2014

 

 

AUGUST CONTRIBUTORS

 

Mona Dash, David Flynn, Laura M. Kaminski, Hugh Lemma, Mamta Madhavan,

Jennifer A. McGowan, Vincent O’Connor, William Reichard, K.V. Skene,

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Amanda Tumminaro

 

 

 

 

MONA DASH

 

A Certain Way

 

As an immigrant

I’m  expected to behave in a way

A certain way.

 

Colour the walls with turmeric

Fill my soul with lament

For the land whose shores I’ve left

To become richer economically,

Poorer emotionally.

Fold oil into long black hair

Dream the stars of the eastern skies

In this land, the land I

Call my own, but never to be my own.

Wrapped in sarees, sapphire blue, sindoor red

It is expected I will be nostalgic about the

Monsoons when the spray dazzles my eyes

And calms my burning skin.

 

Instead, my mind

Soothed by the nourishing cool green

Of the land I live in

Energised by the glowing orange sun

Of the land I come from

Decorates ice cubes with spice.

 

With silver anklets, red stilettoes 

The shortest, blackest dress,

I sip prosecco, spear olives expertly

Pile my plate with rice and chicken curry

While in the garden,

Lavender, jasmine, clematis, and marigold

Spread their roots, dance their petals

Into the pale grey wet skies

Or the searing sunshine.

 

Uproot, grow, and take root

Parallel truths, a little of this

And a little of that.

 

As an immigrant

There is no certain way to be.

 

Born and brought up in India Mona Dash now lives in London and calls it home. She works as a manager in a Telecoms company and is an MBA by profession. She has been writing since her childhood and her short stories and poetry have been published in various magazines and anthologies in India and the U.K. Her first book of fiction is represented by Redlink Literary agency and she is currently working towards an MA in Creative Writing at the London Metropolitan University. www.monadash.net

 

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DAVID FLYNN

 

This is a piece of tin

 

This is a piece of tin left outdoors for six decades.

The rust, the stains of blue and red, the bullet holes

from hunters shooting metal that does not move

make the tin a work of art.

The pattern is not Impressionism because there is no human artist.

This is chance, the truth.

Look at this and do not think God or weather or humans.

Think everything.

So much more profound than if I had painted it,

or you had analyzed it.

The tin square, nailed to a wall by someone unknown,

now dead, maybe, has rusted brown and the brown has streaked.

The blue tear-drop shape has nothing to do with tears. 

That’s my human association and is false.

A reaction to the metal by something thrown at it

on a day in 1968?  As good a guess as anything.

The green streak, almost a straight line on the right?

Bird guano reacting chemically through the decades?

So many question marks.  I like them better than periods.

And inside the hunter, frustration at not killing the placid deer,

an upbringing where father and son shared guns,

then, walking by a target hard to miss bam bam bam,

because there are 20-30 holes scattered.

One or six hunters?  Insane, rigid, stupid.

 

Some day the piece of tin will fall off its nails to the

wet ground, the leaf-scattered ground, the dead-branch scattered ground,

and continue rusting with the back upward.

I will be dead before the tin;

Its life expectancy is more than mine.

Or yours.

 

David Flynn’s literary publications total more than one hundred and forty.  His background includes reporter for a daily newspaper, editor of a commercial magazine, and teacher. His writing blog, where he posts a new story and poem every month, is at http://writing-flynn.blogspot.com/ 

 

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LAURA M. KAMINSKI

 

Red Ink

 

Back before the roads
were paved, if you
got a letter
to say “Your brother, he
is very ill, he has
the fever”
it was written in
red ink.

Blue and black
for ordinary news,
red for past
tense, no hurry,
it has happened
already. Like
accounting, red,
a subtraction.

This was the system
we used, because death
traveled faster
than mail.

 

Last night a friend
sent photographs
of mothers holding
red-ink signs
“Where are our
daughters?”
and I pray in forty
years the code
has changed,
that times have changed,
that now the message
is the one
that travels faster:

 

Bring Back Our Girls

 

Dance Here

a response to Irfaan Jaffer's "Inner Worship"

 

Full moon.

The goatskin drums

would start to speak,

stay up and talk

all night.

I listened with

bare feet.

Nothing ritual,

nothing festival, nothing

magical.

