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Issue # 39 Fall 2018
Poetry
Edited by Roger Mitchell
Tony Beyer
Café Blur
one of those parties
the women talking about curtains
the men talking assertively about sports
played by other men younger than them
no one believed or
listened to any of it
I was ostracised again
for mentioning an instance
of the stupidity
of the educated
or that poems can be made
from almost exactly the same words
River Letter
having failed to secure a post
the poet moves with his family
to shabbier quarters
in an obscure city on the river
where paired mergansers
spring blossom and human corpses
float downstream impartially
and autumn revokes
the architecture of the trees
leaving it to future generations
to admire his verses
like residue after a flood
not that the state has lost much
by declining the services
of a distracted administrator
(there are plenty of those)
nor is his present calling superior
the tropes that recur in his work
recur in nature and in people’s lives too
and would continue without him
as do great doings in the capital
officials less wise and less compassionate
dispatch armies to be squandered in the provinces
some never to be heard from again
unless as assimilated parts
of a foreign populace
unwilling to return to service after decades
unwilling too to speak their old language
he will be remembered in the end for having been loved
and having loved
a rare visit from an old friend
sharing a flask of wine
the warmth of a fire’s embers
out-of-date gossip
clear tears at the corner of the eye
following laughter
Ace Boggess
Rusted Root, 2003
Day of the Northeast Outage when the grid went down.
I carried my concert ticket & handful of pills
on a three-hour drive to Louisville,
chain-smoked cloves, listened to AM radio
for news: how far did darkness reach?
I didn’t concern myself if there were looting, riots,
cannibal hordes roaming the wasteland of old America.
Just the music & whether I’d hear it.
This day seemed some shell game conning tourists,
whereas I was desperate to touch sound,
remember how a melody feels to skin.
I doubted I’d be lucky, find Kentucky lit up
as with tracer rounds adorning the skies over Baghdad
when other nearby states were sans serif,
burnt out, bland, black as lack of music
in a man’s heart. I cursed the road I crossed,
arrived to discover the power on,
doors opened, performers in back preparing &
unaware of nearness to the absence of a song.
Changming Yuan
Charging
Ever since they became erectus, and
Domesticated wheat, dogs and chickens
They have murdered almost all…
Destroyed numerous…
Poisoned every …
Altering the natural course of…
Rewriting the original codes of…
And even redrawing their own genetic maps…
As they keep moving everywhere
Albeit I have placed in loudest human voice
My repeated charges
That are ignored with repeated ignorance
Now
For their next revolution to achieve:
HappinessImmortality
Deity
Making Light of Darkness
in a world always half in darkness
your body may be soaked deep
in a nightmare, rotting
but your heart can roam
like a synchronous satellite
in His space, leaving
the long night far behind
as long as your heart flies fast
and high enough, you will live
forever in light
Mega-Physics
Few are really aware of
Such universes
Existing beyond our own
Even fewer of so many other versions
Of selfhood living
In each of them, let alone
This simple secret:
At the depth of consciousness
Lives a quantum
Or soul as we prefer to call it
A particle, demon and/or angel dancing
The same dance afar, far apart
In an entanglement
John Cullen
The Eyes are the Door
She’s licked death for two days, and we breathe
softly, checking the signs. Cold toes,
hospice tells us, mean shutdown
and organ failure. She is cushioned against
the storm in a morphine snowsuit.
“She has found the door and is ready
to step through.” That’s what the nurse says
and so I imagine a huge set of revolving glass
doors like the ones outside a bank.
By afternoon, her toes feel cold.
Can she look back through the panes
and see us standing here? Confusing,
isn’t it? Likely she sees our mouths
open and close, strange fish uncertain where
they are, gasping behind glass.
Keith Dunlap
The Evolution of the Species
Three miserable women,
their faces red from last night’s drinking,
stumble the rain-soaked mile from the halfway house
to the nearest convenience store.
It is not quite Spring.
Snow piles still stand against the curb
like soiled pillows.
The women wear loose hooded sweatshirts
and tight embroidered jeans.
They walk in the middle of the street,
although both the sidewalks are free.
They are on their way to buy
energy drinks, lottery tickets, and cigarettes.
Yet each must somewhere possess this secret:
that each one holds all the power that ever was;
that all creative majesty courses through
every nervous gesture and every rude remark they make,
and in the dollar store rhinestone
of their jaundiced eyes
is all the world’s intelligence.
E. J. Evans
The Apartment
I'd hoped those walls might make a container for my life,
that I might finally take on a shape, however banal.
But the walls were permeable, as was my self.
After dark there were disturbances I wondered at;
they made random openings in the night:
odd fragments of sound, sparse voices, some hinting
of desperation. I tried to conjure their likenesses,
their secret stories, into my mind. I imagined
all my neighbors invisibly connected somehow
behind the scrim of dark, in the great space
of their common ambiguity. I began to wonder if I
belonged there too. If a kind of home could be made in it.
Slipping Away
What I remember most is thatI stumbled into love over and over,
though in different ways, each time
illuminated anew by the glow of discovery,
imagining myself the most fortunate of men.
But the world is on its own,
wayward, and of many devious currents,
and the accumulating past pushes us forward
into the dim future, separately
or together as chance would have it.
Those times when I tried so hard to hang on
to a lover who was slipping away,
which one of us was on the ice floe
and which was standing on solid shore?
Was it her or myself I was trying to save?
The Desert
Why did we go there
there was nothing but yucca and joshua trees
and the road straight through the stripped world
on which our car had stopped
and sat as if cast off from another planet
watching a tortoise cross the road
the only movement but for gusts of wind
all of us clinging to the surface of a life
Abigail George
Quiver
(for mummy and daddy)
Children under the age of eight love my mother.
