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The Only Order the Day Had Was Chronological Order
In the afternoon, the hour of five falls like quintuplets from the clock.
To live in the moment is a frightful thing. In all the past I never lived in the moment. I was saving those moments for now.
The future is no better place. The future is coming with the sole purpose that I might regret it.
I once loved someone who said things like, “when we’re older and you write my biography…” What a presumptuous jerk he was. But the pathetic thing was how I adored him, and how he still crosses my mind every day, at least the person he was, not the failed man.
(at dusk, while the stars sort out their sleep patterns)
Nothing nourishes suffering like nostalgia.
I don’t pretend to know anything, including the French word for hell. I don’t even know if the English word for hell is quite correct.
After feasting, mint restores coherence.
Although anyone who looks can see it, and even explain it, the daytime moon always seems to be something secret and subversive.
It is good to put an hour aside for thinking. Slow down. Behold your horses.
Weltschmerz. I wash mine down with coffee.
Sarah J. Sloat’s new chapbook Homebodies has just been published by Hyacinth Girl Press. Sarah lives in Germany, where she works in news. Her poems have appeared in Barn Owl Review, DMQ, Bateau and Fraglit, among many other places.
Notes Made on an iPhone while Rocking My Son to Sleep, July 2011
by James Brush
How many times to sing “Redemption Song”? The first song I thought to sing him when he needed singing in the NICU. Some other parent sang nursery rhymes in curtained spaces with beeping monitors to metronome the time. Not knowing any rhymes, I went with Marley it stuck and now it’s ours. Quiet, now, he settles in to rocking my voice trails off to mumbles… this song of freedom…
Moonlight, thunder moon streaming in through the live oak, the passing hours marked by moonlight dropping down the blinds
The dogs dream their twitch-footed dreams, the squirrel finally caught — whimpers and low growls
The fan spins
beneath its spider shadow
ceiling jungle
Dim lines trace frames black pictures on the wall beyond the room… I can’t see them but I imagine what they might be — surely not the same images hung there years ago, not at this hour. They’ll have shifted become things I can’t conceive, ideas of things that can’t exist in morning light
Everything is strange now and somehow more easily understood
His breath slows against my shoulder, he sighs much like the dogs, and I watch the late minutes tick through this room of simplest dreams
James Brush is a teacher and writer. He keeps a full list of publications at his blog Coyote Mercury. He published his first poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves earlier this year. He lives in Austin, TX.
My life’s fragments waiting for reassembly
These fragments lying on the floor of my studio are some of the stencils I drew and cut to create My Life Unfolds, an accordion book included in the exhibition Open Books, which opened at the National Library of Wales on June 30 and runs until September 22. I used the stencils to make monoprints on each of the 52 folds of the accordion, representing significant episodes in my life. Although the book is finished, the multicoloured stencils remain and demand to be reassembled in new and as yet uncharted scenarios.
One side of the accordion book. Click to see a larger version.
The progress of the book was documented on my blog, and all the panels are shown a dedicated section of my website.
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Born in Paris, raised in South America, USA and Europe, Natalie d’Arbeloff lives in London and has dual nationality, British-American. Her father was Russian, her mother French. Her alter ego is the cartoon character Augustine and her blog is Blaugustine where she sometimes interviews God, among other celebrities. See her website for more about her work as a painter, printmaker, book-artist and cartoonist.
Writing in Fragments: a habit of being
by Ursula Vaira
I’ve always written in fragments: small bits I could hold in my head. As mother, homemaker, paddler, publisher, I’ve never given myself the luxury of prolonged retreat. It has become habit—writing in the moment and hoping to keep that freshness for the page.
My three long travel poems published in And See What Happens (Caitlin Press, 2011) were gathered in this way. While paddling you often cannot stop to write things down! “The wind still howls down Quatsino Sound. In an instant we are flung apart, scattered wide.” “Too late—just distant spouts and the faint stink of fish.”
On a hiking trip, while staying in an isolated trappers cabin deep in the northern Rockies, my unexpected homesickness for my boyfriend caused me to write him tiny notes on strips torn from empty toilet paper rolls, bean can labels, ancient sports fishing magazines: “Who can sleep in such darkness? I close my eyes, no difference.” “Your hand on my breast, even here.” I mailed these notes to him from Fort Nelson. Later we sat together at the dining room table at home, moving them around, finding a narrative that leapt from one idea to another—like the poet crossing the creek on stepping stones, never sure whether the next step will result in an icy dunking.
