Archive
Emptiness
There you are, absence, there you are, soothing, black, and gone, there you are, more quiet than the thin dark mushrooms rising in a circle on the lawn at night. I call you and I draw you down, draw you close.
Emptiness, emptiness, I lift your black host in my hands, in honor, arms tense. Fingers long and shaking, I stroke your lack of outline and smell your faintest odor of cold and rain and the divine. I enfold you in my hands — look there between the crevasses created by my thumbs — I see you, your dark honor and your dignity. I have you, emptiness, I take you every night to my room where you assist me. You snuff out the candles and croon no lullaby, blacken my eyes and take me silently to dreamless sleep.
Catherine Ednie (louder) works as a systems analyst in the New York metropolitan area. Her work appears in In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Literature (Impassio Press), and in various locations online.
Credere
by Dick Jones
If God did not already exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
—Voltaire
“He’s God, cried all the creatures…”
—James Thurber, “The Owl Who Was God”
If there has to be a God —
no option on the broken
road, the bridge of sighs —
then let it be a dancing god,
like Shiva but a voiceless one,
indifferent, treading out
the double loop, the bee’s infinity
of weaving round and round until
the measure’s known by all.
Or if not the dancer,
how about a singer?
One who cants in tongues,
a lingua franca from the
furnace heat (ex corde vita),
singing the blues, sean nos,
la duende, passionate, engaged,
yet powerless to lift the curse
of Sisyphus, or block the juggernaut,
or move the stone. These gods omnipotent,
who claim our praise and swallow
our prayers like hungry birds,
are dreams that draw
on the oxygen of our need.
We might as well worship
water falling, shape-shifting
clouds, the janus faces watching
from the cliffs that tell us
what we want to know.
Dick Jones writes, “Initially wooed by the First World War poets and then seduced by the Beats, I have been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15. Fitfully published in a variety of magazines throughout the years of rambling: Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Qarrtsiluni, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles, Other Poetry and others. Grand plans for the meisterwerk have been undermined constantly either by a Much Better Idea or a sort of Chekhovian inertia.”
A Widow’s Curse
by Bev Wigney
Let vultures tug at
the eyes and wallets
of the local yokels
who circle my farm
thinking I lost my brains
along with my husband,
and will sell out for a song
as I’m too dumb to know
what my land is worth.
May whining cicadas
jam up the ears of every
customer service rep
who said they’d change
an account over to my name
but never bothered so that
the monthly statements
continue to arrive addressed to
a dead man instead of me.
Let the Demons of Cosmos
break off manicured nails
and smear lipstick
on the face of any silly twit
who tugs on the arm of her mate,
towing him to safety,
after she discovers “her man” has been
chatting with a woman who (yikes!)
is revealed to be “a widow.”
Send yellow-bellied sapsuckers
to peck and lick at the cowards
who called themselves
family and friends
but never visited my husband
during his illness
when he could have used
someone to talk with
other than me.
May I be showered with pennies
for every time a
well-meaning friend has blithely chirped:
“You’re still young!
You’ll find someone else!”
as though dead soulmates
could be replaced with as little regard
as a pair of worn out hiking boots
or a broken canoe paddle.
Bev Wigney is a photographer, writer, artist and naturalist, who recently left her home of 31 years on a farm in eastern Ontario after the death of her husband, Don, and is now traveling around North America in a van with her two collies. “We move with the weather and my moods, camping wherever we find a good place to while away some time. This seems like the right way to live for at least the next few months, or perhaps even beyond,” she writes. Follow her progress in her blog, Journey to the Center, and check out her photographic work at her online gallery.
Common Needs
for Jim Martyn
My friend with ALS has moved to hospice.
Rick Steve’s tours of Europe streaming
on the Mac, a mouse he can click with a toe.
cough machine at the ready, biPap mask
for extra breath, for sleep, a meal pureed
to soup consistency. Time, still,
for visits, paying taxes, but I’m looking
up communication boards for the time
when speech goes too — this one,
pared to thirty-three commands —
may there be thirty-three angels for Jim,
wings color-coded, jerseys numbered,
to be called in for specialty plays —
moisten mouth, tighten mask,
move my thumbs, bring bed bath,
I’m hot, I’m cold; angels of breathing,
angels of cough, angels of settling the pillow
under his head, his shoulders, his knees;
angels bearing the bedpan, diapers,
the urinal; and send the angel of attention
to watch his eyes, fixed on number 33,
summoning the angel of the call switch
to watch over sleep.
Robin Chapman studied the acquisition of speech acts by children for forty years, and now writes poetry. Abundance, winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Award, is her newest book.
Dream
Prize-winning photographer Anne Morrison Smyth (website) grew up in Ripton, Vermont and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to Belchertown in 1999 after living in Amherst for 30 years, where she raised her four children. Anne’s love for wildernesses of all kinds informs her work with an intimate, unflinching celebration of the diverse small realities that create a larger truth.
