Archive
Egghead
by Jill Klein
after Margaret Atwood’s “Heart“
Everyone buys their thoughts. I buy my mind.
It was either that or a brain.
The easy part is dropping the precious abstraction in.
A wrist twist, like slipping an egg to be poached,
my skull the skillet of water,
but then, whoops! it’s out my ear.
I turn myself completely outside in
like a mailbox catching a letter.
There’s a smooth glissando, the whisper
of robin eggs leaving a nest,
but where is it, the small, dried pale-pink flow
of the now-dead future, broken out of the carton.
It is held tight. It’s sticky. It is picked up,
but spit out. So fine, say many. So bland.
So sweet, say the rest, grinning.
None of them is a seasoned gourmand,
but I sit yelling to myself
in the center, like an old family matriarch,
my caring clumsy foot on the scab
crusting over my hoodie and hair,
boldly, holding in my brain.
Jill Klein has been raising teenagers and volunteering for the past several years, after an earlier career as a commercial banker. She grew up in Kansas and the Pacific Northwest, then moved to California to go to college (sight unseen). She loves the lack of rain in Silicon Valley, babying her bougainvillea, and hiking until it hurts. She has poems published, or forthcoming, in San Pedro River Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Rose & Thorn Journal and The Centrifugal Eye.
Meditation at the Metering Lights on the Bay Bridge
after Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas“
All the new hesitation is about traffic.
In this it resembles the old hesitation.
The sense, for example, that each green light flickering
then fading out is a sign of universal progress. That the idiot
driver ahead of me switching lanes and cutting off others
is getting any farther than the rest of the pack idling
loudly as their engines race to keep pace with inertia.
Or the other idea that bearing a FastTrack pass
will somehow negate the infinity of this fractal coastline
and bear one home safely ahead of the SUVs.
We were talking about their gluttony for gas
the other night, my friend and I, and we agreed
we would never own one. At least, not in Berkeley,
where the Prius predominates. After a while I realized
that our cars were ourselves, as they’ve said all along:
Cougar, Mustang, Impala, male, female, you and I. There
was a time I thought a Thunderbird would impress
the ladies until I realized I had usurped a Native American
icon for my own purposes. I took a vow of celibacy
that night but rose in the morning to the realization
that it had nothing to do with car makes or models,
their metaphorical nuances. It was really about
the girl I wanted to make violent love to in the backseat
of my old Rambler. Maybe it was the same for her
but she was vacationing with relatives in Cedar Rapids.
Distance, we say, is full of endless longing. There are
moments when longing and distance become
one in the same. Moments as on a bridge in rush hour
backed up to the maze with the metering lights on
and all you can think is why the hell didn’t I enroll
in FastTrack, FastTrack, FastTrack.
Susan Gubernat’s first book of poems, Flesh, won the Marianne Moore Prize and was published by Helicon Nine Press. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Cortland Review, Michigan Quarterly and Pleiades, among others. Her second book manuscript, Shaggy Parasol, has been a runner-up or finalist in such contests as the National Poetry Series, the Dorset Prize, the FIELD prize, the New Issues Green Rose Prize, and the Philip Levine Prize. She has held artist residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Millay Colony. Gubernat is an opera librettist (Korczak’s Orphans; composer Adam Silverman) and an Associate Professor at California State University, East Bay, where she and her students have launched a new national literary magazine, Arroyo Literary Review, focusing on, but not limited to, writers of the Bay Area.
New York Bridges
(for Walt, with love)
Keep your great earthworm-tunnels,
Keep your black depths, O underground, and the rattling steam through the soil,
Keep your pools of rainwater and the curious rats, and your cross-legged dime musicians,
Keep the cables lining the dark and the empty platforms of a permanent night;
Give me the rooftops—give me wooden water towers and old parapets invisible behind their graffiti!
Give me interminable lights—give me rivers—give me youths and madmen hanging out the windows!
Let me see the city while I’m suspended from the sky—let me dangle from Christmas streamers and crow!
Give me air and light—give me the Bridges of New York!
Give me the D-train with its wide orange eye that gazes forever on the shape and sway of Coney Island!
(The mermaids and carnivaliers call from the beaches—they swim upstream against the current,
Some waving, some singing, up at us on the train; we follow from their good example.)
Give me the pinnacles of the Brooklyn in a salt-spray dawn!
O move for me! O an ecstatic life, full of chatter and lightning!
The life of the huckster, bag-man, pole-gripping poet for me!
The bikes on the Williamsburg! the Roosevelt towers for me! the J and the Q and their hot silver blood!
The metal mouths of trains opening and closing, swallowing and spitting we rail-addled dreamers;
Nothing but people coming and going, every element but the prison of clay,
New York bridges like veins, umbilicals, the tramped-out procession of stories,
The twenty-four-hour symphony of steel and cement (even in the lowest hour of the moon,)
New York bridges, pressed up in sharp relief to the heavens!
New York bridges forever carry me.
