Archive
Half Past Four on a Lurid August Day
Consider the insects: a pilgrimage of ants lays down
trails of blind devotion from their abdomens, leading from
their dry dirt-mound pyramid to the communion rail
around one fallen cicada tumbled on the sidewalk;
a steady stream zeroes in and circumambulates the great
grey-and-green body, inscrutable as the moon and just as
pockmarked with maria, the deep hue of an ivy leaf, dark little
stains of envy under its mashrabiya wings;
and they take their fill of that thumb-sized sacrifice
blown open, crawling with summer-bred soldiers who carry
this bounty back behind the terracotta pots and the garden
hose, crypto-pagans living right under the stoop;
here I am, sitting, watching, pineapple juice dripping
like manna from my chin, a sweet false prophecy they pause
to marvel at, before carrying on, ignoring the passing cars
ruffling their antennae with thick, inconstant air.
Joseph Harker is the pseudonym of a linguist-poet living in New York, where the animals you see are usually six-legged and/or unwholesome. (Currently, though, he lives with a small and elderly cat.) His work has appeared in Clapboard House, Ganymede, Red Fez, and other publications both in print and online; you can also find him at his blog, Naming Constellations.
The Butcher Dressing Chickens
I know of a woman who raises free range chickens on her city lot. She butchers them with an enormous cleaver on an oak stump outside her kitchen door. Plucked black and white feathers fly across the yard or stick to her hands, bloody from pulling entrails. She sets aside the heart and liver. The gizzard, sliced open, releases driveway gravel. Half-digested grass smells good green after the singe stink of fine hairs.
Three calico cats and one orange tabby pace circles, waiting for a flick of wrist, sending yellow feet to be gnawed, bright red kidneys bolted. Her son, watching from the broken rail porch with a can of off-brand cola, teases her that she is teaching them to love the taste of chicken and soon they will be killers. This all happens on the south side of Chicago in a backyard near the Metro tracks. The first morning train brings her husband home from the late shift. He hunches silent over the wobbly Formica table eating reheated chicken and dumplings as the sun rises, red gold over calm Lake Michigan waters. The butcher is asleep with a feather in her hair.
Lisa J. Cihlar’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in Blackbird, The South Dakota Review, Green Mountains Review, and Bluestem. Her chapbook The Insomniac’s House is available from Dancing Girl Press, and a second chapbook, This is How She Fails, is available from Crisis Chronicles Press.
Trick-or-Treat
by Erin Murphy
Halloween night, two black bears
tramped through town. The next day,
we awoke to a blur of fur on the front
page of the local paper. Had we passed
them on the sidewalk, my son a werewolf
under the full moon? Yes, I’m sure
we waved and praised their costumes.
Erin Murphy (website) is the author most recently of Word Problems (Word Press, 2011). She is co-editor with Todd Davis of Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (SUNY Press, 2010). She teaches English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona. “Trick-or-Treat” is a demi-sonnet, a seven-line form she devised.
Massacre in Maguindanao
Birds flee from reports
Riddling the sky to a sieve.
Ants scatter from the stampede.
Stray dogs race tail-tucked
Into the woods of relief.
Look closely and a spot
In the bark might blink,
Betraying its reptilian blend.
Grief makes a landfall
In a changed clime, washing
Faith’s stone altars. Tides of tears
Rise, rushing into fissures
And crevices where hunger shivers.
To survive, they have to brave their fears.
Creatures of habit, they return
With the jolt stunned in footfalls,
Moving along the edge of recall.
Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, the Philippines. His poems have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Burning Word, Fox Chase Review, Red River Review, the Philippines Free Press and the Philippine Graphic magazine.
The Captive Improvises: Channel Six News
Whiskers alert,
a young lioness stands
on a waving savannah
she has never seen.
Something old
she always knew
bristles in the amber
chamber of her body.
There are no corners
in her eyes
No glass to glass
enclosure.
All keepers are gone.
Intent,
she stalks
a tasty morsel,
the bundle of a one year old
toddling by himself,
eye to eye
beside her glass walls.
