Archive
Vegetative detention
by Steve Wing
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Steve Wing is a visual artist and writer whose work often focuses on extraordinary aspects of the everyday world. He lives in Florida and works at an academic institution. More about Steve and his work can be found here.
Imprisonment–Her Residence
Crows caw, let their
scissor beaks gnash
the air in anger.
She’s in the kitchen,
living under anklet
spells and the jingle
of her gold bangles
from her to-be-mother-
in-law.
Gas stove hisses,
snarls under the pressure
of the pan, where
her story has to be
written under the
ladle’s base, made
bigger and bigger
into rice pancakes,
edited with Gingelly
oil. It’s complete.
The fumes need to
wander between those
black window bars,
She counts in the
abacus of incarceration.
Something falls on
the green roof, she
looks up, her eyes
can move if not
her body. Crows
have left with
her story chunks.
The gold bangles
seem heavy and
loose on her wrists.
Is it possible to
escape through
this circumference
or is it just
another fatalistic
game chalked out
by Saturn imprints
in astrological
tic-tac-toe boxes?
Nithya Raghavan is pursuing her third year BBA at Heriot-Watt University, Dubai. Her hobbies are reading and writing. Her poems have been published in poemhunter.com, fictionpress.com (pen name: Ghost of words), Muse India, Kritya and Asia Writes. She has also published articles for Nxg and The Hindu, letters to the editor in Khaleej Times and Gulf News, and a column in Khaleej Times.
A Theology of an Autistic Body
I.
The florescent sun overhead threatens
to take your eyes for spoils; solar flares work their way up past
the bone cloister wall behind the skin of your forehead
and into the abbey, where they scorch everything in sight. Pull the shades,
offer prayers. Walk a little bit faster. Grab
what’s on the shopping list and get the hell out of there:
all the while, you compose your litanies out of
your own fast-forwarding footsteps.
II.
You curse Eve for her predilection
for believing a smooth character with a forked tongue
and a good pickup line: the clothing canopies next to your skin,
woven and torture-made, hold in the sweaty rain inside. There is
no rising above the clouds to relieve your saturated self
and your baked, burning soul. Above the
nerve-and-sweat thunderstorm, the acrylic, wool, or polyester needles
dig in to stitch a worsted version of you,
doing their best imitation of St. Rose of Lima’s glass, thorn, and stone bed:
and you are begging for the relief of a hairshirt. You wonder
if prescriptions for penance were pre-written into your RORA gene before
you broke forth into this skin and this life.
III.
You have only one wall around your perimeter,
and it is made out of silent and thick concrete block
now worn to a haggard and bleary-eyed gray. You weren’t built
with glass walls, wooden walls, dry wall, or even beautiful brick walls
of burnt umber, carnelian, and auburn; it’s either concrete or nothing.
On the days where the walls break down, everything gets through
and your territory is invaded by armies of
other people’s sad, nervous, and angry. You become the soldiers
flooding your skin, your stripped open telegraph wire nerves.
Confusion. Jumble. Sanctity violated. The anchorites in your cells
flee away, screaming in protest.
IV.
It is up to you to spread your Gospel.
You’ve been writing it since you were three. Or maybe eight.
Or maybe twelve. But no matter: the theologians
put quill to parchment and began taking dictation
from the Throne Room behind your eyes, and then passed the materials
on to the monks, who then crafted illuminated manuscripts made from
vellum, ochre, and cinnabar; lampblack and azurite;
gold and silver leaf.
All the materials, handmade out of you. You crafted them
from the pictures, encyclopedia pages, equations, and musical notes
you smuggled into the hermetic grottos inside your skull.
You, the obsessed prophet,
with a computer mind and a glass-shatter heart,
dedicate yourself to passing out copies of your Gospel,
trying to show friends, family, and passing strangers
how the curve and angle of their gilded letters catch the light just so. Some
take the manuscripts with eyes and fingers of awe and wonder;
some toss them into the bloated watery gutters by their feet;
and some turn your offerings away; but no matter. You,
the emerging cloistered from the Holy Order of Autism,
transcribed that Gospel in your enviable single focus.
You keep passing out the manuscripts,
letting each curve, each angle, each illustration, and each glint of gold
be revealed, delicate and brilliant,
in the light of each newborn sun
and of the eyes of your fellow disciples.
Nicole Nicholson was called to poetry as a teenager and has never left since. In addition to winning a 2010 Naturally Autistic People Award, her work has been featured in MediaVirus Magazine, Poets for Living Waters and Awe in Autism. She regularly blogs her poems at Raven’s Wing Poetry and is also a contributor to We Write Poems. Nicole currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with her fiancé.
