Archive
You Bring Out the Punjabi In Me
by Preeti Kaur
with respect to Sandra Cisneros’ “You Bring Out the Mexican In Me“
you bring out the punjabi in me
the bloody border
the mustard field bitter
the green revolution GMO seed
the grand trunk diaspora
i proclaim myself the sixth river
for you
you resuscitate the drowned punjabi
lover from exiled rivers in me
flood of forgotten
ranjha, i am your heer
i am the pardesi
letter written in ugly english
i am the past written the next unwritten
ranjha, i am your digital heer
late night emails & chats spilled onto screen
every word my own i have stolen nothing i have stolen everything
you, ranjha, i am stealing you
yes, you drag out the punjabi in me
language balanced atop head
an attache of oora/aira/eeri
my tongue ready
to conquer retroflex for you
i would forsake the greatest battles of all time
aloo gobi vs. gobi aloo chawl vs. chaval
for you
yes, raja ji for you
i would steal back
the kohi noor off england’s crown
set up my own auction at sotheby’s
sell off every asset
including the maharaja’s lost coins, swords, even his liver
to the highest bidder in a white hat
all to fund my dowry for you
you
you habibi
you pirate the komagatu maru out of me
hold my ship on your shores
dare/ send back my immigrant cargo heart
i will resist (with bullet!)
dare/ send back my immigrant cargo heart
i will obey (with breast!)
mithu
you mix up the mexidu forbidden out of me
i crave your territory alien land law
imperial over my valley
break into yuba city root peach trees
a thousand san joaquin spawn
our only proof of that angel
island tryst
grown into millionaire agro turbans on tractors
a seed we let loose all over the globe
rrrrrRrrrrRrrrrrrRrrrrr
yes yes yes
sonu
you burn the inquilabi in me
ghadar is a language
i speak only to you
pacific mist we breathe
the subcontinent to freedom
from our san francisco dreams
hidden under guise of fog
tag taxis with saffron orange bumper stickers
ZINDABAAD!!! ZINDABAAD!!!
perhaps the morning pooni the start of our rebellion
radioactive jalebis the danger
we eat
yes, you spin the sufi out of me
meandering wanderer wonder in me
my clothes black
headphones blasting nusrat
freakin’ ali khan all night
i am drowning in your drink rabbi
while the destination remains far
a long road i do not travel because of you
instead i write cheap poetry
sleep away this life for you
this life for you
you bring out the sikh in me
the hindu in me the muslim in me
heck even the christian convert in me (and the communist atheist, i will never forget)
in you, i see no stranger
i will write your name
into every holy text
my prayer the night moan
i am floating in sohni’s mud pot
riding trade winds to mehiwal
bargaining gold coins for holy love
oh my waheguru, eating my own fat thigh for food
as i tread across five rivers and one thousand oceans
surfing solar winds
across the seven universes
for you
all for you
shiv kumar, THIS is the condition of the fakeer
haan ji, ji
ji haan, ji
anything you say, ji
for you i’d pay off every grain to my name
for a kabootar visa
illegal stow away through the ionian sea to valait
escape the suffocation of southall
to hustle burberry purse replicas
beneath the eiffel tower
declare an undying love for the price of a euro
jump an archipelago of countries
gambia roos mexico kanayda umreeka
like my messy kiss
skip cheek to chin to lip to tongue
this journey, for you
yes you bring out the punjabi in me
i’d start a bhangra competition
in every city i heard your name
soho road where ever you walk
electric tumbi your heartbeat
i’d take hold of the stage
re enact some village i’ve never seen
screw lightbulbs into air water the fields twirl my flippin’ praandi
box myself into every poonjab corner i could
bind myself into this prison on my own will
for you
you
these ribs a jail of dried rivers
for you
break these bones
you will find both my heart my liver
and i will sing freedom
Preeti Kaur is a poet from California. She trained with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. She has had poetry featured in The Loft’s spoken word CD ¿Nation of Immigrants?, in the South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection and the Calcutta-based Sikh Review.
Still Life
for e.e. cummings
—how deep and many a bottom
have spread themselves
so wide
upon your four and wooden
sturdy cockeyed
legs twin
sets (the one
in front so rapt
urous the one in back—
coy—displays
coquettishness) the flat
hole low
—how do
they do
it this duoistic
set of
spandrels corners quite
simply
by their back their shared
and common
space
spritely exquisite
ly hand
hewn by faeries right
angles—just
slightly—capped
by wide bands
hold
up high your bottom
s nymphs—
Jeff Fearnside’s poetry has appeared in Permafrost, Blue Earth Review, Assisi, ProtestPoems.org, and The Los Angeles Review. His poems were twice named finalists in Glimmer Train’s national Poetry Open contests. His chapbook Lake, and Other Poems of Love in a Foreign Land, winner of the Standing Rock Cultural Arts 2010 Open Poetry Chapbook Competition, was published in 2011. (See his website for more details.) He lives with his wife and two cats in Prescott, Arizona.
