Archive
If I Jump You Jump Remember
Penetrating a person
means diving into the open sea.
You’ll swim deeper and deeper,
until you reach a point where the light leaves you;
where you no longer know which way leads to the surface
or to the bottom.
And in the abyss, you will falter,
groping in the darkness for breath and life,
but instead something odd will find its way to you.
Grotesque , violent, starving—
Feeding on your foolishness—
the monster at the bottom of every person’s
kind façade.
Download the podcast (reading by Russel Saliendra)
Rina Caparras graduated with a degree in BFA Creative Writing from the Ateneo de Manila University. Her literary works have appeared or are forthcoming in Philippines Graphic, Asia Writes, Word Riot, and Burning Word. She blogs about food in Yummy Date Night and writes about her life in Geek But Not Dork. During the day, she works as a junior copywriter for a local company.
sk/edge
Flash is needed to view the animation (which may also be viewed on a dedicated webpage).
Dorothee Lang is into roads, stories, places, crossings, and all the things they lead and connect to. She lives in Germany, blogs at life as a journey, and her new book is Worlds Apart. Her other animation for the Fragments issue, published on July 30, was “lines of the days.”
Message in Morse Code
by Beth Enson
How—I didn’t know any
word for it—how “unlikely”
Elizabeth Bishop
Before waking
my body
an immense weight
floats Lips and tongue vast
fingers mammoth My will
a speck
diaphanous net of sound
starts to tighten
pings like glass bangles
Rain on the windowpane
the world
why something
why not nothing?
Whispering swish
my father’s razor in the sink
tap tap of metal on porcelain
frenetic tune on the transistor
morning news
Beth Enson lives in northern New Mexico, where she fundraises for her local Birth Center, homeschools her 14-year old daughter, teaches co-counseling, and is at work on her second book of poems. Her first, A Bee In The Sheets, was published jointly in 2001 by Painted Leaf Press and Groundwater Press. She has work in upcoming issues of Mas Tequila Review, The Urban Resistance, Undertow, UNM Taos’s HOWL, and Epicentre. She’s passionately attached to her mad, visionary, conflicted community.
Break Down the House
by Tom Sheehan
Break down the house, take it over there piece by memory, or memory by piece
like damned piecework in the war when some counted bucks not hours, take it
over there where mountains sit down with quick clean breaths, where edge of the
small pond works upright. Drop it there piece by piece; we are tired of the old site
where nothing but pain lingers at the doorstep. What spoke here speaks up:
One broken wing
One leg trapped by steel
Shingle tossed loose by wind
One dug grave left empty
To what recourse
Three empty aches left over
Finger a burnt leaf
Taught of dust
A limb learnt
The cutting rope
Things lightly considered
But deadly lost.
Tom Sheehan’s newest book is Korean Echoes, an e-book from Milspeak Publishers, and five more eBooks are in their production queue. In his cover letter, he wrote: “Every now and then I pore through one or more writing pads I carry in my vehicle and find a piece I had written, not always remembering where or when and often not what kicked a piece off in the first place, but somehow treasuring the effort of recall that I am commanded to in the second place, sometimes with a better yield than the original. That is a severe joy.”
And this is how…
And this is how it was for a long time and she was your only sister until she climbed that ladder and stretched out across the night sky to sleep.
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Pyroclastic characterized by explosive gas, ash and pumice
Bastard Measure odd point size (9 pt.)
Lapidation the act of stoning
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Now the wine woman could change into any off-kilter or improbable thing or person she chose to with a simple ‘yip’ or by baring her teeth.
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No more ‘Chopsticks’ — now it was all Glenn Gould all the time.
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Sleeping under dirt blankets Sleeping under ice blankets
Sleeping under chalk blankets Sleeping under slate blankets
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Research Ellen Key, Swedish feminist Free Love proponent
wrote Love and Marriage 1912
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I speak. I talk. I crow. I sing.
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Sregolatezza intemperate immoderate debauchery disorder
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There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language but on other communicative energies such as the icon or the musical note. And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence.
George Steiner, ‘The Retreat from the Word’
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They ate shark meat, drank rain water from their blistered palms
and listened to high church music from an unknown hell. Raw wound
sound ‘submitsubmitsubmit’. So difficult to submit. Whose metaphors
are these? Whose ghosts pack the choir loft that stinks of myrrh?
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This vehicle has been checked for sleeping children.
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Art is what you have to do when it doesn’t have to be done.
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Rt. 28 Economics: Stimulus Sirloin Steak Dinner 7.95
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The tiny tufts of impatiens every six inches like cheap pink & white buttons
annoy in this half-assed spitting rain.
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Her name was Number. His name was Skin.
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Mordbrenner criminal gangs that roved central Europe
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people here will give you food / threatening might get results / money here / stay away, people want you to work
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Picasso: This target on my eye might bring heaven closer. In my soft little slippers and my stained, frayed shorts.
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Thin Spots Galore touched the clouds/sky/weather from her 30-foot perch, an aluminum ladder named Doug.
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Stirred up the milk of amnesia.
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Goodhue County, Minn. Research poetry barns outside Red Wing.
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Stenciled white paint Breathing in leaves ashes…drawing the harvest inside us
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She put pine needle in her vein. She dreamt tree’s dream.
