A Father Shouldn’t Cry
by Marsha Barber
He shouldn’t take your hand …
by Marsha Barber
He shouldn’t take your hand
on the red couch
the night before you have to leave
and as he talks
his large hand shouldn’t
grasp your small hand
with the bitten nails
tighter and tighter
until it hurts
and you turn to look at him
his face clenched
his eyes filled with tears
even though grown-up men
don’t cry
and you’ve never seen
a daddy cry before
because you have to leave him
to go three thousand miles
away, to a cold land
and now you’ve made him cry
and this is wrong
because everything is
upside down
and your father
who should be telling you
that everything will be all right
is telling you with his tears
that nothing will be all right
ever again.
Marsha Barber’s two recent poetry books, What is the Sound of Someone Unravelling and All the Lovely Broken People were published by Ottawa’s Borealis Press. She’s won many awards for her work and been long listed for the national ReLit award and short listed for the international Bridport Poetry Prize. Marsha has published in such periodicals as the Literary Review of Canada, The Walrus, Free Fall and The Antigonish Review. She’s on faculty at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Blanksicle
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
I count how many bedrooms ago …
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
I count how many bedrooms ago
we ate fudgsicles after sex
on your balcony in Brooklyn. Four. Ferns
like the black fossilized wings
of dinosaurs. Your dad across the Hudson
inventing better and better
lightbulbs to flood ski hills at night. Fudgsicles
dripping into the street. Futuresicles. Pastsicles.
Nothing like presentsicles. Your fluorescent bra.
Your skin the colour of lemons
floating in a hotel pool at night. A truck full
of blood-vials crossing a bridge
to get analyzed. That’s what I told your dad.
I didn’t cross a bridge to get analyzed,
sir. Outside, a bird was making the sound
of a fax machine printing bad test results. I told
your mom she should get raptor
silhouettes to stop the bad news from slamming
into her windows. It started to rain
while you were in the shower. Tennis matches
were getting cancelled all over
the observable universe. I stood in the window
trying on the shape of an umbrella,
a popsicle stick, a fern.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s poetry won The Fiddlehead’s 26th Ralph Gustafson Prize, and was shortlisted in Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Contest in 2017. His first chapbook, Englishing, was recently published by Frog Hollow Press, and his first full-length book of poetry, Correspondent, is forthcoming from icehouse (Goose Lane Editions). He is a poetry editor for Rahila’s Ghost Press.
Boa Gravida
By Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
When we were new, …
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
When we were new,
our love still minnow-soft
and silver, you set their names
like nets along the water’s edge.
Now the first, a son
surfaces, a great fish writhing
in the basket of my hips.
These last gravid days of rain
we digest the remains of years.
You speak of everything to come,
how you long to cradle the lotus-bud
of his skull in the broad leaf of your hand,
to swim in with him from the other side.
Until then, let us wait here in the restless earth,
whisper to each other in mangrove tongues.
Tell me I am beautiful and cold.
I will tell you how thirsty I am
for a mouthful of light.
At night I ache. Veins purple and rise
with this sudden season of blood.
Pelvic plates shift, bones shudder.
I am the great mother boa
turning the soft egg of the world
beneath my ribs. I will tear myself in two
and heal before morning.
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a Trinidadian poet and visual artist. Her work has been featured in the Small Axe Journal, Room Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, The Literary Review and Poetry London, as well as in the anthology Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from the Caribbean. She is the 2012 winner of the Small Axe Poetry Prize, 2015 winner of the Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers’ Prize and the 2016 winner of the Wasafari New Writing Prize.
Here in White Swan
by Allen Braden
Tecumseh, Simcoe, Mission Roads. …
by Allen Braden
For Peter Ludwin
Tecumseh, Simcoe, Mission Roads.
Sad thing is I’m in my element.
A headcount would tally
more strays than locals
if you’d bother to keep track.
Pinkeye. Cleft palates. Head lice.
Now’s the dog whipping hour,
for not coming when called,
for barking or not barking.
Nothing’s better than nothing.
No taverns, no stoplights for 20 miles.