They adore her glowing red
lips. Her magazine hair and
fashion. My father brought
both a manic utopia and his bipolar life
with him. Wherever he went I followed
him surrounded by a sea of faces.
The dutiful little schoolgirl.
I was always a little bit in awe of him.
His high mountains. Complex rivers.
The pastures found in valleys.
I still am. She’s giving him the
Silent treatment. She’s screaming at him at the
top of her lungs. She called
him a homosexual but what’s
so bad about that except he’s
her husband. The father of her
three children. She cannot
bear to let him touch her so they
sleep in separate beds but in
the. same room. It’s a bit like
living on an island surrounded
by applause. So, in return her children scream at her.
Shut her out of their lives
but at the same time, they cling to
their mother’s apron strings
because she is all that they know
of mother love. Documentaries
taught them about the assassinated
writer and academic Rick Turner.
The assassinated communist leader
Chris Hani. The great leader
Patrice Lumumba and the
celebrated poet Maya Angelou. If my mother
had loved me perhaps I would
have been a different person. So, I write to silence
the pain of the false illusion.
The arrows are the gift. The
reward at the end of the day’s hours.
Howie Good
Ars Poetica
I don’t know
where I come up
with these ideas
for word pictures,
they just appear,
like a man naked
from the waist down
who walks into a Waffle House
in Nashville, Tennessee,
at three in the morning
and starts shooting.
At the Light
As the beggar with the lopsided face
limped along the long line of cars,
driver after driver looked quickly away,
disgusted, afraid, wishing, like me,
the light would hurry up and change,
but, no, he arrived, rattling his cup,
and, for all the elaborate machinery of my heart,
I didn’t know what to say, so I just said hello.
2018
Walking along the dissolving shoreline,
head down, shoulders hunched against the cold,
I’m just about to past the lifeguard shack,
boarded up for winter, when the gull on the roof,
a windblown envoy from a defunct nation,
makes a noise like “Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!”
as if finding in our circumstances something
roaringly funny of which I am unaware.
Nels Hanson
The Wheat
The old poets called wheat “corn”
though golden maize like the potato
and avocado, tomato, arrived by sea
from Mesoamerica, bounty of mad
conquistadors. In California at school
after the flag salute each morning
we sang about the purple mountain
majesties and amber waves of grain.
In the San Joaquin, Kingsburg once
was “Wheatfield” and nearby Traver
shipped more wheat than any depot
in the world. Poor miners and their
families from the wild ghost town
Bodie came down past Mono Lake
for harvest. “The Octopus,” Leland
Stanford’s warped railroad, squeezed
farmers dry as chaff. To the west on
Carizzo Plains where Indians drew
pictographs on rocks white tourists
defaced again pronghorn antelope
graze, marsh hawks called harriers
fly low above the lost wheat seeds
hopping kangaroo rats consume for
food and water. In a line great steam-
driven threshers rust in the weather
like Stegosaurs. The Roman Legions’
“Staff of Life,” good bread we eat,
someone still sows somewhere else.
New Season
What new home, where is it
those V’s of teal, jumbled flocks
of blackbirds, one blue heron
and three white swans are beating
toward, what roost or still water
waiting for them? See red ants
like refugees with heavy burdens
march in long lines underground
and wary bees shutting the hive’s
door, late blossoms fading. Even
gray sparrows sense the change in
something more than weather as
they brace for a different world
others left behind, no time to
wonder what those different lands
prepare for wings disappearing
into white distance. Now purple
dusk shadows the day, an orange
tree murmurs with many questions,
a foreign wind rustles green leaves.
Michael Hettich
The Welcome
And when I arrived, having taken the train
by myself for the first time, I found my grandparents
splashing outside in the blow-up pool
they’d bought me when I was a baby.
They were naked and flabby, and their hairy legs flopped out,
but they were laughing, and they moved their sagging bodies
to make room for me to join them, so I got undressed too.
The Shirt
I thought I heard a man muttering
in the next cubicle: Someone he loved
had gotten hopelessly lost, and everyone seemed
to just want to move on. But where would they go,
he wondered. The shirt fit well,
so I stepped out to find my wife and get
her approval. Then we could go home and putter
in the yard, and none too soon: stores
like that make me anxious, alarmed at the sheer
amount of stuff in the world, and this man—
whoever he was—had reminded me of someone
I’d once been, of someone I’d lost. And when
I couldn’t find her, I asked another woman
what she thought of the shirt, I smiled and held
my arms out like an amateur model, but she
just gazed blankly into the air
like I wasn’t even there, and I was left
smiling at emptiness, wearing that beautiful
shirt, and holding my arms out as though
waiting for someone to hug me, or to dance.
Clara B. Jones
Karstfor the late Jasper Loftus-Hills
Pangolins for sale in Newark
Abbots stroll praying prose
And song passing the mercado
On Hillside Street acolyte's pineal
Gland daily rhythms like music in
The distance foreboding summer sky.
Bells peal cerulean an
Oily ani feather—a dendrobatid
Slimy on bark black fungus symbiont
Harboring microbes and gold.
Re-programming circuits and
Trilobites browning karst formations
Falling from cliffs like Jerry did
Rodents mime humans on margins—
hegemonic—though
Psychology is right about some things.
You cannot define fear but you
Know it when you feel it queuing
aimlessly across
The footbridge toward Talamanca.
Microbes braining ants black loam
Economy of scale pre-formation and
Manu-mission as types of dulosis
Different than what you fought for
When the hunter brought his first deer
Home. Cereal bowls cracked like
Iguana skin and speed [Mass x Force]
Flavored with absinthe while ghetto
Burns and negroes sit in cantinas
Eating tacos. Tardigrades swim solitary
Lives grey or white clinging to life
Desiccating slowly in red clay droughting
Because little pets with rhabdomeric
Eyes swim cautiously. Beautiful insects
Flying pollinating like butterflies
Ithomiid translucent where bees make
Honey for the world and Andira flowers the tropics.
