2017

 

 

SEPTEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Pat Anthony, Devon Balwit, Demond Blake, Rachael Burns, Karen Dennison, Jack Little, R. W. McLellan, Jessica (Tyner) Mehta, Carl Nelson, Rajani Radhakrishnan,

J. R. Solonche, PC Vandall, Sarah White.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PAT ANTHONY

 

On Being Prepared

 

Across the world, women watch me go out

to sea, standing on widow’s walks, muddy

shorelines, rocky ledges above the waves.

 

Once the boats vanish in the troughs

there is nothing to do but knit the heavy

sweaters in the family pattern that make

 

for easier identification of washed up bodies.

Below the equator other women return to pink

and blue homes, clean last night’s catch, shoo

 

the last remaining chicken, scattering scales in the yard.

Inland, men go off into dry seas, the rustling corn

and trembling wheat, acres of squash and beans

 

and in this going out there is a terrible defiance

in both the man and woman bent on carving a place

from wave or waving wheat. Here there is beet

 

picking in late evening to avoid the worst of the heat,

squash and cucumbers to ready for the run into town

the next morning. The wife worries she will find him

 

some night. The empty boat, the tractor on its side,

the larger will having overcome what cannot be

subdued. She keeps her father’s funeral card to hand.

 

 

Pat Anthony writes from the rural midwest, drawing inspiration from rugged furrows in the land and those in the faces of people working it. Her work is a response to both observation and experience. Recently retired from education, she holds an MA in humanities literature from Cal State among others.  middlecreekcurrents.com

 

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DEVON BALWIT

 

The Whole Turns around This Center

 

They know I hide here, door swinging to

            like the claw over a hermit crab,

 

tucking me into my shell, walls just large enough

            for my limbs. Here I run the sponge

 

around and around, longer than any burned

            bit clings, just for the peace of it,

 

in this place that’s mine. In winter, I warm

            my hands. In the summer,

 

I cool them, each gesture easy, years gone

            into them until I could pare

 

and peel, flip and whisk blind. Here’s where,

            back turned to them, I’ve heard

 

their confessions, hard days that any other room

            would keep locked tight.

 

These worn countertops, though, don’t judge.

            The fridge adds its hum,

 

a soothing chorus. Need be, and I can lay my hand

            on a hundred proof

 

or a casserole for a different comfort.

            Every inch has its story,

 

some returned to gladly and some skipped over,

            crumbs I leave, and crumbs I brush away.

           

 

 

An Endless Retaking of the Same Ground

 

I never wonder where my son is. As certain as a kidnapper,

            I picture him in his dark room. I put him there

 

if buying him a computer suffices for blame. Like a dealer,

            I offered a free sample of the product,

 

kindling the blaze. At the time, I thought this revealed me

            no luddite, able to flex

 

atop cultural fault lines. Now I curse myself for not grabbing him

            and running into deep woods, off the grid,

 

where the only current pulses from the cells of living things.

            No matter the hour, I hear him up there,

 

his strings of Fucks and Shits as if overmastered by Tourette’s,

            hear the same from his invisible companions.

 

As if in parody of war, each campaign leads to the next,

            an endless retaking of the same ground.

 

Armaments are scavenged, upgraded, ambushes plotted,

            coalitions formed and abandoned, plans made

 

for any future but his own. Like a bullock, he seems content

            to circle the same millstone; each time I free him

 

from his yoke, he pines for his small circle, desperate

            to return to his endless treading, his safe ambit.

 

 

Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry). Her individual poems can be found here in The Lake as well as in The Cincinnati Review, The Stillwater Review, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Ekphrastic Review, The Inflectionist, Taplit Mag, Muse A/Journal, and more.

 

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DEMOND BLAKE

 

Comfort

 

The moment this

Bastard comes around

I start

Waiting for

Everything to

Collapse around

Me

 

“Oh don’t be that way” comfort says

 

“let’s go drink wine and laugh

all night”

 

“you fuck I bet someone’s

waiting to knife me outside”

 

“maybe”

says comfort

then giggles

 

I dress and step

CAREFULLY out

My door

 

No one is out there with

A knife

 

I make it to the store

Get the wine

Make it back

Without

Anything happening

 

Comfort is waiting for me glass in hand

 

“why won’t you

leave?” I ask

 

“cause you worry too much”

 

“I only worry cause

of your ass”

 

I pour us a drink

 

comfort

gulps his 

down smiling

at me

 

 

Demond Blake is a warehouse associate who has traveled the country working odd jobs, writing and meeting various artists, musicians and nonconformists living life on the fringes of society. He lives in Colton, CA with his wife and teenage son. Demond is currently seeking publication for Slackass his first novel.

