Transit
by Danielle Cadena Deulen
The horizon is doing my favorite trick, flattening itself …
by Danielle Cadena Deulen
The horizon is doing my favorite trick, flattening itself
into a blazing line. I’ve been watching the sky from
this plane as the plane burns through it, the dark
streaming behind. It’s an illusion of space and light
I’ve stared at so long now that I’ve become confused.
And not a simple confusion, in which I equal the zenith
of my own perspective and you equal the burning horizon.
You are in the horizon and so am I. I’m also on the plane
and you are nowhere, though several times now, I believed
I heard your voice, turned from the window to look down
the aisle, as if you could possibly be there. Like a dream
I often had in the years after we split—how I followed your
echo through an apartment (that one built like a thin-walled
cinderblock) where the rooms were infinite, filled with
people I didn’t know and your voice steadily disappearing
into the next room. I always arrived late, just in time to see
a glimpse of your heel or elbow slipping around a corner
into nothing, just past a doorway. I never caught you before
I awoke. Between the dream and the years after, I began to
wonder if any of it was real: you, me, the way I could feel
my pulse like a moth in my throat each time you moved
past me. When I blink toward the aisles, I notice a circle
of light obscuring my view (penance for staring too long at
the sun), a transit in negative. Not the astral spot of Venus
across the broad sun, but a bright tiny form on a body so vast
it could be the dark sky itself. It could be the infinite, God’s
Love, as Augustine imagined it in a time before space could be
measured, before we understood that everything is finite, that
everything is only as we perceive it. So, I know that I loved you
from that knowledge alone, though I can no longer feel that heat.
The dark has caught up to the plane and the horizon has burned
itself out. Not even the faint light of a city below, as if we are
flying over nothing into nothing. When I rest my temple against
the glass, I swear I hear the Atlantic shifting below and think of
a water current in the southern hemisphere unbroken by land that
circles the earth. You told me once how a solitary note at certain
depths will echo the same path endlessly, how if I whispered
into that water, my wish would follow its own song of longing
through every ocean, hypnotized by the rhythm of waves, until
someone reached far enough down to lift it into the singular air.
Danielle Cadena Deulen is an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati and has authored two books. Her poetry collection Lovely Asunder (U. of Arkansas Press) won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir The Riots (U. of Georgia Press) won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. Formerly, she was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Two Days in Spring
by Kim Trainor
The nun Tenzin Choedon, at a crossroads near the Mamae Convent, in Aba Prefecture, …
by Kim Trainor
i. Sunday 12 February 2012
The nun Tenzin Choedon, at a crossroads near the Mamae Convent, in Aba Prefecture,
Sichuan Province, sets herself on fire—this girl of eighteen—and dies.
I scroll down the blue film of words this afternoon, then pull on boots, a raincoat, and head outside
to dig through black clumped earth and the fleshed roots of day lilies.
Now she is salt, water, bone. A line of charred letters. Rain falling on the trees’ blackened skin.
It falls so quietly, fingers the guttering eaves, stains the concrete path and the metal blade as it cuts
through chestnut leaves which seep a dark fluid. Falls, soft, into the opened earth.
Now I bury the roots of this small apple tree—a stick and a bare root—scrape back the dirt
and tamp it down, tie the espaliered arms to the wall.
It seems impossible that it will grow. And as the rain comes harder, I stand stripped and rooted,
can only wait—how long—for the bud to swell and tear the bark, stiff blades
of crocus to cut through earth, the quince to blood-redden.
The sudden flowering.
(In Aba Prefecture, Sichuan Province, the soldiers who took her away
will not release the body for last rites.)
I put away the tools and pull the shed door closed. The light to the west is indigo, dried ink, rust.
Shadows deepen. New earth a black stain in this early spring.
ii. Monday 12 March 2012
Bloody dock has survived the winter, rosemary, green sorrel.
The earth labours in the dark.
In Syria, Homs has been under siege a year now.
News comes of a massacre of women and children and some men—beaten, mutilated, throats slit.
News comes like water, a rumour, trickles through cracks and underground channels, then a torrent.
Here is a child. Here is another. Another. Look away, look away.
Their suffering does not end.
