Archive
Loving My Daughter in the Mountains
Hard climb finished,
we clown on the tundra,
my daughter and I,
laughing. I dance,
the sleeves of my
too-big sweater swinging limp
over my hands. She pushes
the bandana over my eyes. I dance
blindfolded, happy,
the water in my canteen
sloshing with my spinning and twirling.
My daughter laughs
until no sound comes and she must sit,
voiceless, on the rocks to recover.
On this day
in this place,
the peaks standing watch,
I love her
and I can only dance it,
my old shoes quick as the feet of a deer
on the grasses.
Marjorie Saiser’s books are available from Backwaters Press. Saiser was named Distinguished Artist in Poetry in 2009 by the Nebraska Arts Council, and part of that award will be publication of a new book of poetry in 2010. Samples of her work can be found on her website.
Case Study
by Heather Reid
(Royal Edinburgh Psychiatric Hospital 1989)
It was theatre of sorts,
a modern take on bearded ladies,
cirque de psychiatry’s
weekly wheeling out of crazy chicks
to be unpicked by disaffected students
whose real aim was gynaecology
or something with a knife.
But you loved the stage,
held the audience with anecdotes
of days amongst the glitterati,
and how your mother —
bless her soul — had passed away
last year and now possessed
the body of your dog.
Your mother didn’t die.
Yesterday she’d helped to clean
the wreckage of your flat,
where stubborn russet stains deface the floor,
the bathroom mirror’s broken into knives,
the drama of a paramedic’s foot
still marks the door.
Heather Reid lives in Perthshire, Scotland where she was a social worker but is now a puppy walker for Guide Dogs. Her poetry and short stories have been published in a number of journals and this year her poem “A Murmuration” won the BBC Wildlife Magazine‘s Nature Poem of the Year.
Panic
Everything sharps and shrills
me: the day’s insistent, high-pitched yaps
as she clips room to room; her cats’
claws on skin when fur fails
to attend; the list
of things I’ll fail
to finish this week or next; the muscle
along my calendar’s ridge, pinch
in its neck, suspension
of disbelief, critical voice between the temples,
echo from some
strained event, the throbbing squares, like swollen
gums, the crystal numbers that slip from great heights
off its thick-thumbed tongue.
Wendy Vardaman (website) lives in Madison, Wisconsin and is the author of Obstructed View (Fireweed Press). She works for The Young Shakespeare Players, a children’s theater company, co-edits Verse Wisconsin, and does not own a car.
Sharps (remix)
by Stu Hatton
There’s a booklet called Patient Rights which no one has read. Ceiling-mounted cameras raise conversation from its natural pitch by a semitone. Count the kinds of innocuous: white walls, a small set of lies played back to placate. For some of us the timetable remains mysterious, opaque; it approaches the divine. Fluorescent tube flashes code; spasmodic pain. Clipboards held towards white coats, shieldlike. Conspiring to dull us; that’s my theory. Ticking off the codeine. The sharps (syringe, paper clips, knife) stored in micro-lockers. Some inmates bemoan the lack of music. Keys carried by orderlies provide semi-regular percussion. Padded footfalls. The door’s alarmed; red pulsing bulb. When a car pulls up outside we set our foreheads on the glass. We ogle with the sincerity of children. The muscled orderlies arriving to move us on, their strides replicated on the monitors. Such incidents are all we have. Sometimes manhandled, sometimes a needle pierces.
Author’s note: This piece is a remix based on Nathan Moore’s poem “Sharps”, which resulted from a collaborative remix project between Nathan and myself. I received Nathan’s blessing to submit the poem.
Stu Hatton is a poet, blogger and freelancer based in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches writing and editing at Deakin University. His work has been published in journals and e-zines in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and US. He contributes to the poetry news blog dumbfoundry and also blogs at wordyness.blogspot.com.
For more of Nathan Moore’s work at qarrtsiluni, see his contributor tag page.
Peaked
by Lisa Alden
Got
the
new
insurance
card.
Flimsier
than
the
last,
this
one
with
perforated
edges
and
thin
enough
to
blow
away
on
a
cough.
Takes
up
little
real
estate,
makes
it
easy
to
find
a
credit
card
when
the
doctor
bill
thuds.
Lisa Alden (website) is a babymaker rooted on the Pacific coast. Her poetry has won a couple small awards and appeared in a few magazines. She loves being in the water and prefers sunny days.
Revelation
in my forties I forgot how to sleep
the sun rose and set and rose and I
wandered the house like a madwoman
my eyeballs were hot in my burning face
I would never be young again
I roamed the house, weeping
I was full of a feeling my body
remembered from childhood
my mind beat in waves, my skin
radiated heat from the inside out
in the mirror my hair had that same
little flip on one side that would not
lay down, that would never lay down,
as if that unplanned curl was all
that was left of my small and tender self,
my small face alive in the camera’s
fast-blinked eye
and aren’t we all like that, really—
burning and love-crazed
in the night, so relieved
when the light finally comes back
that we’ll do anything at all—
and we do—to keep it?