Jen Karetnick
Surge: An Epigenesis
I have a terrific burning
where my breath
used to be. A blister of coal,
I heave with energy on lockdown,
ready to consume
at any moment this veracious fuel.
No one has to tell me when.
In a single
suitcase my picked-over
clothes are sealed, documents
evaporated to clouds
like a reservoir in drought,
wedding diamonds threaded into
crevices only prison
guards might think to search.
I have known this rising
for millennia. Awake,
asleep, I yellow with it, turn sun.
Claire Keyes
To Mt. Sinjar
Place of refuge, narrow-backed mountain: created
by God because he knew Yazidis would need a place to hide,
accept them and shelter them in your stony embrace.
May they find their way along your ancient paths
where ISIS fighters can not follow.
May they carry with them their belief
that the sun is sacred, though they be deemed infidels.
May they never forget brave kinsmen
who were captured, lined up and shot
because they refused to convert to Islam.
May their beautiful young women hold onto
their souls even though sold into sexual slavery.
May the old Yazidi women maintain their dignity
and worth through deep bonds of kinship.
May the escape of the Yazidis to Mt. Sinjar become
the story handed down generation upon generation.
May I bring this story with me today as I walk
the path that turns muddy and then more so
until I am trapped in a morass where I can go
neither forward nor back—only to feel my trials
shrink into a thimble when I consider the Yazidis
and their retreat to Mt. Sinjar, how they pause to listen
to the aerial bombardment laying waste to the militants
and to their villages before falling to their knees
in joy and anguish and relief.
The Widow’s Burial
for M.Y.K.
Eighteen years on her own and she’s come to this:
a funeral cortege rolling past fields of small American flags
flapping in the wind. They mark the graves of soldiers,
sailors, marines who fought for us, maybe died for us.
My sister-in-law’s hearse stops before a concrete shelter.
My brother lies here. His honor guard rifled the sky.
We thrilled to a solo trumpet playing Taps. The military know
how to do burials. The flag draping his casket was lifted, folded
and brought to his widow. The sergeant bowed to her,
his country’s gratitude conveyed.
For her, there’s a chaplain.
Heroically, she endured my brother’s tortured sleep,
the miserable wounds, the nightmares retold over decades.
For her, we recite the Lord’s Prayer, return to our cars,
our lives. And this is what I choose to remember:
his courting her, the two of them taking my little brother
and me to the beach. The salty drive home, not having time
to change properly. He’s mad for her: tells us she may wear a shirt,
but nothing beneath. The wideness of his grin, the lust in his eyes,
the dearness of this woman.
Chancal Kumar
In the Introduction to Sartre’s Nausea
The writer asserts that Camus was more religious than Sartre
Which made me think
It is true that being religious is
More than just counting beads on a rosary
Or offering prayers five times a day
Religion can also be meant to describe
Being in awe of tomorrow,
waiting for a new day
To believe that no apocalypse will hit us just yet, just today
Religion could be more than
what our grandmothers practised with elan, perhaps
Or different from what our grandfathers
Hunched over a holy book
A friendly circular stone to prevent its cover
from fluttering in the breeze, would describe
Religion can also be meant to say that
I expect to see you return
I pray to see us reenact those sessions that we had
Beside the parking lot again,
I with a cigarette, you moving your hand
To capture a wandering sentiment.
Terry McDermott
collecting pills
i’m collecting pills again
still; burying them like land mines
or a pirate’s treasure
i never stop, i’m always prepared:
i don’t know why that’s hard to admit
right now,
i’m sorting the pink-orange hexagons
anti-psychotic and boring;
psychosis is a matter of perspective
sometimes
no one asks for my opinion
anymore
anti-psychotics are slow,
i sleep on the edge of coma;
i’m not interested in sleep;
my attention is fixed
on the mortal side effects
of the pink-orange hexagons;
i keep a variety of pills;
they comfort me, wait for me, always ready
valuable multi-coloured pills, still unopened,
any reputable collector would be envious,
i collect them to eat them;
all pills are made to be consumed
the cabinet in my bathroom
is a storage facility for lost pharmaceuticals,
pills i don’t talk about,
these lovely creatures aren’t my call for help
they are my last hope for resolution;
i can’t tell you this secret
if i do
i can already see admitting papers
smell the drymouth hospital halls,
i’m already wearing the bracelet
that tells people my name
James Owens
Clarity
A minor discord in the hymning mind of mud,
you test a yielding path through boggy mire,
or through the mote-thick music we might call mind,
where the warmth of birth from decay has risen
to umbrel and corymb, brute spore and pollen,
a white and pink simmer of sex, awake, aware,
as the holy plays at evasion, divined
in this plenitude through warble and bud.
Now walk into the shining open, the clear,
templum, its primal sense a rough-hewn
span of sky for auguring wing-written air.
Stay. Stare up at the blue staring down,
no answer breaching the simplified glare,
a puddle’s bright trouble of ripples and sun.
Thomas Piekarski
At the Car Lot
We were either sitting or standing
at rapt attention as Zander demonstrated jujitsu
moves to Colton. It was getting dark and chilly
and the lights had come on under the awning
that spanned the entrance to the car dealership.
Colton, who still had red marks on his neck
from having been knocked cold by a choke hold
administered by one of the managers
just the night before, was throwing punches.
Zander dodged them all, then came straight back
with rapier jabs that he pulled short,
an inch or two from Colton’s nose.
Colton only 19, a crack car salesman already,
sharp as a razor but overwhelmingly abrasive,
still learning hard lessons after a 3 year stretch
in state prison, still learning how to survive
outside a world of heroin dealing and addiction.
