The Garbage Truck Trashed the Sunflower
by Jeff Steudel
It had just overtaken the fence, springing …
by Jeff Steudel
It had just overtaken the fence, springing
colour over the grey-flecked cedar boards
that enclosed the small garden and yard.
I imagine its big head hit with a thwunk
on the lane of compacted gravel and dirt.
Of course, nobody heard it, and the chances
are nobody saw what were the pincer-like
hydraulic arms side-swiping the tall stalk
during the dust-up of high-pitched stops
and starts forking from bin to bin. I don’t
blame the driver—there isn’t much time
to collect all that garbage. What’s the life
of one sunflower? Sure, I planted it there
and it grew heavy-headed until it leaned out
into the lane a little, but I didn’t want to tie it
to the fence. Besides, a magnum opus of sun-
flower centres the yard like the tuba’s high
note blasting the brightest yellow of the year.
Its six-foot stalk stands straight against gravity,
but its hunched neck bends as if it’ll break
under the weight of its seedless head peering
onto sweet peas, salad blooms and the carrot
leaves that dance in the gentle breeze. For some
time now, carbon has questioned many things
green. Though the end is certain, the sun will
only shine through the spindles of red maple
that way this time. The fractured light will stay
on the gold band of petals like fire licks only
so long. If I look long enough, I feel happy,
even laugh. And the light has changed already.
Jeff Steudel‘s work has appeared in several Canadian literary magazines, including The Fiddlehead, CV2 and Prism international. In 2010, he received the Ralf Gustafson Poetry Prize. In 2011, his poetry was selected as a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Photo credit: Susan Steudel
The Grasshoppers' Silence
by Linda Rogers
Listen to the story the prisoner’s wife …
by Linda Rogers
Listen to the story the prisoner’s wife
hears in the Bengali darkness: the
one he’d told her about a grasshopper
he’d caught in his sweep net at dusk
and taken home in a glass jar with
breathing holes punched in the lid.
“Why do boys catch insects?” she’d asked,
and he’d answered: “Because they are lonely.”
He told her the alarmed grasshopper
fiddled, rubbing its leg against its
belly. In Bangladesh, as in China,
ancient violins have one string; and
they sing in minor keys. “Why is their
music so sad?” she asked him, even
though she already knew the answer.
“Their music is sad because grasshoppers are sad.”
In Bangladesh, unfaithful women are
called “grasshoppers,” because the
adulteresses jump from leaf to leaf
in monsoon swamps. “Don’t ever leave
me,” her husband had ordered his
captive insect, pulling off one of its
legs before he made it a suit of rags.
“Did it ever sing after that?” she’d asked.
His wife was a curious woman who’d
gazed past the Chittagong Hills to praise
the sunrise, its clamorous golds and
vermilions. “Don’t you ever leave me,”
he’d said to her every time she opened
a book or looked out the window, her
eyes astonished as water lilies opening
to the first light of dawn. And that one
last time, “You left me,” tearing out her
eyes and leaving them both alone in the
dark—her in a room without windows and
him in the prison he’d made for himself,
listening to the grasshoppers’ silence.
Linda Rogers is a poet from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and the author, editor and illustrator of several dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Currently Rogers is editing an anthology of Victoria painters and poets, while tweaking a novel set in Turkey, where her husband plays New Orleans blues with Sweet Papa Lowdown.
The Infinite Library
by Jillian Pattinson
There’s a man climbing the book stacks, all he’s read …
by Jillian Pattinson
There’s a man climbing the book stacks, all he’s read
behind and beneath him, part now of the firmament
on which he balances his ladder. He has been a long time
climbing, reading as he goes. He remembers it all,
no need to down-climb, backtrack, reread. Long
as his years of climbing, his recollection of all he’s read,
hands, eyes and feet all fluency, economy; deft and steady
his ascent. He keeps to hard-bound literature. Anthologies
and well-read authors make the soundest steps. From time
to time he stumbles upon a slim volume of obscure origin,
whose weight belies the name. These he carries with him,
letting go only when the burden of whispers
buckles his legs, sending a tremor through the edifice.