Our laundromat sells Pepsi, gas and Bud.
Malt liquor speeds up the intersection
of distemper with disbelief.
There’s a log cabin church on the way
to Hoptowit’s logging camp.
Its pews full only once
when the town was on fire.
Smoke shacks. Hop kilns. Wheel lines.
No cash or missiles in these silos.
No babes in our corncribs.
If you stay, you will taste silage
and failure. Per capita checks
land in the tribe’s new casino.
Everybody’s cousins. Sort of.
No natives dancing in the grange hall.
No Whites in Shaker Church.
Home of the PowWow Rodeo.
Home of the Grange Xmas Bazaar.
Home of—well—home.
Mint oil. Flat beds. Cattle guards.
Grazing rights all depend
on brace posts and barbed wire.
Bumper crops of buffalo grass
and sagebrush foretell
foreclosure. Stubble fields.
Alkali flats. DDT.
When our lumberyard gave in,
the white swans left the millpond,
never to return.
Allen Braden is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood and Elegy in the Passive Voice. He was the last generation to grow alfalfa, wheat, barley and cattle on his family’s farm of two hundred plus acres outside White Swan, Washington, on the Yakama Indian Reservation. Assistant Poetry Editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environment, he lives in Lakewood, Washington.
The Art Gallery
by Chad Campbell
Something brighter lives here …
by Chad Campbell
Something brighter lives here
than the granite light
sparrowing in the arches—
a cathedralled order like a mind’s
envisioning of itself.
The air in the vaulted cobalt walls
hangs sterilely, as if
a gurney were always just
disappearing around the corners
of the sloped causeways
aqueduct to dust to blue to how
solid the silence of winter
sky lathes down the halls’
white mortar of stone.
For every open door
another forty are closed,
sealed panels starch
as archivist’s gloves
where you’re certain
The Bureau Against Imagination
is busy with tin tools scratching
illuminations of night
into vials to be locked away
in drawers. Imagination grows
oranges bright as these lights
entreating us to grow
or else fall into a place like this
cloister at the gallery’s end
where a gnarled tree wardens
a single gaunt plum.
It looks like the bronze spider
on the terrace crawled
sunk its fangs in the walls
torn as we are between
a painting of a sun in waves
and a drill-faced torso drilling
frantically at the blue dusted
dark until the moon slows
and the trees walk their seeds
through the broken windows.
Chad Campbell’s first collection of poetry Laws & Locks (Signal Editions 2015) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His poetry has appeared in Brick, The Walrus, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others, and a chapbook of recent work Euphonia was published earlier this year by Anstruther Press. Chad is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.
Windchime Meadows — Spring
by Ashley Chan
The first dry weekend in December …
by Ashley Chan
The first dry weekend in December
Our shearer calls by
Saluting the spring air
Clippers at the ready
Blades oiled and sharpened
Shearing table trestled
Llamas and alpacas marshalled
The shed commandeered
A division of labourers – family and friends
Corrals the woolly herd
The first alpaca
Frothing green spittle at the mouth
A trail of reluctance dragged into the dirt
Is tightly trussed
A rising moan of imagined woe
Drowning the electric buzz
At each shear stroke
Young Tarin gently strokes her neck
Cupping his hand to ruffle her head
Mum, to planned avail
Grasps in turn each hoof
To clip, grout, file and mend
The doctor, Andrew, plays vet
Injecting this year’s medicinal
The needle pricks
A camelid wails
The shorn and kempt
Now leaking at all three ends
The chirocatharophiles - those lovers of clean hands
Keep an intended safe distance
Ignoring the commotion
Muck in to sort and grade
Discarding the prickly guard hair
Weeding out soiled fibre
Bagging premium fleece with care
Resisting the childlike urge
To gheegle the unshorn stud
Waiting his turn in the pen
By mid-afternoon, the last of twenty-odd done
A glass of wine deservedly in hand, to drink in the spring sun
Ashley Chan is a composer and poet in his early 40s. He was born and raised in New Zealand and graduated with honours in economics from Auckland University. Inspiration for his work comes from the cosmopolitan city life and the lush rolling hills and golden beaches of the north Auckland countryside. Since 2013, Ashley has been living, working and writing poems in Perth, Western Australia but makes frequent trips back to New Zealand to visit family.
