Archive
Or When the Police Come
With the new world cornered, we can
better appreciate the laxity
of the Sabbath. Here the drummer
who sits on the drum does not play
for you.
But the women—turbans twisted on
in the required colors—
dance until the streets
are black.
Jenna Cardinale is the author of Journals, a chapbook from Coconut. She lives in New York, where she often writes poems about New Orleans.
Jesuit students, Évora, Portugal
by Steve Wing
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Steve Wing (PBase gallery) is a visual artist and writer whose work reflects his appreciation for the extraordinary in ordinary days and places. He lives in Florida, where he takes dawn photos on his way to work in an academic institution. He’s a regular contributor to qarrtsiluni, as well as to BluePrintReview, where he has a bio page with links to some of his other publications.
The Suffering of Others
You can protect yourself from the negative
energy of a crowd by envisioning white
light surrounding
your entire body. Imagine this light
enveloping you.
Imagine this light
filtering out the suffering of others, the pain your body
is prone to absorb as its own.
Imagine this light
as your shield, your womb, your favored skin,
your dearest armor,
your police dog, your invisible
fence, your power word, your safe house.
Imagine this light
filling you, traveling
from the soles of your feet into
your spine, through your core, and when grief
howls in with a vengeance, when you are
bowled over, in fact
bewildered, by the failure of this light,
after the blow
of betrayal, you might well say,
you might well understand,
that it was never Them at all.
It was never feasible: no skin no light
no prayers save us for we have,
all of us, swallowed
ourselves, and contain
only one another.
Kristen McHenry is a Seattle-based poet. Her manuscript The Goatfish Alphabet, one of two runners-up in qarrtsiluni’s 2009 chapbook contest, was recently published by Naissance Press. She is the creator and facilitator of the Poet’s Cafe, a poetry workshop for homeless teens. She can often be found napping in front of the TV, her poetry journal as a prop. Kristen blogs at The Good Typist.
Commute
Morning-dark and chill Friday
May, Thursday June, November
Monday, we ride the train.
It’s what we do, how we go.
Each day, we ride the red line,
sometimes the blue.
We are breasts, ass and womb,
bloodless crone, girl-child
green, a bound wife.
We carry baggage—
crammed backpacks and totes
that overflow, purses that bulge
with jars of war honey, lullabies
antler-carved, tins of bitter
jasmine, cunts of bone.
We bring with us what we must.
R.A. Dusenberry lives in the Pacific Northwest with a cat that isn’t her cat. She loves to garden, hates turnips and is ambivalent about plaid. She is also the Art Editor of Soundzine.
On Our Way
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Tama Hochbaum (blog, website) is an artist/photographer living in Chapel Hill, NC. She is represented by George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco.
One of the Many
Janis Joplin’s gruff voice screaming to the hordes
I wanted to live in her screams
We sat in your day-glow room plastered with posters of Hendrix
Bohemians and Beats barely passé
I wanted to live in full-surround-scream—
Led Zeppelin, The Doors, in mad love with Morrison
We basked in the Bohemian equivalent of our generation
Life magazine photos of Haight-Ashbury
Led Zeppelin, The Doors, how I loved Jim Morrison
Ragged cut jeans, everything bright
Reminiscent of photos in Life magazine
We sat at Café Reggio, watched kids like us on MacDougal
Ragged cut jeans, tie-died bright
World of runaways
We sat in Café Reggio watching the natives
Never wanting to go back to Queens
This world of runaways
Your room plastered with posters of Hendrix
We had to go back to Queens
Like Janis Joplin we screamed, on the subway to the hordes
Julene Tripp Weaver lives in Seattle. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails her Blues, with poems inspired by her work for 18 years in HIV Services. Her poems are published in many journals and several anthologies, including Hot Metal Press, Gemini Magazine, Chicken Piñata, Outward Link, Blossombones, The Smoking Poet, Drash and Future Earth Magazine, and in the anthology A Dream in the Clouds, featuring art inspired by the 2008 Presidential Election. Her first full size book will be published next year. She does wordplay on Twitter @trippweavepoet.
The Convert
by Eric Burke
In her new life, she was like a nation.
This was how she felt. She was beginning
to feel the responsibility of being many,
of having pasts
from which she could separate herself,
of having harmed many
but of being now innocent.
So, around her past, she stepped
carefully, with a hesitation
that felt like subtlety,
like nuance,
to her.
Eric Burke (blog) works as a computer programmer in Columbus, Ohio. Recent work can be found in elimae, Pank, A cappella Zoo, decomP and Bloody Bridge Review.
The Minor Leagues
by James Brush
Flying west over the diamond, egrets glow orange in the setting sun as they round second base and head over and beyond third, deep into foul ball territory. It’s good to watch the sky. You might see birds, perhaps an owl. You might see free-tail bats racing through the insect swarms around the stadium lights. You might even see that foul ball coming right at you. Hopefully you have a hat to use for a glove; otherwise, that ball will sting when it smashes into your palm.