Like feathers they drift into darkness, no echo returning
to tell of the fall. Even as he climbs, reads, climbs,
the stacks grow taller, yet he never tires, each shelf
firing his attempt at the next. No lack of oxygen
in the bookish air and ever the chance of a fresh breath,
something not quite new but sharp enough to raise a gasp,
release a sigh. Quiet as a dust mote circulating in a light shaft
between the towering stacks he climbs, directed
by the voice of every author, accompanied by every
character. All his life, it seems, he has been climbing,
paragraph by paragraph, page upon page, book stacks
growing ahead and behind. Never enough time, never
enough light for so much yet unread. Still he climbs,
having come so far, unsure now of the way down,
knowing how deep the silence that greets the fall.
Jillian Pattinson is an Australian writer based in Melbourne. Her poems have been published in the Australian Book Review, Griffith Review, Meanjin, The Best Australian Poems 2007, Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008, and others. The working manuscript for Jillian’s first poetry collection, The Infinite Library, won the 2010 Alec Bolton Prize for an unpublished manuscript. In 2010, Jillian’s poem “The Still Point” won the inaugural UTAS Place and Experience Poetry Prize.
The Kingfisher
by Mark Tredinnick
And so each bird throws the idea of herself …
by Mark Tredinnick
For Maureen Harris
And so each bird throws the idea of herself
ahead of herself, up the river—
A line of spiritual thought without a sinker—
And flies after it. As if the actual could ever hope to reel the ideal in. But so it is
That awareness of the azure kingfisher—a dark electricity, a plump
Trim elegance of intent—reaches you on the riverbank
that last warm Sunday of autumn, split seconds
Before the bird; so that when she passes you at light speed, her name
is already a bright blue phrase on your tongue, is already
the unresolved cadence of your second self.
Mark Tredinnick is an award-winning Australian poet, is the author of Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, The Little Red Writing Book, and eight other works of poetry and prose. Mark lives, writes and teaches along the Wingecarribee River, southwest of Sydney. The Lyrebird (2011) is his most recent book of poems, and a new collection (Body Copy) will appear in 2012.
Late Breaking News
by Gary Geddes
We’re in Wally’s Renault, driving …
by Gary Geddes
We’re in Wally’s Renault, driving
south in Provence, the car radio
harvesting disaster, swaths of it,
and the fields bloody with tulips,
a brash statement stretching
to the low hills of the Luberon.
Later, in the hilltop fortress
with its catapult and trebuchet,
I ask my friend what happened
to monks, to sanctuary, places
where little pain sears the weary
breastbone, where envy’s rare
as gourmet meals, where even
the spirited horse, grown
accustomed to lassitude, nudges
the pitchfork’s worn handle until
hay falls like manna from the loft,
and where prayers are crafted
in lieu of weapons. Eternity
is long, Pascal has written, so
faith is worth the gamble.
The soul sets sail for a distant
port. Tears mark its departure,
but what marks its arrival?
Planks resound with footsteps,
deep water parts to accommodate
the insistent keel. Wally, amused,
dismisses these speculations,
insists there’s romance
in neither monastery nor rose.
Solace, perhaps, though skimpy,
and only in what the moving pen
inscribes or the stiff horse-hairs
of the brush render permanent
and lovely, those moments, all
too brief, when the anchor holds
and the sea blooms resplendent
with all manner of kelp and with the
scrubbed tulip faces of the dead.
Gary Geddes has won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lieutenant Governor’s award for Literary Excellence (in the Canadian province of British Columbia) and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile, awarded simultaneously to Vaclav Havel, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti and Mario Benedetti.
Leaving the Island
by Talya Rubin
We’ve all gone now, left the place to the sheep …
by Talya Rubin
We’ve all gone now, left the place to the sheep
and the gannet, the puffin and the wren.
For decades only a mailboat of whalebone and oak
came and went from here. Then the tourists
arrived to see if we were more than myth in the Outer
Hebrides. We sold them tweed and spotted
bird’s eggs, let them look in on prayer meetings, count
the stones in the walls we built to keep out the weather.
When we prayed it was for a cease
to things: the wind, the war, the plagues.
In the end, the land choked us out, carcasses
of sea birds and layers of peat moss turned to lead
the constant fog, the solitude, the slippery grass
by the cliff’s edge, that impossible winter of 1929.
We left our Bibles open and handfuls of oats on the floor.
Locked our doors behind us. From this vantage point
our home was just a sketch of land that shrank into the sea—
the island’s sharp crags impossible to understand.
This land, so angry and so peaceful now, without
us. The feral sheep bleat into the evening.
Nothing to bother them but old age and the wind
that made us all walk like bent trees.