 

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RACHEL BURNS

 

Lost

 

I find in my dreams

all the lost things

the street I grew up in

the small backyard

and the milk bottles

with the silver foil

pecked off by crows

and my mother’s

wedding ring

in the farmer’s field

covered in mud.

She washed it

with Fairy Liquid

in the porcelain sink.

It clattered and glittered

like gold in a broken tooth.

 

 

Rachel Burns is a poet and playwright living in Durham City, England. Poems published in UK literary magazines. Shortlisted in competitions Mslexia, Writers' & Artists Yearbook and The Keats- Shelley Poetry Prize 2017.

 

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KAREN DENNISON

 

Immanence

 

Nothing right now is louder than rain

as if all the pebbles from Brighton Beach

have catapulted from the sky, each one

hitting the bullseye of a thought;

 

each thought like a fragile glass, each rim

circled by a licked finger, waves resonating

into one repeating wordless sound.

 

Under its weight, leaves mouth their hymn

struck by stony drops, hold out tongues

in communion. And as the seed of a blackbird's prayer

begins to grow it's snatched by a river cascading

 

down the roof of the house, diving from the gutter.

My reflection wavers from a watery other-world,

submerged, unreal; signals like a deep-sea diver.

 

 

Karen Dennison won the Indigo Dreams Collection Competition in 2011 resulting in the publication of her first collection Counting Rain. She is editor, designer and publisher of the pamphlets Book of Sand and Blueshift (longlisted for the Saboteur Awards 2016) and co-editor of Against the Grain Poetry Press. https://kdennison.wordpress.com/about/

 

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JACK LITTLE

 

Inertia

 

With nose pushed up to windows,

condensation builds

into a grey storm

of stillness.

 

Grieving for those purple days

when prospects swarmed

and life was a thousand barrels

each filled to the brim with apples.

 

Out there on the other side

I catch the glare of the cat

before he howks and spits up

a hair ball, slinks off under the car

 

all unmoving again as potatoes fry

sizzling, at the other side of the kitchen.

 

 

Jack Little is a British-Mexican poet, editor and translator based in Mexico City. He is the author of Elsewhere (Eyewear, 2015) and is the founding editor of The Ofi Press. He was the poet in residence at The Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in Ireland in July 2016. @JLittleMexico

 

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R. W. MCLELLAN

 

So many, so much

After reading Donald Hall's "Out the Window"

 

The snow is high enough that a horse would be

mostly hidden if he walked the path I shoveled

from the front door to the driveway. If the horse

 

were real, I’d ask him to recall the ecstatic grass;

the pushy and arrogant bushes we had in our yard

this summer. I'd tell him that snow becomes river

 

soon enough, ask him to remind me that the words

can cease, can become a friend who got tired of

waiting around for me. I'd beg for him to speak

 

of the snow and yard, the grass and bushes; I'll be

in a reclining chair, slouched in a forgotten living

room, surrounded by so many unread novels, a

 

silent room of so much dancing dust.

 

R.W. McLellan is the author of Plenty of Blood to Spare (Sargent Press) and is a three-time recipient of the Esther Buffler Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Lower East Side Review, OVS Magazine, and The November 3rd Club. He is currently teaching and writing in the woods of western Maine, where he lives with his wife.

 

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JESSICA (TYNER) MEHTA

 

Relativity

 

Cages are relative, the animals

showed me that. Gallops and scurries

from unclaimed Oregon wild

out back. Nightly, they came

for discount cereal, day-old

pastries, the scraps and crumbs

of our sorry offering. The skunks

groomed us to serve their favorites

earlier in winter, the raccoons

showed us they didn’t like plates

or trays, thought they were traps,

proved they’d never miss a crumble.

The littlest ones, the babies,

the kits and fawns and joeys,

jolted with increasing confidence

towards the glass doors. Watched us

with curiosity as they feasted.