Just enough light

to dance.

 

To raise the eyebrows

in silence in

my early language

meant consent.

When I came to America,

land of electricity, I found

so many

who freely gave

permission when I asked:

Is it permitted

to dance

here?

 

Laura M Kaminski is the Associate Editor of Right Hand Pointing, and a reader for The First Day. She grew up in northern Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in Missouri. More information on her poetry is available at arkofidentity.wordpress.com 

 

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HUGH LEMMA

 

April

 

Some days,

the resolution
of distant chimes
at my window,

the whirligig
decked out in ecru and cream,
unoccupied, spinning;

others,

the sweetness
of green tea
cooling in a pitcher,

the manic beauty
of the hummingbird
evading my lens;

still,

that single raindrop
finding my lashes,
the ensuing blink,

the moon in daylight,
unexpected, comforting,
almost reachable;

and today,

the palo verde
whose tiny petals
gather beneath 

then lilt away
in late currents,
paving the street

with gold.

 

 

Hemispheres

 

The moon 
pulls at water,

watchmen 
turn pages,

lilies
close,

dots of merlot
dry in crystal,

a house 
clicks with settling;

somewhere,
it is day.

 

Hugh Lemma lived most of his life in Southern New Jersey before relocating to Arizona in 2005. His writing is informed by experiences in both places, as well as abiding interests in philosophy, religion, and pop culture.

 

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MAMTA MADHAVAN

 

Images................You and Me..............

(for H.L.)

 

Floating Market, Ratchaburi, Thailand

Crowded klongs and thai canoe boats

in the morning rush and through the succulent fruits

we try to wade.

 

Wat Phraw Kaew, Grand Palace, Bangkok

Mythical tales, elephants and murals,

near the altar we hold hands

and pray for harmony.

 

Taj Mahal, Agra, India

A full moon night, hushed whispers

the silver beams etch our filigreed selves

through the jalis.

 

Cheenawala, Kochi, India

Rows and rows of fishing nets

we get trapped

in the bait.

 

Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt

Looming large; the sphinx and tombs

we hear our echoes

sift through the sands.

 

 Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt

Ramses and Nefertiti,

artifacts and coins on the walls

history stares at us.

 

Khan el Khalili, Cairo

In the bustling souq our bejeweled gazes

scan the souvenir shops,

nazar boncugu and the silver trinkets.

 

Hurghada, Egypt

Scuba diving in the turquoise blue waters

and coral reefs of the Red Sea -

we discover  the rainbow .

 

Dune Bashing, Dubai

Gahwa and shisha,

amid the ochre sands and golden sunset

we purify ourselves.

 

Jebel Hafeet, Alain

Winding lanes and hot water springs

up the steep road

we see the summit.

 

Mamta Madhavan has been writing poetry since the age of 13. Her poems have been published in print and online literary journals all over. She is a curator at gotpoetry.com.

 

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JENNIFER A. MCGOWAN

 

Study

My mother had a tiny room
filled with bookshelves, filing cabinets,
echoes of undergraduates, and just her.
There she sat, a singular Fate who judged
how long or short a thread a student would hang by,
bleeding red ink in the hope
that she would be understood.
Sometimes, through the panes,
she’d watch the boulder in the yard,
shadows leafing across it;
her children climbing its height into moments of self,
learning the value of solitary space.
Even when empty the room was full of her.
Books I would never grow into
jacket-dusted their disapproval.
Still I was driven to search, 
to seek intimations of identity,
to discover the ways she moved
into and beyond her limitless circles
by sitting still.  Wanting to understand,
how I riffled her pages.


Oral Interpreting

Do not jut the tongue between the teeth
when saying an L.
What makes a B an M
is flared nostrils.
Speaking a P, puff your cheek
and release air sufficient to be seen.

Lips lifted forward, the lower one up,
tongue pressed precisely
to where high palate begins.
Exert force.  Ch.  That’s right.

Do not grow a moustache
or otherwise obscure your lips.
Release the words gently,
your breath not even a whisper.
Be animated.  Your silence
is all they will ever hear.

Now. Let us try Shakespeare.    
 