Talya Rubin is a Montreal born, Sydney based poet, playwright and performer. Her poetry won the National Canadian Bronwen Wallace award. Her poetry, short stories and non-fiction have been published in Grain, Matrix, Macleans Online and Ascent magazines.
Leopold
by David Mortimer
It’s alright Leopold you can relax now …
by David Mortimer
It’s alright Leopold you can relax now
There’s no need to plan another tour
Everyone can see you weren’t exaggerating
Everyone agrees your son’s a star
And you don’t need leave from Salzburg anymore
With the Prince-Archbishop gone from power
With Colloredo gone (relax) your son’s the power
Who’s taken all before him so that now
Your surname’s not your surname anymore
(More ways than you could advertise on tour
Watching and hearing the child star)
But a byword for music and mastery past exaggerating
For beauty and genius past hope of exaggerating
The whole world knows his power
And follows the Mozart star
Even to praise or blame his father now
(Don’t laugh) for attitudes or incidents or risks on tour
To royal houses that don’t matter anymore
Leopold it doesn’t matter anymore
What anyone or Wolfgang tries exaggerating
In home town service and on European tour
You’ve done your best with your employer and every other power
So prodigies and parents then till now
Can hate or hail you as a guiding star
From your first joy in your infant star
(The play of fear) till after you couldn’t teach him anymore
As child or adolescent or as adult now
With warning and advising and exaggerating
Dangers of travel and marriage and power
By letter when you couldn’t be on tour
Like when your wife instead of you on tour
Died past planning in Paris leaving the young star
All alone and all grown up to power
Leopold you just can’t do this anymore
With the Prince-Archbishop dead and no exaggerating
You and your son more than two centuries dead now
Leopold the tour is over you can rest now
With all your family with the star raised to a higher power
Needing no strategies for exaggerating anymore
David Mortimer is working on a third collection of poems to follow Red in the Morning (Bookends 2005) and Fine Rain Straight Down (Friendly Street New Poets Eight Wakefield 2003). Mortimer lives in Adelaide. For further information please visit the South Australian Writers’ Centre website.
Lise Meitner Leaves Berlin
by Victor Tapner
I’m taking off my lab coat …
by Victor Tapner
Born into a Viennese Jewish family, physicist Lise Meitner helped to discover nuclear fission in Germany before fleeing the country in 1938.
I’m taking off my lab coat
for the last time.
Each piece of apparatus stands in place:
cloud chamber, electrometer,
a web of wires to trap lightning.
Today I’m saying goodbye
to Frau Professor,
the Jewess with the worthless brain.
Tomorrow I’ll leave my flat
with nothing but a jacket,
an address in Holland
I might never find.
For too long, Otto, I’ve worn the white
of this sanctuary for science,
possessed, like you, by the prize,
my head filled with atoms.
Do we know, even now,
what demons’ eyes we’ve lit?
One neutron and a chain reaction,
one word to turn a crowd
and shatter the world.
When I could take the tram home
I’d see young women in the Tiergarten
pushing prams,
boys chasing round trees
waving wooden guns,
girls with ropes,
men reading newspapers.
Even then I could guess the headlines.
They say Vienna waltzed after the Anschluss.
Everywhere people are dancing
to the music of broken glass.
I’m saying good night, Otto.
My lab coat hangs lifeless
behind the door,
notes on my workbench
a muddled epitaph,
the electrometer’s needle
back to zero.
Victor Tapner is a British poet living just outside London. He has won several poetry prizes, including the Academi Cardiff International Competition. His first full-length collection Flatlands (Salt Publishing 2010) has been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry.
Morel-Floored Forest
by Carolyn Hoople Creed
O mushrooms …
by Carolyn Hoople Creed
Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks so longeth my soul after thee . . .
–Psalm 42, Coverdale Bible
O
mushrooms
so epicurean,
as knights their grail,
shepherdesses their lambs,
thus I
search
for you
morels,
grown up O
below oak— the paroxysms
fungi that jut from leaf-mulch of my disbelief greet
ground that fosters musty birth fist-fat conical hats (on
of such saintly/earthy fleshpots cream-bottomed stems) which
strive to achieve tower height
such that
my basket
black masses—
gargantuan drowsers to be plucked
from their beds: the mushroom sheep
take up plump and bulbous positions
Morels along the paths of forest floor, when one kneels to them, always
bestow an annunciation (sometimes seconded by sunbeam, dappled through
tree-crown) upon the seeker of their lift-of-sorrow essence/their lichen-
sprung luscious pungency/their undeniably desirable spongy glory.