When we’d open the doors,

foots would stomp and tails went up,

rushings fast into the darkness

because we,

we were escaping. And we bolted

from our cage with a feral ferocity.

 

 

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a Cherokee poet and novelist. She’s the author of four collections of poetry including Secret-Telling Bones, Orygun, What Makes an Always, and The Last Exotic Petting Zoo as well as the novel The Wrong Kind of Indian. She’s been awarded numerous poet-in-residencies posts, including positions at Hosking Houses Trust and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. Visit Jessica’s author site at www.jessicatynermehta.com.

 

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CARL NELSON

 

Listening to Merle Haggard in a Quiet River Town Bar

(“Today I Started Loving Her Again”)

 

It’s a sad, reflective song of a man and an old passion;

rising like the bubbles when you tap the side of a flat beer.

The mind encumbered by itself,

wrapped up in a past thought

with two old hens and a ponytailed bartender,

who like ginned up country rock;

an old party crowd with wizened hearts,

who’ve seen and been through a lot,

a lot of which they started.

So things aren’t going that well.

 

Merle would understand this earthy bunch,

but right now he’s trying to think something through,

as am I who am always trying to get to the point,

which is a way of ending conversation,

rather than to feed it.

Which is another good reason for me to order another cold draft

and not spoil this moment,

as Merle is trying to resolve this love issue,

to get to the point, which it won’t do.

Love can be evasive as all hell.

 

Some emotions just won’t summarize.

They hang about like bar flies,

till you’ll buy them another drink

and then afterwards.

Haunted by a love which keeps re-appearing,

by a part of life which won’t move on,

trying to get a step ahead with one foot stuck in the past,

you think you’ve broken free just to step in it again.

Glancing around the bar, trying to scrape it off your shoe,

until someone up and says it:

“You need to get a dog, man.”

 

Merle Haggard was on the road a lot,

so he couldn’t have a dog.

Instead, he has this memory of love

which kept following him around,

in and out of bars

and onstage.

 

 

Carl Nelson has recently taken up the poetry pen again after an extended interval spent writing and producing plays in Seattle, WA.  He currently runs the Serenity Poetry Series in Vienna, WV.  He lives across the river in Belpre, Ohio with his wife, son, dachshund 'Tater Tot', and cat 'Sammie'.  Currently he moseys about his small river town and spends his days reading and working up what small thoughts that come to mind into poems. 

 

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RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN

 

That Evening in Goa

 

He said he was one of those minor gods,
no miracles, no judgement, no crown,
just here doing his job, though he never quite mentioned what.
Sitting on the sands of Candolim
eating curry and rice with our fingers,
the waves washing over my ill formed thoughts,
I asked him about souls and consciousness,
about karma and rebirth.
He seemed to think it was alright,
not to understand things like that, not to know,
his voice so gentle,  light bubbles strung on a silken smile.
“Do you think about us, humans fending
for ourselves on this little rock?” That was either question or plea,
the wind wrapping it in a strange falsetto
that couldn’t have been my voice.
“Do you think about quarks,” he asked,
and I nodded, like I had that all figured,
a speck of dust, dithering in a beam of borrowed light,
all that mattered then was that one cloud
homing in from the lost distance.
“Fine, just tell me why I am here,
now, with you, trying truth out for size,
the rice gone cold, the beer flat as the limp horizon
without a sun to centre it.”
He turned to the water,
polite maybe, just hiding the laughter
that shook his shoulders.
“Or why I will still be here tomorrow
after you’re gone.
You will be gone, won’t you, being such and such god?”
He rose abruptly, brushing sand off his jeans,
his eyes were the colour of the night
that was still an hour away,
I’m not sure he replied then,
or maybe I just heard it later,
who knows what happens with the sea and the sky,
maybe I said it myself, afterwards.
“Where else would you rather be now?”
The gulls were singing as they flew
in formation, away from the curling surf,
their day at least was done.