In Book One of the Georgics, Virgil tells us how to occupy the long winter months with small tasks,
waiting for the spring. How to read the signs:
A crimson shadow darkens the sun.
Wells seep blood.
Pale ghosts come walking through the fields at dusk.
(Think of the farmer who will plough his land a hundred years from now, harvest weapon and bone,
how seed will take root, grow through socket and blue-black soil, towards the cold light.)
Sometimes the small tasks of custom and routine are not enough.
War creeps over the surface of the earth.
Kim Trainor’s poems have appeared most recently in Grain, Qwerty, and The Dalhousie Review. She won The Fiddlehead’s 2013 Ralph Gustafson Prize and was co-winner of the 2013 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. She has recently completed a first collection of poetry, entitled Karyotype. With the exception of five rather cold years in Montreal, she has always lived in Vancouver.
The Uninvited
by Lee H. McCormack
If I do not often think of the dead …
by Lee H. McCormack
For Charles Simic
If I do not often think of the dead
it is because I know they are with me.
They come from their strange distance
carrying gifts in their misshapen hands:
books, string, cabbages, poetry and bread,
or less desirable things—a yellow word,
blue corroded thoughts, shriveled black
plums of something said or left undone.
Watery and vague, they still know how
to penetrate the deepest, sleeping self
lost in the daily relief of labor and light;
no matter how I deny it, they use my grief
to unlock the twilight gate of my defenses.
But I don’t mind their unannounced arrival,
their fingers of willow, their unfocused eyes. . .
Like friends, they linger aimlessly, counting
flies or kicking stones, or pacing in the grass.
Then they simply pass away, and the day
is my own, to slough, or tear and mend, as I
see fit. Alone again, I see how easy it is to be
like them: to let the numbing autumn sky
chill my eyes until nothing human remains,
iris and cornea dissolved into a gray flat
mass without an echo in the sea. And gifts?
Well, I admit, I’ve got some rubbish to lug;
it’s summertime and the livin’ ain’t easy,
and things I offer seem to slip and fall
between their rainy, treeless lifelines
and foggy, missing palms. But at midnight,
though I’m not sure I should invite them in,
I think some evening I could set the table
and leave out a glass of milk, so they will
know I welcome them, as I hope they will
me, when my time comes, to the other side.
Lee H. McCormack has been a year-round resident of Martha’s Vineyard for 43 years. Poet, master carpenter, sculptor and guitar-maker and cofounder of The Savage Poets of Martha’s Vineyard, he has written poetry for over 50 years. He is the first Martha’s Vineyard Poet Laureate in the history of Martha’s Vineyard Island, selected in 2012 by ten judges representing the Martha’s Vineyard Poetry Society. Intensive studies with Howard Nemerov, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky and Thomas Lux.
Walking Without Feet
by Rosamund Taylor
You do not return complete. …
by Rosamund Taylor
You do not return complete.
You return with broken teeth and bleeding gums,
sores on your heels down to the bone.
You return blind, you have stood too long on the prow
watching the place where sunlight meets the sea.
You return unable to eat, with flesh turned inwards,
you return with a duodenum heavy with parasites,
you return with visible bones.
You return silent, you return deaf.
You return without names for the garden birds, for
the robin’s territorial disputes, the magpie’s indifference.
You return with vomit staining your clothes,
you return open, you return having lost your defences,
you return choking on flies and cockroaches.
You return from a long journey, you have come further
than Odysseus, than Dante, than Frodo.
You do not return complete. You have walked without shoes,
you have had cholera, you have walked past exhaustion,
past drought. You have walked past language,
past sky burials and cities too ancient to have been given names.
You return and stand on the other side of the wall from me,
as I hang my washing, white and yellow and fresh
against the sky. Bile in your throat. I smile, raise my hand:
you look the same to me.
Rosamund Taylor was born in Dublin in 1989. She was shortlisted for the 2012 Live Canon International Poetry Competition, had two poems long-listed for the 2011 Montreal Prize, and was a runner-up for the 2008 Bridport Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals in the UK and Ireland. She has worked in animal shelters and veterinary surgeries, but is currently writing full time, working on a novel for young adults as well as on poetry.