Jennifer A. McGowan was highly commended in the Torbay Poetry Competition and longlisted in the Over the Edge New Writer Competition last year. Her poetry has been accepted by The Connecticut Review, Agenda, Connecticut River Review, Envoi, Acumen, Gargoyle, and other magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. She has a chapbook with Finishing Line Press and another forthcoming in 2014and has been anthologised alongside the likes of Ursula K. LeGuin and Lyn Lifshin.  She is a peer reviewer for the arts page of American Journal of Nursing and a reviewer for Orbis and The North. She was featured at the Torbay Poetry Festival last year and several of her poems have been used as teaching texts at university level in the US.

 

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VINCENT O’CONNOR

 

A Poem is a Sea

 

First the sound, first the sea,

it moved me first in furrows.

Singing soft words, strangely, the music

settled on the shoreline with the ebb

and flow of pebbles, endlessly lapping.

The crashing white behind us,

the creaking ship-wood sleeping,

and the hundred thousand folds.

 

Mountains could never seduce us,

not like that. Mountains echo only nothings,

quiet in their magnitude. The sea seduces as a poem,

gently lapping kisses, faintly foreign,

constantly corroding both mountains and memories.

The rise begins, and falls, and begins again.

 

 

The Trees I Cannot See

 

The trees I cannot see are vectors,

dissecting perfectly the plane

between brick and brackish bay.

 

In the blind of my peripheral eye line

they rescale parallels, intersect

perpendicular angles. Shell trajectory

 

true, they pin the pavement, traffic,

and rising shadowed skyline.

Axe-straight as a lightening crack.     

 

The single sunlight is slanted cab

edge, scantly dazzling,

sped past in phantom calm.

 

But my head is down. Curve-turned

uptown, I’ve passed the feeble

Jewish bubbes heading East

 

passed the handouts and the street tarts,

and all bent as sinners, fixed

tight against the self- salted

 

whip-wind curving off the Hudson.  

What are vectors anyway but

blind, grasping arrows of augury?

  

 

Vincent O’Connor is originally from Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, Ireland. Having previously lived and worked in Spain and Japan, he now lives in Cork with his wife, two kids, and two cats. His poems have appeared, or are upcoming, in, amongst others, The Lake, The Penny Dreadful, Vending Machine Press, Right Hand Pointing, The Puffin Review, Acorn, the Asahi Shimbun, Frogpond and Modern Haiku. Vincent tweets @ vincentoconnor_

 

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WILLIAM REICHARD

 

Vigil, Bedside

 

Rain's darkness yet, no rain

          only the back and forthness

                   of sun and cloud, sun under cloud, sun, no cloud.

 

The heat makes this contrariness unbearable.

          The ferns doze in the worst of it, what ferns still stand

                   and the air is tension, anticipation.

 

Housebound, but self-imposed, hiding from

          what I will not accept, cannot accommodate,

                   this dew-soaked air, the nothing of breathing.

 

All through the house, the scent of hot attic musk,

          dust-choked, mildewed, rotting.

                   We're waiting for something but we must not say what.

 

She sleeps through most of her days

          and when she wakes, she stays near the window,

                   looking out, patient, knowing.

 

I make deals with the devils that inhabit my head,

          as if I have the power to will anything into action.

                   These devils never sleep, always eat, eternally hungry.

 

Say it out loud - but you must not.

          Words possess the power to make things happen,

                   like wishing for an end to suffering, then it ends.

 

I am wishing for an end that is inevitable but will not come.

          But I want it to. There, it's said. And so the days stretch

                   impossibly thin, brittle, until she, at last, with the heat, breaks.

 

 

Alice Rallies

 

Death comes close, but she recants.

It leaves again. She takes back

the testimony of the spine,

that rough mountain of bone;

she takes back the hips

into which her skin collapses.

She says she never called for death.

She denies him completely.

Meanwhile, there are stairs to climb,

bedrooms unvisited in months.

There is sleeping where she likes,

her body curled into a perfect C

so her head nearly touches her feet,

forms an impenetrable fort

into which mortality may not enter.

 

 

After Wonderland

          06/01/99 - 07/16/13

 

Alice, come back through the looking glass.

 

I've tried to follow but cannot pass

between one world and another.

 

If you see me through the scratched silver

of the mirror's back, return to me.

 

If you hear me calling from the opposite

end of an infinite tea table, come back.