I’m working on a salmon poem now. I have pen and paper at hand… reading Terry Glavin and Alexandra Morton. Fragments crowd the margins of my research notes:
so tender how the bear
carries the dying salmon into the forest
completing the journey
rings on salmon scales
record how long spent in sweet/brackish/salt water
starvation/abundance
how difficult the journey
back to the trees they will fertilize
thirty-four million sockeye
swam through Vancouver (twice)
while people clicked keyboards,
watched TV
slow motion
the salmon
airborne
soars past the bear’s open mouth
the bear delicately guides the salmon from the falls
with the tip of his claw
salmon spent the ice age in Mexico
it took them only 1000 years to return to Alaska
rebuilding the rainforest
with their spent bodies
And lately, as I tramp through the forest with the Nanoose Bay Streamkeepers, such a pleasure to hold words in my body again: “I inhale / breath of tree / creek / fish.”
Ursula Vaira grew up in northern British Columbia. After studying Education at UBC, she taught school on the northern coast and in the Arctic, then moved to Vancouver Island in the early eighties. Ursula loves wilderness camping and kayaking, and has a passion for the west coast. In the summer of 2005, she kayaked with a group from Port Hardy to Zeballos, around Cape Scott and Cape Cook. In 1997, she paddled by Coast Salish canoe from Hazelton to Victoria as part of Roy Henry Vickers’s Vision Quest to raise addictions awareness and funds to build an all-nations recovery centre on Vancouver Island. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and chapbooks, and in anthologies published by Hawthorne Society, Outlaw Editions, Anvil Press, Quills, and the B.C. Federation of Writers. In 2011 Caitlin Press published her poetry collection And See What Happens. Ursula is the founder and publisher of Leaf Press, publishing “poetry only” since 2001.
In the Morning (Tweets, May 2012)
by Magda Kapa
In the morning, we return to the day like fallen angels.
In the morning, before memories and dreams have said goodbye to each other.
Before light has taken our bodies back.
Before we need something, and after we’ve had everything.
In the morning, we’re thrown out of our dreams like banished dictators.
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Magda Kapa tweets as @MagdaKapa and keeps a regularly updated blog, I was not born in English, where she writes: “It takes me too long to write anything: a day, three trains, one hundred poems, a few deaths, one sorrow and the present tense.”
From a Notebook Weighing 194 Grams
by Rodney Wood
the sky’s a razor in summer light
flies crawl down windows singing
an elm accepts death without complaint
shadows count the size of my dreams
the day has yet to be decoded
white comets across my wrists
my mother with a light round her head
a magpie paddles across the street
the house at night relaxes its stays
shopping trolleys piled high with Bibles
father alive in the cycle of days
crushed beer cans by the railway line
a forest of bottles covered in sun tan lotion
children press damp eyes to the railings
God is an ice cream cone topped with a cherry
I’m wearing a hat, need a shave, diazepam
and the rain’s sudden applause.
Rodney Wood lives in northeast Hampshire, U.K., and has had work in various magazines, anthologies and on the radio. He writes: “Fragments made me think of the person from Porlock, TS Eliot, Raymond Carver and a huge iceberg with chunks falling off to create giant waves whose ripples spread over the world.”
Wishful
by Linda Umans
I want my comfort in an orange night
where the heat stays later than you might expect.
I don’t want to dream of coastal living
with a man who would have gotten me drowned.
I want to live in the art world where medicine’s an art.
I want to ride the centrifuge and know the whirling cells.
I am perennial and stand with irises
border of iridescence reliable as squash.
I would choose biennial as beets as winter wheat
for the appeal of slow for the drama of the bloom.
I want to be your life preserver but not your life.
I don’t want to leave but love you anyway.
Linda Umans enjoyed a long teaching career in the NYC public schools. She is a native of Manhattan where she lives, studies, and writes. Recent publications include poems in qarrtsiluni, YB, Terrain.org, The Broome Street Review, The Ghazal Page, Status Hat, Switched-on Gutenberg and a piece in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.