Wedding Service
by Sally Moore
She is plain …
by Sally Moore
She is plain
but he likes that
not, as others whisper
because Another is so fair
nor as rebellion for the act
not for subservience
she is not to be ignored
Her veil, white lace
as pale, almost, as her skin
eyes bright
stance demure
and she has been taken
before
What better scandal
an unexpected wife
like the whispers
a preference
without choice
He vows, this day
one to see happy
the other to serve
Sally A. Moore has been published in The Globe and Mail, Word Weaver, and Heart So Open, Soul So Wide (Amherst Writers and Artists Press). Her writing credits include a prize from the Ontario Poetry Society, a long-list from the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011, and award-winning film credits. Recent recipient of the Len Cullen Writing Scholarship, Sally is currently working on an historical fiction trilogy and holds certificates from Humber School for Writers.
Yawn
by Sarah Rice
Funny how a yawn travels through a room …
by Sarah Rice
Funny how a yawn travels through a room
a pied piper gathering all the rats
In that instant we all draw from the same source
a great swallowed gasp shoved into our lungs
like socks stuffed in a bag
and the long outward sigh
That we try to hide it up our sleeves
makes us culprits in common
like playing truant
with a friend
It’s mostly like this
our bodies that bind us together
despite talk of mind’s united
mutual goals—a Weltanschauung
No, more likely it is that we all pee
bare-footed in the night
with toenails that particular pale shade of shell
and a shadow pressed onto each heel
That at a certain point in the evening
we reel our shoulders in on tiny strings
to catch the small warmth of our elbows
and shrink our silhouette
We all lean the same way as the bus turns a corner
grow a wide-legged stance on a train moving
We all rise
on tip-toe
at the edge
of cold water
And sneezing scares us somewhat
those first few seconds when the breath comes in and in with no end
We know the mundane imperative of bowel
and the incredulity of a broken heart
Our bodies loosen in warmth or water
and we all leave hair on the pillow
We share in the first great O
our mouths make for milk at the start
And the milky grey our eyes
all turn at the end.
Sarah Rice is a Canberra-based art-theory lecturer, visual artist and writer, who co-won the 2011 Gwen Harwood poetry prize, amongst other awards. Her limited-edition, art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (Ampersand Duck, 2010), with prints by Patsy Payne, is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Award Winning Australian Writing and Best Australian Poetry 2012.
You'll Never Know
by Simon Miller
The window confesses a square of summer, …
by Simon Miller
The window confesses a square of summer,
A blue to stripe those bone-white cups,
The farmhouse jug you still remember
Sometimes. The netted curtains tremble
On the shadows of a breeze that, somewhere,
Absent leaves have smothered from the air.
Opaque, your gentle body spent by days,
You rest your brown and knotted fingers
On sheets turned down and tucked in ways
Your unchanged self would quietly adjust.
That was always your method, your routine;
The smoothing, placid ghost, the half- unseen.
Now in open space a child yells in sharp delight,
A throttled bike roars, spiking into the distance.
And in that moment your mind has taken flight
Skimming the dark waters of time—
To the bicycle leant against a whitewashed wall
The muffled ring of laughter from the village hall
Frost-brindled churns, blistered fields of clotted mud
Days imagined before dawn, the flare of his cigarette,
Stocking lines, that one-meek-kiss, flush of blood,
‘You’ll Never Know’ on the vicarage gramophone,
A rhapsody, those days.
When all began to fade,
Still you wept when you heard that love song played.
For you now, no letters lie in no special place.
Too brief the touch of love. Only an imagined
Ending; beneath the Perspex his dying face
Looks up, captures a blue square of summer
Skimming the dark waters, fading from sight
Falling towards home, forever losing height.
Simon Miller teaches English and Drama at an international school in Thailand where he lives with his wife and three growing children. He has written several plays for young people. His own childhood was spent between Botswana and England and he has rarely stopped exploring since. Social history, culture and the natural world are his key fascinations, particularly the points where all three meet.
After Cancer
by Leslie TImmins
And there they were …
by Leslie Timmins
And there they were
just under the surface of the water,
full of the meat of the body, taut and silver,
liquid with grace,
what I asked for
when I asked to feel again
my own breath.
