Archive
On the Scree
by Davide Trame
The path is zigzagging, narrow and steep,
logs hammered in keep it tight to this
bright cheek of gravel.
It’s hard to climb but it’s
the effort I want and I need despite
the pain in my foot, a pain
that like most of anything else
is what one can’t escape.
Maybe it will leave — I want to think — the pain,
because at one point everything changes and leaves,
but slowly, so slowly, because nothing is a flash,
but just a breathing and enduring on a path
like these steps that negotiate each stone
under the sole, each uneven and honed speck
of the ridge’s skin, each drop of sweat
trickling down the back
while the blue sky
spaces, pressing
its silence on the bones.
A still chamois stares at us down there
from a rock, one chamois only, alone.
But no, you take in at once
others running and jumping and no sound comes,
their feet looking like sailing on air.
We climb on, the one on the rock, king or guardian,
has not moved, keeps staring, and the dog sits
for a moment, spellbound, and stares too. Statue-like
under the sun.
And the top of the mountain, the path pointing
towards it, like at the top of a triangle,
stares down, openly covers us
with its stare.
So, call it faith all we come down to:
feeling an unframed eye, calling for it,
bearing it with the force of gravity and pain
and, suspending the search for a name,
enduring the brightness that spaces and cuts in.
Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English. He has been writing poetry in English since 1993.
Call for Submissions: Health
We’re pleased to announce that submissions are open for the winter issue, which will begin publishing after the New Year. The theme this time is Health, broadly defined, and the editors are Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson (the links go to their works here at qarrtsiluni; see below for more about them). We’re having the submission period now, in November, to avoid the busy holiday season. The deadline is November 30th. As always, please refer to the How to Contribute page for general submission guidelines (and note that there have been several minor changes).
The editors have chosen a theme that should resonate far beyond the current health care debate in the United States:
We are interested in creative interpretations of health, which will of course include the health (or lack thereof) of the human body, but also of the mind and spirit, the environment, or the culture. How systems stay in balance, how one attains wellness, how we relate or respond to our own state of health and the health of others, and the extent of an individual’s physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope with his/her environment would all be fair game. Unusual health-related practices also intrigue us (serpents? psychic surgery?) as well as tales of spontaneous recovery. How much control do we have over our own health? Explore superstitions, regale us with symptoms, or simply make a well-written toast to our health — we’ll consider it. Keep in mind too that the etymological roots of health include “whole” and “hale,” but also “holy.”
Our limit is three poems or one prose piece per submission, with a 1,200-word limit on the prose.
Both editors hail from the American Midwest, and they’ve been friends for years. Susan Elbe is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press) and a chapbook, Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, diode, MARGIE, North American Review, Ocho, Salt Hill, Smartish Pace, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books). Among her awards are the inaugural Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize (Calyx), the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award, and fellowships to Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Susan has served on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and currently serves on the Council for Wisconsin Writers Board. You can learn more about her and her work at susanelbe.com.
Kelly Madigan Erlandson is the author of Getting Sober: A Practical Guide to Making it Through the First 30 Days (McGraw-Hill). Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in Best New Poets 2007, Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, Plains Song Review, Terrain.org and Prairie Schooner. She has been a writer-in-residence at Jentel Artist Residency Program and the KHN Center for the Arts. Kelly was awarded the Distinguished Artist Award in Literature from the Nebraska Arts Council in 2006, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2008. She has worked as a licensed alcohol and drug counselor in Nebraska since 1983. Visit her website at KellyMadiganErlandson.com.
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Don’t forget to join the qarrtsiluni news group on Google if you want to receive these announcements via email. We’d also like to emphasize something we mention in the general guidelines which some contributors seem to overlook: if you don’t receive an acknowledgment note within two days after you send something, assume that we didn’t get it and re-submit. If you still don’t hear anything, try sending from another email. If you’re submitting via the Contact form, please be sure to type your email address correctly. Sometimes we can find the correct address by Googling, but there was one guy who submitted to the current issue who we never were able to track down — and we wanted to publish his essay, too! Finally, please make sure your email is set to accept messages from qarrtsiluni(at)gmail(dot)com. Getting an automatic reply telling us we have to jump through extra hoops to communicate with authors makes us very grouchy indeed.
If this is the first you’ve visited the site in a while, be sure to check out all the great stuff we’ve been posting for the Words of Power issue — and stick around, because there’s much more on the way. We look forward to hearing from you soon.
—Beth and Dave
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