2013

 

OCTOBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

RICH BOUCHER, VALENTINA CANO, JON DAMBACHER, PHILLIP A. ELLIS,

ROBERT KLEIN ENGLER,GORDON GIBSON, SALLY GRADLE, KYLE HEMMINGS,

 USHA KISHORE, ALAN S. KLEIMAN,  PIPPA LITTLE, PATRICIA J. MCLEAN,

CATHERINE SEIZ NICHOLS, CINDY RINNE, ADEN THOMAS.

 

 

 

RICH BOUCHER

 

A Long-Lost Friend

 

Every month I get a new letter from the same person,

this poor, poor man who is under the impression

that we were once good childhood friends.

We're about the same age, but he lives in Nebraska,

where the only way one can communicate

with the outside world is with handwritten letters,

where you have to live in a slanted barn, amid tall wheat,

in a kind of sunlight that is always the dusk in a painting.

I live in a city, where you can go to see handwritten letters

where they belong, under glass inside a museum.

I have seen paintings of tall wheat slanting in the sun

in museums where they also have handwritten letters.

He sends me a letter every eleventh, and in these letters

he asks me if I remember the playground behind the school

we went to together, except that I don't know him

and we never went to any school together that I know of.

I write him letters in return, and in these letters

I tell him that I do not remember falling backwards

off of the top of the ladder on the slide by the sand;

I don't remember Miss Heston, or her big glasses;

I tell him I honestly don't remember helping him

when he almost cut his thumb off in the bus window,

but I am glad he has his thumb still, and I tell him

that if we were on a bus together now, as adults,

as strangers who happened to pick seats near each other,

I would seriously consider helping him, if it turned out

that he got his thumb stuck in the window again.

He keeps sending me letter after letter, month after month,

even though I close my letters back to him the same way:

I'm sorry, Ryan, I really am, but we can't keep meeting up

at the playground behind the school we used to go to as kids together;

we're grownups now, and there's nothing we can do about that.

  

 

Rich Boucher lives, works, writes and performs steadily in Albuquerque, and is the occasional Guest Editor of the weekly poetry column "The DitchRider" at DukeCityFix.com. Rich's poems have appeared in The Bicycle Review,The Subterranean Quarterly and The Nervous Breakdown. Hear his poems atrichboucher.bandcamp.com

 

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VALENTINA CANO

 

 A Man Facing the End



 

His skin turns grey and dry.

Cold until it rattles like paper

with each intake of breath.

His heartbeats hook into his flesh,

a fish caught over and over again.

This must be what an end feels like,

the running short

and the running out

of every spare part.

  

Paper Coffin

 

She planned a burial in origami.

Folding, unfolding sheets.

Imagining the tight, crispness

of cold corners,

the contrast to her days

of television static

and the rows of meal after meal after meal.

All of it pressed back

by a ninety degree angle.

The world folding away

from her eyes.

 

 

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever  free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise  Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19,  Precious Metals, A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal,  Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary  Journal, A Narrow Fellow, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling, Popshot,  Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Rem Magazine, Structo, The 22 Magazine, The  Black Fox Literary Magazine, Niteblade, Tuck Magazine, Ontologica, Congruent  Spaces Magazine, Pipe Dream, Decades Review, Anatomy, Lowestof Chronicle, Muddy  River Poetry Review, Lady Ink Magazine, Spark Anthology, Awaken Consciousness  Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Magazine, Avalon Literary Review, Caduceus,White  Masquerade Anthology and Perhaps I'm Wrong About the World. Her poetry has been  nominated for Best of the Web and the Pushcart Prize.You can find her here

 

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JON DAMBACHER

 

 

1

 

The kid behind the counter

in the East Village costume shop

fingers the decorations on the uniform I brought to sell.

Says,"Wow,"

asks, "did somebody die in it?"

 

His pot-swollen face

reminds me of a kid I saw in the field

caught a sniper bullet in his front teeth.

Air whizzed from the back of his throat

as he fell to the ground

we had to take the knoll and leave him.

Colonel Dax, Weber, Turner

and a few others were pissed off later

even discussed going out to find the body.

 

I'd had enough of that

our unit dropped from twenty men

to seven.

I was lucky to stay alive

I just bought a Hawaiian shirt with palm trees

these fatigues are my flaking scales.

I look at the little stoned kid

in his cloudy eyes

 

answer his question, "Yes."

 

 

2

 

She sits

watching from beside him overusing his hands

in a conversation she isn't a part of.

At least his outfit looks presentable,

she thought,

and the wine was taking care of the rest.

Admiring the detail

someone put into setting this table

and the floral arrangement smells fresh.