In the quiet of night,
you beside me dreaming,
I attend to the cathedral of my body,
its scarred and saddened walls,
and what I thought scarce, even vanished,
swims beside me
shark-finned, salmon-eyed,
intent on feeding whatever comes their way,
and I’ve learned not to run to the thinning shore
but stand among them breathing;
and when still I can’t sleep
I think of all the sleepless others
stepping in beside me.
Leslie Timmins has published poetry and short stories in numerous literary magazines. She has lived in France and Germany and now makes her home with her husband and cat a few short blocks from the sea (the sea, the sea…) in Vancouver, Canada.
Aluminum Beds
by Russell Thornton
When he pulls up in a truck and hefts new beds …
by Russell Thornton
When he pulls up in a truck and hefts new beds
into the house to replace our camp cots,
we see the dark in a metal’s dull sheen
is the dark displayed in his beard. The sound
rushing through the hollows of the square posts,
the frames, guards and rails, is the sound rushing
through the spaces he has made within us.
He sets them all down, the pieces he measured,
sheared, and welded together in the evenings
in his father’s factory, while I, half hidden
in among the machines, gathered up scrap
fallen to the cement floor. The four beds
stand in our shared room, one for each of us—
with this he fulfills his unwanted office.
He leaves us soon after, and I keep vigil.
Nightly I allow not one of my brothers
to speak or even audibly breathe. I know
that the sound of any of our young voices
will distract the light trying to make its way
through the fitted substance of the metal. I know
at the same time that this light is my father
searching for his sons. He does not know it—
long before he left us, his love began travelling
to us apart from him. If I memorize him,
I will be able to see the love. If I cut
from myself all that is not my love for him,
the right set of rays will find us. My brothers
fall asleep one by one. I lie and wait
for my dream. There is no space not swirling,
no fire with its core of blackness not burning,
within the beds’ angular emptiness
because of the love meant for us. Through the night,
the metal embraces me. It is a skeleton,
unending silver, pure and cold, and I become it,
the light of my father’s love arrived at last.
Russell Thornton‘s books are The Fifth Window (Thistledown, 2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim, 2002), House Built of Rain (Harbour, 2003), and The Human Shore (Harbour, 2006). He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead magazine’s Ralph Gustafson Prize in 2009. His poems have appeared in several anthologies. He now lives in North Vancouver, Canada.
Among Schoolchildren
by Spencer Reece
The one-story houses were painted aqua, violet, orange, pistachio. …
by Spencer Reece
For Father Edmund Harris
The one-story houses were painted aqua, violet, orange, pistachio.
I spoke to the taxi driver in broken Spanish.
I was becoming a priest, I told him, God willing,
as we drove over muddy ruts, pot holes, and alongside hungry dogs.
Much of the taxi’s interior had been removed.
Time slowed that summer in San Pedro Sula.
Around the rotary, legless men shook their tambourines,
epileptics convulsed and the blind tapped their sticks
through donkey excrement. Blue mountains and fields of banana trees
shadowed the city’s edges. There were the many poor
on the muddy river bank assembling huts out of rubbish.
I had come to work in an orphanage in Villa Florencia.
Inside the ten foot wall with barbed wire, behind the metal gate,
guards fingered their pistols like bibles,
and seventy orphaned girls politely greeted strident Christians.
One had been found on a coconut truck.
She had lived on coconut juice since birth,
had trouble speaking, preferred not to be held.
Two sisters had been left at a street corner on a sheet of cardboard;
their mother told them to wait, then never came back.
It was a landscape both porous and uninviting.
Half way up one mountain was an enormous white Coca-Cola sign.
Rain steadily fell against the tin roofs and colored the chapel windows to plum.
Sweat colored my T-shirt the color of a steeped tea-bag.
At night, grease on my cheeks shone, lit by the Coca-Cola sign
that would redden and whiten like the eye of an insomniac.
The clock on the night-stand was like a face I could not reach.
A world widened in me. But what of my Protestant professors rearranging
furniture in their well-appointed heads,
hunched in their sepia-colored libraries?
Was it true, what they said, that a priest is a house lit up?
Spencer Reece is an ordained Episcopal priest at Iglesia Catedral del Redentor in Madrid. His first book of poems, The Clerk’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin) won the Bakeless Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker and Poetry. His forthcoming books are The Road to Emmaus and The Little Entrance (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013).
