2017

 

 

 

APRIL CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Kitty Coles, Mike Dillon, Robert Klein Engler, Robert Ford, Jessica Goodfellow,

Tom Harding, Peycho Kanev, Mohamad Kebbewar, Robert Lee Kendrick, Tony Press, Angela Readman, Monterey Sirak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

KITTY COLES

 

Cinderella

 

I think of nothing when I sweep the hearth,

nothing except the ash

that shifts and trembles, like breath

made visible by cold, or bird-swarms,

diving and rising smokily, at sunset.

 

And when I scour the tiles, my mind

is empty.  Only, my eyes await

my own reflection, which slowly floats up

from the sheeny surface, emerging

whitely, froth on a dark mill race.

 

In sleep, my heart is full.

Not, as you think, with dreams

of princes, gowns of thistledown,

my mother's funeral rites,

childhood companions.

 

I dream of the guillotine,

its shining blade, falling so swiftly,

sweetly down down down,

your fat face goggle-eyed and disbelieving. 

You're cleaved as cleanly, crisply, as an apple.

 

 

Tempest

 

Entering sleep like stepping into water,

holding my gooseflesh taut, a conscious effort,

bracing myself and shivering the surface.

 

The current takes me, hauls me to the depths.

Weed winds my face; my fingers brush

your bones, the ribs of wrecks.

 

I surface hard, thrown out; the waves

now break against the shore with violence,

boiling whitely.  All day, I pick

wrack from my yellow hair.

 

Kitty Coles lives in Surrey, UK and works for a charity supporting disabled people.  She is one of the two winners of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, will be published in August 2017. www.kittyrcoles.com

 

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MIKE DILLON

Gwen John: A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (painted 1907-1909)

The furnishings are Spartan:
a wooden table, one chair, an open book on the table,
a window open to the pale trillium of Parisian light.

There is no second chair.
No Gauguin is expected. Gwen’s cloistered heartbeat
has thickened the walls between her room and the world.

Her little brother Augustus John,
society portrait artist, King of British Bohemians,
moved through the world as a struck gong.

Once they lived together.
When callers came for her brother she fled to her room.
She is the better painter, her lionized brother admitted.

“I may never have anything to express,”
Gwen wrote a friend, “except the desire for a more interior life.”
September 1939: The curtain rose on yet another war.

Gwen fled to the Normandy coast
where she died alone in her supposed madness quickly
leaving detailed instructions for the care of her cats.

All this is somehow there in the painting
done thirty years before: the future changed to a posthumous gaze
any one of us might feel in the last blue days of summer.
 

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. Four books of his poetry have been published, including That Which We Have Named, (2008) from Bellowing Ark Press. Red Moon Press has published three books of his haiku.

 

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ROBERT KLEIN ENGLER

 

Night Train to Benares.

 

when the oily skinned boy offers me some nuts 

from the bowl he covers with his headband 

I have to take them like it or not    he is thankful 

but can’t say so in English I stopped the man 

 

with a tractor tire from getting on the train 

I saved the boy’s business because he sells 

nuts from the train’s doorway it was either him 

or the tractor tire  then the train pulls away 

 

from the station and pyramids of overhead lights

recede we click-clack into the darkness on our 

way to Benares where Hindu holy men go to die

I suppose around this time Jerry is getting 

 

married in Chicago I was invited but how could 

I go I was taking my holy love to die and now 

on the stereo Ravi Shankar plays Raga Ahir Lalit 

the music starts slowly but gets hectic at the end.

 

 

Robert Klein Engler lives in happy exile in Omaha, Nebraska and sometimes New Orleans. He is a writer and artist. He holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Chicago Divinity School and has received Illinois Arts Council awards for his poetry.

 

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ROBERT FORD

 

Extract from “Notes for the unborn child”

 

No matter how embarrassing or inept,

they will cherish every sample of your juvenilia.

 

Like eager anthropologists, they’ll seize

the very first crayon marks you make on paper

 

and thrust their way at the school gate.

They’ll paste it in a scrapbook somewhere,

 

or have it framed, or tape it onto the fridge door,

next to the magnetised Van Gogh miniature.

 

It will have astonishing powers; it will chase away –

though never quite banish – peculiar sadnesses

 

beyond your understanding, and even solder

unseen fissures in their tiny, damaged hearts

 

(remember – adult hearts are not as big and strong as yours).