Virginia Roots
after Lenard D. Moore’s “Postcard to an Ecologist”
Last month,
I read your
postcard –
a snake you killed –
and it made me think
of hiking
in Virginia foothills
as a young cubscout,
of climbing up a ravine
where a root punched out
and how, when I grasped it,
I felt warm and dry skin.
How the snake did not move,
but waited until I climbed by.
Eric M. R. Webb is an MFA candidate at Old Dominion University, where he also runs the Writers in Community service program and works on the Poetry editorial collective for Barely South Review. He recently published with Thunderclap Magazine in issue 7, and has an interview with Mark Halliday forthcoming in the craft issue of Barely South Review. He posts most of his academic work and other thoughts online at Poetic Idealism.
You Are
by Lia Brooks
Egglike, safest in your shell,
Limbs round the spark, and sun-jawed,
Warmed like a chick. A hopefulness
Feather-spread on a gull’s soar.
Coiled in your wish like a spring,
Searching your view like eagles do.
Blind as a potato from the harvest
Of Autumn to the last plate of July.
O high-flyer, my tiny pie.
Lost as dune rain and wanted like daylight.
Far from morning as midnight.
North-stayed hands, our stopped watch.
Caught as a breath and vacant
Like a zero on a graph.
A crackle of bark, all breaks.
Trembling as a birthday jelly.
White, like a moment gone.
A tea time, with your sunny face on.
with apologies, Sylvia Plath, to you and “You’re“
Lia Brooks, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has had poems published in various magazines and journals in the U.K. and the U.S. These include Poetry London, Lily Lit Review, California Quarterly, Magma Poetry newsletters, American Poetry Journal, South and Penumbra. She was short-listed for the New Leaf Short Poetry Prize and has been part of two ekphrastic events in collaboration with painters in Indiana and California. She lives in Southampton, U.K., with her partner and two sons.
A Philippic
after Phil Levine
Kids, you don’t know what sweat is.
You with your trust fund BMWs.
I never bought a car Detroit didn’t make.
So there, you whiners. And what
did you come out to the desert to see?
A man, like other men. I can’t baptize
you into poetry. You have to put in
your time: the Coke factory, a chicken farm.
Your sleep has to be dreamless
and earned. Even then, you’ll still
have your pedicures, your French
fountain pens. But where do you think
this hard callous of mine came from?
Not from a writing instrument,
I can assure you. It was years on the line
when I came home wasted yet teeming
with verses. I sat up all night, my No. 2
lead pencil (made in America)
filling the blue lines of a cheap notebook
with priceless stuff. Everyone
in my family was an artist manqué.
And it was left to me to ventriloquize
a whole silent generation’s voices.
The 50’s, yeah, they pretty much stank.
If you didn’t land on a list of some kind
you were a coward. Or worse. Maybe
you spent too much time in Montmartre
instead of sweating it out here, baking in a heartless heartland,
cooling in the shadows cast by the abandoned
steel plants and metal silos, empty, impotent
chambers of the post-industrial US of A.
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.
Channeling Gertrude
by Tom Konyves
Everyone hears voices.
The voice I heard that night was the voice she used to write the names she used in writing.
“make a name for yourself”
what if the name makes the sound of a smoke alarm when it makes us listen up to the sound, it makes us rush toward the sound like a long lost one, one who has been lost to us without a sound, now there is a sound of one who may have been lost only to us, not without a name, but a name whose sound makes someone stand up and turn to us rushing toward them like a long lost someone whose name is the same
now what if the name is the same as someone else who has not been lost to us, but with us all the while and he or she is the same one whose face is so familiar that we would recognize them no matter where they were, he or she, and even if they came up behind us in a sudden wind whose touch was not immediately familiar but whose face was as familiar as could be
and if the sound of the name is recognized by someone who hears the name and suddenly the wind dies and the sound of the name is clear to us but not to someone who still hears the wind rushing to meet them at the train station
who has not recognized the sound of the name he or she hears at the train station, can the sound be recognized to make someone turn into the wind and still hear clearly, the name whose sound is the same as when they left and were lost to us who will always recognize the name and the sound of the wind rushing toward the train station
and the more we hear the sound of the name the more we begin to recognize that it is the same name we have always heard from a distance and it continued to sound in our ears as if we had always heard the name, no not a sudden wind, would make us turn toward the voice who said the name because it was familiar
or if it was so familiar that the name was the same as so many other names whose sound, like the wind in a train station, where the sound of names and places and time and faces are many, so many
now they say that you can’t go home again because it is not the same home you left when you were lost to someone in a place and time we recognize when we hear someone speak about this or that place or time and it is always the past where it is all so familiar and even if it is not we don’t have to be so careful about what we do
if the name is familiar and we recognize the sound as someone who has left us for far away where the past is unfamiliar and the sound is not one we recognize but one whose sound makes the sound of a whistle, we turn to face the direction of the sound and if he or she is different from the one who is lost to us, we turn and return to the home where he or she is sitting on the steps and smiling
Tom Konyves writes, “An unusual experience prompted the writing of this poem — hearing the voice of someone we have never met. For me, it was the voice of Gertrude Stein. I managed to capture only one brief statement: ‘make a name for yourself.’ What followed was a torrent of words that astonished me; it was like being caught up in a whirlwind. Almost faster than I could record them, repeated phrases — with minute modifications — swirled through my mind and onto the page. When it was done, it was as if the words had been written by another. I then truly understood Rimbaud’s famous phrase, ‘Je est un autre.'”