Joseph Harker used to do melodramatic renditions of TV commercials as a kid, which turned into a career in college theatre, which went nowhere; so now he’s writing poetry instead. His work has appeared in qarrtsiluni, Assaracus, MediaVirus, and other fine publications; he has also just self-published his first chapbook, Greeks Bearing Gifts. He lives in New York, blogs at naming constellations, and wanders everywhere else.
Lace
by Carol Dorf
(after William Carlos Williams)
Nothing is what they say when they’ve
gone past wish into a kind of blankness
white hole of open time
Our pious suggestions cluster
like overblown chrysanthemums
weighing down their stems
This antidote to desire
to the white field that empties
into a single point
Until context disappears
like overwashed fibers laid out to dry
on brown summer grasses
Each flower’s center
questions color the way in the small
world of moles light is texture
Questions begin before speech,
that inquisitive babble, a small hand
pointing, gesture to the unidentified
When the world held wild and remote,
when the edges of the fields remained
uncultivated for the small creatures
How resilient, a gesture
Carol Dorf’s writing has appeared in Sin Fronteras, Canary, The Mom Egg, Sentence, The Prose Poem Project, Unlikely Stories, Helix, In Posse Review, Poemeleon, Fringe, The Midway, A Cappella Zoo, Feminist Studies, Heresies and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing.
Sound Catcher
After 39 years, this is all I’ve done.
Dylan Thomas’ final words
Dylan, Welsh god of the sea, what have you done
but drown yourself in sound and longing,
stroking the arched backs of words, seeking the ones
that curl together like cats on the tongue,
the ones that electrify the dark, that spark
the spongy dryness of the mind. But all your meanings
within meaning can not disguise the fact
you did not rage against the pain. You slid
down the narrow neck of anything you found,
glass and flesh alike, and you drowned, you
who knew why water throws itself against the shore,
spurred your own demise, taking your sweet syrup
of sound, half-hidden on that honey’d tongue
upon which all your words were hung.
Karen Stromberg is a minimalist who prefers the short poem, flash fiction and the ten-minute play. She has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes.
A Shaking Spear
by Louie Crew
My lover’s buns are nothing like a God’s.
Plate glass is far more rippled than his chest.
His six-inch fuse becomes his only rod.
With no cologne but rankest funk he’s blessed.
I have seen glistening men, hirsute or smooth,
but no alluring luster’s in his face.
And I’ve known even yokels less uncouth
clutching their men in graceless long embrace.
I like to hear my lover’s tuneful shower,
but any glories there are merely myths,
for though his songs indeed my spunk empower,
the truth is that he all too often lithps.
And yet I swear my man’s to me more real
than hunky clones who, unrehearsed, can’t feel.
Louie Crew (website) is an Alabama native and an emeritus professor at Rutgers. He lives in East Orange, New Jersey, with Ernest Clay, his husband of 37 years. To date, editors have published 2,157 of Crew’s poems and essays. He has written four poetry volumes: Sunspots, Midnight Lessons, Lutibelle’s Pew and Queers! for Christ’s Sake! Crew wrote the first openly gay materials ever published in Change Magazine, Christianity & Crisis, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Churchman, Fellowship Magazine, The Living Church, Metanoia, and Southern Exposure. He has been editor of special LGBTQ issues of College English and Margins. He serves on the editorial board of Journal of Homosexuality. For more about him, see the Wikipedia.
The Lyric Angel
after Rafael Albertí
She half believed him to be a man,
the traces of black hair on each knuckle of his hands,
reminiscent of her father’s fingers tapping
the darkening ivory of piano keys when she was six, seven.
He opened a familiar music in her.
She would come to him late afternoons
to watch the muscles in his back tighten, unfold,
like a man’s fists opening into prayer,
his whole body turned from her in thought, reading.
She watched the collar of his blue sweater
for a sign, for the pulse of artery in his neck. She wanted
no divine agency, only the flesh and bone
of a man’s hands pressed firm against her face.
She loved the blond, slatted back of the oak chair
she came to when he worked at his desk. Each slat curved,
separated by the exact distance of her own cupped palm.
Each, a picket in the gate to a garden taking root
in her head or chest or thighs.
One night she dreamed she was lost among books,
lay down among rows of shelves on the library’s tile floor,
and wrapped herself in the smell of old paper
until she found him there just above her,
his wide shoulders, bare back, a palpable pressure.
And for once she appreciated the terror of a Rilkean angel.
But even as a dreamer she knew her own dreaming state,
knew he was all words and typeset and eternal humming.
He could open a hallway in her chest, fill each muscle with light.
This was his job, great messenger of the erotic,
but he could not open her knees, bury his own hard flesh.
He must have been sent to instruct her in longing,
to open the old wound where language begins.
She knew she should be grateful,
should push back tears, remind herself to stand up,
gather the voices of books into her arms.
Robin Davidson’s poems and translations have appeared in 91st Meridian, AGNI, Literary Imagination, Paris Review, Tampa Review and Words Without Borders, as well as the Polish journal, Fraza. She is co-translator, with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, of The New Century: Poems from the Polish of Ewa Lipska, and has received, among other awards, a Fulbright professorship at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. She teaches literature and creative writing for the University of Houston-Downtown, and lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and their two adorable Chihuahuas.