Awaiting Trial
Scuffed floor tile, peeling paint, crumbling cinderblock; every edge broken with time and abuse. County jail is depressing, as jails are meant to be.
To get there, you go to the third floor, above the courthouse, past food machines stocked by someone with no interest in nutrition. The walls are covered with NO SMOKING signs and invitations to join recovery groups for all the standard kinds of human misery. There are ads for bail bondsmen and one smiling woman, who wears a strapless evening gown, as if she’s rushed from a fabulous soiree to spring someone from the slammer.
You walk through the corridors, past lawyers, legal secretaries and the others. Three hundred-pounders in butt-sprung sweatpants, dragging dirty toddlers, sullen, zitty teens with jeans as big as parachutes and vacant-eyed straw-haired girlfriends with tattoos on their ankles. These are your people now. They’ve come — just like you — to visit their own (presumably) presumed innocent (choose one: violent, non-violent) criminal.
Still walking, you overhear talk of money woes, diets, funny things that happened in court, plans gone awry, car trouble, dog bites and plenty of she-done-him-wrong. These aren’t private discussions. When you’re in jail — even as a visitor — there are no secrets.
The first time you step inside the double doors and see the battered cubicle where a bank of TV screens form a backdrop for the jailer on duty, you know your life is forever changed. Something’s been taken away. Even though you’re not guilty and even though your particular criminal might be innocent, nobody believes it, not for a minute. Everybody knows he wouldn’t be in this mess if he weren’t guilty and you are his (choose one: mother, sister, whatever). Right? Ipso facto, you and his whole damn family are guilty as hell, which explains why they keep you waiting so long, even after you’ve filled out the little form that tells them who you are and proves you have some purpose in visiting the dab of shit they keep in a cell somewhere.
So you stand and wait, or there’s a bench, a rickety wooden thing where you can sit, if it’s not already crowded with other lowlife scum waiting for their moment to visit their personal dab of shit. And if you’ve still got some notion that you’re not like them, because after all, you have a college degree, your husband has tenure, and your middle son is on the honor role at Berkeley. Furthermore, you’ve got two platinum Visa cards in your wallet and you’ve never committed any kind of crime in your entire life. Well, honey, that’s not what counts in this neck of the woods. Because the skinny babe next to you with the black eye and the weird scars on her forehead? She’s your equal here. In fact, she’s got an edge, because she knows the ropes and you’re just a penal system virgin.
The jailhouse is a world of buzzers. Get used to it. A nerve-shredding ZZZZzzz! sends you inside the visiting area. Once the heavy steel door clangs shut, you cannot leave until your time is up, not even if you’re sick or have to pee. Not even if the person you’ve come to visit refuses to speak to you. You’re stuck here, for at least thirty minutes, divided from your (choose one: child, husband, whatever) by a thick glass partition. So thick this might as well be a TV transmission from the moon. So thick you can only talk through a phone that smells like a sewer. A phone, which may or may not, work.
He hasn’t seen the sun for a year and a half. There are no windows in his cell. The light is all fluorescent. And he is so pale, so white–like the sheets he tried to hang himself with. But you try not to think of that now. And you’ve forgiven the friend who said maybe it would be better if he had killed himself.
His hair is greasy and matted. Maybe they won’t let him have a comb yet. Maybe he’d sharpen it and do himself (or someone else)harm. There are worse things than uncombed hair. The orange, jail-issued jumpsuit means he’s considered dangerous. His medication makes him jumpy. They haven’t got it fine-tuned for him. The jailhouse doctor isn’t really any good, otherwise why would he be here? Surely, he didn’t grow up dreaming of ministering to criminals. He’s here because he isn’t good enough to be anywhere else. But who are you to have such thoughts? After all, you’re not good enough to be anywhere else either.
If you’re lucky, you have an upbeat chat with your kid. Or husband or boyfriend or whatever the relationship is. Was. You try to keep a mental list of safe things to talk about. Maybe you’ve even jotted a few ideas on the back of an envelope while you were waiting. Things that won’t upset him or you. Because there’s nowhere to go in here, no private place to shed tears. Still, it happens. Grown men sob and smash their fists — or their heads — into the wall.
You don’t want to waste the talk on weather. What does he care about that? His weather’s the same every single day.