She hunkers down,
lifts herself with him
side to side.
Her paws extend
to knead the killing ground.
Nancy Fletcher Cassell (website) is a visual artist and writer. She has written poetry most of her life and collaborates with other artists whenever possible. A finalist for the 2012 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Award from Heartland Review, her work has also been published in Water-Stone Review (finalist Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize), Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems from Accents Publishing and in Still: The journal. Her visual work has received Fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council and support from The Kentucky Foundation for Women.
Woodpeckers?
Brad now had an attic filled with old, bad guitars.
His Uncle Henry was a music teacher for fifty-two years.
Aunt Clara had been a ballet dancer.
You could see the pictures of her on the walls
of their home, this house. And now
it was his job to clean it before the sale.
His mother was in Europe on a trip his father
used to dream about. Brad’s college-dorm buddies
dared him to do it. They could get the woodpeckers.
All they needed to do was empty the attic of everything
but the 37 guitars, and sheet the rafters, the walls,
the floors, anything exposed. And lay out the guitars.
June knew how to un-cage and re-cage the birds.
The rest was music, they thought. Henry set up
the audio stuff for the recording, and speakers
in his aunt’s sewing room below. But it was not
how they imagined it. Sure, there was occasional
string noise, even plucks. Mostly rapping, tapping.
But the bird calls were incessant, almost nonstop.
As if those woodpeckers knew this was wrong
and were not going to shut up about it.
Dennis H. Lee’s poetry has appeared in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Descant, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Rattle, Umbrella, and other journals.
Cat and Pigeons
(click image to see a larger version)
Monika Andersson is a photographer and animal lover who grew up in Sweden, came to America to go to art school and never left. She worked as a freelance photographer for 15 years, but is now now a very happy teacher, she says.
Pigeons
Perched on a right angle
grey, concrete sill overlook,
with 180 degrees of peripheral eye,
pigeons minute waltz,
sidestepping left-right,
back, forward, then wing it solo
to street level to search
for tree seed, wrapper residue,
to bide their time
by pecking pavement.
Pigeons are possessive chest thrusters.
Puffed in muted, sleek feathers
they wait for raindrops on city sidewalks,
pick their way through puddles,
preen humidity.
Flocking to regroup in plazas,
where bronze horses abide,
they pay homage to bigger beasts,
nestle on heroes’ heads, hats,
and on sworded hands
raised in charged leadership.
They grey-swoop, silver-glide,
intimidate pedestrians inches from faces,
autos feet from windshields,
from exits, from parking spaces.
Pigeons own cities.
No license, no permit,
they squat, grandfathered in
by their grandfathers.
They are the huddle cooers
of urban uptowns,
the detectives of ordinary environs.
Marilyn Zelke-Windau lives in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin with her husband, Tom, and their golden retriever puppy. She taught elementary school art for many years. Her poems have appeared in several printed journals including Stoneboat, Fox Cry Review, and Seems, and at the online sites of Your Daily Poem, Verse Wisconsin, and brawlerlit. She is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.
All-Together Scent
by Coco Owen
Not only the bees, but the bats
Are dying off too—mysterious
Disappearances triggering
Pheromones of human alarm.
It’s time for evasive maneuvers,
For people are dangerous when riled.
Maybe the hives’ slats gapped.
Habitats are ruined & halved,
Starving out the bees & the bats.
Birds riddled with toxins
Brood on thinned eggshells.
Without the birds and the bees getting it on,
Fructification will end: no more
Love-in swarms—no begats.
If there aren’t any bats, no one can echolocate:
Human lovers will get lost in the dark,
Bumbling toward each other in the all-together
Of naked’s musk & honeysuckle scent.
Coco Owen (website) is a stay-at-home poet and psychologist in Encino, California. She is on the board of independent Les Figues Press, and has had poetry published in the Antioch Review, The Journal, Tidal Basin Review, 1913: A Journal of Forms and Umbrella Journal.
Crocodile Tears
by Akumbu Uche
For surviving the Civil War, my mother’s family is indebted to a crocodile.