Carolyn Hoople Creed teaches Creative Writing at Canada’s Brandon University. Her writing has been published coast-to-coast in Canada, from Prism on the west coast to Undertow in the east.
Mosaic
by Polyxeni Angelis
This is how you kiss me, …
by Polyxeni Angelis
This is how you kiss me,
hard, your hand on my throat.
Your tongue slides along my teeth.
It feels like the wing
of a small bird on my lips.
Your mouth moves over my skin,
and like a magnet
brings to the surface
the parts of me that are real.
My body in fragments, the pieces of me wet.
You put me back together,
a mosaic you design from my remains.
This is my offering.
I kneel before you, no longer broken.
Your body, the curve of your arm,
the tightness of your thigh,
is the altar where I learn to pray.
Take it, you say. All of me.
I take the part of you
that is unforgiving and hard,
the part of you that carries
the secrets and dreams
of the women you have loved.
I feel your chest rise and fall,
at first slowly, then fast and deep.
You become still,
the way lake water calms
before a windstorm.
My voice breaks, Come, I whisper.
I am baptized, a sinner cleansed in holy water.
You are the wafer on my tongue.
You taste like warm rain and salt,
something the spirits created
to tempt me and keep me thirsty.
I find redemption in the way
the taste of you lingers,
and in the outline of your mouth
when you smile.
Polyxeni Angelis was born in Athens, Greece. She emigrated from Greece to America with her family in 1967. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. Writing is her passion. She resides in Minnesota with her son.
The Need for These Things to Be Said
by Margaret McCarthy
The baby grand, its mouth gaping, is robbed of children’s practice books. …
by Margaret McCarthy
For Donald Woods
The baby grand, its mouth gaping, is robbed of children’s practice books.
The police retreat with pens, pencils, and sheet music.
Donald Woods, leaning his elbow beside the keys,
faces the one-way night window.
Wendy, his wife, stands away from the glass, mimes
the daily inquest proceedings—fingers, leg irons, fists, police trucks.
Donald wipes a finger under his glasses,
nods.
For this editor, the Restricted Persons Act tapes his mouth shut,
fuses this writer’s fingers with law.
Upstairs, his children fall into sleep, his wife reads.
Across the keyboard, from a childhood Christmas, his uncle
draws on a postcard the three movements of a sonata.
Woods stalls at the keys, a writer with no pens learning
Chopin with no books.
The bullet that entered the living room window last night, that hush
bullet wrapped in the scowl of the neighbours,
made a hole the size of a rand.
Now the wind-filled smells of cooking come in, and go out, in breaths
—a strange asset for the house-bound—a glass tracheotomy.
Donald loosens his tie, heels to the ground,
right foot brushing the sustain pedal.
He centers himself on the stool, back to the window
while they dare not shoot him.
Ninhydrin!
For lifting prints at crime scenes is lifting the skin from his five-year-old.
His child is sedated, but he is awake.
Writing is lifting ninhydrin from his hands and pressing the keys violet. He types:
“No fear can outweigh the need for these things to be said.”
The poisoned t-shirt is in the bag, but
not the one they’re packing.
At New Year, the watchers go on the nod, the piano falls silent.
For this escape, each word is learned by heart.
The music has been called up and stored—
a deep breath for an underwater swim. A cassock, the editor’s mantle.
Fireworks spark from the watchtower into the night and fizz.
The international audience sits, legs politely crossed at the ankles, waiting for
Woods to play freely
for Biko
Margaret McCarthy’s poetry and fiction has been widely published. Her most recent work appears in the online journal Eureka Street. Her first poetry collection is Night Crossing (2010). Margaret teaches professional writing and editing at Victoria University. She lives with her daughter in Melbourne, Australia.
Night Thoughts from Somewhere Past High Noon
by Iain Higgins
Roadwork everywhere, jackhammers nattering on …
by Iain Higgins
Roadwork everywhere, jackhammers nattering on
like mosquitos escaped from a drive-in schlockflick.
Call it a day the late sun says but then lingers
lightly on the western porch like some bright-eyed guest
reluctant to depart and you can see why, having
been all day struck by its riveting midsummer
rise, the light insistent on its own absolute
rectitude, poised for hours against that slow plunge
towards the smoulder of old midwinter moonshine—
that the sky god will rise again—as yes it will,
unlike me, say, whose turn comes only once,
no matter what our phallic fables might pretend.