 

They're in a fine dining restaurant

he's being interviewed

about what he saw over there.

When everyone was introduced

he never gave them her name

and they've yet to address her.

 

As the tortellini and asparagus arrive

she eyeballs the ingredients

thinking of what to buy at the market.

Had she finished off the last of the noodles

was there anymore lettuce in the fridge

it's had some time to turn?

There's no one cooking

but she for herself

and usually fresh from the pot in front of tv.

 

After dinner & taxi

she's joined him for a kiss at his place

afterward in the shower she's alone.

Hand on the porcelain tile

unaware now of the water's temperature

decides she's not going to spend the night.

  

 



Jon Dambacher lives in Los Angeles, Ca. His published works of fiction are, Gyratory Jabber, Sour Candies, A Strange, Sickly Beauty, & a small book of poetry Anchored Disorder in collaboration with Cliff Weber. @Jon_Dambacher is on Instagram, Tumblr, etc.

 

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PHILLIP A. ELLIS

 

Calypso Singing in her Haunted Cave

 



The sea murmurs outside, down along the shore
that knows intimately his footsteps burning
tracks into the sand. There are bees in flowers,
ground cover turning aside from the seawinds,
and there she is singing in her haunted cave,
and the sound of it is lost in the burnished
seethe of the water on the shore, where the gulls
congregate and complain to the open wind.

 

It is the thought of home that swells within him:
the old and faithful hound waiting by the door,
his wife awaiting him, maybe still faithful,
the young son that was a boy when he had left,
his worn father toiling in his vineyard, and
the bridal bed waiting after a long day.

 

 

Seagrass

 



Among the aisles of seagrass, in the light
of wincebright suns, the dugongs pass like life
unmoved by thought, so that this realm of time
is moved by currents only, seasons' rimes.

 

The water burbles, sounds are lowered, dulled,
and liquid rhythms mark the passing poem,
and something sweet and simple dares to hone
itself upon the world—a trope of waters.

 

But there is structure to this life, the cast
of creatures into birth, bewildered living,
and then, upon occasion at the end,
the gassy, floating corpse, propeller gashes.

 

I wonder what the number is that lived
and died, that had survived a moment only,
that maybe registered the spawning moons
before the humans came with burdens, boats.

  

 

Phillip A. Ellis. These poems are earmarked for inclusion in a proposed chapbook, Coral Seas: Poems for Graham Nunn. Website: http://www.phillipaellis.com/ Blog: http://www.phillipaellis.com/news/

 

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ROBERT KLEIN ENGLER

 

Burning Man

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning...

 

T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

 

 

Black Rock dust gets into everything. My advice,

bring things you don't mind getting destroyed.

 

A scent of fresh mowed grass perfumes
the morning air. The lawn is neat and trim like

the tasseled tops of cornfields on the road

out from Omaha, or the crew cut hair on

the boy who holds carefree the handlebar

wings of his bike and rides down Eden Street.

 

The dust is not an acid but a base, yet it works

the same. Last year it ate Jimmy's transmission.

 

I've seen the goldfinches fly from thistle flower

to thistle flower and shake the cotton off seeds

to eat. A serious and mortal business for them.

You can always walk out into the fields on a

clear day and look up. It's like living under a bowl

of blue sky. Then, you have nothing to hide.

 

Some folks swear after a week in it you feel clean.

I'm a Burner, you're a Burner, we're all Burners.

 

I'm from a forgotten place where weeds grow

from sidewalk cracks and dandelions struggle

in dead grass. After men landed on the moon

a weariness set in. Then, it was the corrosion

of civil rights. Outside of town, the graveyard

stones are set in rows like the fields of corn.

 

Some girl lost her green notebook of poems,

but it was found like a stray lamb and turned in.

 

Grandma came here with the rest, leaving

more and more behind and looking for that

missing part of herself. That's why the farm

was a burden for her. It forced her to look

at the earth, to lower the bucket into the well.

You draw up worry along with the cool water.

 

Black Rock Desert is a dry summer in the heart.

I'm a Burner, you're a Burner, we're all Burners.

 

It took us a year to save up enough to buy

her a recliner. Then she said she didn't like it.

The leatherette was too slick. She died

soon after that. Kinda like those old houses

you see by the railroad with the porch falling

down and the stairs rotting back to dust.

 

In Black Rock City some believe art saves us.

Use vinegar to wash the dust off your gear.

 

On bright days, the hard line of a corner shows

one side is sunlight the other side is shade.

There is no desert vision beyond our common

coming and going here. The Man's arms are high

the night he burns. When you leave, the rusty

gate by the barn needs a push to set it right.