Guadalcanal
by B. R. Dionysius
Neat as an Olympic diver, the moustached kingfisher …
by B. R. Dionysius
i)
Neat as an Olympic diver, the moustached kingfisher
splits the brackish water, feathers luminescent tracer.
Akira watches the bird resurface, a fingerling in
its beak, long & silver as a newly crafted knife.
On an overhanging branch, it is devoured
in a few quick actions like cocking a rifle.
It scrapes both sides of its bill on a stem; mimics
a soldier cleaning his bayonet on some canvas.
His splash is small too. Like Mbarikuku, he is
holed up in the mountains, forced ever upwards
by the Marines who swarm over the island &
Henderson airfield like an invasive species.
(ii)
The Corsairs make matchwood out of his gun pit.
He alone survives the bombardment. There is no
fire. The rainforest smothers any flame with its wet
blanket. Bones split; the trunks of downed canopy
giants that have collapsed under their dead weight.
Greasy sunlight patterns over him like camouflage.
Akira cannot hear the kingfisher’s call. His
god rings a bronze Shinto bell in his head.
Purple berries rest by shell casings.
The bird’s perch is a charred hand.
The enemy struggle to reach him.
Akira lets the leeches drink their fill.
(iii)
At two thousand feet above sea level
the zoologist stumbles over a mystery.
He estimates the hole is coffin deep,
& precisely tooled by human hands.
He digs up the tiny lamps of shells &
rubs them. The trench is a good bird
hide to look for this rare species. On
a stump overhanging a creek he spies
a single male preening his molten head.
Azure wings like a Pacific island advert.
The kingfisher has telescopic sight, but
the mist net surrounds it like gun smoke.
He thinks of DDT & thin eggshells as
it cries; ko-ko-ko-kokokokokokokoko-kiew.
B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. He has published over 500 poems in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online. His eighth poetry collection, Weranga was released in 2013. He teaches English at Ipswich Grammar School and lives in Riverhills, Brisbane.
How a Typo Changed the World
by Ann Gamsa
There has been a revolution in Darwinian Evolution: …
by Ann Gamsa
There has been a revolution in Darwinian Evolution:
Leading scientists have found buried deep, down underground,
A most shocking manuscript, locked away inside a crypt;
It’s the last thing Darwin wrote; listen carefully as I quote:
“My great theory of evolution
Has suffered from a substitution:
Where I wrote “A”; they wrote an “I”—
Why, oh why, oh why, oh why!
Can’t they get their spelling right!
People now run day and night,
Go on diets to lose weight—
Because of this malign mistake.
Survival of the fittest is not what I said!
If you’re sinewy and skinny
You’ve been hideously misled.
Hear ye! Hear ye! One and all:
It’s the fat, who have it all!
1869’s the year I announced for all to hear
My great theory for survival
Of the fattest, the most idle.
A stupid “I” instead of “A”
Has sadly led the world astray.
Here’s the science, here’s the truth:
In order to survive your youth,
Bestow your genes on hale offspring
You must eat and eat; eat everything!
Survival of the fattest is the song to sing.”
So, go and eat a fattening steak,
Followed by a cream-filled cake,
Then lie down all afternoon,
Lardy layers will pile on soon.
Throw away your diet book,
Stop exercising, always cook
With cream and butter afloat in batter,
In order to be healthy, you must strive to be fatter!
“Survival of the fattest,” is our cry!
The fit, despite they're strivings,
Will fail to fructify.
Ann Gamsa came to Montreal from Sweden at the age of 6 ½. She wrote her first poem at age 8, when she was home, sick with the mumps. Since then, she has written many poems, short stories, and stories for her grandchildren. In addition, she has written and published professional articles in her capacity as a psychologist and pain specialist. Writing, various creative projects (e.g. “Honouring Feet”), and acting are amongst her favourite pastimes.