 

Years later, when you’re as old as they are now,

you’ll visit them at their new house, and find

 

the long-forgotten ceramic mask you made in

early High School, hanging from a wall by wires.

 

As they explain excitedly how they found it while

clearing out some boxes from the old garage,

 

you’ll finally be convinced they never really

wanted you to grow up. You’ll almost be right.

 

 

Robert Ford lives on the east coast of Scotland. His poetry has appeared in both print and online publications in the UK and US, including Antiphon, Dime Show Review, Dream Catcher and Ink, Sweat and Tears. More of his work can be found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/ 

 

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JESSICA GOODFELLOW

 

How to Audition for a Silent Movie

 

Red deer, stags, and bison,

horses, cats and cattle—

mostly animals were painted

on the cave walls at Lascaux.

But also geometric shapes,

an early ache for order

and control. And a star chart,

Taurus Pleiades—Zeus

rebirthing self as bull

to get the girl, to get

whatever he wanted

at whatever price.

Also, famously, outlines

of human hands. Signatures,

perhaps, say archaeologists—

haven’t humans been leaving

signatures all over this planet

as long as we’ve been here?

 

And now, our sentiments

in the sediment are permanent.

Welcome to the Anthropocene.

May I supersize your suicide?

Tinkering with extinction,

concreting fossils, extruding

yearly enough plastic wrap                     

to wrap the planet,

yet no intent to keep

leftovers for tomorrow.

Erasing glaciers,

lacing ice cores

with isotopes from bomb-

ast that will last and last and—

last but not least—

algae blooms and oceans rise

like a standing ovation

at a silent movie starring us.

 

But silent movies were just movies

until the talkies came along—

only retro(radio)actively rechristened

as silent, as was the Anthropocene,

which started namelessly—

in the fifties, perhaps—

although auditions began

generations ago

and we didn’t know it.

Shall we keep on auditioning,

pretending not to know

the talkies are coming

just in time to feature

technicolor screams against

the droning acoustics of statistics?

Dear little death wish, before you fall

asleep, do you enter a sound-

lessness so deep you can hear

your own heart throbbing?

Welcome to the Anthropocene.

 

 

One-Armed Man

 

When the one-armed man asked

what the difference was

between curing and healing,

I shouted at the radio—

it’s how you can’t describe the wind, only

what it does to other things.

 

It is a strange season—time unyoked

from weather, the winds rising, all nature

healing or straining

to heal, and no cure in sight.

 

Once, my father

laid his two good hands on his secretary’s

dying son, commanding the child to arise

and walk.

 

A few days later the boy died.

I was required to witness the blessing

but not the funeral.

 

The secretary, who could not have

refused, returned two days after the burial

to the office.

 

Meanwhile, I had to sit

at the dinner table every night, head

bowed and both arms shackled

in prayer.

 

Jessica Goodfellow’s work has appeared in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, Motionpoems, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She was awarded the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal. Last summer she was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, where she completed work on Whiteout, poetry about her uncle's death on Denali, forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press in summer 2017. She has work published in or forthcoming from Threepenny Review, Passages North, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.

 

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TOM HARDING

 

Time moves...

Time moves in one direction, memory another,
I’m watching light slowly cross a pavement
reminding me of a man whose walk took longer each day,
how he’d stop at each garden on the road
wanting to reveal every flower to you by name;
the camellia, primrose and peonies,
the rising tulips and climbing morning glories,
the sun pulling back shadow, slow and steady,
he wanted to teach you only how beautiful the world is.
So rare, it’s out of time, to operate without agenda,
to live without judgement to want only what’s best for others,
truly there’s more strength in being gentle and kind
than any other resolve,
and with hands as tender as the breeze
he’d thumb a flower's petal
to induce the marvel of its scent,
ever curious and married to amazement,
like the bees amongst the lilacs
like the sunlight across the crooked pavement
he embraced the world with measured care,
bringing splendour to the ordinary
embodying a sense of hope
ensuring our belief that even dull grieving winters
can change in a breeze and a sudden burst of blossom.
 