 

The old rhymes and stories are not true.

 

I know this.

 

          Somewhere out in the confines

of our little yard, there is a rabbit hole.

 

I feed the rabbits in the winter, fruit

and vegetables on a plate in the snow.

 

Why did you search for that tunnel at all?

 

Now that you're there you'll have to keep

moving.

 

          Look for the hidden door,

the one rabbits make for a quick escape.

 

Follow my voice.

 

Come back to me.

 

The story tells us you can't emerge

from the same door you disappeared into.

 

 

William Reichard is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, Sin Eater (Mid-List Press, 2010). He lives in Saint Paul, MN.

 

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K. V. SKENE

 

Like A Beautiful Apparition

 

Late afternoon and the air in her flat

thickens over the traffic rumble

assaulting her

from below. Above her window

a spiderweb oscillates

on a single breath – at its centre

the spider flexes long probing legs.

 

            * * *

Like a beautiful apparition he dismounts

the Harley. Under his helmet the boy seems taller,

harder, older  than before. Abruptly

he shifts from sunlight

to shadow

and enters, brushing her cheek

with the back of his glove

 

            * * *

as she sits on the edge of the bed

and stares out the window.  Happiness

was supposed to arrive today. She remembers

how her mother once opened the door to it.

Just like that.

While she, the pigtailed birthday girl,

sat at the kitchen table eating strawberry ice cream.

 

            * * *   

Before he leaves he turns, eyes

her thin cheeks, her narrow throat,

the roadmap of veins on her small breasts,

her soft stomach – before his hands

begin to fist, before he unleashes

whatever never sleeps in his head, before

he grabs for his helmet, shoulders the door.

 

            * * *   

There is more to this than using a woman

with long brown hair, a woman wearing black

fishnets, heels

on the tumbled bed, a woman

who won’t repeat the name of the boy

who shivered

after she held him to her.

                                                                                                           

* * * 

So the story is murder happened in that flat

and, late at night, there are footsteps ...  

In a street where people are suspicious,

are superstitious,

such a flat stays empty for years.

It is true that once a woman lived there

and a boy came ...

 

            * * *   

Nothing else is for sure, no forensics

are found and no one’s suspected,

no one’s arrested and no face

appears at the window where the spider

spins out its web –  evidencing emptiness

and evil, appetite and ache –  banal

circumstantial things

 

            * * *     

as possessively, he guns his Harley, crows

when its oversized exhausts burble. Crouched

over it, he breaks into a grin

as he did when the kitten exploded

that time ... When the puppy he’d picked up

whimpered no more

and hung limp in his hands.

 

K.V. Skene’s poems have appeared in Canadian, U.K., U.S., Irish, Australian and Austrian magazines, most recently:  Weyfarers, Acumen, The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Cornwall and Orbis. Her publications include Love in the (Irrational) Imperfect, 2006, Hidden Brook Press (Canada) and You Can Almost Hear Their Voices, 2010, Indigo Dreams Publications (UK). After living in England and Ireland for many years, she has returned to Canada and currently lives and writes from Toronto.

 

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YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB

 

Temperance Movements

 

Just when we learned to roam in this tongue,

to shed awareness of our tendency to round vowels,

to not round the vowels at all, to respond without pausing,

to dip into pools of colloquialisms and Technicolor slang

emerging from the taverns and street corners, approved in the cafés,

and ultimately sanctioned by the language academies,

to enunciate with the flag aflutter (but not waving) in our larynxes,

 

Just when we learned the nuances of these recipes,

now is the time for the flame lowered, this will render this dough

flaky, here the right garnish and there the right drizzle of gravy

on flower-bordered porcelain and beneath the silverest cutlery

for framing is equally crucial all points that cannot be taught by

recipe books but only by the experts taught by forebears over fires roaring

on a day defined by sheets of rain tolling against pane and roof

 

Just when we learned to tailor our dress,

to don the tones of our surroundings, to relinquish the shades

of breeze fluttering palm fronds and petals, to accept instead those

of pewter and slate and coal dampened by mist, to look away from or

reach out to those who persisted in those now impossible shades, caught

in dreams that were for us becoming ever more distant in memory,

to persuade them that our way was for the best, for the now,

 

