Archive
Apartments
by Rose Hunter
Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City (click to enlarge)
Rose Hunter is a writer who dabbles in picture taking. She posts some of them at her photo blog, Fotos del Dia.
Coals
by Lynnel Jones
Big Richard pokers the coals, toasts
heart and liver, sips the moon,
considers The Club, fine as any white man’s:
blues, barbecue and booze
up the back mountain.
No drugs, no back-room whores,
no revenue stamps, no income tax —
there’s the rub. He took the fall.
The deal? His partner cut it
with the Feds. They beat him down,
squeezed until he was as dry as ham in salt
but still he owes. The coals light up in bars
along the grain of the oak; five years
he counted them; he almost broke.
He taps his poker to the steady beat
of whip-poor-wills, savors the question
called by an owl. He’ll hunker there all night,
feed slivers of green pecan and peach
to the oak, tending the cure.
Lynnel Jones’s poetry is steeped in the joys and struggles of Minnesota’s immigrant mining community and the lives of the people of rural southern Virginia and Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. A people-watcher since childhood, above all she aspires to write poems accessible to the ordinary folks she writes about — and to do that with sensitivity, originality and gratitude.
Rubber
Passing the tire factory on the way
to school I’d move through pockets of haunted air,
the sudden warmth of unseen hands would part
across my face, wrist bones of smoke twisting
away. This is my fate, I’d think, only half
hating it, how my life was caught up
in machinery I’d heard yet never seen,
that constant comforting whir behind
painted-over windows. Across the street
in class I’d read about the honey-cured
flesh of pharaohs, the green glow that spilled
from the lab of Madame Curie, but still
nothing changed, even Giza and Paris
reeked with fumes of burning rubber.
Karina Borowicz’s forthcoming book, The Bees Are Waiting, was selected by Franz Wright for the 2011 Marick Press Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in AGNI, Poetry Northwest and The Southern Review.
Expelled
Pool closed, says the sign
on the door leading out.
A black canvas flaps
between the indoor (permitted)
and outdoor (forbidden) waters.
Although it is now officially safe
to plant tomatoes, the season
has not really started.
Sunshine, lounging on the canvas,
warms the water directly beneath it.
Even with my eyes closed, I know
I am passing the enticing opening.
I want to sneak under, then out,
but fear a lifetime banished by the Y.
All through my long laps, I swim
like a seal pup, in luscious, sunlit circles.
I am the yellow canary in the dining room,
peeking wistfully out the clear kitchen window
at the finches flitting on the thistle feeder.
I continue to trill, a teakettle’s whistle,
although I imagine cutting my bars with my sharp beak,
then nipping through the window glass, to hop
from top to bottom rung of the feeder, then up again.
I am the young prisoner, really just a boy, allowed
in the yard for the first time in six long months.
Cautiously, I pull a wild onion,
brush off the dirt, and chew.
Flitting from bar to bar,
I gnaw the green stalk, still warm from growing,
then, suddenly, dive under the flapping canvas,
escape from the cool cavern of the pool’s vault,
into the sun warmed sparkle.
The birds nesting in the rafters flee behind me,
holding their breaths for the first time,
plunging under the water, humming like dolphins.
One flips onto its back briefly, and spouts bubbles.
A whole lawn of wild onion tips
waves its feathers hello.
Dripping, we all climb out, and begin to feed,
caring little about the onion smell on our breaths,
the green remnants stuck
in our teeth, our beaks, our gills.
Ann Neuser Lederer (website) was born in Ohio and has lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky. Her nonfiction and poetry appear in journals such as Brevity, Diagram, Hospital Drive, and Cross Connect; anthologies such as The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, The Country Doctor Revisited: A Twenty-First Century Reader, and Best of the Net 2007; and three chapbooks: Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated, and Weaning the Babies. She is employed as a nurse in Kentucky.
Lock us up forever
Click on images to see larger versions.
lock us up forever VI redux
lock us up forever XI redux
lock us up forever XIII redux
Artist’s statement: These digitally rendered images are visual/poetic objects that are modeled in a three-dimensional virtual environment and texture mapped using real-world photographs, found image, and metaphorical allusion. This work is an ongoing, serial experiment creating narrative and poetic form in the visual world. They are multi-disciplinary in the sense that they encompass drawing, painting and sculpture techniques as well as poetic and textual form all in a single digital matrix.
Peter Ciccariello works at the interstices of creative intermedia, where process overlaps and defines form and form becomes the carrier for the birth and evolution of ideas. Inter-disciplinary and cross-genre, Ciccariello is an artist, poet, and photographer working with metaphor and allegorical memes. His work is concerned with the dynamics of language and image in 3-D digital environments. He blogs at Invisible notes, Liminal Spaces, and Hope Street, and has published his images in the book Uncommon Vision.