Wild Horses
by J. P. Grasser
Haphazard, hulking, & hideous, …
by J. P. Grasser
Haphazard, hulking, & hideous,
the weathering of switch-houses & well-houses
girdling the train-trestle’s girders.
What gray railroader welded hours
on end to anchor this ancient bridge?—
an after-thought now to all but the walleye, hares,
martins, & those, like us, who must cross its truss
hoping to manage a glimpse of wild horses.
Across the river, the rocks, even, are running to rust,
ransacked by taggers, who wiled hours
marking up the monoliths with sappy glyphs. I hate them,
mostly, though the impulse still pulses: to wield hearts
without restraint, without regard—desire rising, & risen,
writ in a red so ardent the walled heats
of their scrawlings should’ve burst into flame
or bloom or the braying of wild horses
at first sight. But they don’t. Instead, they sit, squat
on the shelf of sediment, below wheeled houses
of stars which turn, turn, turn, & so I saw
love demands stirring, not of trains, well-houses,
or tired machines, but the heavy-tread trample of wildflowers
thundering the pasture of the wild heart.
& When I saw this, I saw wild horses.
A Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, J.P. Grasser is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where he edits Quarterly West. Previously published work can be found in 32 Poems, AGNI, Best New Poets 2015, Ecotone, and West Branch Wired, among others.
Civil War at Parliament Hill Playground
by James Greene
“Come down: you aren’t yet five!” She doesn’t stir, …
by James Greene
“Come down: you aren’t yet five!” She doesn’t stir,
astride her look-out tower still, this spy
from the maternal camp; a rampart
of hands, of hair, defends her ears.
And all those other Sunday fathers, mes
semblables, mes frères, half-axed already, slumped
beneath a slide, must mount their one-way stair,
a scaffold’s: here our executioners,
our daughters, aren’t yet up for sliding down,
unless trumpets of pardon silver the sulky air.
James Greene, born in Berlin, has translated Osip Mandelshtam (Penguin, 1991) and, Love of Beginnings, the autobiography of J.-B. Pontalis (Free Association Books, 1993); he’s also written a tragic comedy about Stalin, Killing time in the Kremlin (not yet performed). He has devised scripts for BBC Radio and worked as a gardener in a cemetery and as a psychoanalytic therapist.
Goya’s Missing Skull
by Barbara Hobbie
We never found it. …
by Barbara Hobbie
We never found it.
We never found them.
A polished mantelpiece, void of phrenology, absent its memento mori,
the rainbow-colored orbs in the pit at McDonald’s PlayPlace
before Trayvon, before Tyre with his BB gun, before Gettysburg’s opening volley
of cannon balls—bowling balls, Lebowski, Nam, M16s, magazines, Columbine,
a mallet-struck goat’s head flicked across nomadic pastures,
stones and soccer balls skittering, blood-rust soil at Ghazi Stadium,
a sphere anchoring a sunken raft, an ovoid repast for fish
trawling the enticing edge of the undertow at Lesbos,
Mr. Kurtz’s ivory globe—balanced in her ebony palm, the pilgrims squirting
pellets of lead, their Winchesters at their hips, he, almost dead,
Humpty Dumpty, the disembodied face of Oz, the Cheshire Cat
a floating smile reciting our most fearful nursery rhyme,
a crater in Homs, shaped like a cranium, where once lips kissed,
sipped laughter, cardamom coffee, orange-blossom water.
Nations decapitated, hurtling IEDs, the bunker buster Madar-e Bamb-Ha,
a blue marble spinning desolate in its intelligent universe,
the head still unaccounted for, the journalist from our close-knit hometown,
pinging date stones and olive pips, along with the others doomed,
a game of Risk to retrieve the world, a skein of dream-wool
saved for his sweater, wound tightly in a ball . . . disappeared
from Diane’s worry basket of nights and days.
Poor Yorick’s capital remains, sans soliloquy.
These were men, these were boys. These were women, these were girls
—their skirts twirled faster than dervishes, forming circles,
answering the grave-robbed past in the present tense, forever questioning.