Zander the finance manager with years of experience
on the lot taking ups. Zander the former gang leader
who would with his band of Assyrian brothers
traumatize the sleazy bars downtown San Jose
on Saturday nights. Saturday nights during summers
when the Mexicans, blacks and Asians would all
roam the alleyways and hot streets, itching to rumble.
Zander could snap your neck or knee with
one quick move, or easily dislocate an elbow.
He showed us how to do this, ignoring the prospect
of some unexpected customer’s arrival.
Never mind customers--we salesmen transfixed,
in awe of his precision, prowess and polish.
Zander a bit winded, carried on nonetheless
like a latter day Saul of Tarsas
giving a gangland sermon--one gory, despicable
scene after another: smashing of heads
with boots and bottles, taking on a phalanx
of huge black bouncers and standing them down,
daring cops with raised batons to come on,
blood flowing from bodies mutilated by knives.
And then sales manager Jason, a wily Mexican
with diamond stud in his nose sparkling,
not to be denied, segued Zander, enthusiastic
in his chilling account of lurid events past.
His little brother had run with a band of immigrants
and was often involved in bloody brawls.
At one time a rival gangbanger threatened to kill him,
no doubt with good reason. Jason,
enraged that his house may be attacked,
decided being proactive was in order,
so cruised past the home of that gangbanger.
With an AK 47 he sprayed
bullets into every front window. Jason chuckled
as he recounted how his jubilant thoughts
were of a baby shrieking, grandmother diving
under the bed, father taking one in the chest,
as glass blew like mini monsoons throughout
the house. Needless to say, the gangbanger
never threatened his brother again.
On another occasion, Jason boasted, he unloaded
a magazine into a Ford carrying some greaseballs,
not knowing how many he killed, as the car skidded
across a neighbor’s lawn and crashed into a fence.
Dandelion Days
It isn’t that you haven’t done it but that you don’t realize it.
When they come for you in straightjackets throw the remote.
Christmas just around the corner so you won’t have to scold.
It’s proven to be therapeutic to whip yourself all day long.
In Mesopotamian diggings lies immense richness of sacrifice.
Why the underemployed so employed seeking unemployment?
Tooth decay implodes with those new chemicals on the shelf.
Stay a while and the weather will likely get better and better.
Standing in line at the supermarket one’s legs can go astray.
The same things happen every day except they’re not the same.
Playing pizzicato Menuhin the master conquered his inner ear.
It shouldn’t seem at all odd that the Hindenburg met its end.
When Trudy washed dishes she imagined dry hands laughing.
The substitute teacher was weak at math but not tetherball.
Sometimes exercising patience is a way of whistling Dixie.
Mainstream fashions dominate like juicy steaks and taxes.
It can be quite a strain to raise your own food holistically.
The attention those protesters get is media paying dividends.
In creation we defeat those who insist on remaining ripoffs.
A little brine rubbed into the cut on a finger is emancipation.
Maybe you want something somewhat more than it does you.
You can belong anyplace as long as you don’t have to wait.
Coming home is appropriate assuming you have one to claim.
If you begin to doubt your abilities you just might try texting.
Judith Roney
Laetoli
—In 1976, while working in Laetoli, Tanzania, Mary Leaky discovered footprints of three early humans walking through wet volcanic ash. The smallest set of prints was determined to be walking in a set of the larger ones. After a volcanic eruption, layers of ash covered and preserved these oldest known footprints of early humans.
It is newborn warm; the sky heaves and readies itself
to soft-rain on three diminutive bodies walking.
The female is aware of the impending wet
but has no Word for cloud, gray, or water.
The still-nursing male at her hip wiggles,
is let down to put small feet
within his mother’s earth-pressed prints.
A game he makes on a day
without hours or name, but the adult male knows
where the water hole is so they move, following
tracks of gazelle, giraffe and the zebra—names unspoken
but hand-motions are made with fingers “running.”
They know them by musk scents
and the scat fresh on the path.
Three million years later we’ll find them,
come to love them, these antediluvian
grandparents. The female carries the hive
of us in her ova. We are pelvic-held pearls.
She, the mother-cathedral. The three walk in tandem
in rain. Brains still small, thoughts
of extinction or forgiveness are never discussed.
Out of the valley, out of their quiet
clock-less world of roots and tree-shelter they walk
into the sanitized stink of our own skin.
Disquiet in Central Florida
After Bruegel’s The Hunter’s in the Snow (January), 1565
I walk from my air-conditioned home to Kelly Park, giving in to my white Labrador
who tugs at her leash. Flat-land Florida, blue-skied, south of the Space Center,
in early August morning air—
Violet & I could be going anywhere, really. We slip past stucco homes,
pigmy-date palms and crotons, past the massive ribbons of century plants.
We rawbone back as sidewalk shifts to ice-crusted snow as the hill steepens.
The air, once like clabber, is now frigid under bare-leaved trees and still
Violet does not bark an alarm. Ahead she pulls, to reach ragged hounds
fresh from a hunt at the heels of dark-clothed men, heads down
at their take of only one small fox. This time of year we’re all hungry.
Wood smoke hangs in the air of the valley’s flat basin filled
with small figures black like fleas. They skate the watermill’s pond
frozen, as is its wheel. I love the feel of my felt hat curve to my cheek
keeping in warmth, the brim pulled low—how it tilts my vision
between branches, gray sky, and ravens circling a carcass tossed.
We veer left from the hunters. Our breath makes small-fleeing clouds
in January’s white chill. Two women are feeding a fire in front of an inn.
One turns a small pig above flames. Violet catches the scent of the meat,
and I feel the shift plead inside of my skin—it might be the ghost of an ancestor:
Stay here forever—but with this the scene darkens. It’s really quite cold.
