Archive
Between the Notes
They’re not trying to be rude, or cruel, the kids, laughing and chattering while he plays the oud on stage. To be fair, the music is difficult for Westerners to hear, even though he carefully explains its differentiating features: the maqam, so much more complex than 12 tones, zakhrafat more intricate than the Baroque, and an awzan unintelligible to our unsophisticated ears, with 10 and 7 beats stressed in unexpected places. And though he tries to involve the audience, teaching them to clap 1-6-7 out of 10, they don’t seem to get it. By the end he’s more then a little irritated and begins to sound like a middle-school teacher rather than a Grammy-nominated world musician. You can waste time. Or you can learn something. He plays a song composed while touring Southern France, another for a festival in Madrid, speaks lovingly of the warmth, blue skies, dazzling beaches. Wonder what he’ll write after his blizzard-bound weekend in Wisconsin, separated from the takht trapped in Detroit?
Meanwhile, at least thirteen teenaged girls keep getting up and down in their seats, leaving the theater and coming back in while his fingers fly up and down the fingerboard finding pitches not allowed in our music — casting them out, calling them flat or sharp. And the teachers also mill about, on the pretense of settling their classes, who, apparently, have not been told that the music is for them, that the performer in the spotlight can hear and even see them when he shades his eyes, that this is not a television show.
Wendy Vardaman (website) is the author of Obstructed View (Fireweed Press) and the co-editor of Verse Wisconsin.
what holds (us
by Daniela Elza
crow.d I
as a child I would hear them at dawn in my bed on the eighth floor (imagine them) all huddled around chimneys and TV antennas in a chorus high above the winter city. at such a tend.er time I could even hear them through the thinning walls of dreams just before the first high heels clatter onto the morning pavement.
crow.d II
we weave our destinies daily with a scream and a rattle a whine and a coo a caw and a cackle. among the city’s n.eon signs humming homing us in. crooning from warm beds from cedar lined nests cradling speckled eggs. when we chopped the trees down and offered you dumpsters to dive in back alleys to raise your young what do you choose to line your nests with?
crow.d III
they perch behind my ear. nest there in my hair. their carrion breath permeates the spaces between. temples full of r e s t l e s s wings. the place turns so b.lack I could mistake it for :grief:
“All the words, all the silences disguised
as words, adrift between us and the unsaid.”
—Robert Bringhurst
crow.d IV
I hear the black charred voice of all the words from the c r o w ns of trees it is here among all the silences disguised as words that one raven speaks among many crows. only the water a.drift between us reflects as we cross everyday back and forth from the city (its skyline call.igraphy) to perch in the st.ark branches of memory and the unsaid w.here we are blind. * yet in between is where (we float our meaning.
crow.d V
from this far from this end of the field p.ages flutter into memory ) ) ) with my eyes half closed even the gallows looks (as if it has always been t.here. crows take turns passing on sharp- eyed secrets. the letters— faceless. ink caught heavy in the mind’s gravity. named crows turning white. as black snow falls on deaf ears.
Daniela Elza (blog) has written with and around crows for more than a decade. The crows remain a mystery to her. She know, for sure, they have a lot to say. She has decided to put them in a book and let them sort it out. Daniela’s work has been published in over 42 print, online, and peer-reviewed publications. Daniela is the recipient of this year’s Pandora’s Collective Citizenship Award.
Moving Koi
by Gordon Smith
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Gordon Smith (website) is a Southwestern internist physician and a part-time landscape photographer who’s also a lifelong poetry fan, and says he continues to read and compose poetry during inspired moments.
Of Ten or More in a Room
by Scott Owens
One will be thinking of dinner.
One will be humming a Pretender’s tune
in her head. Two or more will look
out the window and think of something
they’ve forgotten to do. If you’re lucky
two will be hanging on every word.
The rest will be so sad
they can hardly keep their faces on.
But one, one will be writing a poem
so beautiful you can see trees
in her eyes. Flowers will bloom in the corners
of her mouth, and in the crease of her forehead
the knowledge in that moment that says
Right now, I care for you all.