We knew them. We trusted what went round-and-round inside their brains,
their senses sharpened, their voices battering Saturno,
his god-mad envy of his progeny. As gone as what cradled Goya’s mind.
These are the time capsules we seek to find—swallowed into earth, sand, sea,
Munch’s enigma, framing the letter O about to sound in silent mimicry.
Barbara Hobbie, an American, lives in the former East German city of Leipzig and has worked as an independent journalist/essayist, frequently addressing themes of migration and integration. Her poems have appeared in The Anthology of New England Writers, Avant Garde, Poetry in Windows, Chicago Journalism Review, Leipzig Zeitgeist, The Granite Review, and the Global Poetry Anthology 2011 (Signal Editions).
Twenty-two Days Before the First One Hundred Days
by Rebecca Gayle Howell
The first camera I recall holding was the Polaroid Land Camera, that old grey mare, the Highlander, …
by Rebecca Gayle Howell
The first camera I recall holding was the Polaroid Land Camera, that old grey mare, the Highlander,
with its rare roll film that developed in the back, but I wouldn't have known that then, what I knew,
when I was five, was how to fondle the black vinyl bellows that protected the light as it flew
from lens to caught frame, how to slide the Chrysler-chrome hood of the aperture along its metal track,
out to the world to see something, then back into the steel case, click,
where seeing clear would be closed down and kept so safe, the ivory dial with its red and certain arrow choosing
between two shutter speeds. Henry Dreyfuss. He designed it. 1954. One year on and
Dreyfuss, who would before he killed himself at love's height in a suicide with his dying wife give us
the Bell phone, the John Deer tractor, the Westclox alarm clock that sent us each into those needful morning shifts,
before he spent his whole life lifting a little elegance into our half-lived twentieth-century,
he wrote his opus, Designing For the People, the people!—the dream that part of any machine's purpose was to be
human experience. It's New Year's Eve, eve, again, I'm in a LaQuinta Inn in Macon, Georgia.
I don't know how to say out loud the count of Confederate flags I saw on the way here. Sold out,
they put me in a smoking room fashioned in cheap contemporary with two bowed beds and my dog keeps itching.
I'm driving back from Christmas with my mom, who moved to Florida once she got rid of us, who lived her happy life there,
who this week asked which of her rings I want when she dies. I don't want her to die. I don't want
Carrie Fisher to die or Debbie Reynolds to die a day after Carrie Fisher dies. I don't want my mom to know
who Debbie Reynolds is and me to know who Carrie Fisher is and for neither of us to know who the other
is talking about. I don't want 2017 or 2016. The ball has dropped a hundred times: Prince and Bowie,
Leonard Cohen, the Wizard of Woo, Gwen Ifill, Phife Dawg, Dr. Stanley, Christenberry, Eli Wiesel,
Tupac's mom, my boss's Grandado, Ali, democracy, for Christ's sake, Dreyfuss! Save us! The rapture is on
and all the elegant ones are leaving. Build something, a worthy thing for which they'll want to stay, build a way
for us to see clear through this our winter of disconnect, build a steel case to click. I want two speeds. Dials to turn.
I want the human experience of metaphor and not a metaphor of experience. I want the ruby and diamond gold estate ring
on my mom's hand, her hand in mine, the two of us walking into a store to look at bobbles, so pretty, that we will not buy.
Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of American Purgatory, selected by Don Share for the 2016 Sexton Prize, and Render /An Apocalypse, a finalist for Foreword Review’s 2014 Book of the Year. Among her honors are fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Carson McCullers Center, as well as a Pushcart Prize. Howell lives in Knott County, Kentucky, where she serves as James Still Writer-in-Residence at the Hindman Settlement School.
The Time White Lightning Busted Out
by Cynthia Hughes
Inside our guts a jitter. …
by Cynthia Hughes
Inside our guts a jitter.
Inside the jitter a ribbon
the color of a January morning
curling past the wood box
and through the shed door,
to the packed dirt floor,
the rusted-out hinge.
Inside a velvet black
the empty water bowl
and inside that lack
a lost pony in a blizzard,
out on the hill or down
a two track to the river
winding along our worry,
the frozen car battery,
‘til finally our tires
slip the slant road
to the high pasture.
