Archive
Old Professions
POET: I told them to look for the right words in the bluest place. Some turned to the sky. Some observed an odd bruise on an old one. My star students closed their eyes. I knew even if they did not find words, they found sparkling black.
CARPENTER: There were no new nails. We burned down houses and shifted ashes to reclaim old nails. But the houses had been fixed with wooden pegs. So I told the boys to make nails of forks and spoons and wedding rings.
CLOCKSMITH: One was two and two was three. What’s the difference? One hour was no better or worse than another. Only the shadow of a dying tree remained loyal to time. The girls were most stubborn. How do you make twenty-five out of twenty-four? They pouted.
COBBLER: If you run out of cowhide, there’s always pigskin. Or the hides from dogs or goats or sheep. If it came down to it, you could peel your skin off your own thighs for shoes, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
SINGER: It was easy to teach them to sing. It was less easy to teach them to sing with joy. How could I teach them something I didn’t know? My melodies were suspected. We sang songs of frogs, of cranes, of bats.
COBBLER: The fact was, we didn’t have anywhere to walk to anyway.
CLOCKSMITH: And since we didn’t know what day it was, why track the hours?
CARPENTER: Our team built seventeen houses but there was nobody to live in even one of them.
POET: We gnawed on the words we did not forget. The words became smaller but never lost their flavour.
by Tammy Ho Lai-ming and Reid Mitchell
Reading by Dave Bonta – Download the MP3
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Everything Simple Becomes Complex
The phones are dead, our children, unreachable,
unless that’s one of them crying in the street.
Everything simple has become complex.
I should’ve known we’d be abandoned
to vandals and the weather,
and, before heartbreak had vaporized,
admitted to the priesthood of grief,
but my thoughts were taken up with other things,
the advantages of probity versus confession.
Now the three-legged black dog next door,
moved by the poor moon’s blistered face,
growls all night in grisly sympathy.
by Howie Good
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Mother Contemplates the Apocalypse
Some days are like that — everything
means something:
two parallel pits in fresh snow, filled with black
ice and surrounded by sediment, by rock
created
in eruption; a perpendicularly driven bread
truck gliding down the road’s middle
while traffic in each direction scatters; four dark basses that scuttle
up slippery stairs
without a missed beat; little knots
of black-shelled figures
at every corner waiting with the same expectant faces,
each gaze pinned
on the horizon, with a regularly-timed
pulse of eye
to wrist to road in the measure of one hardly-noticeable sigh;
the bus that never arrives; the runaway dog;
the lengthening knives hanging from every roof’s edge.
by Wendy Vardaman
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From the Revelation of St. John the Divine
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
My friends Frances and Nicolas McDowall (the Old Stile Press) asked me to think of a book I’d like to illustrate which they could print and publish. I’d always been fascinated by the thunderous words and hallucinatory imagery of Saint John’s Apocalypse, so this is the project I suggested. They were enthusiastic about it.
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
I decided to try and create a sense of being overwhelmed by a flood of words and images and repetitions, so I photocopied the whole text in various sizes and then made a collage of words or sentences, sometimes repeated, and drew on top of this text background in black ink and gouache. The whole of the text is there, but not always visible. Nicolas made blocks from my originals and printed them wonderfully on his hand-press. We designed a triptych binding and an edition of 150 copies was published by the Old Stile Press. Details and a slideshow of the whole book can be seen here.
The Four Horsemen
Nothing was too small to start so much.
The revelation was somewhere in between:
A breath, a thought, a shiver felt before a touch
Which tells you just how much the world has grown,
With all its intricacy and excrescences:
Flesh — fat and vulnerable — and rocks turned wise
With weather. While, wide ahead, the desert dances
In its greedy heat and whitens in surprise
At mirage images. And people swarm,
Breeding money in vaults, offices and dark bedrooms.
And harbours with boats bemused by calm
Await the ferreting claw of storms.
And in towns, where bombs explode, the question comes
In fragments, mouthed by voices lost to reason,
Through endless, mirrored, interconnecting rooms,
Where the horsemen give no answer but gallop on.
by Joe Hyam
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Satan Crushed by St. Michael
The Juke Box Needle Hovers Over ‘Could We Start Again Please’ from the “Jesus Christ Superstar” Soundtrack
Each lyric douses Jesus in light waves and sound particles.
The 45’s concentric grooves capture and release
the bar’s stale fluorescent glow, as much a miracle as any.
The many feet, the sagging arms, define the space.
Jesus parts the throng, laying hands on strangers’ thighs.
We become germs and weariness begging for soap, heat and water.
The music starts again, this time without a source.
Jesus looks up, his eyes crackled marbles ushering light
into the bowls of his retinas, small imploding suns.
Elsewhere rags soak in kerosene, entire blocks catch fire,
old padlocks corrode and release all the inmates.
Jesus hears every cry as glossalalia. He stutters into song.
Pretty words won’t live past his teeth. Hard ones marry music.
Jesus taps out rhythm in sudden necessity, raises his arms like driftwood.
We learn food can be sung to, coaxed out of sand and cloud.
Now Jesus moves his body as if conducting a jazz orchestra.
He sways in front of the destruction asking questions of flame.
Bricks blacken, crack. Tar runs in from streets, seals flesh to flesh.
Our skin reddens like the eyes of a tired bartender. Hurt accumulates:
change in a tip jar. Jesus takes cover behind the bar, hunkers
next to thumbed copies of Maxim, Bartending Today and Screw.
Who doesn’t blink in a snow of cinder and ash?
How can the end come down to this: a sound like a trill,
like olive jars trembling on a glass shelf?
by Dana Guthrie Martin and Nathan Moore
Eyes of Mercy
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
by C. Albert (originally appeared in Shit Creek Review)
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Angels’ End
Can it be the wings are first to rot?
Why now this surprise when for twenty springs
you turn a familiar corner, never finding
in the shadow of the stop sign a fallen angel,
its soft but gritty carcass?
Though it’s been a hard winter,
it must have been a massacre up top.
The dead in such great numbers
you’ve witnessed out windows of planes,
yet they were all lined up, ghosts reclining
in vague coffins, feather-white and buoyant
on a backdrop of purgatorial blue—
unlike the heap in the gravel lot across the street
that suggests forms never human,
though there’s no comfort
even in the torsos of demon creatures,
let alone a mound like an albino sea lion
you earlier stumbled upon at home, tucked
along the foundation, out of the sun, out of sight.
by Karl Elder
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Befallen
1
For the world so loved itself coming daily into light
the finish line of any sight beginning over there
where it isn’t such a stretch to think of truth as light
and in so thinking come to see yellow as much a part
as blue when it come to green a grasshoppers stirred up
amid yarrow and thistle disappears for one prismatic
blink risen say the sunblind
2
Fear-fed by the firehaired the arresting flash
all light every center owes its eerie orange to bloodshed
ruddy self-congratulators brandishing a brand
new world they say quick to particularize
the earthen brown of famine to say whose bowl
of moon spills itself new but never fills
for the world so bled itself
by K. Alma Peterson
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qarrtsiluni 