I solve the sphinx’s riddle merely by living
the answer, hoping to carve my initials scritch-
scratch-scritch in the thick-skinned world I happen through,
thinking hell they’ll last like eximious dinosaur
shit, but knowing the numbers tell a different tale.
Midsummer’s where I am and lingering on the porch—
downhill from here, the easiest leg, though hardest
on the knees; their bent gets awkwarder all the time,
but nothing that good shoes, aspirin, and surgery
can’t delay till Hamlet in hiking boots mutates
into this slow-mo Lear doing Tai Chi barefoot
on the heath beside that nipped and tucked and still (thanks
to pharmaco-chemistry) well fucked Tony and Cleo.
You go gently guys! the heckler in my brain yells,
teenaged even now, addled with its own juice.
I love my life like sunlight, oysters, and the dulled
pain of dental surgery, but know that the fat
hump of irony which adorns my hairless back
will not keep the coffin lid from closing down, down,
or stop the hearse’s jaunt the way roadwork just might.
Iain Higgins was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His books include Then Again (poems), The Invention of Poetry (a translation of Polish poet Adam Czerniawski’s selected poems), The Book of John Mandeville (a translation of a fictional medieval travel book about the East), and Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (an academic study).
The Old Man and the Beanstalk
by Alina Wilson
Three beans in the clay pot, …
by Alina Wilson
Three beans in the clay pot,
one for each hope left to the old man.
A week passes with soil still bare,
watered by thick hands,
until the morning a single stalk
bends its neck to the sun.
Noon. He waits for his son,
beef stew cooking in the pot,
rises, once, to check the slight, green stalk.
The night smells of burnt onion. The man
does not eat and the door handle
does not turn, too shy to bear
his steadfast gaze and bare
itself in turn. The morning sun
unrolls its slow heat a handsbreath
across the sill, limns the clay pot
and the table where the old man
sleeps, restless. The beanstalk
seems no bigger, lacks more stalks
for context. Dream bares
its throat to waking. The man
finds a brief message from his son,
who is sorry he forgot. A pot
of coffee later, the shaking in his hands
has faded. He soaks the soil in handfuls
of water, tender of the brown stalk.
He is sorry he let the pot
dry. A story then, low-voiced, of a bare
field that grew a sturdy beanstalk and a son
who climbed it and became a man,
or maybe a thief. Where is a man
who can reach that high, hands
giving instead of taking? Too much sun—
the old man is baked as dry as the stalk.
He spills out two dead beans, the stalk and the barren
earth, then walks away from the empty pot.
Alina Wilson will be graduating from Canada’s University of Victoria this year with a double major in both Writing and in Germanics. After that, she intends to spend some time in Germany, working as an English-teaching assistant.
Old Men on a Bench
by Adil Jussawalla
Of the ability we still have of walking on slippery ground …
by Adil Jussawalla
Of the ability we still have of walking on slippery ground
to where the boats are moored; of levitating,
not in cultivated gardens but, against all advice,
on the fishing dock itself, its smells more uplifting than yoga;
of imagining our children helpless in foreign cities—
our excuse, through subterfuges of anger, to ruffle
travel agents, hurry the issuing of visas—we speak,
carefully, pressing another’s hands should the need arise,
counselling patience, as though drawing up plans
for a new building we’re certain, one day, to share.
Our words may seem to you, eavesdropper, to skip over surfaces,
like today’s last dragonfly before it’s absorbed by shadow,
and some things may be clearer to you later,
much later, like, as every evening darkened, we imagined
we’d lift off the bench without effort
and sail home as steady as herons.
Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940, and went to school there. He is the author of two books of poems, Land’s End (1962) and Missing Person (1976). His third book of poems, Trying to Say Goodbye, will be published by Almost Island Books this year.
For more information, visit Poetry International Web.
On Finding a Copy of “Pigeon” in the Hospital Bookstore
by Susan Glickman
I prowled up and down the rows of the hospital bookstore with a fevered intensity; …
by Susan Glickman
I prowled up and down the rows of the hospital bookstore with a fevered intensity;
“fevered” because it was a hospital, “intensity” because I was perplexed by
the mysteriously ruptured tendon in the middle finger of my right hand
in sympathy with which the whole hand had cramped
so that I could scarcely hold a pen or open a jar.
Even a five-month-old octopus in the Munich zoo can open a jar!