We scour the storm –
ice crystals hurtled
through the eye of a needle,
threading our hearts
with gleanings of tracks
beside the snow fence.
And inside those tracks
recognition, a small hope.
Cynthia Hughes writes poetry and music from her home in Southern Vermont, where she is a primary school librarian and teacher. Her poems have been published in several literary journals in the U.S. and have received recognition from poetry awards in the U.S., Ireland and Canada. She is working on her MFA and a first collection of poems.
When My Father Met Jesus
by Cynthia Hughes
One evening the living room walls folded …
by Cynthia Hughes
One evening the living room walls folded
down around him, and Walter Cronkite’s voice
unspooled to a wave thinning into blackness.
A star grew from the sky and landed in the yard,
a figure emerged. He could tell by the hair
it was Jesus, a certain brightness to the eyes.
My father stepped over the sill of the house
and walked with Jesus into the fields
down where the stream crosses the road.
They talked about their battle scars:
the betrayal of their fathers,
a sponge of vinegar, malaria in the Philippines.
They discussed how to feed the hungry
and love your enemies.
Why worry about your life? Seek first the kingdom of God.
He returned to the couch then for another fifteen years,
ranting, Love your neighbor, dammit!
And I come not to bring peace but a sword!
In his last days in the hospice room at the V.A.
he asked me to scribe for him, his voice
barely a whisper, but he wanted to get this part down.
So I typed the words fast as I could,
letters lifting off the paper,
love reeling around our heads like little black stars.
Cynthia Hughes writes poetry and music from her home in Southern Vermont, where she is a primary school librarian and teacher. Her poems have been published in several literary journals in the U.S. and have received recognition from poetry awards in the U.S., Ireland and Canada. She is working on her MFA and a first collection of poems.
I Am Not Born...
by Jnanama Ishaya
I am not born of Africa, …
by Jnanama Ishaya
I am not born of Africa,
yet do I bleed for the horned
and tusked creatures of my never
homeland... raped and pillaged
for the myth of old men's virility.
I am not born of the polared vasts
that coat our northern lands,
yet do I hunger with the denizens
of that deep wasteland, watching, waiting,
as the ice recedes and their lives fade.
I am not born of the treed heights
that cradle the old men of the forests,
faces rimmed with flame as their homelands burn,
bodies of their mothers and young etched
in the fire of man's greed.
I am not born of the ocean's depths,
sonared cries echoing grief beyond gauge
with each butchered breath, heart strings tortured
past telling to deafened ears... tears upon tears
disappearing in salted waters.
I am not born of this world of gouging gain
that pits peopled plains against every grace that gifts
this precious planet... I am not born of this, cannot bear
the burden of pain or pacific plenty... my soul
rebels... rebukes... reborn, reaches... for more.
I am not born of Gaia's get. My stuff is not the stuff
of this earth, but finds its home, its heart, its heritage
in the sweet beyond, One with the Morning Stars,
singing its soul's song with the Sons and Daughters of God,
in mourning for this sad, sweet Earth.
And yet... and yet... here am I.
Striving, still, to heal this hurt and harried heart,
here among the fallen... angels all... my brothers,
my sisters, my sentient soul, suffering...
still harried, still harnessed, still... here.
Wordsmith, craftsperson, teacher, wanderer, life has taken Jnanama Ishaya down many paths since she was born in Quebec City, Canada, sixty-three years ago. She’s been a farmer and a monk, taught meditation classes around the world, and been a classroom teacher, too. Now a school librarian in a tiny town in BC, she is a little more free to write, make handcrafts, and spend time with her three wonderful dogs and two cats. Life is good.