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Straight lines in the landscape help the aviator.
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Notebooks are the quarries of artists.
Author’s note: I’ve still got a file drawer full of notebooks/journals & datebooks that go back to the late 70’s. I randomly grabbed a 1980 lab book and a pocket-sized notebook from 2008. Working quickly I skimmed lines and pulled bits from both books and dropped them straight into a single Word doc without noting either year.
Funny how little my interests and obsessions changed in that 28-year period.
Holly Anderson’s The Night She Slept With A Bear, published May 2012, is a collection of flash fictions and mesostics shipping with an original soundtrack CD written and played by Chris Brokaw from Publication Studio in Portland, Oregon. For more about Holly, see her page on the Mission of Burma website.
Matters
As in, material.
Plural.
Enigmatic content
of brains,
unlit outer space.
As in,
this is significant,
weighty.
Sudden certainty,
meaning
placed, pointed to.
As in,
to be taken into one’s
own hands,
owned, held within
my grasp,
a cupped moth still
flying.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, and instructor. Her poems have appeared in places such as Contrary, MAYDAY, and The Nervous Breakdown. She is a poetry blogger for the Huffington Post, and is the founder of Paging Columbus!, a literary arts event series in Central Ohio. You can visit her online at The Storialist, where she posts poems, art, and thoughts on creativity.
A Contemplation of Surgery
Old eye. A window and its pane. Whether
what clouds it now is cataracts or grief: the Knife.
Clean swipe. The pane, the pain. Then clarity.
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Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld is a former missile analyst and university press editor and English instructor who has done poetry therapy with forensic patients and has made Web sites on perished Jewish communities in Europe. Her poetry has been published nationally and internationally in journals and anthologies such as Southwest Review, Nimrod, Rosebud, and Margie as well as at various sites on the Web.
Snapshots of the Revolution
Washington encounters the fabled Boy-faced Hart outside Valley Forge
(click to enlarge)
Mr. Jefferson’s Meteor
(click to enlarge)
Statement
I feel that my love for poetry with its fragments of imagery leads me to be a collector by nature, somehow, and then to place the disparate things I’ve discovered into a box assemblage, or digital collage, in presentation, a sort of hominoid bowerbird posing bits of blue and shiny objects it has gathered within a frame of bundled twigs. I am attracted to lovely, mostly used, distressed, castaway objects and images that I find in thrift stores, on streets, in basements, forests, yard sales, and unexpected places.
The arranged items then take on a new life: splinters of miscellanea come together as a larger, more complete fragment. They take on new meanings through their associations with one another. They suggest stories, names, titles, histories. They form an entry point into a narrative that is then conveyed to the viewer to direct or expand on as their own experiences and imaginations lead them.
Working with these fragments, I am reminded that there is rarely such a thing as The Complete. And that great potential lies in this incompleteness, and great beauty lies in the unknown and untold.
The Small is part of the Large. The Piece is part of the Whole. The Unseen is part of the Beautiful.
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Brad Fairchild is an artist and writer living in Atlanta who wants to point out the lonely beauty in broken things. He wants to pay tribute to these inanimate souls by rendering them into something new and accessible to others. He is descended from a pirate, and that is somehow fitting.
Fragments of a life
Here are bits from my blog, Risa’s Pieces, small fragments of a life, which will always be a work in progress, at least until death, which I prepare for as best I know how.
One Way
We arrive early on a chilly morning. The home is spotless and charming, embossed with her favorite colors, reds and pinks. Her daughters are gracious, relieved to have support, offer us coffee. We sit at the kitchen table and open 90 barbiturate capsules, briskly tapping them and then using a toothpick to remove all of the white powder. We dissolve it in 4 ounces of cranberry juice. About 30 minutes ahead of the time she had carefully chosen, she takes pills to quiet the stomach and chase away nausea. Everyone is sad and peaceful. She holds the glass with both hands—a bit unsteady, sitting in a rocking chair, bright red afghan across her legs—and takes two long deliberate swallows. Gives a sweet, tearful hug to each daughter, then relaxes back in her chair, smiles gently, and falls asleep in about five minutes. There is no struggle. No noise or movement. Twenty minutes later, there is no heartbeat.
Pieces of a Story
I couldn’t have reached this place
without kinship
could not have been born
without my mother
or father, for that matter
or become who I am without
my brother or the sister
who died at her birth, 8 years before mine
now an archetype, absent, much grander
than I can ever become
without so much as a
whimper
or the cousin
my aunt gave away
not exactly thoughtlessly
but without knowing
the effect it would have
on her legitimate children, two born before
and one after the affair
or for that matter, the effect
of her untimely death on all of us, God
forbid what did in fact happen
to her daughters in foster care
and to peripheral me
who was ignorant
!ignorant!
of the born-dead-girl
and the give-away-boy
and as sordidly as this
I blemish others
lost custody of my own son
letting go mournfully, like every mother does
so much so that most of this story
are the pieces I did not know
the ones that have harrowed me
Risa Denenberg is an aging hippie currently living in Sequim, Washington. Her chapbook, What we owe each other, is forthcoming from The Lives We Touch Publications. Risa blogs about poetry, aging, death and other matters at Risaden.
qarrtsiluni 