Snarls of rose thorn catch the fur of my dog’s neck and she whimpers.
The women turn for a look in dumbstruck-surprise. Who are you?
A thick-scarved woman asks in Flemish, a language I don’t speak.
The pull of the painting I’ve loved snaps and the persuasion puddles
like the remnant of a rural freshet within this village,
my village, I want to say. And this is my longing.
Is there no magic to snatch me back to kindling and hunger?
Our walk ended, we return home to a refrigerator and cabinets stocked with food—
the only sound is the drone of the AC’s compressor. There are only us two.
On cool white tile Violet pants on what looks almost like snow.
Stan Sanvel Rubin
LuminanceCome on, come on/We'll vanish without a trace
--Jefferson Starship, “Light the Sky on Fire” (1979)
I wake to evening as if to day.
The windows fill with orange light,
a light without shadows, without anyone
to fill the space beside me. The space inside me.
The stars spread out in icy circles
as if they are still gods who remember us.
The innocent lack forgiveness
and the forgiven lack innocence.
What faith binds me to the sky?
I got my sense of Inner Light
by drinking magic tea in the desert
where I saw the amber beings
flow around me, dressed in moonglow
and making amazing patterns in the air.
Curlicue angels, calligraphers of spirit,
they stole my mind and bent it
into shapes I could not dream of
and never dreamed again.
That was the way then, seeking truth
by losing the world to find one
more beautiful and strange.
Revelations pricked my eyes like pins.
My head exploded with cartoons,
a wisdom of colors. I knew it was the dance
the soul makes when it’s loose
and any god can grab it. Maybe one did.
Who knows why what happens happens?
Now, so many years after that night
of wonder and the promise of the stars,
I wake alone in a bed whose emptiness
is more terrifying than the desert sky.
I drink silence and breathe time.
But I saw visions once, the ancient ships
that could have saved us came and went
into the center of the earth, into the dark core
and back again, to wherever is their home.
Yvette Schnoeker-Shorb
The Other Side of Hudspeth
There are places in Texas
where borders are thickerthan in Arizona; the edge
of Hudspeth County,
for instance, crawls down
to the Rio Grande
then oozes southward,
transformed from desert
to agri-green patchwork
flowing southeast,
seducing shadows
off distant mountains
where over there
the land is nameless
from here behind glass,
passing trucks, roadside
rules, future walls,
and other temporary
artifacts, but a raging
sky still quietly darkens,
violently ignoring
imaginary boundaries.
Claire Scott
Group Therapy
So here I am, fingers fluttering, feet tapping
chewing Dentine by the dozen
should I sit in the back and be unobtrusive
or march to front and make a statement
should I sit next to the miniscule Asian woman
or the man with a walrus mustache
Sally who talks to her lap is worried about
eating asparagus without washing it
what of rogue waves flooding my house
rapists dressed in UPS uniforms
Mustache stammers that he only chewed his
toast thirty-four times today, not thirty-five
Samantha is worried she left the stove on
even though she never cooks
I agonize over a war with Kansas
the earth flying off its axis
aliens in driverless cars
multiple myeloma gnawing my bones
I get up to leave, scraping my hard plastic chair
gathering my parka, raincoat, snowshoes,
sunscreen, Luna bars, peanuts, vitamin C,
and three bottles of triple filtered water from Fiji
Clearly I am too advanced for this group.
J. R. Solonche
How Poets Ruin Zen
for Chase Twichell
If there were only a way
to stop the thought short
of the word, to hold it back,
to say without saying, No,
do not go there, here, stay here,
your secrets are safe with me,
to swallow it before it escapes
into the ear of the world,
but the zen masters gave up
after centuries of trying, so
they solved it by practicing
letting the word go on its own,
thoughtlessly, thoughtless,
empty as breath, wearing
nothing but a smile.
David Spicer
My Grandmother
didn’t acknowledge her dark almond eyes
and clay-colored skin in the trailer, no,
didn’t see gutted ravines in her soul,
and loathed her mother’s Sioux spirit, recalled
doilies her mother fashioned for the spruce
easy chair, remembered rye her mother forced
her to drink with the horse soldiers. She thought,
I’m no damn Indian, no squaw for men who hold
long knives to my throat any more than the prairie
is butter or my arms are ribbons. My grandmother told
me this as if to explain her prejudice, as if to give
reason for her bile toward reservation neighbors
and for the shame she wore like the soft, beaded-leather
rags that covered her brittle, century-old bones.
D. E. Steward
The Valley of Virginia
The Cavalier, The Pocahontas, and the all-luxury Powhatan Arrow
All three done up in maroon and gold, they all made the Norfolk-Roanoke-Cincinnati run in about twelve hours through the West Virginia Alleghenies
In the first half of the twentieth century, Norfolk and Western’s heyday
The N&W trains that ran the length of the Shenandoah Valley were Winston-Salem to Hagerstown trains and known as Train 1 and Train 2
Like the train of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River epiphany of “Virginia in the moonlight, with the dream-still magic of Virginia in the moon”
Northering from Asheville to graduate school at Harvard in 1920
“Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight. In Louisiana bayous the broken moonlight shivers the broken moonlight quivers the light of many rivers lay dreaming in the moonlight beaming in the moonlight dreaming in the moonlight, moonlight moonlight seeming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight to be gleaming to be streaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight”
His train smashing on through the Valley of Virginia
Through the manifest power of Virginia
“––the power of Virginia lies compacted in the moon.”