The year Andy Pettitte came down from the Astros for some rehab work, the cars were an extension of the first base line, stretching down 79 all the way to the interstate. He stood above the opposition like Goliath facing 9 Davids, but wanting to give them hope, he let them stay in the game until sometime in the 6th when he decided it was over. Then, the only bats we heard were the ones hunting insects in the glow above.
In the minor leagues, we are ladies and gentlemen and respect the good play. Sure, things can get rowdy on Thursday nights when the beers and dogs go for a buck, but stout applause greets any man who plays well. Home runs, doubles, triples, we’ll cheer work well done whether by the home team or the visitors.
There are stormtroopers, Jedi knights and even Boba Fett wandering around the stadium. I don’t know why. There could be trouble. A stormtrooper stops near our section, pauses while everyone takes his picture. He looks so real, I worry that he’ll ask to see the papers for my droids and I’ll have to blast my way back to my ship — a real piece of junk, but she’ll make point-five past light speed. Made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, I tell anyone who will listen.
In the front of section 119 almost everyone has a radar gun, held toward home in steady hands, measuring each pitcher’s worth and tallying the results in worn notebooks. These radar guns are windows to the future flashing the potential greatness of up-and-comers in red digital miles-per-hour, but they are also portals to the past documenting the steady irreversible slowing of arms that once threw lightning in the big leagues.
There is a crack, and the crowd silences as the ball sails over the outfield. You can hear the prayers, the screams and cheers waiting on thousands of lips. If the ball falls short, the stadium will sigh. When it clears the wall, the crowd lets go. Did you see that? we all ask whoever’s closest, but they don’t answer because they’re asking the same question. Hats circulate through the crowd, collecting fives, tens (twenties on those one-dollar Thursdays), tips for the batter, that master of physics, who stopped and restarted time with nothing more complicated than a wooden stick.
Some nights it all comes down to the bottom of the 9th. One more strike and the game is over. Or one good hit — it could go either way. There is nothing else in the world but the pitcher and the batter staring one another down. Even the players disappear as the pitch is released. All that remains is a small sphere hurtling through space toward the batter and a strangely silent crowd that breathes again only when the ball thumps into the catcher’s mitt. There are scattered cheers, and fireworks if it’s Friday, but everyone knows this series will continue tomorrow night.
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James Brush lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, cat and two rescued greyhounds. He teaches English in a juvenile correctional facility. He doesn’t mind crowds if the music is good or the game is well-played. A list of publication credits and links can be found here. You can find him online at Coyote Mercury.
On Seeing “Envy Barn” in the Real Estate Listings
It is what we want, though
we’ve never even heard of one,
a barn of spectacle, maybe,
structure out back that holds
it all. So what if a property’s price
vaults six figures at least?
Worth it, yes, more than any cow-house
or mere hall of stalls, the envy barn
sets a place apart. Not just
in the sticks, we’re talking suburbia,
and it holds quadruple the cattle,
twenty-nine tractors,
un-nameable fields of hay.
Windowed, solar heated, flash
air-conditioned, Berber carpeted,
self-cleaning with three teak-walled lofts,
titanium piping, and the tools there
won’t rust. That it doesn’t
have a cellar makes no difference:
in the envy barn, it is all about
up. It rises above the ground,
the neighborhood, above any god
of a realtor that might even think
of selling short. It is
sheer impossibility meant
to stand on land, and it is gorgeous
and it is enormous,
and it is what we want.
Amy MacLennan has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, River Styx, Linebreak, Cimarron Review, Folio and Rattle. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Not a Muse from Haven Books and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press. One of her poems is available as a downloadable broadside from Broadsided Press.
Keating Road
What do we know
of dark places
that fill the spaces
between workshop
shelves and liquor
stores. the street
outside bears tyre
marks of tired lives
stretched like grime
under a fingernail.
Oiled hands beneath
dark machines
soil sheets in rooms
across the road, or
press rubber pieces
into deflated souls.
the city lies beyond
the gutter, a junkyard
heap of mangled trees
and skeletal houses.
What do we know
of dark places
that fill the faces
passing by in shuttered
light. the road outside
bears potholed longing,
it secretly deepens
with midnight feet
and wheels that turn
like bottle tops.
Janice Pariat (blog) is a freelance writer currently based in her hometown of Shillong, Meghalaya after many years of being away in Delhi and elsewhere. She is inspired by her mixed Portuguese, British and Khasi ancestry, literature, Shillong’s troubled history and folktales, everyday things, and travel. Her writing has been published in nthposition, Danse Macabre, Soundzine, tongues of the ocean, The Smoking Poet, Barnwood International Poetry Mag, The Caravan, Art India, Ultra Violet and Literati, among others.
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