After Cancer
by Leslie TImmins
And there they were …
by Leslie Timmins
And there they were
just under the surface of the water,
full of the meat of the body, taut and silver,
liquid with grace,
what I asked for
when I asked to feel again
my own breath.
In the quiet of night,
you beside me dreaming,
I attend to the cathedral of my body,
its scarred and saddened walls,
and what I thought scarce, even vanished,
swims beside me
shark-finned, salmon-eyed,
intent on feeding whatever comes their way,
and I’ve learned not to run to the thinning shore
but stand among them breathing;
and when still I can’t sleep
I think of all the sleepless others
stepping in beside me.
Leslie Timmins has published poetry and short stories in numerous literary magazines. She has lived in France and Germany and now makes her home with her husband and cat a few short blocks from the sea (the sea, the sea…) in Vancouver, Canada.
Aluminum Beds
by Russell Thornton
When he pulls up in a truck and hefts new beds …
by Russell Thornton
When he pulls up in a truck and hefts new beds
into the house to replace our camp cots,
we see the dark in a metal’s dull sheen
is the dark displayed in his beard. The sound
rushing through the hollows of the square posts,
the frames, guards and rails, is the sound rushing
through the spaces he has made within us.
He sets them all down, the pieces he measured,
sheared, and welded together in the evenings
in his father’s factory, while I, half hidden
in among the machines, gathered up scrap
fallen to the cement floor. The four beds
stand in our shared room, one for each of us—
with this he fulfills his unwanted office.
He leaves us soon after, and I keep vigil.
Nightly I allow not one of my brothers
to speak or even audibly breathe. I know
that the sound of any of our young voices
will distract the light trying to make its way
through the fitted substance of the metal. I know
at the same time that this light is my father
searching for his sons. He does not know it—
long before he left us, his love began travelling
to us apart from him. If I memorize him,
I will be able to see the love. If I cut
from myself all that is not my love for him,
the right set of rays will find us. My brothers
fall asleep one by one. I lie and wait
for my dream. There is no space not swirling,
no fire with its core of blackness not burning,
within the beds’ angular emptiness
because of the love meant for us. Through the night,
the metal embraces me. It is a skeleton,
unending silver, pure and cold, and I become it,
the light of my father’s love arrived at last.
Russell Thornton‘s books are The Fifth Window (Thistledown, 2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim, 2002), House Built of Rain (Harbour, 2003), and The Human Shore (Harbour, 2006). He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead magazine’s Ralph Gustafson Prize in 2009. His poems have appeared in several anthologies. He now lives in North Vancouver, Canada.
Among Schoolchildren
by Spencer Reece
The one-story houses were painted aqua, violet, orange, pistachio. …
by Spencer Reece
For Father Edmund Harris
The one-story houses were painted aqua, violet, orange, pistachio.
I spoke to the taxi driver in broken Spanish.
I was becoming a priest, I told him, God willing,
as we drove over muddy ruts, pot holes, and alongside hungry dogs.
Much of the taxi’s interior had been removed.
Time slowed that summer in San Pedro Sula.
Around the rotary, legless men shook their tambourines,
epileptics convulsed and the blind tapped their sticks
through donkey excrement. Blue mountains and fields of banana trees
shadowed the city’s edges. There were the many poor
on the muddy river bank assembling huts out of rubbish.
I had come to work in an orphanage in Villa Florencia.
Inside the ten foot wall with barbed wire, behind the metal gate,
guards fingered their pistols like bibles,
and seventy orphaned girls politely greeted strident Christians.
One had been found on a coconut truck.
She had lived on coconut juice since birth,
had trouble speaking, preferred not to be held.
Two sisters had been left at a street corner on a sheet of cardboard;
their mother told them to wait, then never came back.
It was a landscape both porous and uninviting.
Half way up one mountain was an enormous white Coca-Cola sign.
Rain steadily fell against the tin roofs and colored the chapel windows to plum.
Sweat colored my T-shirt the color of a steeped tea-bag.
At night, grease on my cheeks shone, lit by the Coca-Cola sign
that would redden and whiten like the eye of an insomniac.
The clock on the night-stand was like a face I could not reach.
A world widened in me. But what of my Protestant professors rearranging
furniture in their well-appointed heads,
hunched in their sepia-colored libraries?
Was it true, what they said, that a priest is a house lit up?
Spencer Reece is an ordained Episcopal priest at Iglesia Catedral del Redentor in Madrid. His first book of poems, The Clerk’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin) won the Bakeless Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker and Poetry. His forthcoming books are The Road to Emmaus and The Little Entrance (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013).