Based in Montreal until 1983, Tom Konyves is most recognized for his mid-seventies association with The Vehicule Poets — a period distinguished by Dadaist/Surrealist/experimental writings, performance works and “videopoems.” In 1978, he coined the term “videopoetry” to describe his multimedia work, and is considered to be one of the original pioneers of the form. His books of poetry include No Parking (Vehicule Press), Poetry in Performance (The Muses Company), Ex Perimeter (Caitlin Press) and Sleepwalking Among The Camels: New and Selected Poems (The Muses Company). He is currently living in White Rock, British Columbia, teaching Visual Poetry at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Pencil & Sand Dance
Beginning with a line by Lisa Jarnot from a poem she began with a line by Frank Lima
And how terrific it is to see the stars inside the radios,
how terrible, to read their dials and find pencils,
pens, markers; how terrific it is to write
with the radios’ pencils, unsharpened and blended
to make this night; how terrific it is to use the radios’ pencils
to draw clouds in the sky, as if they appeared by
the breath of a sheep in a field, the breath of God; how terrific
the field peppered with sheep and sand dunes, the
shadows of the stars etched into their surfaces—
and how terrific it is to see the stars inside the sand.
How terrific the sand, sculpted from the scalloped foam
that edges the sea; and how terrific it is to eat sea scallops
in Boston in May, their jaws pried open—how terrific
their tongues, how terrible their silence—how terrific it
is to eat scallops in silence in Boston in May.
And how terrific it is to sculpt the sand on which the stars are etched,
how terrific the toes that undertake this task, how terrible
their purpose in balancing a step. How terrific it is to step
in sand and step again, reading the poems written
with each of the radios’ pencils; how terrible the importance
to these poems of the radio, the sheep, the sand, the scallops, the stars.
Kate Marchetto is a native of Eastern Pennsylvania. She is an alumna of the University of Pittsburgh and a current candidate for the Queens University of Charlotte Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Marchetto serves as the Editor for the New Fraktur Arts Journal, which is available (along with her chapbook, Quite Quiet) online. She lives with her husband in Norfolk, Virginia.
Fall
by Mike Puican
after “Spring” by Gerald Stern
The dawn the dawn after a night-long rain the poem
the one by Gerry Stern the alley the alley the
one I turn down as fallen leaves loosen the brightly painted girl
of the waterfall within me of whom
I’ve been silent for decades the linden the linden
slowly dying that later will return alive and Eros
standing naked among the parked cars. What does it want of me,
shameless, unraveling the thread-like thing woven
from the bright intersections of avenues, the hand
of the wild-eyed street preacher that comforts no child, the touch
the touch that speaks both cherishing
and farewell? I watch an airplane float through
a billboard on my left. I slip
past the commuters waiting for a bus as quietly as
an old man coming in for supper.
Where is my plot? A chorus of locusts
sings out; a woman with red shoes and pocketbook
spins; the streets intersecting Clark Street scatter and disentangle.
Mike Puican has been published in the New England Review, Michigan Quarterly, and previously here at qarrtsiluni, among other places.
pale imitation
by Anna Dickie
| I | last leaf on the cherry tree
the colour of a blackbird’s beak
|
| II | blackbird
silent in briar the river must be frozen yet
|
| III | blackbird
out in the darkness take me back
|
| IV | I know when I leave
your dark flight will beat my bounds
|
| V | the whistle of a blackbird
above another urban dawn
|
| VI | three blue-green eggs
which to prefer, new life or the promise of it
|
| VII | blackbird and woman
the perfect marriage of blossom and thorn
|
| VIII | our figs are ripe
the blackbird says
|
| IX | driving in low light
heart stopped by a blackbird’s swoop
|
| X | dusk in the orchard
where a vigorous shadow is knifing fruit
|
| XI | a blackbird scolds
and she breaks off her homily, and puts away her speech
|
| XII | a man, a woman, a blackbird
winged bit players in a pantomime
|
| XIII | many black birds,
one blackbird |
Note: Anna writes of the European blackbird, Turdus merula, which is in the thrush family, rather than the North American species, which are icterids. For further information on this common British bird please see here.
Download the podcast
Sound of the blackbird by inchadney at Freesound.org (Creative Commons Attribution licence)
Anna Dickie started writing poetry in her late forties and has been published widely. Her first pamphlet Heart Notes was published by Calder Wood Press, and last autumn Imprint, a collaboration with fellow poet Irene Brown, was published by jaggnath press. Her poem “Snow” has just been anthologised in Not Only the Dark, a book in aid of Shelterbox, a charity providing worldwide disaster relief, and she recently took part in BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Workshop with the poet, writer and broadcaster Ruth Padel. She also performs with a poetry group called Poetrio.
qarrtsiluni 