Author of six collections of poetry and over 600 poems published in journals and anthologies, Scott Owens (webpage, blog) is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College.
Fashionista
I’m dazzling fashion baby, fashion whore.
Corsets hide my emblem, my tattoo,
a mirrored magpie. It will be on show
as fashionistas lurch in gladiators.
A magpie’s eye lets me accessorize.
I love the sequins, have the gift of bling.
My breasts get seasonal repackaging
(the plumed god requires sacrifices).
I die for sparkly zippers on ripped denim.
What else is there to love in the time of cholera,
but Miu-Miu’s bondage bows, of tulle in silver,
the must-have bliss-dream in her store, a gem?
I’m all about the Look, finding the Look,
how I look in the mirror, seeking what I seek.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Claremont, California. She started writing when she was 9, and majored in German Lit so that she could read poetry for credit. She is yet another cat-loving feminist anti-war grammar prescriptionist for solar power. Her poems and photos have appeared in O Tempora!, Superficial Flesh [PDF], the San Diego City Works Press 2008 anthology Hunger and Thirst, New Verse News, The Dirty Napkin, Lilliput Review, Umbrella, Poemeleon and Off the Coast. She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize.
Nite TV
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“Nite TV” was taken at near 2:00 a.m.; the image on the TV is my solitary view of a crowd demonstrating in Western China. In the past few years, I have been keeping a photographic night diary of those moments when I awaken and the world has rearranged itself in ambient moon/cityscape glow and, occasionally, the radiant flash from the TV. The photos are then digitally retrieved from the suffused glow or flash to balance light with the ‘unseen’ and reveal whatever grainy life/landscape exists in the black surround.
Caroline Beasley-Baker (website) is a visual artist and poet. She learned to recite her first poem, a traditional Scottish song, when she was 16 months old, sitting on a barstool next to a gorgeous gloved and hatted woman in a family bar in downtown Kansas City, Missouri: “I am a poor little orphan, my mother is dead, my daddy’s a drunkard…” Subsequently, she has known an inordinate number of poets and writers and storytellers. Her poems have been published in MungBeing Magazine, the MOM Egg, and qarrtsiluni, and her ‘chain’ poems done with Holly Anderson and Lisa B. Burns will be published in a chain poem anthology by Meritage Press later this year. She has also received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting, and her sets for choreographer Bebe Miller have been collected by the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University.
Control
by John Vick
It was an army of bishops. It was an army. It was a religion. It was terror on Earth and terror after unrepentant departure. It was a cavalcade of irrationalities played out as monochrome duty — scrap the artists — scrap the journalists — scrap the trade biographers. But no one spoke until the sieve clogged with rape — felonious and torts a gogo — the kind one pursues like an unwilling ascent of K2, questionable even as to status, painful as to personal likeability.
Sales skyrocket on water from Lourdes, and the grotto’s river of disbelief runs strong in response to futures’ investments. Nothing like mad men to take over the immersion of that which was created at the time of hurling rocks and sun worship. Production was cut out of the picture. There was still no need for words. Creation. Production. Immersion. And the exclusion of all reflective, recording, and resonant. The way of give me that and I’ll take one of those things I don’t need resounds in a Socialist’s yurt, as Victoria Falls seems convenient for a spontaneous picnic.
He always said, “beatnik,” and didn’t venture into preferred nouns of kindness, progressiveness, and legitimacy. There was a way of going mad. There is a way of going mad. There will always be. And fortunes come like singing Waltzing Matilda, in grammar school; the feeling of internationalism. The feeling one might sing The Internationale while a child falls to sleep after stories of individual honor, team strength, independence and interdependence. No harm in vanilla anxiety, yet no need to feel wrong, either. It wasn’t meant to be painted on that hobby-horse or etched on the origami crane. Nothing lackluster, nor artistic self-distain.
