingtips looped into his belt buckle. He won’t talk much at first, but if you get him going he’ll spin stories like country songs—beer drinkin’, cloaca kickin’ and trains beyond the horizon. He’ll tell of blue northers ripping down the plains and the time he lit a fire under a mule that hadn’t moved in two days. He waits while you imagine what a burning mule would smell like and then tells how the mule just moved over a couple feet from the fire and stayed put another two days before movin’ on. Usually, though, he just stares out past the high rises planted where longhorns used to graze, dreaming lonely dreams from another time. Maybe he even writes a song or two about the rough and tumble old birds of the past. In the evening, after a long day picking bugs off the backs of settled cows, he sends demos to Nashville and Austin hoping he’ll make it big someday.
glowing orange
the cattle egrets fly off
into the sunset
James Brush lives in Austin, Texas. He spends a lot of time watching the local city birds some of which can be found in his recent poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves. He keeps a full list of publications at his blog Coyote Mercury.
The Stag
(After Robert Lowell)
Malibu Colony’s newest widow
slow pours the bourbon in her frosted glass;
her blue eyes stare out at the bay.
Her son’s a lawyer in Century City,
Her daughter’s an actress in LA.
She lives in the past.
Driving to
the Liquorama Thrifty
in her Mercedes Benz 450,
she starts to stall.
The neighbor’s house looms up,
she hits the wall.
There’s naught but fog—
we’ve seen some changes on our street,
they buy, tear down, then build a bigger
edifice. Our exclusive
realtor’s cards spring up in front.
Boys kill cranes in Watkins Bog.
And now the local
congressman hangs up his signs for fall,
his office filled with MBA’s,
young turks stride up and down the hall.
There is lots of glory in his work,
he’ll be a judge someday.
Last full moon,
my old Chevette quit on the freeway edge;
I waited for smash-ups, blinkers on.
The tail lights passed me, red on red,
where the merge lane narrowed and was gone.
The Auto Club was coming soon.
A siren screamed nearby,
Death, unholy Death its song.
I wrapped my shaking arms around me
as if to calm my anxious heart.
I strained my eyes to see—
it seemed too long.
The deer that forage
the hillsides for something to eat
must live by their wits near city streets.
Brown shapes, moving shadows dart
beyond the lilacs where the ivy parts
for the halogen street light.
At my doorway,
I pause to look up at the stars.
A stag with full antlers steps from the brush.
Stopping, he returns my stare,
caught in the evening’s hush,
but he does not stay.
Patricia L. Scruggs’ work can be seen in ONTHEBUS, Spillway, Rattle, CALYX, Cultural Weekly and qarrtsiluni, among others.
How To Explain The Birds That Sing At 3 A.M.
by Daniel Hales
There’s a book in the next room that will tell their names, parse these notes, this sequence. On another shelf, none of this exists.
A sentry in a distant outpost listens, reports into his broken transmitter
“the clarity of their polyphony… the most precise measure of… that exists…
the fluidity of each arpeggio… the rate of a warble’s latency…
the depth at which a trill dissolves into its own reverb…”
* * *
They are conducting market research
Programming would not be possible without the underwriter’s support
Nature’s finest nesting adhesive
Worms sweet as hummingbird nectar
They have found their nest on Google Earth
They are calling everyone over to see
They are sending friend requests to you and me
* * *
I faintly hover, rehearsing the details of a favorite flying dream, trying to initiate myself into its secret society. It’s what I clothe my insomnia in.
* * *
A young robin asking questions
do mouses grow up to be rats
Parents mumble under their wings
He asks again
Daniel Hales has had poems, flash fictions, and creative nonfiction published in many print and online journals, including Verse Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Conduit, Quarter After Eight, Upstreet, Bateau, H_NGM_N, and previously in qarrtsiluni. He’s the songwriter, singer, and guitarist for Daniel hales, and the frost heaves.
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