The Babinski
Monitors grind, and light from nowhere
comes soft as the sole of my aunt’s foot
somehow cleared of spur and callus
My aunt’s daughter strokes her hand, calls her name,
the blurred Rs of childhood returning
as she tries to override the bled-out brain
The nurse hisses don’t agitate the patient, chivies us out,
but my clinical thumbnail has already creased her sole
and got no answer. First-year, assessment of reflex:
if the toes don’t curl, well…
After thinking hard about this theme, Karen Greenbaum-Maya has decided to be quiet. This is not at all like her.
My Memory Palace
by Robbi Nester
The ancients found remembering was simple
if they built in memory a place to stash
each name or fact. I have no need
of this old tactic. The building rose itself,
no mere mnemonic, without my effort
or my will, needing no intention on my part
to make it stand, secluded, a palace
or a prison on a street not quite the one I knew.
For years, I wore the windows watching out,
aspiring to the world beyond this
faded square of sky, though sometimes
it might hint at nascent drama:
coiled green hose a lurking
mamba. And there, the borders
of a country yet to be discovered:
the spot I scratched into the wallpaper
beside my bed, hoping if I made it
big enough I could climb through, like
the children in the books I read,
entering another world.
The clothes hang still, waiting forever
to be worn. And there, my mother’s vanity,
where I would sit and gaze into the glass
trying on her earrings and her pearls, her
broad-shouldered jackets, inspecting
photographs of relatives I’d never meet,
all this spreads before me, each room
multiplied in memory, a sheaf of dining rooms;
the living room in all its incarnations.
Here, the French provincial sideboard, gift
of a wealthy relative, rules the room;
and now, eclipsed—an avalanche of envelopes
encroaches. And now the roaches
and the rats, the bags of trash I helped to clear away.
No people walk these rooms; no conversations
can be heard. Harsh words and gentle ones
do not endure. Only the doors and windows
where I walk in dream and reverie
fan out like drafts, an intricate origami I could
never fathom. Now that these walls
are someone else’s legacy, I can never leave.
Robbi Nester lives and does yoga in Southern California and blogs at Shadow Knows.
They Say the Spring Breeze Has Come
For Liu Xiaobo
“Silence is still the story of the East.”
Bei Dao
The spring breeze that has seen him
through the tiny barred window
now carries his thoughts, his sorrow
along the river, eastward, nightward.
Through the tiny barred window,
he recites to the world forbidden words.
Along the river – Eastward – Nightward,
ashy faces flow, chanting a dirge.
He recites to the world forbidden words
by tapping his fingers on black bricks.
Ashy faces chanting a dirge
until they are renamed martyrs on escarpment.
By tapping his fingers on black bricks,
he bears the pain of seeing light.
Until martyrs are spoken of on escarpment,
he waits for a hole to break the sky.
He bears the pain of seeing light,
caused not by brightness, but opacity.
He waits for a hole in the sky,
and will call it an all-seeing eye.
They say the spring breeze has come, weightless.
It brings his forbidden words of might.
And they say it returns with the image of an empty
chair reserved for a silenced martyr.
Download the podcast (reading by Nic Sebastian)
Nicholas YB Wong (website) is the author of Cities of Sameness (Desperanto, forthcoming) and the winner of several awards, including the Sentinel Quarterly Poetry Competition and nominations for the Best of the Net and Best of the Web anthologies in 2010. He is currently a poetry editor for THIS Literary Magazine and a poetry reader for Drunken Boat.
We dressed like Muslims
scarves and black abayas
beautiful shoes
no makeup yet under our hijabs
our hair was long and glorious
we were deliberate and pious
we lowered our gaze
and remained chaste
the world moved quickly
we moved slowly
through our five daily prayers
our husbands were enigmas
coming and going
through a curtain
touching us as if strangers
grateful for food, children
and purdah
we were God conscious and
conscientious
we lived in our safe world
of sisters, masjid, and Arabic
holding our breath
from Ramadan to Ramadan
Abaya – long traditional over-dress
Hijab – head scarf
Purdah – seclusion of women
Masjid – mosque
Ramadan – holy month, dedicated to fasting and prayer, that absolves previous sins
Khadija Anderson returned in 2008 to her native Los Angeles after 18 years exile in Seattle. Khadija’s poetry has been published in print and online extensively and her poem “Islam for Americans” was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize. Khadija holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.
qarrtsiluni 