 

Tom Harding lives in Northampton UK where, when not working, he writes poetry and draws. He has been published in various places including Drunk Monkeys, Shot Glass Journal, Lighthouse Journal, Sentinel Literary Quarterly and Nthposition. He also maintains a website of his own work at tomharding.net

 

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PEYCHO KANEV

 

Short Prayer

 

I kneel as a child, but through the window

I look like a grown man.

Time’s slipping away.

Let the women still smell of

warm bread.

Let the darkness always be beautiful,

indecipherable, unlike the light.

I close my eyes.

After that let me be turned into water,

a hidden river in the forest, which

can be found only by those who are

lost in the woods.

 

 

 

The Hospital

 

Snow-white, farinaceous and

little green.

 

Tall windows

and birds on the branches outside

like in an aquarium.

Squeak of rubbers soles

and wheels on the linoleum.

 

Then a scream echoes that quickly fades away.

It goes out and starts to wander from

room to room:

 

the pain is looking for a new recipient.

 

 

Peycho Kanev is the author of 4 poetry collections, published in USA and Europe. He has won several European awards for his poetry and his poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review and many others. 

 

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MOHAMAD KEBBEWAR

 

Fragments

 

Farewell Aleppo, farewell humanity

With our blood we write ourselves into consciousness

Writers paid more attention to the form

Words are chiseled into perfection

but empty of meaning like a neighborhood square after a bomb

The poetic is lost

Oil is pumped

Governments are changed

People are massacred

Perhaps the land was the problem

Fresh air was not free of charge

Birds’ feathers fell from the crown of the minaret

 

***

State of absence

State of siege

The garden filled them with aroma and peace

Dead leaves fall on the pavement so too fall the children of the city

Missile were fired like hail on drought land

Maps redrawn with fire and steel

Dreamers crushed under the heavy barrel bombs or Blitzkrieg

They swept the ashes at the marketplace and went to the funerals

The phone buzzed on the table

Thirty seven people killed in the candy store explosion

They carry their wounds on their faces and pray for God

A droplet of rain sooths the hungry soil

Hope was reported missing

 

***

In the age of ignorance or Jahiliyah freedom was sexual

The rubble suffocated the jasmine tree.

Those that made weapons sat up in fancy hotel rooms

tucked up in silk suits to discuss peace

The hearts of our children bleed on their way to school

How will they love?

Blood streamed on the barricaded roads 

A field of mothers

Farewell Syria

Birds sing on a broken branch of the lemon tree

Fire burned my olive tree

Maysonati, my love who is God what is God?

In the market place I look for God

 

***

I write my home in the depth of the AlQasidah or the poem

With every word his beloved ask him why do you write

Just come along and hang out with us

Forget the world

I write myself on a blank page

I write to stay alive

I write because writing is the beginning of humanity

Because without writing there is no history

Without a record a debt cannot be paid

No proof of blood or a mother's tears

 

I roam around the walls of Aleppo

Throughout centuries and empires

Here an Ottoman house, There a French church

A history full of blood and ammunition

Piled up on the sidewalk

The elderly and children weep

Even stones and steels cry

Words bleed inside my brain

 

She takes a picture of her home

The photograph becomes a living thing

It was the last proof of the city

The place where I first opened my eyes

I pace back and forth in my memories of shattered Home

 

Mohamad Kebbewar was born in Aleppo. Since moving to Canada in 2012 he found peace and tranquility in the alphabet. His poetry explores the failure of the international community to do anything about the war that grinds an entire population into nothingness. His poetry has appeared in The Nashwaak Review and Sinker Cypress Review.

 

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ROBERT LEE KENDRICK

 

Cateechee Blue Yodel Number 3  

  

Wet with moon glisten, Night 

pulls a wrench from her hip pocket,

 

checks for daylight sneaking 

over her shoulder, ready

 

to knock it back east.   

Her pit bull wind raises his hackles,   

 

shoves snout to ground, trench knife   

tongue whetted for meat. The creek  

 

wraps its moon gash in moss,  

slips between stones to die in the lake.  

 

Seven times seven years back,  

I was born on a blood star,   

 

damn near killed my mother.  

Daughters I never fathered  

 

dance around logs, cast possum  

bones into fire pits, keep the omens  

 

to themselves. With razor and hook  

I come to pull spawn from stream belly.   

 

When I strew carp gut runes through mud,   

the creek suckles on my curses and spells.  