Norfolk and Western’s huge locomotives, some of them seventy feet long like their famous No. 1218 built solely to haul coal
The 611 passenger engine with futuristic streamline shrouding built in 1950 and retired before the decade played out with the demise of passenger trains
All from Roanoke, out of the Roanoke-Salem N&W’s shops and yards
The grand old ersatz Tudor Hotel Roanoke built for Norfolk and Western’s carriage trade
Straight Tudorbethan and like a hulking figment of Wolfe’s vision
“Is it the wind that howls above the earth, is it the wind that drives all things before its lash, is it the wind that drives all men like dead ghosts fleeing?”
From the mountains
In the Shenandoah the winds blow all winter into March
Through the chain of Blue Ridge gaps, across the Valley from the Alleghany gaps, the South Fork of the Shenandoah’s flats
Roanoke itself sitting atop a Blue Ridge gap
Augusta County, Stuarts Draft straddling US340
Lexington almost to Frederick
Sherando, Grottoes, Port Republic, Luray, Winchester
The settlers came in off the Atlantic to the port of Philadelphia on the Delaware from the 1770s on to start to walk west on Lancaster Avenue’s cobblestones
Talking of hope, faith, their safe passage, the future, bottom land ahead
Ulster Irish, Swabian, Platdeutsch, Welsh, a lot of West Midlands and Yorkshire English, some Nederlanders, some French
Out the Lancaster Pike west, across the Susquehanna and down into the Valley of Virginia on what became the Great Wagon Road, embossed on the Valley now by the rights-of-ways of US11 and I-81
Then through the Cumberland Gap, then the Wilderness Road that spread them across the rich Kentucky-bluegrass and Ohio River basin lands
The Kentucky dream, still in the imaginations of those in the mountains and inner valleys and hollows of Virginia
As it was when Abraham Lincoln’s family left the Shenandoah in 1802 to take fresh Kentucky bottomland in Hardin County
“Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you, Far away you rolling river…”
Virginia in the moonlight
The Valley and the Blue Ridge
The farmers in the Valley, the mountain people back on the mountain up along the runs
In Yancey Station upriver from Elkton the landed families were the Owens with a big farm on the flats on the near bank of the river, and the Sipe family a little farther back
At least one Sipe from the Valley fought in the Revolution
“That’s a fact, Comer, that’s a fact,” is what Junior Shifflett, the friend who rode shotgun with Harold Comer, the only taxi driver in Elkton during WWII, would say
Comer, with a low-priority rationing sticker, would drive a stately twenty-five or thirty to save gas and so the conversations up front went on a long time
Stock cars and white lightning were in the shadows of the Shenandoah in the 1940s, talked about a lot but rarely evident with sugar and gas rationing
The days of young men off in the service and of WSVA Harrisonburg playing Country
Few houses had electricity and kerosene lamps burned coal oil, people had smokehouses and butchered in November
By the hanging butchered hogs, soap was made from hog fat and water poured over the scalding fire’s wood ashes to make the lye
Stirred with a long hickory paddle in a cast iron cauldron over the same wood fire that singed the bristles from the hams
WSVA-AM went contemporary not that long ago and Conrads Store became Elkton only in 1908
Before his Valley Campaign Stonewall Jackson made his headquarters in Conrads Store
Jackson destroyed the bridge at Conrads Store before the Battle of Port Republic in June 1862 to keep Fremont from crossing the South Fork
In the Blue Ridge hollows of Rockingham, where anti-slavery feelings and ornery mountain individualism thrived, a number of men went north to join the Union armies
Virginia voted only 88 to 55 for secession at the state convention in Richmond in 1861
Conversations between Confederate and Union soldiers were common, across rivers, shouted between lookouts and guard posts, at water points and springs, across picket lines, rumors, jokes, complaints of how tired they were of it all already in early 1862
Early on a detachment of Jackson’s troopers skirmished with a pro-Union militia just northeast of Conrads Store, one was killed and others captured and “put into irons”
On the morning of Sunday, May 3, 1863, Private Charles R. Kite of Conrads Store, 2nd Cpl. Alexander Wyant of Beldor (a hollow nearby off Swift Run Gap) and Cpl. James M. Philips of Page County (just downriver from Conrads Store), all members of Company I, 10th Virginia Infantry, were killed at Chancellorsville
The battle at which Jackson was killed by friendly fire
The Stonewall Jackson cult still trickles-up now and then in the Valley a century and a half down the line, his beard, Bible and all
Jackson would ride to a high point, pray openly to the God of War, survey the field, ride down, and then commit
“Onward Christian Soldiers”
Guns, gumption and God
His dim ghost is everywhere in the Valley of Virginia cantering by on his way to check his artillery positions and the lay of the land
Sometimes out there around Cross Keys and up the South Branch in and out of the Port Republic Battleground
At Browns Gap in the Blue Ridge where he passed from the Valley after Port Republic on his route to Charlottesville and the Seven Days, is a single military grave, the stone less than half a mile off the ridge, left side of the old Browns Gap wagon road
William H. Howard of Louisa County, Company F, 44th Virginia Infantry
The June day Howard died, other CSA troopers probably stood around his grave slapping deer flies, tired in the dust of thousands trailing in close double-file route march, the officers’ horses without forage up there on the wooded slopes
Soldiers in their second year of war scratching at their filth, sweating, concerned temporarily at Howard’s burial with the nature of heaven and hell
Throughout, rebel dead were buried like that as the survivors pondered on the worth, the cause, the cost, before their column formed up and moved out for the next skirmish or encounter with their familiar enemy
After Port Republic the Union commander James Shields had retreated through Rocky Bar, Island Ford and Yancey, harassed by W. B. Taliaferro’s troops back to Conrads Store then on into Page County, over four hundred of his men were taken prisoners
When the Union caissons, ambulances and troop columns withdrew through Rocky Bar, they trailed by another Episcopal church, and still another, St. Stephens farther on in Yancey, all Episcopal parishes since colonial times