John Vick was born in Mississippi. His family moved across the continent to Canada in the mid-60s, and when he was 11, he moved to Oklahoma with his parents and finished high school. Since then, Vick has lived in Texas, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He served in the military for two years in the mid-80s. He’s placed poems in a variety of journals, and his chapbook Chaperons of a Lost Poet appeared from BlazeVOX in 2009.
Sea of Stars
by Dick Jones
They will require,
should I return,
that I give name
to all the things I saw.
Even as I feed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I share
my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they will question
in quiet voices,
seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.
As now their aerial voices —
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans —
whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation
like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,
lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes, speculating
my parabola by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.
Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes — long black
sargassos drifting, planet wrack
and flotsam, dereliction.
And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.
Dick Jones blogs at Patteran Pages and has placed poems in such magazines as Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Westwords, MiPOesias, Three Candles and Other Poetry.
Gaining vantage point on Ulysses Grant Memorial, Obama Inauguration
Washington DC, January 2009 (click image for a larger version)
Jonathan Sa’adah’s photographs often deal with people and political/social topics. His favorite places to photograph are streets and within shared lives.
My Brief History of Crowds
My first impressions of crowds were the hems of overcoats, hands reaching down, dark trousers, and skies jigsaw blue or else filled with umbrellas. The sidewalk was punctuated by black shoes like a thousand unsynchronized metronomes.
Later, packed waiting rooms. At train stations, at airports. Hospitals. Long stretches of contiguous but discrete waiting. Today we’re in a kitchen sounds from infomercial TV suspended above us, which some people are watching with an abstracted air. Others try to read, or flip idly through magazines. Many sit at a slight angle, trying to avoid shoulder contact with those next to them.
Sometimes the crowds are part of the point. Sporting events, for example, or concerts.
Loud. LOUD. Rahhhhhhh. GO. Roar of the pack animals, roar of the arms lifted. I’m bewildered for hours afterward. In the parking lot, mounting panic. Eventually I learned to pay attention, make a note of the car’s location, physically if necessary. Carry a pen.
Where have the tightest crowds been? I have a memory of being crushed in a crowd surge — but no memory of where or when… Clamped by the shoulders, I was lifted along by collective will, pushed and pressed into whatever shape the crowd commanded. Surrender was my only option, but it was also sweet, a release, a melding of my ego into the whole. Gradually the sense of compression, of mutual pressure, changed to discomfort. My memory stops somewhere during that transition. A bellow builds, and then goes silent.
Aloud, aloud, crowd. Nowadays I like to be alone, quiet in my home. Even the highway traffic below in the valley annoys me now. And yet I still like to go to cities. I like to enter them by train, tunnel further by subway, burrow into the city’s heart. There’s a thrill to rush-hour travel underground, everyone going somewhere, this man with his chest to your back, this woman clutching her small son’s hand as he squirms against your leg. Cities with subways dig deep, rise high, live three-dimensionally, crowds swarming across levels, between levels. My favorites are London and New York, but almost any one will do.
It’s a homing, for one thing, but it’s also a kind of protection. No one makes eye contact or says hello, and though they don’t do that much in rural New England, either, in the city it’s different. There’s no awkwardness in staring through someone, even at them. Come to think of it, sometimes you do actually make eye contact in crowds, but it’s a detached version, as if through one-way glass. That’s why I feel least exposed in a city, in a crowd, even though that’s where it’s most likely that someone is observing me.
I’m stuck in the age-old quandary: I want to be part of the crowd and I want to stand out from it. I want to push my wheelbarrow along with the rest of the foot traffic, and I want to crow like a cock above their heads.
Fortunately, crowds judge not. They take you in whenever you show up — always room for one more — and let you go without a murmur whenever you leave, closing seamlessly behind you. I step in less and less.
Lisken Van Pelt Dus is a poet, teacher, and martial artist living in western Massachusetts. Her poems can be found in numerous journals, including Conduit, The Comstock Review, and Main Street Rag, and her first poetry collection, Everywhere at Once, was published this year by Pudding House Press.
qarrtsiluni 