 

 

Rajani Radhakrishnan lives in Bangalore, India. Some of her poems have recently appeared in online journals such as Quiet Letter, Under the Basho and The Cherita.  She posts her work on hotpurge.wordpress.com

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

Afterglow

 

I asked the poet what her poem

was about because at first I thought

it was about sex, and then I thought it

was about a nuclear war, and then I thought

it was about sex again. I thought it was about

sex because of the lightning and the tides

ebbing and flowing and the crater and,

of course, because of the title, “Afterglow,”

but then I changed my mind and thought

it was about a nuclear war because of

the lightning and the tides ebbing and

flowing and the crater and especially because

the stuff that filled the crater was green

which I took to be new grass growing

after the nuclear war and semen is yellow,

not green, and because of the title, “Afterglow,”

and I changed my mind and thought it was

really about sex after all because of the ending

with its Ah and Oh, aftermath and afterglow,

which so reminded me of the lovely light

of Edna Millay’s both-ends-burning candle,

which is about sex. So I asked the poet

what her poem was about, and she stared

at me and said, It’s self-evident, and I said,

You’re right, I said. It is, I said, How

stupid of me to ask, and she stared at me

and said, That, too, is self-evident, and she

turned away to talk to someone else, and

I was left there in the corner, alone in

the afterglow of the sex of our nuclear war.

 

 

On a Picture Entitled Jesus at Twelve Years of Age

  

We have all known such boys

in sixth grade. Tall, slim, athletically

built but not an athlete, serious but not

a great reader nor the scientific sort,

the matinee idol profile that drives

the giggly girls, in whom he shows

no interest, crazy (even the high school

girls have a crush on him), yet something

tender, perhaps effeminate about the corners

of the mouth, the cherubic lips, the eyes' long lashes,

the poet who doesn't write poetry but only looks

as though he did, the odd one the other kids

have given up teasing, the loner who has no friends,

who lingers on the edges of things, even in class,

sitting by the window where he can look out

of this world altogether, look out at the crystalline

blue of sky and the clouds, white as shrouds,

and then turn toward his teacher (she too

is secretly in love with him) with an expression

she has seen before only on the faces of runaways.

 

 

J. R. Solonche is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Invisible (Five Oaks Press) and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the poet Joan I. Siegal and several cats, at least two of whom are poets.

 

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PC VANDALL

 

The Love Seat

 

The love seat isn’t as comfortable

as it once was but then nothing really is.

The cloth once ruby red and full of life

 

is sagging pink and has lost its spring.

When we bought it-- It was the brightest thing

in our living room, two padded cushions

 

where we could watch movies and sip wine.

The couch reminds me of my mouth --wishing

it was still stuffed and full of yesterday

 

before the perky-fat nurse flattened out

my breasts like griddle cakes on a fry grill.

Today my mouth is empty yet it's hard

 

to swallow. I sink down into our love

seat deflated and drained. You bring a bowl

of popcorn which reminds me of our youth.

 

Back then, my chest was budding. Remember,

when your hand slipped under my shirt and felt

nothing? Soon there will be nothing again.

 

PC Vandall’s work has appeared in Rattle, Room, Carousel, Freefall, Kansas City Voices, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Zetetic and many others. Her next book is forthcoming from Oolichan Books.

 

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SARAH WHITE

 

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

 

a child plays

with a wagon-toy

at the end of a long string—

long for him, at least—a boy

of one-and-a-half. Sad

because his mother’s

not home, the tot

 

throws his plaything

into a curtained crib,

throws it very skillfully

according to his grandfather—

Opa to the child, and, to us,

Sigmund Freud,

 

who tells how, when

the wagon-toy is out

of sight, the kid yells Gone!

or rather Fort! (one

of his words in German).

 

And when, repeatedly,

he pulls the wagon back

into his arms, he hollers:

Da!  Here!  Thus, the child

in his play masters

the loss of Mother

by throwing away

a pleasure he can

himself recover.

 

Freud goes on to cite

the artists, working over

in their minds each day

a new ordeal of loss

whose final outcome

has a yield of pleasure in it.

 

Maybe so. Think of Shakespeare

destroying his own noblest creature,

poisoning and stabbing him

before our eyes.

 

Though it horrifies us,

we say Goodnight to the hero

and allow him to be Gone!

 

But, ah! what if the stage

were governed by a small

god of Da?

 

The Sweet Prince would rise

from his pile of corpses,

exit, and reappear, drawn

by a long, unseen string.

 

 

A review of Sarah White’s most recent collection, to one who bends my time, will feature in the October issue of The Lake. She lives in New York City.

 

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