San Vigilio de Marebe
by Richard James
In the piazza of San Vigilio we sit talking, two old men, …
by Richard James
In the piazza of San Vigilio we sit talking, two old men,
about nothing, about the beauty of nothingness and
the way things were before the coming of the tourists,
who come in the time of lemons, who come in the time
of grapes ripening, who come with their Rolex watches
and their Gucci luggage taking photographs of two old
men talking on a quiet afternoon with the sun on them,
the mountains behind them, about the olive trees and
how they came early this year not late like last year,
how perfectly round and sweet they are like oranges
in Gubbio at the end of summer when all things turn
older but still sweet as a kiss of the sun on your hand
when you're sitting and talking, just two old men about
nothing, about the beauty of nothingness, how lovely
the mountains are in Marebe when the sun is behind
them, still they come with their Rolex watches and their
Gucci luggage taking photographs of two old men of no
importance who go out to the orchard in the afternoon
when light between the boughs of the olive trees casts
long shadows, what are they searching for, what do they
think we know, a secret, two old men talking about nothing
the sun on our backs the mountains behind us, yet there is
a lingering light in the afternoon we sometimes pause for
and remain mute in the presence of, a form of worship
some could say, a secret kept between us unspoken but
understood, the divine nature of afternoon light that hovers
over the olives so sweet and perfectly round like the bosom
of women when they get out of bed or bathe their hair in
secret, there are things we know without knowing them
that are secret but we don't speak of them, only of the
olives coming early this year and the beauty of nothingness
that even the agony on the face of St. Vigil in the Duomo of
Marebe cannot capture exactly.
Richard James has a B.S. degree in English Lit and a teaching degree. He has, however, made his career in medicine as a Physician’s Assistant. He is presently sending out a novel to agents for publication. And he also has a collection of sixteen short stories, and a second novel already written as well as several books of poetry.
Kaieteur Falls
by Fawzia Muradali Kane
In that scene, there were swifts that live in a cave …
by Fawzia Muradali Kane
(Potaro River, Guyana)
Out of curiosity, our physician on location...wanted to see the mysterious nesting place of the swifts. From the bottom of the falls, the gigantic cave is inaccessible...We lowered a camera to him... Later, we decided not to show his footage. [due to the wishes of the local people]
The White Diamond (2004), Werner Herzog
In that scene, there were swifts that live in a cave
behind a waterfall. At daybreak, they would fly
out through the water, murmur into the shape
of a monstrous grackle, feathers flickering black
iridescence. The dark shape spins and explodes
to a blurred pixilation in our mind's frame.
Again and again they coalesce and split into waves,
unroll as giant arabesques that curve against
the screen of the sky. We are made to hover
over the paper white of the mist. It shimmers
in the sunlight, forms a rainbow at its belly.
The water pours from a point so high, we never
question its power, never look up, and we cannot
see what ends below. In the distance, mountains
fluoresce, clouds pump their heartbeat colours
while through all this, the water continues
its endless spitting. There is nothing else to bear
while that moisture clings to our skin. Sometimes
we can glimpse the cave when the wind gusts
and billows the fall. The sheet lifts, folds, shows us
the open mouth. The sky begins to darken, and they return.
Now their sound becomes a mass that wraps into a point:
watch how they unravel to form a snake of coal dust
that plunges through the fine spray, into the hollows,
until the tail whips across to snap the curtain shut, smooths
white noise of water over the silence of sleeping birds.
Fawzia Muradali Kane was born in San Fernando, Trinidad & Tobago, and practices as an architect in London. Her first collection of poetry Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press, 2011) was a poetry longlistee for the 2012 Bocas Lit Fest Prize. A long sequence of poems Houses of the Dead was published as a pamphlet by Thamesis in 2014. She is currently working on a novel titled La Bonita Cuentista.
Photo credit: Karen Brooks
Degrees
by Maithreyi Karnoor
Grandfather had a degree in English …
by Maithreyi Karnoor
Grandfather had a degree in English
Which he used to teach
Sonnets and soliloquies
To unsuspecting young men
And women who wanted
Degrees in English;
He died of a broken heart
When grandmother whom
He kept under lock and key
To his bosom and other things,
Died. Mother keeps his degree
And a picture of him posing with it
Along with his death certificate
In a locker with her trinkets.
She has a degree in Math.
Maithreyi Karnoor was born in Hubli, India. Her poems, translations, and reviews have been published in national literary journals and publications such as Indian Literature, Muse India, The Hindu, and as part of an anthology by HarperCollins. She is currently translating a Kannada novel into English and is putting together her first collection of poetry. She has an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies. She lives in Goa.