At Swim Three Words
by Gary Geddes
As my mother lay dying in a dark, cold room …
by Gary Geddes
As my mother lay dying in a dark, cold room
where plumbing and ductwork were visible
overhead and cracks in cement walls sprouted
spider-webs and dust, I recalled the flume
that carried us pell-mell down, risible
in the extreme, at the Exhibition Grounds
in Vancouver, her mouth wide, kerchief
blown back, her body language quizzical,
as if laughter were verboten, out of bounds,
a thing unexpected, a joker outed
sans warning. When I stood by the bed,
my small hand clasped in hers, I had grounds
to wonder if she would die, though I doubted
this, of course, thinking only of myself,
my needs, days at the beach in English Bay
or Kitsilano, where I tossed sand, flouted
authority, sun-baked bodies, the air
reeking of seaweed, mustard, hot-dogs.
Some days I feel her speaking through me,
the few remaining strands of damp, brown hair
at sixes and sevens across her forehead,
lips pursed, facial muscles contracted
in a worry—ethics, clichés, beliefs,
each a clipped, forced whisper with its dread
finality. Resolute, I played the elf,
doing the dog-paddle across the frayed
linoleum, trying to make her laugh.
A tad of whimsy left on the back shelf
would suffice. She rallied briefly, half
alert, pulled herself into a sitting position,
the skin slack around her neck, eyes
closed from the effort. Grimace or laugh,
I know not, but she who swam kilometres
from Fisherman’s Cove to Point Atkinson
managed a thin smile, patted my head
and traced on my body the necessary letters.
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.
Atocha 2004
by David Bunn
The Caliph at Córdoba had a dizzying pool— …
by David Bunn
The Caliph at Córdoba had a dizzying pool—
quicksilver from his mines at Almadén
sent glints and highlights wavering through the air
and set his guests and courtiers’ heads to whirl.
It’s ruined now—the palace’s grand halls
unroofed and broken open to the sky.
On the all-night train from Lisbon to Madrid,
rumbling through the outskirts in the early dawn,
still gloomy, so the braziers flare bright
in trackside encampments and wrecking yards,
I think of commuters who check the time and yawn,
who’ll be blown apart at the station up ahead.
There’s a story that the bombs were to avenge
the last destruction of al-Andalus
which the Catholic Monarchs launched from Córdoba,
wresting Granada lovely from the Moors
five hundred years ago—itself revenge
for Arab conquest, eight hundred years before.
When they bombed Atocha we were safe at home
but preparing our first Spanish trip,
and our friends asked us if we’d ‘cut and run’—
crude words which mimicked the Australian Right
still glorying in the capture of Baghdad.
But not to go would feel like giving in.
At Barcelona there’s a mercury fountain:
quicksilver ripples out across the bowl,
in memory of the miners of Almadén
who rebelled from despair in ’34,
who Franco, soon a rebel, came to crush.
This shimmering device revenges them.
Now we’re at Atocha six months beyond the blast.
Angry tourists wave their tickets in the air,
urgent to board the fast train to Barcelona:
as if there’s no call for the guard and his gun,
as if six months ago those travellers didn’t die,
as if bombers didn’t die their murderous death.
We’ve run to see Guernica, ate our paella,
rushed to send emails home to our kids,
eager—Catalonia and France lie ahead—
but surrounded by all Spain’s silent dead.
David Bunn was born in 1946. For the last three years, with wildly inadequate skills, he has been translating the French poet René Char’s challenging post-war collection Fureur et Mystère.
Breakfast at the Friar Arms
by Peter Richardson
You say you’d like to move to St. Palendra …
by Peter Richardson
You say you’d like to move to St. Palendra
and kiss the stone we St. Palendrans kiss
on holy days on our elbows with a wick
burning in front of us at an altar. Well,
entering what looks like a badger hole
at the back of a fenced-off local cave,
you’d feel your rented helmet tapping
the underside of the Ralston Boulder,
named for one who preserved the site
by choking himself on strips of cloth
while his torturers were on ale break.
Once through, though, you’d relax.
Your eyes would adjust to a round
chamber banded with pink granite.