 

 

Robert Klein Engler lives in Des Plaines, Illinois and sometimes New Orleans. Many of his poems, stories, and photographs are set in the Crescent City. He holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Chicago Divinity School. Mr. Engler has worked as a college administrator, a union chapter chairman, a university professor and an associate at the Gap. He has received an Illinois Arts Council award for his, Three Poems for Kabbalah, and other poems. His long poem, The Accomplishment of Metaphor and the Necessity of Suffering, set partially in New Orleans, is published by Headwaters Press, Medusa, New York.

 

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GORDON GIBSON

 

Mandolin

 

When I was a child,

my father played the mandolin.

The notes came, unexpected

like drops of summer rain,

unlooked-for from a man so sober,

his scarred and blackened fingers,

dancing on gold and silver strings.

I did not know till I was grown

the well of sentiment

from which he drew such poignant tunes

with hands that seemed impervious to pain.

 

 

The road across the moor

 

When, in a dream, he walked again the moor road,

it was no longer summer, with harebell and bog cotton.

He did not hear the skylarks nor the sob of golden plovers.

 

But in the shifting light of a violet autumn dusk,

the undying wind spun and rattled the chimney-tops,

made flapping ragged flags of linen on the line.

Distant grey hills waited, like an unknown land,

where heedless children in a tale wander, never to return.

 

He saw again the steading, the cottage, the dry-stone walls,

the twisted hawthorn, the rough grass yellowing for winter.

A dream of loss, of vanished time, insistent like

an old song from the sweet voice of a sorrowing girl,

led him along the dark road on the empty moor.

 

Gordon Gibson lives in Troon, on the south-west coast of Scotland. He has worked as a teacher and lecturer, and now writes full-time.

 

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SALLY GRADLE

 

How to Hold the Earth and Everything in it



 

Rocks hold the soil because

they want to feel history

surround them.

 

The soil speaks

of what they will become as they age,

and they respect that.

 

Breathing from a deep place, any rock

can become aware of being crushed, too. It builds character,

and they are stronger from the stress.

 

Fractures are just openings in each other,

and places to go. Rocks crackle with these daily miracles,

revealing their sense of humor.

 

An avalanche appeals to some, they jump on

the bandwagon and roll. Others, unconvinced, stand

their ground as though rooted.

 

What happens is they learn to see

what they hold. The rocks have a strategy for freedom,

never mind their names.

 

 

Plastic Surgery

 

I celebrate the perfect avocado

whose flesh is firm,

yet yielding.

It is so rare to find The Perfect One.

So many

come and go. Most are cut and then

discarded, brown and stringy, decayed

in the core.

But today, I thought to hope again.

I topped my bowl of lettuce

with my seven almonds,

fresh ground pepper,

and pink Himalayan salt,

and then. The Perfect One.

Cut and consumed so slowly,

savored as though this

was always

about the timing of knife, responsive

flesh, and anticipation.

 

Sally Gradle is an artist, writer, and art teacher Her poetry has been published in The English Journal, Grasslimbs, Oberon, and others. She lives to create. Period.

Visit her blog here

 

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KYLE HEMMINGS

  

Mr. Glass and the Melting Girl

 

He passed her each day on the way to work.
Hands gripping the bowstring arch of a bridge,
body thin as flag of a nation he wished to forget.
He found her melting in the windows of shops
that sold bittersweet chocolates in complex geometric shapes.
He almost ran over her when she was decomposing in the moon's reflection.
When he looked back, she was gone.

 

He searched for traces of her skin, the broken treble of her voice,
in cupboards, in the pipes under sink holes, in the tunnels under sewers,
in the eyes of familiar thieves, until he himself became bald
under the weight of all things he had lost.

 

 

Mr. Glass and the Disowned Dog

 

The dog crept up, as if from nowhere,
in each photo from Mr. Glass's new smart phone.
It was a beige Toy Poodle with the kind of big black eyes
that could suck one in until that someone
became too small to hold or fondle or fold.
It turned up in the background
by a Michigan shimmering lake,
keeping its head up in shallow sinks of sky blue water
alternating with dark. It materialized on the lowest branch
of a large leaf dogwood. It raised its paw
in a photo taken during a vacation
on Phuket Island, Thailand.
It may have been the only dog on the island.

 

The smart phone was a gift from Mr. Glass's two-note key girlfriend,
named Erin Price. The notes were always yes or no
little in between. Erin Price was a slight woman
attracted to eating Oreo cookies in dusky corners
or finding new subtle refutations against sex.
As if birds never existed. And dogs never barked.