Just when we learned the trajectory of events foundational,

when the patriots had outlined the parameters of community, illuminating

signals in fields, sending messengers to dodge the tyrant’s boot, when the

generals had released the call for the men to step away from the barley

harvest, when women were recruited for the sewing of uniforms,

nursing the wounded, and indoctrination of the young, always the young,

when the community so long imagined finally became the motherland,

 

Just when we had been rendered into citizens extraordinaire hewn until

pliant, and simply just here, on this divan together in this flat on a Friday

night after services and dinner, just then did the petitions begin to

circulate, the boycotts, once dismissed as ineffectual, began to

strengthen.  Far from defending us from the plans forming abroad,

our neighbors found themselves eager to learn more about

and to execute those very plans.

 

Only when we accepted the inevitability of the end,

only when we had confirmed that a cousin across the ocean

would indeed shoulder the burden of us, only when we had gathered

our medals and prizes for services outstanding rendered

did we pause to finger the shapes

of a collective self that we could not even begin to locate. 

What for these accomodations? 

 

In our flawless diction, we lauded the architectural intricacy of the

parliament building.  We remembered X who had presented us with a then

obscure pastry when we moved into these now bare rooms.  Its

sweetness reminded us of the flourishes and swirls of our (once)

parliament.  We giggled despite ourselves.  Gloves in hand, tremors

shielded by a black veil, Mother urged us to finish packing and to brace ourselves for the avalanche of nostalgia sure to come.

 

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of four books of poetry, including Prayers of a Heretic.  He was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of New York’s best emerging Jewish artists and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net award.  Visit his website at www.yataub.net.

 

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LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA

 

Running Orders

 

In July 2014, before the Israeli military would fire at a structure in
Gaza, they would send a warning “bomb” to let the Palestinian residents
know they had less than a minute before the next bigger bomb. They
called this “roof knocking”

 

They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass
shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us not to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this
Message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth.
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your
house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes
out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place.
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application.
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

 

First published in Vox Populi, 17 July 2014

 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes poetry and literary translation. She has lived in and traveled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing borders: cultural, geographic, political, borders between peace and war, the present and the living past. Her work has appeared in the journal Magnolia, Exit 13 magazine, Al-Ahram weekly, Vox Populi and the Seattle Times. Several of her poems are forthcoming in the online journal Human, based in Turkey, and in the print anthology Being Palestinian, to be published by Oxford Press in 2015. She lives with her family in Redmond, Washington, in the United States.

 

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AMANDA TUMMINARO

 

My Hands

 

They craft, from particles, a turkey and mayonnaise
sandwich (receding nourishment for brunch).

 

The fingers are not locked in unison for prayer –
the religious hunch has got to be present
for me to submit to cloud and sky.

 

I painted the bloody, crumbling porch – it is an absurdist
story. I will walk it one day and it will disappear
under my touch.

 

I believe not in holding the dead rabbit’s foot for luck, for
it is dead, but I will eat chicken with a crunch.

 

It’s been much too long ago since carnations or petunias
were placed on Dad’s grave. They have drooped and slunk,
now mirroring the artificial gardener.

 

 

Description of Night

 

So avant-garde is 10 p.m.
how it hangs in the air
like a mammoth sloth.
A conjuring fly sits upon the wall,
and, like humans, lies in wait
for their partner, sometimes as impersonal.
The clock ticks. It is round,
missing pendulum, castrated.
A woman somewhere is putting on
her nightly facial, a thick mask,
vegetables for eyes, a child’s Halloween.

 

 

On Our Way to Dubuque

 

The greens flush with their brilliance,
they grew on the land in a bowl for the Deity.
The quaint villages opened up their
yawning skies, the clouds appeared to be

 

humble, harmless, rounded mountains
with a backdrop of azure, diligent in its’ postcard
employment. The thumping of the jet-black tires,
and we were horizontal travelers passing

 

glass museums, through the prisms, and I took
note on my palm of cottage of crafts,
the crooked roof, the planted petunia
that grew outward and striped like soft candy.

 

 

Amanda Tumminaro lives in the U.S. with her family. She enjoys libraries and caffeinated drinks. Her poetry has appeared in Storm Cellar, Sassafras Literary Magazine, Hot Metal Bridge and Three and half point 9, among others.

 

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