The Union troopers in retreat passed what in local legend was a hangman’s tree, passed the future site of Delta Shiflett’s plank-sided cabin on Cub Run in Yancey
There are many variant local spellings of Delta’s common family name
Eight decades after the battle, Delta entertained men rumored to be from places as far afield as Richmond and Baltimore
Where after Port Republic in 1862 Yankee troops retreated through the grove of oaks in which St. Stephens Mission church, school and parish hall would be established during the last of Reconstruction, in part as a gesture of Yankee noblesse oblige
Through the years, now and then the bishop from Charlottesville or a minister from over the mountains would visit the mission church to don the chasuble and perform the High Church rituals to congregations sometimes almost without shoes
Most along the Blue Ridge lived in cabins, plank-sided or log, from the time the Indians moved out and the Valley was settled by Colonial Americans and Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century
That country was first mapped in 1733 as the Jacob Stover Tract, the Lower from Elkton north to Page County, the Upper from Elkton south to Port Republic, both with proviso that within two years there had to be one family on every thousand acres
Bobinet caps with ribbon ties
Infares given at the groom’s parents’ cabin
One Maria Graham Carr, b. Harrisonburg 1812, wrote this in description of Muster Day across the Valley in about 1822
“…he had on tow-linen pants and shirt, coarse shoes, no stockings; around his waist was a bright red woolen sash: he had a rusty slouch hat on, without band, and torn at the edge. On the front of the hat was a long white feather with a scarlet tip. I saw several soldiers with bright yellow coats trimmed with black, and green flannel ones trimmed with white or silver, uniforms of the War of 1812”
Now in the second decade of the Valley’s fourth century of settlement most color is the ball caps, T-shirts, the bright treadplate aluminum truck boxes and grills of Silverados, few F-150s, Rams or Toyotas around, that part of Virginia is mostly Chevy country
Andrew Mowbray had come over the mountains into the Shenandoah with horse and wagon
In the 1940s his grandson John Mowbray was a conductor on the Norfolk and Western working out of Salem next to Roanoke, brother Leonard worked in the N&W shops
Aubrey, their elder brother, would pack Beulah Mae and their four girls into his Chevy to drive the two hours up the Valley on 340 to Roanoke on a whim to visit at any time of the night or day
He was that sort of wild, loved driving at night, especially in the rain
Beulah Mae Campbell Mowbray of Elkton died Sunday, April 5, 2009. Born in Rockingham County, December 26, 1915, the daughter of the late Marvin and Luthenia Dofflemyer Campbell, attended Humes Run and Model Schools in Elkton, was a homemaker and cooked in various restaurants and nursing homes in the area
Snuff-happy Beulah Mae stomped everything she didn’t get along with, kept a .22 single-shot to shoot at cats, squirrels, dogs, rabbits, anything that came into her yard, once took a pop at people she told to get off her land and put a hole in a front fender
“Life is either sugar or shit,” she used to say
Beulah Mae’s great grandson, Elkton father of four with two women, recently stopped by his grandmother’s one Saturday afternoon to tell her to ask her church to pray for money to come in to him for gas and child support
Patsy Cline, Crazy, came from Winchester way down the Valley, the town next to Berryville, where Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust the president of Harvard is from
Tim Suermondt
Dallas Is Faraway
One by one, my old friends
peel off into the air
until they’re out of my sight—
and to imagine this was to be
a conventional poem. What Happened?
Well, there are times when the poem
has as much of a say as the poet
and you must trust its instincts.
My youthful old friends seemed pleased
at starting their new journey.
Youthful too, I told them I won’t go—
so much yet to be done, and in fact
I love it here, despite my complaints
capable of filling volumes.
I take a glance at the picture on my desk—
the one of President Kennedy eating
an ice cream cone on his sail
boat moored by the shore of Hyannis,
so much yet to be done, so youthful
and Dallas is faraway.
Glissando Is One of Those Words
John Wayne, as Davey Crockett in the Alamo
put it this way:
“Some words give you a warm feeling all over,
Republic is one of those words.”
A sentiment endorsed
by the Mexican boys I played war with
and where in the desert
across the highway and behind the houses
Zorro was the hero every one of us loved.
In the heat and rain, in arroyos and the dunes
my companions and I commandeered
every crusty patch, moving armies
with the speed
that would have put Santa Anna to shame,
saving our countries again and again,
the cry, the fierce yellow eyes of the coyotes
who let us stay and live
and the beautiful glissando, such precision,
we achieved as a result.
Where are you, my playmates? Which of you
can hear me? What have we saved lately?
Has the grown-up heart served us well?
Anton Yakovlev
Legacy
He still travels on foot to the bakery
along the twelfth-century obelisks of his town
whose stones turn into faces every few sunsets.
He lingers in farmers’ markets to enjoy the chop
of pineapple slicers. The summer is almost
invisible. Pianos sink in corners.
He comes home to find people with briefcases
at his door. They give him stacks of papers he can’t read
and don’t stick around for questions.
He can’t shake the thought that beyond the slopes
the shrine of his relics has already been consecrated
then demolished for lack of pilgrims.
Newspapers are full of articles
about the different ways a heart can charge itself.
He pours curdled milk on their headlines but doesn’t feel better.
He can wake up at a reasonable hour, have chai, exercise.
He can call his apartment Cloud 9,
build tricycles, pray.
But the cement that holds the castle walls
will come apart and take him. He will be billed for
technology used to spy on him all these years.
Someday two people will meet on a corner and
get on each other’s nerves. When they get tired,
they’ll talk about the movie based on his memoir.
They will praise the camerawork
and reminisce about their significant others’ tears
when the lights came on for the Q&A.
They will say goodbye and leave in the same direction.
They will stumble over random objects.
They will not cuddle anyone that night.