Is the phone tapped? Someone (the 1st lawyer) said Yes. Someone else (the 3rd lawyer) said No. Do you take the average? Sometimes you think, just go ahead. Ask him “Why? Why did you do it?” Let’s finally have The Goddamn Truth! Let Big Brother or the phantom phone-priest — whoever’s there, lurking in the wire-y void — hear those explanations, expiations, permutations, of guilt, innocence, or whatever lies between.
But you don’t ask why. You’re afraid to hear the answers, afraid to tip the scale. You cannot be the cause of whatever happens next.
And long before the trial begins, this is what you come to know: There’s no absolution for insanity. Truth is irrelevant. His life is over. Only the penance matters.
Linda Stewart-Oaten’s other fiction and non-fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Eureka Literary Magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, Barbaric Yawp, The Sun, CollectedStories.com, Prime Number and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a sprawling novel.
Goldfish and water lily under ice
by Lucy Kempton
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Lucy Kempton is British, living in Brittany with husband and dog, and sometimes teaching English. She blogs at box elder — subtitled “meanderings of a displaced dilettante” — and the microblog Out with Mol. She co-edited qarrtsiluni’s Water issue with Katherine Durham Oldmixon.
in a no-win zone
we remain ever in six-x-six rooms, on ice, unseen :
we consume no sun or moon views : we sew our
concise seam, same as ever : we receive no new air,
never roam, never run across a wren, a sure omen :
we once were warriors : now our sorrows rain on
us : our rosier news is no nooses : we mourn ruinous
memories, mine rue, see no surcease : woe is we :
some insane sin or crass crime means we weave our
remorse in an iron maze, women, men in an ominous
zoo : we seem mean so we can survive, a zero sum, no
score, or worse, we owe : nervous, we are unsure our
voices can save us : we scream, more room now : we
vow, no more war : our vices over, we are sore users :
wave au revoir : soon we resume our ravenous music
Evie Shockley has two books of poetry: the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006). Her poems and literary criticism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She co-edits jubilat and teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Freedom from Fear
Three words chalked on a blackboard
in a quiet lane in a small village
in a county south of the city,
the bold powdered strokes larger
than life in the draining light,
the doorstep a glimmer of white.
There is bitter chill in the air,
my face is a tight mask, no-one
else is on foot, few cars pass.
This could be the dwelling raided
at dawn, the children of asylum
seekers taken to a locked cell,
re-living the nightmare, father
bundled into one van, mother, sick
with fear, hustled into another,
her arms around them all through
the twists, turns, lurches, the pause
at a perimeter fence, key clang doors,
the destination just north of the city,
on the outskirts of a county town,
in a country that claims to be home.
Helen Overell has had work published in magazines including Staple, The Interpreter’s House, The Frogmore Papers and Acumen. Her first collection, Inscapes & Horizons, was published by St Albert’s Press.
Neon in a Jar
by Susan Elbe
based on Underwater C-Scape (Anemone), 2006, Pae White
Electro-luminescent wire in a plastic container
Buzzing at the glass, honey
with the sting still in,
a river’s strong green, fire
following a tree-line,
blue prairie wind whistling through.
Kneeling inside, helpless
in the hands of good-time gods,
their hocus-pocus,
held rapt by this weather, we are lit
with lightning and no rain,
our eyes, the stubs of burnt-out stars,
no escape from our reflections.
Susan Elbe (website) 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, Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books). She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Guilty
by Don Schroder
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
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Don Schroder is an Allentown, Pennsylvania-based travel and nature photographer. Whether shooting macro, telephoto or wide angle, Don tries to find the perspectives that capture not only the beauty of the surroundings but also the essence. When the two fall into place is when he is most satisfied with the image. To see more of his work, visit donschroder.com. Contact him for custom ink-jet prints in varying sizes.
Sentences and Corrections
by James Brush
The guy from the attorney general’s office
blamed the nouns, sources of all trouble—
people, places, things.
Combined with certain verbs—
assault, distribute, trespass and possess—
these nouns form gangs of complex sentences,
fragments of lives half-lived, and run-ons
rambling through the detritus of car crash lives.
The simplest, though, tell of kids locked up,
looking out at the free, positions of attention
in the parking lot, half-listening
to mockingbirds refining their own syntax,
as they mimic the ringing fire alarm
while we wait to go back inside
where we’ll try, again, writing
sentences that don’t mimic the past,
sentences that aren’t destinies.
James Brush lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, cat, newborn son and two rescued greyhounds. He teaches English in a juvenile correctional facility. You can find him online at Coyote Mercury, where he keeps a full list of publications.
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