The octopus’s name is Frieda, which reminded me
of D.H. Lawrence, and thinking of him
brought me to the hospital bookstore. It was minimally stocked
with anything resembling literature, offering those in pain,
afraid, or just dully waiting for test results
a choice of pink-jacketed chick-lit, cookbooks, investment guides
or glossy thrillers spilling blood
as red as that pooling down the hall in the O.R.,
as though emulating some homeopathic principle
of curing a disease by a surfeit of that which caused it.
And perched as eccentrically as the sparrow who sings from the rafters
at Loblaws, and looking just as lost,
was the only volume of poetry in the store.
Reading it I recognized at once what I disliked
about the bulky bestsellers nudging it from the shelf
like bullies in the halls of high school, their meaty faces
full of self-regard, their minds absent of thought.
I hate the omni-present present tense, that fake cinematic contrivance
meant to create a sense of “being in the moment” with the hero
as though life were a constant rush of adrenaline
with no possible mood but surprise.
Whereas poetry offers the results of its meditation
tentatively; it is not embarrassed to show that thinking
—some of it slow, arduous, confused—has taken place.
And then poetry doesn’t rush ahead shouting, “Look at me! Look at me!”
Instead, it takes your hand, your poor mangled hand, like the good surgeon it is
and massages it joint by joint, feeling for the sore places.
And because it doesn’t speak without reflection
you trust it, and let it cut you open.
Photo credit: Nancy Shanoff
Susan Glickman has published five books of poetry with Véhicule Press, most recently Running in Prospect Cemetery: New & Selected Poems (2004); a sixth, The Smooth Yarrow, is due out in 2012, the same year as her second novel, The Tale-Teller (Cormorant Press). Her first novel, The Violin Lover (2006) won the Canadian Jewish Fiction Award.
Paradiso
by Maria Borys
In a garden they had named their Paradiso …
by Maria Borys
In a garden they had named their Paradiso
The garage stands with the door always ajar
An old man in the evening waters roses
Plastic flowers grow amid some Pampas grass.
In a garden—and its name is Paradiso
an old woman sets the table for some tea
A veil of lilac blue perfume dances around her
for an instant she’s become his young new wife.
In this garden—and its name is Paradiso
Flags of laundry fly their colours in the wind
A picnic table, plastic chairs, mismatched companions
the man whistles for the stray cats to come back.
There’s a garden whose name is Paradiso
An old barbecue leans rusting by the vine
Smells of rhubarb, dandelions and wild garlic
Water barrels stand forgotten in the rain.
In the garden whose name is Paradiso
she finds solace as she sits there in the shade
she remembers the good times when they gathered for a feast
Sunday afternoons with friends long gone away.
In her dreams she named this garden Paradiso
In wrought iron its name written on the gate
It doesn’t matter—just a dream—the garden lives still within
And she loves him among the stray cats and the rain.
In this garden whose name is Paradiso
There’s a teapot on the table, and two cups.
So I miss you but you don’t know that you’re not here.
We have tea in conversation with stray cats.
Maria Borys was born in Poland and spent her formative years in Mexico. She writes and translates business, academic and literary texts in English, Spanish and Polish. Her work has recently been published in Chilean Poets: A New Anthology (Marick Press, 2010); and Borealis: Antologia Literaria de El Dorado (Verbum Veritas/La cita trunca, 2010).
The Pardon
by Ellen Wehle
Slavish to the letter of the law or perhaps just plain …
by Ellen Wehle
Tyburn Gallows, 1447
Slavish to the letter of the law or perhaps just plain
Malefic, the hangman refuses to return his due
And the gallowbirds—babe-naked, marked for
Quartering from Adam’s apple to navel—scarcely
Dare meet each other’s eye as the messenger
Spurs his nag back to town. Should they kick
Up a fuss? Demand their earthly goods, wood-soled
Shoes and shirts, the woolen hose holding each
Wearer’s shape like a ghost? Thwarted, the mob
Rumbles, a faint thunder on the horizon…one felon
Takes his cue and strides off, rubbing at the roadmap
Inked upon his chest with an idle thumb. One sits
Poleaxed at the platform’s edge; the Wheel has spun
Too fast to catch his breath. Laughing madly, two leap
Down to join their drunken friends while the last
Looks blinking around him, shaken awake to this
Shadow-dream—the rain-dark fields, glinting leaves,
Kingfisher and reeds of a high summer day—then
Stiffly, like an old man, begins his journey back.