Bittersweet
Snow drifts on the Rocky Mountains
Buffalo herds
race across the ice
The wind blows
so strongly
as the sun fights its way
to a fresh new day
—Alton Fred Brown
April 17, 1984 – April 10, 2001
Bitter-root
bitter cress
bitter-bloom
bitter weed
Bitter Gourd
Awash in bitterness
like moonlight
at forty below
midden heaps
beneath old city snow
Berries of Kansas hawthorn
smashed on sidewalks
or shat by birds
hungry in this drought
Bittersweet orange
Decades of mourning
a member of the family
Celastraceae
called Wahoo in the Audubon guide
An American tree
its powdered bark
a purgative
Purple berries
winter fare
for cardinals and chickadees
Death’s inexorable plow
laying open furrow after furrow
of virgin prairie
Osage orange
eastern cedar
honey locust
The sad butchery
that buried him
on his seventeenth birthday
and before that his father
murdered
in front of his two-year-old eyes
Then dust and grit
March gusts pelt
the windshield with
almost two centuries later
Bitter-root
bitter cress
bitter weed
Bitter-bloom
bitter fruit
Bitter Gourd
Buffalo-ooooo-ooo
O OOO O oo o
Christina Pacosz (webpage) has been writing and publishing prose and poetry for almost half a century. Her collection Notes from the Red Zone, originally published in 1983 by Seal Press in their anti-nuclear series, was selected by Ron Mohring as the inaugural collection in the ReBound Series from Seven Kitchens Press. Her work has appeared recently in Jane’s Stories III: Women Writing Across Boundaries, Pemmican, and Umbrella. She has been teaching urban youth for the past decade on both sides of the Missouri/Kansas state line where she lives with her husband.
The Language of God
To learn Arabic is to learn to speak of the divine. God enters every conversation, whether you intend Him to or not. Thanks be to God. If God wills. God’s blessings upon you. May God give you health. Thank God for your safety. God be with you. God forbid. Only God knows.
To learn Arabic is to enter a world of formulas, expressions of the sacred, which frame life, its events and actions. Everything is rooted in His will. Formulas give every interaction a reassuring structure. Their repetition bestows power, reminds you that God is ever-present, central to all. Yet repetition can also remove meaning — for these are words it is impossible not to say.
To learn Arabic is to learn to introduce these formulas of the divine into your speech. And after Arabic has become part of your thoughts, has carved new patterns of language in your mind, when you speak English those formulas leave an echo in your conversations. Imagine sneezing, and not hearing ‘Bless you.’ It is that absence, magnified.
…
As I look at a copy of the Qur’an, the Arabic accompanied by the English ‘interpretation’ — for God’s words are believed to be a miracle, inimitable, and impossible to translate — I see the Arabic words tightly curled, compact and potent. The English words sprawl loosely beside them. A word in the Qur’an can become two, three, four, five words, even a sentence, in English.
…
The recitation of a single letter of the Qur’an is considered a form of worship, and worthy of reward.
…
Twenty-nine of the Qur’an’s chapters start with short sequences of letters, called muqatta’at. If their meaning was ever known to humankind, that knowledge has been lost, and scholars over the centuries have put forward various theories with no consensus reached. The one point of agreement is that only God knows the exact meaning of the muqatta’at.
Alif Lam Ra. Alif Lam Mim. Ha Mim. Ta Sin. Ya Sin. Ta Ha.
…
Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i faith, which has its roots in Islam, wrote a commentary on the muqatta’at. In it he described God’s creation of the Eternal Alif by the Primordial Pen. After being called by God to set down the mysteries of pre-existence upon the Perspicuous, Snow-White Tablet, the Pen was first stupefied by intense yearning for 70,000 years, then wept crimson tears for 70,000 years. Then, as it stood erect between the hands of God, a black teardrop fell from it upon the Tablet — and the Divine Point took on the form of the Eternal Alif.
…
In the beginning was —
Ayesha Saldanha is a writer and translator based in Bahrain who blogs as Bint Battuta. She has requested no audio for this post.
For Tom W.—Eyes Only
by Linda Umans
I never identified with the straight back L
or the manuscript loops too girly maybe
(I’m way more loopy now)
the erectile i was a better fit
definite and pointing away
hanging on the dromedary n
riding slow rhythmic
the d dropped stomach about to birth
(the late births knock me out)
enclosed sometimes pampered in the space of the a
a place for a round girl to curl
the open-topped U a way up and out but challenging
the m a human purr
another a when I need it again
the n this time connecting to the final s
my sign in China
an all-time hissing favorite.
I’d like my ashes
carried to the ocean
in Townes’ flying shoes (you know)
(I’ve imagined it already
been there already
so if it’s inconvenient…)
my true remains are yours.
by Linda Umans
Download the MP3
Linda Umans has had work published on- and off-line, recently in Beauty/Truth: Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Big Apple Short Radio Drama Festival and upcoming in Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. She is a traveler but a native of New York City where she lives and works.
Toxic Cylinder
Mom, they want to bomb
holes in my aura,
they fucked our men at war:
your husband, my father,
your brother, my uncle.
They’re bombing Iraqi children with plutonium.
Bumblebees can’t hardly kiss nectar,
the world is awry.
I came a long way
from bearing a child
my two-time denial scream
then the ultimate screech,
No way Jose,
we live in a toxic cylinder
where martyrs have
no good reason to live.
Not complacent, but I sit,
sip tea in my condo in America,
I have a man, a passport, a beater car.
A single white woman hanging onto a job
my nails scrape cement, but I carry on.
It’s enough already, enough
it’s good, good enough
I breathe, pay my bills, stand on my head,
have caller ID.
An all American white girl
not complacent being fucked
so they better leave me the fuck alone.
Julene Tripp Weaver (website) has a chapbook, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues, based on her work in HIV Services. A poem from this chapbook was featured on The Writer’s Almanac. Her poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Main Street Rag, The Healing Muse, Knock, Arabesques Review, Nerve Cowboy, Arnazella, Crab Creek Review, Pilgrimage and Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po LISTSERV.
qarrtsiluni 