Soldiers
by S. K. Kelen
Sunsets, Dad and I walked the dog around the block …
by S. K. Kelen
Sunsets, Dad and I walked the dog around the block
and he told me all about his journeys, the places
he’d been in his life. The ’twenties and ’thirties were great
until the Depression even then you got by, tough times all right.
Then there was the war when the world turned to shit.
Your war memories amazed me most, kitted out in jungle green
how tough you had to be, diving off a sinking troopship
when it hit a mine, sleeping with your rifle
strapped to a tall tree above the Borneo forest canopy.
The glory of war: weeks behind enemy lines without shower
or latrine, the food tasted like murder and the morphine
wasn’t strong enough when they got the shrapnel
out of your back. There was that one time you were shaving
that one time you were shaving outside the tent, about 5 am
before the day’s heat and mugginess settled.
Reflected in the tin shaving mirror you see a glint of metal
in the bush that shouldn’t be there, the flash from a sword,
katana, or whatever they call it (you almost laughed the words)
you kept shaving and watched in the mirror
the Japanese soldier moving quickly, quietly towards you
all you’re armed with is a cut throat razor—it’ll have to do—
he creeps up and as he draws the sword from its hilt you spun around.
Stunned and terrified the bastard cried mama—one fluid
movement like a flattened forehand tore the soldier’s larynx out
as he fell he looked into your eyes, he was just a boy
maybe seventeen or eighteen, did not have a blessed hope.
Afterwards you carried the sword in your kitbag.
The jungle heat was powerful, kind of life-affirming
in spite of the killing, and the malaria would stay in you
and keep these days to relive in future fever dreams, and sweat
turned your bed into a swamp. You shouted and swore in English
and Japanese the fury of killing and living
it was like being back there with you in that godawful war
as we cooled our dad’s burning head with damp towels.
Waking you’d stare and cry for the poor Japanese soldier
and his mama. The sword lay on the wardrobe floor,
next to a laundry basket.
S. K. Kelen is an Australian poet currently living in the bush capital, enjoys hanging around the house philosophically and travelling. Since winning the Poetry Australia Prize for Poets under 18 in 1973 his works have been widely published in journals and newspapers, anthologies and in his books. Kelen’s oeuvre includes pastorals, satires, sonnets, odes, narratives, haiku, epics, idylls, horror stories, sci-fi, allegories, prophecies, politics, history, love poems, portraits, travel poems, memory, people and places, meditations and ecstasies.
An Attitude of Waiters
by Christopher (Kit) Kelen
Eyes down, they won't see you. …
by Christopher (Kit) Kelen
Eyes down, they won't see you.
Though it's only moments since
they pounced, so that you're seated
now. And now it is the season.
Let's have them stiff starched,
creased to bow, tuned to any tongue.
Their world is pigeon swift, yet
priestly, they will stand like herons,
have had the special training.
Collectively they know each
other's signs. Once of the kingdom,
it is we seek their attention. This is
as arduous as prayer. Patience! Are
we virtuous? Sometimes we wave
the scripture at them. Kitchen will
have none of that. Even the specials
run out. Clock slogs. Appetite
makes monsters. It will pauperize
the soul. Cook knows how much
condiment. To pay's something like
Ragnarök. It matters little how
much silver you leave for them
on the plate. In heaven one imagines
them, crowded to whim, obsequious
of any peep. No greater delight in
their station but serve. Of course
you are already fed. Nor will the savour
ever lessen. Here on earth, we're all as
much for form. My model's Charlie
Chaplin, with his two great buffet trays
and absolutely no intention to pay.
Cigar for after, that's the style.
And let the world cough up.
Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a well known Australian poet and painter and Professor of English at the University of Macau, in south China, where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature for the last seventeen years. The most recent of Kelen’s fourteen poetry books are Scavengers’ Season and A Pocket Kit. Translated volumes of Kelen’s poetry have been published in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese, Filipino and Indonesian.