 

 

Selkie

 

As a child, Mr. Glass would walk barefoot into the night,
under an endless grove of bur oak or black locust.
He'd listened to the stones whisper, but it was not a human language.
He crept up to a brook where he would catch a glimpse
of a white translucent horse. Would his hand go through the horse's body
if he tried petting it?

 

Back in bed, Mr. Glass would outline in the air, the horse's chin groove,
the branch of jaw. For years.

 

Mr. Glass was never certain if he sleep-walked,
or if we all awoke in someone else's sleep,
and everyone became someone else's dark magical horse.

  

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, This Zine Will Change Your Life, Matchbook, and elsewhere. He loves cats, dogs, and garage bands of the 60s

 

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USHA KISHORE

 

The Milkmaid

Inspired by the painting of Raja Ravi Varma

 

You cannot just fathom her in analogous colours

of yellow, rust, gold and brown. The brushwork

flirts so intricately in tonality that oil paints wear

her bewildered expression like a mirror image.

 

Her reluctant doe eyes and her quivering lips speak

volumes of his deceptive mélange of matte passions.

Is it the lightly rising sari in sfumato, darkening

around her torso or is it the faint blush suffusing

her dark cheeks that draws the painter to his canvas?

Is it the sleight of hand that deftly holds the brass

milk pot or the coyness of the fingers that bashfully

wrap the sari around her face, that draws you most?

 

You can almost hear the tinkling of the black

and white glass bangles, as she poises demurely

in mellow hues. Given half a chance, she would

just leave a sensuous silhouette in the brunaille

and slink away into her blossoming youth, that

brought about the capture of her timorous mood

into his frame of illusions and varying shades

of amorous ochre that depict such seductive

innocence in the intriguing stillness of impasto.

 

 

Raja Ravi Varma (1848 – 1906) was one of the greatest painters in the history of Indian art. Ravi Varma is well known for the fusion of Indian subjects with techniques bearing strong influences of the EuropeanAcadémie des Beaux-Arts. This poem is part of my ongoing ekphratic work on the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma.

 

 

Gypsy in Bikaner

 



She sits veiled

in solstitial sandstorms.

Smiling like daylight,

she sells her wares

to the world, bangles

feigning in silver,

earrings made of slivers

of sun and puppet tales

of princesses in love

with blue gods. Behind her,

the desert sang of men

and horses, of the moon

roaming the skies

on camel back

and of the universal causality

of karma and rebirth.

 

Usha Kishore is an Indian born British poet, now resident on the Isle of Man. Her first collection, On Manannan's Isle, due out in February 2014, has received an Arts Council Award and a Culture Vannin (Isle of Man) award. Usha's work was shortlisted for the Erbacce Poetry Prize in 2012. "Gypsy in Bikaner", along with another poem received an honourable mention at the New Writer 16th Annual Prose and Poetry Prizes, 2012.

 

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ALAN S. KLEIMAN

 

Body Whispers

 

My bird chews quietly by the humming sounds

the cars outside passing between lights

the fan on the computer

singing a steady drone

a door opening and closing as one leaves a room

saying I'm settling in

I read some poems of the famous

I listened to them speak their magic

on colored videos with talk show host

 

I saw these poets with their hairs

all combed

and dressed up in poet clothes

with hems and cuffs

that skimmed the ground

where we would step

I was listening to my bird

chew a seed

and push one kernel aside

to find its favorite

You see, I had entered the holy room

where sometimes on a clear day

a few words of my own

come together

and I smell my body whispering

poet.

 

Alan S. Kleiman's chapbook, Grand Slam, has just been released by Crisis Chronicles Press (September, 2013). His poetry appears in Verse Wisconsin, The Criterion, Right Hand Pointing, Camel Saloon, Fringe, The Montucky Review and many other journals and magazines. His poems are in anthologies published by Fine Line Press and Red Ocher Press. He lives and works in New York City.

 

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PIPPA LITTLE

 

Homely

 

Brothers and sisters of the same harvest,

these walnuts, green apples, plums red

and yellow - but what are you doing in the morning

lantern?

 

Something to tell

about a girl, barefoot in seas of ragwort, fern,

not looking at who looks back at her

when the window opens

a faces comes flying out

and look! The chimneypot's a posy of thistles.

You want to say

 

I can mend her like a boat

with my hammer and nails,

seal where the rain slips in

under the warterline

 

only nobody's near enough to hear

 

Pippa Little was born in East Africa and raised in Scotland. She now lives in Northumberland with her husband, sons and dog. Her first collection, The Spar Box (2006) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her latest collection, Overwintering, was published in 2012.