Ellen Wehle‘s poems have appeared in Canada, Europe, the U.S. and Australia. Her first collection of poems is called The Ocean Liner’s Wake (Shearsman, 2009). Wehle writes poetry book reviews, “a labor of love,” she says, “to help bring exciting new poets to a larger audience.”
The Silence
by C.K. Stead
The dead we know are gone except …
by C.K. Stead
The dead we know are gone except
when dreams return them. So it was
Frank Sargeson took me aside
in Hell and said, ‘You know, my friend,
how well the wind among the reeds
is used by shaman and guru,
rabbi and priest.’ He had the face
of Dante’s much-loved preceptor
Brunetto Latini among
the sodomites, as we ambled
down the avenues of the damned;
and he, brushing ash from his sleeve
went on, ‘Those with a patch of earth
and running water lack vision,
preferring to leave such mysteries
‘to desert-and mountain-dwellers
and the poor of Varanasi.
Where little is lacking listen
‘always to the silence until
you hear it whisper its name.’ So
he faded into fire, and I,
half-waking, wrote to remember
all that he’d said—and listened for
the silence, and could not hear it.
C.K. Stead is a writer from New Zealand. He has published a number of novels and books of literary criticism, as well as poetry and short story collections. He was awarded a CBE in 1985 for services to New Zealand literature, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1995. His Collected Poems 1951-2006 was published in 2008 by Auckland University Press in New Zealand, and by Carcanet in the UK.
Spring in Cow Bay, Nova Scotia
by Barbara Myers
Sad coasts that even these weeks of unrelenting rain …
by Barbara Myers
After A.F. Moritz
Sad coasts that even these weeks of unrelenting rain
from clouds assuming squatters’ rights cannot make
sadder. They drench silver picnic sands long denuded,
scraped to build docks for container ships, landing strips
for naval aircraft to muster local jobs, beach rendered
defenseless in Atlantic hurricanes; the coast receding
ever further, nothing to look at. For whoever has not
from him shall be taken away even that he has. The old
family cemetery is held in check between commuters’
new-builts where tides and ties exert their pull, and surf‘s
adventuring gliders on their circuit. Abraded stones
soft among rain-green patches blanketing unknowns
and long-forgottens, the swollen yard’s one small scar
takes the rain as though to nourish new ashes, this
closing-out-of-sequence, youngest sister. Our practice
of containment. We too as wraiths—unrecognizable,
scraped-away grains inhabiting new ports and runways, receding
ever further, coasts of mind removed to another place.
Barbara Myers was born and bred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and now lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is a contributing editor to Arc Poetry Magazine. Her first full collection, Slide (Signature Editions) came out in 2009. Whistle For Jellyfish (Bookland Press), of which she is one of the co-authors, has just been released.
The Stiltwalkers
by John Wall Barger
We arrived on horseback. Villagers pooled …
by John Wall Barger
We arrived on horseback. Villagers pooled
around us, faces kind & open. We drugged the water.
We constructed their poverty from scratch.
Poured wine on each other’s heads, laughing,
dubbing ourselves kings. Introduced a new law:
each foot of each villager would be severed
& upon each stump a tall wooden stilt be sewn,
so they could not escape the woods. They turned
on us. My comrades fled. I heard the stilts on
cobblestones at midnight like a thunder.
I escaped my palace to the brink of a deep barranca
singing my death chant & hurled myself in.
I survived. Now I walk among them, disguised
as an old woman, feet strapped to stilts,
ankles blistered, toes smashed. They eye me
at market, but I do not break. I hobble to my room
under the stairs. Peel off the mask & wool dress.
O, freedom becomes them. They have grown eloquent
in walking. Running faster than we ever could.
Tall as birches. Their young born that way:
attached. I hear their voices, drowning phonemes,
through the floors. I do not make a sound.
I am afraid to look, but each night I peek out
at their street dances. They lope like puppets &
never fall. Women gyrate in a ring around the bonfire.
Behind, the men jump, ever higher, calling for love.
Women catch them. Everyone begins to spin,
these giants, arms upraised, slowly, then blurring—
impossibly—& sing in a collective low
moan the joy of their dark hearts like gods.
John Wall Barger has lived in Halifax, Vancouver, Ottawa, Rome, Prague, Dublin, and Tampere. His first book of poems, Pain-proof Men, came out in 2009 with Palimpsest Press. His next book, Hummingbird, is forthcoming with Palimpsest in spring 2012.