Harriet Brown’s poems have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Indiana Review. Her nonfiction appears in the New York Times and a slew of other magazines. She also writes books: her next one will appear in September 2010, and will be a family memoir about anorexia. She’s an assistant professor of magazine journalism at Syracuse University and holds an MFA from Brooklyn College in poetry. She has a blog called Feed Me!
Girls on the Slide
by Sarah Busse
“I’m on fertility drugs,” she says.
The sun along the ground like knives. “We still want
a second child and now
I’m on fertility drugs and angry all the time.
I dream of burning houses, smashing—” she keeps her eyes
on the line of trees—”people.”
This is where coyotes live. Knowing that,
we’ve brought our daughters out in boots, fleece, mittens,
to splash in snow, puddles
of slush and thaw. They lob a nerf. We stand the wind
as the girls tumble the hill, get up giggling. Grit in the eyes,
the sun starts down.
Download the podcast
Sarah Busse is the co-editor (with qarrtisluni contributor Wendy Vardaman) of the poetry magazine Verse Wisconsin. Her chapbook, Quiver, is available from Red Dragonfly Press, and chapbooks are forthcoming from Finishing Line Press and Desperado Press. She lives with her husband and two children in Madison, Wisconsin. You can find her online with a bunch of other cool poets at bookthatpoet.com.
An Inside View of the Patient
The medical profession is,
We all agree, quite laudable;
But certain of their practices
Are somewhat less applaudable:
For instance, when the doctor says,
“Let’s take a look inside;
A simple test will help us find
What treatment to provide.”
So like good patients we submit
To experts’ ministrations;
But “simple tests,” we find, have need
Of complex preparations:
Instead of just one enema,
They give us triple unction–
Plus a fourth one on the table
To help the X-ray function.
And then the “look inside” becomes
A prolonged stare instead:
We’re photographed in every pose
But standing on our head.
The scientific appetite
For data’s near unslakable,
But after twenty pictures
Any more would be untakable.
When diagnostic tools at last
Bring treatment of the matter,
To say we’re “radiating health”
Is hardly idle chatter.
Download the podcast (reading by Theo R. Gardner)
A veteran of World War II, Delbert R. Gardner (1923-2008) taught college English for twenty-one years before returning to government service as a writer/editor for U.S. Army training materials for fourteen years. Over forty of Dr. Gardner’s poems and stories have appeared in publications such as The Literary Review, Poetry Digest, American Poetry Magazine, Provincetown Review, Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit, The 2009 Rhysling Anthology, and Christian Science Monitor. His nonfiction credits include the book An “Idle Singer” and His Audience: A Study of William Morris’s Poetic Reputation in England, 1858-1900. More information is available at www.gardnercastle.com.
Bloom
by Tori Ellison
Click image to view a larger version
28″ x 22″ 1998
Monotype with serigraph and lithograph on Rives BFK
From the print series “The Spaces Between” (see the portfolio on Ellison’s website for a statement and description).
Tori Ellison creates paintings, sculpture, prints, installation art, and theater design. A MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Jentel fellow, she is collected by the City of Seattle and Paul Allen’s Vulcan and has exhibited in 11 states and abroad, including Portland Art Museum, Bellevue Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum Gallery, and New York’s Grey Art Gallery (NYU) and PaineWebber Gallery. She studied at Cranbrook, Reed College, and School of Visual Arts (New York), and has written about art for the Guggenheim, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Seattle Weekly, Seattle Times, Oregonian, and Artweek.
Some Beauty Needs a Dimness
For instance — the morning after snowfall, when
everything has the centered hack
of obsidian and white, clouds still covering the sky, without shadow.
Then, absence of color intimates
knowing and
alchemical possibilities.
If that morning, still puffed with the snow
draped on branches, were
shone upon, sky’s delphinium globe
swimming out of cloud-cover,
the little branches now dipped in
Tiffany-ice,
it would lose immensity
under my lids.
Now the
gold and green and orange snow blowers and shovels
would come out, a reminder of
worldly destruction; the kids in red gloves would
dirty the world with snowballs, the car mufflers
would blow out a column of assertive, lively particles,
some perhaps staining the snow blue. Even the light itself would be
cheerful and lose its sonority.
Edward Weston’s peppers — wouldn’t you shudder
if they were green? Would you ever want to see a Greta Garbo
film in color?
No.
Some beauty is created out of dimness,
and this I must remember in future times, when my hospital bed
will throb with the white of a morning after snowfall, the white
still almost dark because the clouds remain to cover
the sky. Let me celebrate an inevitable approach
of dimness, which I now am able to recognize
as final beauty. Let my seemingly ringless hand,
lying on the pristine sheet, reveal
the invisible philosopher’s stone I’ve always
worn on my marriage finger.
Let me remember light is only
indicated by lack of light and my closed eyes
thus behold
the alchemical chisel of black and white.
Diane Wakoski’s new book, The Diamond Dog, will be published by Anhinga Press this spring, 2010. She is the author of more than twenty collections of poems and continues to teach at Michigan State University as a University Distinguished Professor.
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