It’d be worth it, back at your hotel,
to say you’d received the blessing
as if it were your chance for fealty
to a toothless hag with a stone-axe
while a bearded furnace mechanic
conjured the names of fifty rebels
tethered to their ox-carts and hung
in pairs from trees along the roads
of St. Palendra—start and finish for
seditionists on their dirty hustings,
detested shire, blot on the imperial
shield, though nowadays promising
with our storm-watching weekends
and timeshare condos. What’s that?
Your wife wants to tour the harbor?
Amble along the quay? I’ll be here
if she should change her mind about
our discounted tour for barrow buffs
who contemplate a cottage on the bay.
Peter Richardson has published three collections of poetry with Véhicule Press in Montreal: A Tinkers’ Picnic (1999); An ABC of Belly Work (2003); and Sympathy for the Couriers (2007) which won the QWF’s A.M. Klein Award for 2008. His work has appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Sonora Review, The Malahat Review, The Rialto and Poetry Ireland Review among others. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada.
Children's Stories
by Philip Nugent
The War was popular, with alluring cruelties: …
by Philip Nugent
The War was popular, with alluring cruelties:
at bedtimes, pressed, he might manage
some grim anecdote, small and
strangely lacking in heroics or apparent purpose:
the cold or some long dead soldier’s rotten luck,
the terrible grinding of an engine
that promised death or
the Sten gun’s many failings;
nothing any kid would ask for
and all of it given reluctantly.
But that head of his was full of stories
though we only got them later, told by
other mouths than his, mouths not stopped
in turn by reticence and earth:
the great sheds packed with tiny shoes,
the railheads and fences and him,
his weapons jammed and his tongue tied
while ghosts in legions, little groups, wagons
and rusty garments followed him down roads
and occupied the corridors he had to be in,
pleading in babels and when he woke
to smoke a sweat drenched cigarette,
lined by the bed, their fingers trembling,
reproaching him for lateness, for his failure
to fetch their children safely from the gates
of schools he couldn’t name in streets he couldn’t find,
in towns that tanks had ploughed away
and left to rot beneath the rain and failed harvests,
schools whose keys, in any case, were melted,
or crumbled in his fingers as they closed
around his nightly promises of rescue.
Meanwhile we dug garden camps, liberated Normandy,
fought hard at Arnhem, died over and again to overthrow Berlin
and made him join us in our victories, dragging at his sleeves
to make him come
until he sat and watched, fag on, tab end cupped for snipers
and commented on military technique
as you’d speak of something vain or sinful:
the forms of pride, perhaps,
or some vast gluttony.
Philip Nugent was born in London, grew up in Wiltshire and Sussex, took a degree at Edinburgh and lived for a while in Greece where he taught English. Nugent was for many years a police officer in North London. Now he lives with his family in East Anglia.
Delenda est Carthago
by Ron Pretty
I too come from Carthage. I was there …
by Ron Pretty
I too come from Carthage. I was there
as the city burned, as Scipio Africanus
came in from the sea—a bloody sunset,
a fiery night, six hundred years of city
sundered blood and rubble. Scipio
Africanus came in from the sea,
implacable with his legions, came in
from the sea implacable with his mission:
Carthage must be destroyed, must be
rendered void. Rome will have no rivals.
The ancient people, heirs of Tyre
and of Phoenicia, sold into slavery, those
that lived, or buried beneath the rubble.
A victory bloody and complete. I was there.
A victory bloody and complete. Carthage
must be destroyed. Citizens of Rome turned out
in force to cheer the murderous legions home.
A three day triumph through the city and Cato
vindicated. Carthage is no more. But Rome,
what of her, now master of the world?
The Senate in its celebration saw a future rich
with loot, its last rival gone. Instead it got
a hundred years of civil strife, of factions
fighting over African entrails. Assassinations,
riots and the death of the Republic.
I too come from Rome, I was there
in its martial glory and its slow civic
attrition born of triumph. I was there.
Ron Pretty’s seventh book of poetry, Postcards From the Centre, was published in 2010. Until he retired in 2007 he ran the Poetry Australia Foundation and was Director of Five Islands Press. He taught creative writing at the Universities of Wollongong and Melbourne. He has edited the literary journals SCARP and Blue Dog: Australian Poetry.