Robert at 80
by Robert Roth
I think of my young, beautiful downstairs Zimbabwean neighbor. For the first time age really comes in on me. I think of myself at 80. That is just 15 years away. Though 50 was a while ago. And what does she need with that? And how then can this intimacy be expressed without committing her to the possibility of tending to an old man. Obviously anything can happen to anyone at anytime. But here there is an almost certain future if I live that long. A commitment to each other would take that into account. Eighty though is still potentially very vibrant and very sexual. With some real fluidity between us whatever sexual connection we had would not limit her to it. Me neither I guess. But in this case it would be her I would be most concerned about. Why am I obsessing and fretting about something that is very unlikely to happen? I guess because it’s fun to do.
Months later. We speak about one weekend before we became good friends, when she was still living downstairs, when she cut herself off from everyone and everything. No e-mail. No phone. A four day urban retreat, looking deep into herself, trying to find a “purpose,” a direction, a deeper meaning, a deeper pursuit. I tell her about a small cottage on the top of a hill somewhere in Zimbabwe where I imagine living when I’m 80. In my fantasy Aziza has created some space for me on a large plot of land that is dedicated to some very significant pursuit. Maybe a place for children. Maybe something entirely different.
“What will you do there?” she asks. “Well, I’m there. That should be enough,” I answer. “You have to do some work,” she laughs.”You can’t just live there.” “I’ll be a presence. What more do I have to do?” “A presence is more than enough,” she answers, yielding to the power of my argument. And so there it is. My future. A cottage on a hill in Zimbabwe. The destination a certainty. The route getting there very much a mystery.
Walking toward the East Side I come to Greenwich and 10th where there is a fork in the road. Totally forgot where I am going, who I am visiting. A total absolute blank. This has happened a few other times recently. Two times at that very spot. Scary feeling. Tried to relax. The destination returned and I continued. At 80. Hot muggy Zimbabwe summer. Wild committed energy everywhere. Up and down the hill. Not knowing where I am. Which direction I am going. Maybe this is something that will happen from time to time. Hopefully no more than that.
The total blank was very scary. Maybe try to surrender to it next time.
My father at 76 had sold his business, but still tried making deals, still overflowing with energy. “You’re still wheeling and dealing,” I said. “I’m doing more wheeling than dealing,” he replied.
Robert Roth is co-creator of And Then magazine and author of Health Proxy. He lives in New York City.
lines of the days
Flash is needed to view the animation (which may also be viewed against
an all-black background 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.
Fortune Beams
by Jeffery Beam
(Lines extracted from four decades of poems,
placed inside homemade fortune cookies
for our friends on my husband’s and my own
50th birthday celebration, 2003)
Transfigured by spider webs & sunset.
* * *
Open the windows! Let the wrens in!
* * *
For all this to happen. Becoming landscape.
* * *
Into flowering expanse world without blooming end.
* * *
The white thoughts are tiny fish in your hands.
* * *
The end of the universe glistening, a silver spoon.
* * *
Through winter’s wet mess & slump…love always.
* * *
Light shining in darkness. Darkness which cannot hold.
* * *
Earth’s lovely darkness. Water’s clear rinse.
* * *
With closed eyes we feel the clouds.
* * *
The golden empire of the grass.
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We are all waters, all unfoldment and melody.
* * *
Suddenly, you see everything behind you.
* * *
If you look carefully through the vines you will see it breathe.
* * *
One day a man came. I am not he. Observe.
* * *
Stone drums & their echoes.
* * *
To enter. The heart must shatter.
* * *
The song itself. The only audience, the song.
* * *
May abundant storms comfort you always.
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A maple tree’s fired leaves.
* * *
The one prayer. Before & after. Precise as distance.
Jeffery Beam’s many award-winning works include Gospel Earth, Visions of Dame Kind, An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold, Midwinter Fires, The Fountain, and a spoken word CD with multimedia, What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001. The song cycle, Life of the Bee, with composer Lee Hoiby, continues to be performed on the international stage and can be heard on Albany Record’s New Growth. Forthcoming works are The Broken Flower (Skysill Press, England, Autumn 2012), and The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969–2012― an expanded version of The Beautiful Tendons (Spuyten Duyvil, 2013). Beam is poetry editor of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review. Find links to all his projects at his website.
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