Odes of Opposition
by Lisa McCool-Grime and Nancy Flynn
I. Ode of Opposition to Sylvia Plath’s Poem: “You’re”
I’m (Lisa Opposes Sylvia)
Anti-mime, grouchiest off my feet,
Hands away from planets, but sun-skinned,
Beaked as the birds. The fool-hardy
Flick-off toward a cuckoo’s break.
Unwound around myself as the thread,
Avoiding my light, like rodents avoid.
Chatty like a jack-o-lantern up til Christ-
Mas since All Saint’s Day,
Ah wide-spreader, your bloated dough.
Specific like hail but hidden from as secrets.
Closer than the Outback Steakhouse.
Smooth-stomached Eve, her homebodied worm.
Sprawled like the blossom but not far
As the bear outside the jelly belly.
The cuff for pufferfish, no slack.
Squat like Arborio rice.
Wrong, as the poorly-begun difference.
The scratched vinyl, without our mask off.
He’s (Nancy Opposes Sylvia)
Sticklike, speediest on his feet,
Hands on the ball, and sun-beaned,
Filled with a wish. His magic-touch
Palm raised in a beggar’s bowl.
Unspun round himself like a top,
Following his light as fireflies will.
Chattery as a magpie on the court
From dawn to every wisdom’s night.
O low-faller, her reedy lope.
Precise as a scar yet overlooked like rain.
Closer still than the heartbeat’s pulse.
Straight-front Adonis, her homeboy spawn.
Restless as a wasp and far-off, at sea
Like a gull on a brining tug.
A water jar of lotus, no waveforms.
Focused as a Buddhist monk.
Left, like a less-charged pole.
One smudged note and his ghost-trace, gone.
II. Ode of Opposition to William Carlos Williams’s Poem:
“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”
Mount St. Helens, May 18, 1980 (Nancy Opposes William)
Happiness was your rented field
when the old earth
ashed as it hadn’t ashed
a few times after and also
without the hot airs
that opened inside you that day.
5:30 p.m.
You died by your wife.
The tree plum was black yesterday
with scatterings of buds.
Scatterings of buds
fell down the plum trunk
and erased every sapling
red but no yellow
and the joy of your soul
was weaker than each
as if each wasn’t your sorrow
lately, yesterday you ignored one
so headed toward remembering.
Tomorrow your daughter will write you
how beyond the forests,
by the center of the thinning hedge
close to home, she smelled
marshes of black sludge.
You didn’t think you’d ever hate
to leave here
or rise above these dregs
or lift above the scorch, far-flung all.
A Bride’s Hymn After Autumn (Lisa Opposes William)
Joy was our shared home.
How the old woods
have rained though they rain
little since and still
without a hot shower.
What opened inside us that day?
One part of a day
you separated from your wife.
The brambles will be black tomorrow
without a single fruit.
A single fruit
bears a pear stem
but dulls no tree
to brown, none to green
and comfort from your hands
isn’t weaker than it
except that it is our grief
hence, tomorrow we will ignore it
yet stand close remembering.
Tomorrow our daughter will ask us
about a forest
surrounded by a thin meadow
nearby where she hears
birds with black feathers.
You think of yourself, would hate
to come here
or lift up this fruit
or rise up from a plowed field far away.
Nancy Flynn hails from the coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania and now lives in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has received the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and an Oregon Literary Fellowship; her second poetry chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, will be published in 2012. More about her writing and publications is at her website.
Lisa McCool-Grime loves Sappho, wallflower women, and collaborations. Her wallflower women are or soon will be in DIAGRAM, Splinter Generation, Verse Wisconsin and elsewhere. Her collaborations can be found at elimae, PANK, and Poemeleon. Tupelo Press awarded one of her poems first place in their “Fragments of Sappho” contest.
About their on-going “Odes of Opposition” series, Nancy and Lisa write: “We wanted to copy the hand of the masters, those poetic stars fixed into the contemporary discourse. We wanted to thumb our noses at them, oppose them word-for-word charting our own course. We wanted to read critically. And write creatively. All at once. Again, then again.
“Our oppositions to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were published in the collaborative issue of Poemeleon, Winter/Spring 2010. Our oppositions to Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein appeared in PANK’s Queer Two issue, November 2011.”
Identity Crisis
by Steve Wing
After the work of Jerry Uelsmann
Click on image to see a larger version
Steve Wing lives in Florida and has been a frequent contributor to qarrtsiluni. More about him can be found here.
Anti-Midas
by J.D. Smith
After Kay Ryan
Whatever he touched
would turn to dry dirt
or, worse,
a ferment of leaf mold,
great slops of mud,
silt and clay
interspersed with turds,
the rest sand and loam.
He shrank from throne and country
and died convinced of his defeat,
leaving the people to their fields,
which for once yielded
enough to eat.
J.D. Smith’s third collection, Labor Day at Venice Beach, will be published in 2012. In 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Periodic updates are available on his blog Smitroverse.
qarrtsiluni 