The Contortionist Speaks of Dislocation
by Rachel Lindley
The trick is not to care about connections. Then there’s no pain …
by Rachel Lindley
The trick is not to care about connections. Then there’s no pain
when ligaments twist and the shoulder pops from its socket,
when ribs accordion intercostals or heels bump
against the base of the skull and toenails scrape skin
from cheeks. The body is abandoned so clavicles can bend
backwards and the spine can arch to carry crown to coccyx.
Tendons forget and never know how to hold
their brother bones. Just a light nudge can push
their lax grip to anarchy. They slip away from woman
into an avalanche of buckled scaffolding, a game
of pick-up sticks, a car crumpled around the Pisa lean
of a streetlight, a cherry stem knotted in a closed mouth,
a crushed spider. The crowd cheers my collapse.
Once I was frozen. A shoebox under my bed holds
photos of a girl who tensed between the steel
of family on porch steps, stood stiff at the gate
of a Catholic school with books mooring her
to the cracked cement, and lay like a stone in the snow.
Each shutter snap clipped the same command
from the secret face behind it: capture a girl
beaten into hands without fidgets and irontight braids.
Nothing could be out of place. She is always out of place now.
Each night before muscles coax flesh to fold inwards
and cameras flash to catch this endless metamorphosis,
a square of memory is tucked away between the skin
and skintight suit. It lies below the left breast and counts
the heartbeats of each change. I need it there, I need it
after I let go, so the girl braced against picture clicks
can remind this body where the bones belong.
Rachel Lindley has had both dramatic and light verse published in the CBC Alberta Anthology, Margie Review, Alsop Review, Light Quarterly, Stitches, and the anthology Kiss and Part. Rachel is currently working on two poetry series: Seven Chakras for a Split Brain and Fair Voices: Songs in Three Rings.
The Earth Moves and Bright
by Linda Rogers
Hold on, the mother sings to herself …
by Linda Rogers
Hold on, the mother sings to herself
in the rain, holding her infant child
above the floodwaters. Hold on,
the orphan who sleeps standing up
will not let go of her doll. For one
hundred and one days they’ve been
waiting for the toxic waters to release
the souls of their loved ones. For one
hundred and one days they’ve been
praying for the children left behind.
We are a prehensile species, holding onto our children:
mothers giving birth in trees, remembering the lessons
of our simian ancestors, mothers holding on through
earthquake, hurricane and plague, when the earth
moves and bright angels, their bones bleached white,
the colour of mourning, fall through the cracks.
Now, after one hundred and one days,
the trees are receiving the voices of
souls come back. Does water polluted
by death without blessings, le dernier
priye, release the voices of angels or devils?
Who is it that speaks when the wind of
savage gods whispers in leaves watered
by innocent blood? Do not question the
mothers and children with the world in their
hands, just praise them for holding on.
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.
Earthquake Light
by Robert Wrigley
Earlier tonight an owl nailed the insomniac white hen. …
by Robert Wrigley
March 11, 2011
Earlier tonight an owl nailed the insomniac white hen.
She’d fluttered up onto a fence post to peer at the moonlight,
to meditate in her usual way on the sadness of the world
and perhaps the hundreds of vanished eggs of her long life here.
I was watching from the porch and thinking she ought not to be
where she was, and then she wasn’t, but taken up, a white hankie
diminishing in the east, one the owl would not ever drop.
Now an hour after, the new night wind spins up a leghorn ghost
of her fallen feathers under the moon and along the meadow grass:
corpse candle, friar’s lantern, will-o’-the-wisp chicken soul
dragging its way toward me, that I might acknowledge her loss
and her generosity, and wonder again about her longstanding
inability to sleep on certain nights. There are sky lights
beyond our understanding and dogs whose work it is to scent
the cancer no instrument can see. On the nights she could not sleep,
the hen Cassandra Blue perched herself with clear view to the east
and studied the sky, every two seconds canting her head a few degrees
one way or the other. What she saw or if she saw it I cannot say,
though it seemed that something always somewhere was about to go
badly wrong. Then again, it always is. Now there’s a swirl
of wind in the meadow, spinning three or four final white feathers
west to east across it, and there’s a coyote come foolishly out
into the open, hypnotized by feather flicker, or scent, then seeing
by moonlight the too-blue shimmer of my eyes, and running for its life.