 

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PATRICIA J. McLEAN

 

Territory

  



The last naturally nesting condor in Oregon

died in 1911 the same year my mother

was born on the Kansas plain.

The condor didn't know it was in Oregon.

Mom didn't know she was in Kansas.

My mother spread a wide territory around her,

a people-free zone

welcoming only her lifelong mate

and only so long as he remembered her

and he almost always did.

 

Condors are carrion eaters

shy of killing, shy of each other, shy of people.

I see the condor dropping

from the rain swollen belly of a cloud,

drifting, descending in casual waves

growing larger and larger with each swing.

Its wings eclipse the sky.

Rabbit knows it's not for her

but hides anyway, trembling.

 

Condor eats the dead.

With its mate raises only one chick a year.

The pair require miles and miles of solitary territory,

nest in high cliffs where predators

and chance encounters are unlikely.

My mother's cliff side nest was a book.

If she met a condor on her ascent, she averted her eyes

and from a distance, watched in secret

the wide stretch of wings and listened

for the drumming of its beak against the bones

of a winter-killed white-tail deer.

 

Patricia J. McLean is co-founder and non-fiction editor of Eloghi Gadugi Journal. She writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction and has published two chapbooks of poetry, and a novel (Bartlett House). Her work has appeared in Trillium, Panache, and other publications. She is currently working on a novel.

 

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CATHERINE SEITZ NICHOLS

 

Mother Cooking

 

she guillotines the carrots, with a dull, slivery knife,

then turns to light the stove already burning high,

she marvels at the butter, smokey dark in the pan,

moves it swiftly to the sink, turns the tap, burnt butter steam

 

anoints her wrinkles as she reaches for the soap with

the knife--surprised, she drops it into the white sink

before dripping lemon liquid thick as honey in the pan,

she turns, opens the cupboard, picks up an iron skillet,

 

weighing heavy in her hands, it clinks against the burner

still softly glowing warm, she cannot find the butter

forgotten in the freezer, left beside a soggy carton of

eggs that have cracked open, and turned to slimy frost

 

Catherine Seitz Nichols lives in Seattle. Her poetry has been published in the anthologies, Illuminations: Expressions of the Personal Spiritual Experience, and Radical Dislocations: Best New Underground Poets, as well as in the journals, Between the Lines and Floating Bridge Review. She was a participating poet in the Found Poetry Review's Pulitzer Remix Project, where she wrote thirty found poems in thirty days for National Poetry Month, based on the Civil War novel, Andersonville, by MacKinlay Kantor.

 

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CINDY RINNE

 

How to See Speak Art

After Wendy Xu

 

You must allow art to be your voice. You must not

think all people will like it. You will find a mentor to push

you to create larger, add folds, or experiment

with materials. This is a journey to my heart

the heart of the sacred fig where

are your eyes? This is because you bring your overlay

to my story and I have explained that to you. You must suspect

art has one answer when it is not

so simple. I stitch together fabrics

and listen for them to tell me

the next step. A hawk flies

overhead encouraging me to explore the land. An ancient

tree loses its leaves

choked out by other figs. Wait

I promise you will experience something new. You and I

grasp a fabric painting in our timeless moment.

 

Cindy Rinne creates art and writes in San Bernardino, CA. She is a founding member of PoetrIE, an Inland Empire based literary community. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Revolution House, Soundings Review, East Jasmine Review, Linden Ave. Literary Journal, The Gap Toothed Madness,A Narrow Fellow, shuf poetry, Poetry Quarterly, The Prose-Poem Project, Tin Cannon. www.fiberverse.com.

 

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ADEN THOMAS

 

Signals and Songs

 



My wife sings a nursery rhyme

to the shelter dog we've had for years,

playfully codes the beat

on his gray-dusted snout.

His half-fold ears track the echoes

like antenna tuning to the frequencies

of signals across the time band,

invisible waves from prescient seas,

when girls sang of London bridges,

and younger dogs, so black and tan,

ran freely through the streets.

 

Encore

 

The mason jar lives its afterlife

dressed as a blue vase on the windowsill,

but even in retirement old habits remain:

the preservation of carnations

clothed in formal white,

the scent of cinnamon rising from their lips.

 

Strapless

 

The cottonwoods let down their leaves

in the heavy air of November.

Rain exfoliates their crusty skins.

Sparrows whisper rumors: the lucidity

of December, the hush of falling snow.

The wind yawns and exhales,

a breath rushing by and fading

in a burst of a season the next town over.

It's been six months since we told the kids,

long enough for a reverse of weather.

  

Aden Thomas has published poetry in The San Pedro River Review, The Red River Review, and The Avalon Literary Review. Click here to visit his website.

 

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