 

It will take anything to its lips.  

  

 

Robert Lee Kendrick lives in Clemson, SC. He has previously published, or has work forthcoming, in Tar River Poetry, Xavier Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, and The James Dickey Review. His chapbook, Winter Skin, was released in 2016 by Main Street Rag Publishing. He can be found online at robertleekendrick.net 

 

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TONY PRESS

 

Day Laborer at Midnight

 

Six months become six years.

I only wanted things a little better.

 

My precious baby is seven. Impossible.

How do you kiss un foto de una chica.

     A chica I don’t even know.

     She’s in Sonsonate. I am here.

 

And my wife. I guess she’s still my wife.

     But there’s Aracely now, here

     Here in Oakland with me. What do I call her?

 

Worse, mi hijo, Santiago.

He waited for me, then he followed my path.

    Or tried to, but they found his body in Mexico.

    Never even made it El Norte.

 

This can’t be the American Dream.

   What is that word por una pesadilla?

   Nightmare.  Eso es. Nightmare.

 

 

Tony Press tries to pay attention. His short story collection, Crossing the Lines, was published in 2016 {Big Table}. His stories and poems can be found in many fine journals, including this one. He lives near San Francisco but has no website.

 

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ANGELA READMAN

 

Elizabeth Bishop at the Fish Quay

 

I knew not to serve her straight away. 

At the fish stall, I put my knuckles in ice
and looked a frosty morning in the eye.

The mouths of mackerel striped the silence

of the woman on the other side of the display.

Up, down, she paced, not just any fish would do.

No, that one at the back caught her.

This one with an oil spill slicked to its spine.

She saw my fingers redden wrapping it to go,

fingerprints on paper dark lockets draped

around the death she carried home. I saw her

some days by the dock, looking for so long

the water wove a white river into her hair. 

People walked past with dogs, eating sandwiches

and looking for Hemingway’s house.

She stared at the cold fish in her lap. Notebook 

the colour of liver clamped shut, one finger 

ran over a back and opened a fin like a wing. 

I saw her hold up her hand to inspect a cut, gills 

digging an arc of blood. She studied the scale, 

a mirror of daylight and gasping for air. I swear, 

I saw her run it over her lips as if biting a pearl, 

lick the rust off her tongue and finally pick up a pen.

 

 

Mackerel on Marizion Beach

 

They wash in streaked as winter nights, frozen 

puddles on the slip-path holding what's left

of the moon and the day ahead like a pit full

of knives. The mackerel have quit to taste air 

for the second time this year.  The beach 

where you broached a bikini is a ledge of spines. 

You nudge the waves made cold flesh, oil glazing 

fingers, you bend to paint the feeling onto your hands. 

You think of a man's hair, open windows, the stars, 

all that rocking like creatures operated by coins. 

You knew it was all fleeting, you've lived long enough 

to know an ocean can look like a crushed steel any time, 

but you didn't expect the mackerel to die quite like this, 

foiled heads curved upwards their whole body

a comma curled around those shallow water nights.

 

Angela Readman's poems have won The Charles Causley, The Essex Poetry Prize, and The Mslexia Competition. She has been published in anthologies and journals including The Rialto, Envoi, Popshot, Ambit, Prole, Bare Fiction and Magma. Nine Arches recently published her poetry collection The Book of Tides.

 

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MONTEREY SIRAK

 

A Matter of Taste

 

Grandmother said to feed him well

The way to a man's heart is through his stomach    

I pick up a paring knife and chop freshly washed carrots

with a smart     clunk     clunk     against the cutting board    

Slice away the layers of lettuce protecting its heart    

Peel the layers of emotions guarding my heart    

If a man accepts your food offering    he loves you    

 

But while I aim for his stomach

firing bullets of broccoli   steak   and potatoes

he shoots     straight     to my  exposed soul

He says women are like fruit     and the bruised

areas are the softest     taste the sweetest

where the succulent juices pool under the skin

He says if a woman bleeds for you    she loves you    

 

Grandmother never told me what a man prefers to eat

 

 

Monterey Sirak is the author of three books of poetry and a memoir. Her poetry has appeared in The Red River Review and The Oyez Review. Her short stories have appeared in Rosebud, Ruminate, and Epiphany magazines.

 

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