My mother remembers the day she was at the stream with her brothers. The war had just started. That was the first time they were surprised by mortar falling from the sky. From her doorway, my grandmother watched helplessly as her children ran uphill. They made it to the house a little out of breath but otherwise unscathed from this brush with death.
My grandmother immediately began packing and by the next day, they had left Port Harcourt for Uyo where my grandfather, a magistrate, was stationed.
Because of my grandfather’s job, the young family was used to changing addresses. Name any major town in former Eastern Nigeria — Owerri, Enugu, Umuahia; they had schooled, churched and made friends there. This time, my grandmother felt the need to explain.
“If we are going to die in this war, we will all die together.”
Her eldest child was eight years old.
In Uyo, the children studied the region’s vernacular in school. At home, they practised their newly picked-up Ibibio so much they drove their mother nuts with it; they heard accounts of their father’s courtroom dramas – how he had remained impervious to the spells some witch or the other hoping to influence his verdict had tried casting on him. With friends, they took turns learning to ride the same bicycle and whenever meals took too long to cook, they snacked on okra, freshly picked from the house garden.
Life was idyll until the war flew into their lives a second time.
Previously, they had run indoors to escape the air raids. This time, they did the opposite. As soon as they heard the sirens, they would run out of the house and into the garden where they would lie flat, face down on the ground and wait for silence to return.
My grandmother is practicality defined and my grandfather had studied Law at an English University so it baffles me that they had once thought the canopy of fruit trees would shield them from harm. Perhaps this was their way of ‘running into the bush’ since nothing in their Western education or Native wisdom had prepared them for modern warfare. Maybe war robs us all of rational thought.
A different kind of death threat changed everything. During one of their take-cover outings, they noticed a crocodile’s snout jutting out of the loamy earth. This was not a demonic apparition. Neither was it some random swamp creature disoriented from its natural habitat. No, this was the family’s pet crocodile. The one they had apportioned a section of the grounds to, complete with a makeshift shallow pool, fenced in. The one they used to feed a live fowl to every three weeks or so, watching in cinematic delight as its strong jaws and ragged teeth snapped up the squealing bird.
Apparently, animals adapt to war. This one, it seems, had secretly dug a hole; and during the raids would attempt to tunnel its body out of its pen. To prevent the possibility of his family being eaten alive, my grandfather had an underground bunker built. Shortly after, the compound was heavily shelled; all the mango trees, citrus trees, vegetables obliterated.
But seriously, fenced in or not, why would anybody want to keep a crocodile on their premises? As a totem? As a thief repellant? To remind oneself of the wild in the face of encroaching urbanity?
My grandfather would later keep another reptile, this time a tortoise; an animal so reclusive that in all my visits to his Enugu townhouse I have never sighted it. I am never at home, it seems, whenever it makes appearances, as my siblings report to me, “under the hedge”, at Easter, or “near the poultry house”, during the long hols.
I do, however, remember a time during my childhood when he had once kept a caged eagle, gifted to him on the occasion of his coronation as Eze Ndikelionwu X. Kept in the hallway near the entrance of what we now call Old Palace, that bird would shriek and rattle violently if anyone passed by, which was a lot.
More tame are the fighting turkeys and the peacocks who, with their less colourful female kind, currently parade the grounds in my grandfather’s newest home, sweeping his gravestone with the spread of their long tail feathers, leaving droppings on balconies and on the grass they often eat.
I think that during his lifetime, he was just attracted to animals. But I doubt, with the exception of that old crocodile, that he had any attachment to them.
The time came during the war when the family decided to evacuate themselves from danger to what was considered one of the safest places at the time — the village. And if the war reached there as well…at least the entire Ike family would be together.
The crocodile must have been considered a member of the family too, seeing as my grandfather repeatedly tried to get the beloved pet on board a hired truck. Adamant to remain its own individual, it would not budge and so, was reluctantly left behind.
Akumbu Uche (blog) considers books to be her first love. Even so, there is enough room in her heart for good music, engaging films and bright nail polish. She lives in Uyo.
qarrtsiluni 