Robert Wrigley teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. His books include Moon In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois, 1986); What My Father Believed (Illinois, 1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995) winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003), winner of the Poets’ Prize; Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); and most recently, Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Among his other awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize; and six Pushcart Prizes.
An Embarrassment of Riches
by Phillip Crymble
Our first full day in Zambia, a family in an old oil-burning Beetle called …
by Phillip Crymble
i
Our first full day in Zambia, a family in an old oil-burning Beetle called
to welcome us to town. While the grown-ups talked, I opened crates
and boxes: found a pile of Marvel Comics, scale model die-cast toys,
the Field Commander Action Man with life-like hair and gripping hands
I’d got for Christmas. The shoeless, wide-eyed neighbour boys stared
openly, stood mesmerized, as if suddenly exposed to works of alien
pornography, or posing in an amateur tableau evoking Sodom, Lot’s
defiant wife. My new friends left with borrowed Beanos, dog-eared
Famous Five adventure books, a stack of Captain Britain weeklies—
said they’d pay me back. That night I slept uncovered, left the light
on in the hall—awoke to a cacophony of crickets, croaking frogs.
In the shadows, tailless geckos moved sure-footed on the walls.
ii
Food shortages were commonplace. Rhodesia cut off milk and meat,
blocked the open trade of cocoa beans, preserves and packaged sweets.
Cars were much the same—my father searched for weeks to find an old
estate, bought a third-hand Morris Minor crank start off of Jimmy Crabb,
a Scotsman fond of crimplene, garish stay-prest slacks—short-sleeved
shirts and belted jackets in the style of early African explorers. Along
with outsized hedgehog flies and bees came painted locusts, mixed|
varieties of lizard, praying mantids, raids of army ants—our garden
was a lush and unspoiled paradise of sub-Saharan fauna flanked on every
side by cyclone fencing topped with razor wire. A neighbour told my father
that the local Bemba children often shimmied underneath to steal ripe fruit—
claimed he kept a rifle in the kitchen, said it put the wind up thieving munts.
iii
The motionless agamas found on rooftops, wide-trunked mango trees
and flowering acacias often plagued me in my dreams, freed fight-or-flight
anxieties, released inchoate feelings of aversion, fear, hostility. Blue-throated
alpha-males would bob their heads aggressively, engage in combat—use
their armour-piercing tails as deadly weapons. When chased they reached
alarming speeds. The one I chance-encountered after running to retrieve
an errant cricket ball was monstrous—hissed like a corn snake, made
my muscles seize. Though charmed, I kept my wits and backed up slowly,
called for the garden boy in Bantu—found him underneath the shade trees
rubbing wax on our estate. Once murdered the agama lost its colour, left no
ornament to decorate its death—just lay there flattened in the dust. We left
it belly up, went in—ate pickled beets and tinned ham sandwiches for lunch.
Phillip Crymble’s poems have appeared in publications around the world, including Vallum, Arc, The Malahat Review, The Hollins Critic, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and The New York Quarterly. Crymble now lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he serves as a Poetry Editor for The Fiddlehead. Not Even Laughter (Salmon Poetry, 2012) will be his first full-length collection of poems.
Four Trees
by Donald Givans
As you narrow your eyes and focus …
by Donald Givans
As you narrow your eyes and focus
I follow the line of your sight
to the prospect of order before us:
four trees in equipoise. The thrust
of it—symmetrical, plumb—excites
you. I narrow my eyes and focus
on colour, nonplussed
by this arboreal (your favourite)
prospect of order. Before us
were water-lilies—all blooming fuss
and clutter—but right
now you’d rather all eyes refocused
on this long-extinct border—this locus
amoenus, you call it (lost overnight
on a prospector’s orders). Before us,
I say, the proof of disorder—life on the cusp
of loss. You save that fight
for later, and narrow your eyes. You focus:
the prospect of order before us.
Donald Givans was born in 1990 in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He recently graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in English from Queen’s University Belfast and is currently reading for a Masters at Queen’s in Modern Poetry.