The Buried Man
The singer of my college graduation song
hanged himself. The radio shakes like an engine
on the edge of his desk. Belonging
is the one stone tablet he never found. This morning
it occurred to me sunrise in documentaries
was entirely God’s responsibility.
But the documentary of his life
contained no outdoor scenes.
If I thought more about death, I would want to change
the color of the curtains in the room where they found him.
I would never speak to his enemies.
But I still buy the drinks they recommended
and fill my napkins with contempt. Change the station,
I don’t want to listen to his last album.
He was already going when he wrote it.
He wandered into stables and punched the horses.
At the end of the song you can hear the freezing soap bubbles.
In the background, people who will never ship out
chat on a jetty. And if the sound were enhanced,
you could hear the cormorants cheer.
Did the room look bigger from the ceiling?
Did he notice the daylight behind the curtains?
Did the spiders in the walls disappear?
Now everyone is falling in love with him.
The Raging
For Donald Zirilli
As soon as the curtain opens,
the sad man stops blinking.
The opera pours into him.
He watches the conductor’s slowing hands.
This performance could well be this conductor’s last.
A ring of femmes fatales sighs.
He thinks of the baton as the minute hand
of a small Big Ben, as asexual
as a laundry line with no clothes.
The people sitting next to him are poor nurses,
their bedside manner a joke. Earlier, one of them
tried to change seats with him for some dada reason.
The lead singer, a one-gas-station village
surrounded by scenery-chewing cows,
does little to mess with the sad man’s memory.
How demotic the sardines of erotic dancers,
the salaried satyrs! How decaffeinated
the urn-like poppies sprouting all over the stage!
His hearing aid is dying, and his ears
will soon become a self-addressed stamped envelope.
God will trudge in, hand-in-hand with a grizzly bear.
He is still the best-dressed audience member.
His pocket handkerchief is a spotless sun,
his suit impeccable, never mind its monument color.
His wisdom, though, unearths too much death
from every cubic foot of the hall.
The hands that built these seats have now decomposed.
When the opera ends, he misses the curtain call,
deprived of the white roses thrown on the stage
by an existential need to pee.
A cloud hangs under the chandelier
with an Excalibur no one else notices,
a thorn of a four-dimensional rose.
Mark Young
I guess this means I'm on Godzilla's side
maybe it's not the last & only
subcutaneous carcinoma
swimming in an elliptical sea
of atrophied naval glazing
but seeing it b/eaten down
by this an/atomically distorted
& oh so sensitive beast which —
even when blindsided by the
forces of evil & evil fucking over-
dubbing — keeps on selflessly
coming back to tokyo bay to save
the world to fight again another day
then of course you're gonna shout
when it hits you yes indeed
Unlike the best renditions
The eutrophy of lakes occurs
gradually as a cumulative effect
of small decisions. In Kolkata
the norm in art photography
is a dynamic personality & a
restrictive diet. What's left, after
crawling restrictions & censor-
ship, is a moral nadir that leads
to psychological breakdown &
an inability to withstand un-
wanted reminders of Fanon's
dictum that colonialism doesn't
come to an end with the decla-
ration of political independence.
Donald Zirilli
Aunt Enid Smokes a Cigarette
It's afternoon, the family is getting along, catching up. Aunt Enid
stepped out for a cigarette. I see the back of her head through a pane of glass in the door.
I see each exhalation, her head tilting back like a reindeer swimming across a river,
smoke pouring upward. Aunt Janet is asking me about my job. I tell her
about my new responsibilities.
Aunt Enid stepped out for a cigarette. Nobody else smokes anymore.
Mom is laughing about something. Dad is still watching TV. Aunt Enid
shakes when she talks, her voice is hushed now. She's still sharp,
saying what's she's always said, just quiet and split up,
punctuation she doesn't mean.
She's out there smoking. Why not? She's always enjoyed it,
never minded having to pour a pile of salt on everything she eats.
Why not this misty costume for her breaths, a hint of relief for her eyes?
I stare at her white plume of hair. Aunt Janet asks me another question,
but I don’t answer. I’m thinking of Enid.
Aunt Enid, named for some ancient Dame
who lured a hero to the hearth and then, even better, rode off
to be a hero with him. Love proven, life made. Another puff, the cig
runs out before she does. Her moment alone almost done,
a loneliness in returning,
a loneliness in coming home, a loneliness of embraces,
more distant as she approaches, like dames in coaches.
My Father’s Heart
I have my father’s heart,
the size, the shape, the coldness,
and if you ask me I will throw it at you
and hit you in the head,
because his heart is always at my fingertips
and it flies the way a rock flies,
it knows how the sky appears to itself,
in an almost invisible blue.
If you ask me I’ll show you
the stone wall in the middle of a forest
where there used to be farms.
I’ll warn you about the moss
that causes you to slip. I’ll catch you.
Together we’ll find where the path turns to clay
and we’ll play and look for snakes,
we’ll do everything but cultivate
because my heart, my father’s heart,
is the only thing that grows,
and it grows in darkness,
in layers of darkness,
in a rush of fear,
as strong as winter and mountains and wind,
but I’m waiting to see
how strong that is.
The Men of Cardio Rehab
We are the men of cardio rehab,
marching on treadmills, charging
on stationary bikes, into the valleys
we programmed. We know
the reason why, we drink
seltzer at the bar with bitters,
and when we sing karaoke,
we sing every song to our hearts.
Should I stay or should I go
is Hamlet's question. We stay.
We see the view from here, it's Hell.
We pedal backwards, we battle
the eventual, none more alive
than we the old, we panting men,
we tired, wired chests who move,
then rest, then move again,
on a road that never turns
and all we have to do
is never get to the end.
T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Virgens de Guadalupe by Lynda Schor