At Swim Three Words
by Gary Geddes
As my mother lay dying in a dark, cold room …
by Gary Geddes
As my mother lay dying in a dark, cold room
where plumbing and ductwork were visible
overhead and cracks in cement walls sprouted
spider-webs and dust, I recalled the flume
that carried us pell-mell down, risible
in the extreme, at the Exhibition Grounds
in Vancouver, her mouth wide, kerchief
blown back, her body language quizzical,
as if laughter were verboten, out of bounds,
a thing unexpected, a joker outed
sans warning. When I stood by the bed,
my small hand clasped in hers, I had grounds
to wonder if she would die, though I doubted
this, of course, thinking only of myself,
my needs, days at the beach in English Bay
or Kitsilano, where I tossed sand, flouted
authority, sun-baked bodies, the air
reeking of seaweed, mustard, hot-dogs.
Some days I feel her speaking through me,
the few remaining strands of damp, brown hair
at sixes and sevens across her forehead,
lips pursed, facial muscles contracted
in a worry—ethics, clichés, beliefs,
each a clipped, forced whisper with its dread
finality. Resolute, I played the elf,
doing the dog-paddle across the frayed
linoleum, trying to make her laugh.
A tad of whimsy left on the back shelf
would suffice. She rallied briefly, half
alert, pulled herself into a sitting position,
the skin slack around her neck, eyes
closed from the effort. Grimace or laugh,
I know not, but she who swam kilometres
from Fisherman’s Cove to Point Atkinson
managed a thin smile, patted my head
and traced on my body the necessary letters.
Gary Geddes has won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lieutenant Governor’s award for Literary Excellence (in the Canadian province of British Columbia) and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile, awarded simultaneously to Vaclav Havel, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti and Mario Benedetti.
Atocha 2004
by David Bunn
The Caliph at Córdoba had a dizzying pool— …
by David Bunn
The Caliph at Córdoba had a dizzying pool—
quicksilver from his mines at Almadén
sent glints and highlights wavering through the air
and set his guests and courtiers’ heads to whirl.
It’s ruined now—the palace’s grand halls
unroofed and broken open to the sky.
On the all-night train from Lisbon to Madrid,
rumbling through the outskirts in the early dawn,
still gloomy, so the braziers flare bright
in trackside encampments and wrecking yards,
I think of commuters who check the time and yawn,
who’ll be blown apart at the station up ahead.
There’s a story that the bombs were to avenge
the last destruction of al-Andalus
which the Catholic Monarchs launched from Córdoba,
wresting Granada lovely from the Moors
five hundred years ago—itself revenge
for Arab conquest, eight hundred years before.
When they bombed Atocha we were safe at home
but preparing our first Spanish trip,
and our friends asked us if we’d ‘cut and run’—
crude words which mimicked the Australian Right
still glorying in the capture of Baghdad.
But not to go would feel like giving in.
At Barcelona there’s a mercury fountain:
quicksilver ripples out across the bowl,
in memory of the miners of Almadén
who rebelled from despair in ’34,
who Franco, soon a rebel, came to crush.
This shimmering device revenges them.
Now we’re at Atocha six months beyond the blast.
Angry tourists wave their tickets in the air,
urgent to board the fast train to Barcelona:
as if there’s no call for the guard and his gun,
as if six months ago those travellers didn’t die,
as if bombers didn’t die their murderous death.
We’ve run to see Guernica, ate our paella,
rushed to send emails home to our kids,
eager—Catalonia and France lie ahead—
but surrounded by all Spain’s silent dead.
David Bunn was born in 1946. For the last three years, with wildly inadequate skills, he has been translating the French poet René Char’s challenging post-war collection Fureur et Mystère.
Breakfast at the Friar Arms
by Peter Richardson
You say you’d like to move to St. Palendra …
by Peter Richardson
You say you’d like to move to St. Palendra
and kiss the stone we St. Palendrans kiss
on holy days on our elbows with a wick
burning in front of us at an altar. Well,
entering what looks like a badger hole
at the back of a fenced-off local cave,
you’d feel your rented helmet tapping
the underside of the Ralston Boulder,
named for one who preserved the site
by choking himself on strips of cloth
while his torturers were on ale break.
Once through, though, you’d relax.
Your eyes would adjust to a round
chamber banded with pink granite.
It’d be worth it, back at your hotel,
to say you’d received the blessing
as if it were your chance for fealty
to a toothless hag with a stone-axe
while a bearded furnace mechanic
conjured the names of fifty rebels
tethered to their ox-carts and hung
in pairs from trees along the roads
of St. Palendra—start and finish for
seditionists on their dirty hustings,
detested shire, blot on the imperial
shield, though nowadays promising
with our storm-watching weekends
and timeshare condos. What’s that?
Your wife wants to tour the harbor?
Amble along the quay? I’ll be here
if she should change her mind about
our discounted tour for barrow buffs
who contemplate a cottage on the bay.
Peter Richardson has published three collections of poetry with Véhicule Press in Montreal: A Tinkers’ Picnic (1999); An ABC of Belly Work (2003); and Sympathy for the Couriers (2007) which won the QWF’s A.M. Klein Award for 2008. His work has appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Sonora Review, The Malahat Review, The Rialto and Poetry Ireland Review among others. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada.
Children's Stories
by Philip Nugent
The War was popular, with alluring cruelties: …
by Philip Nugent
The War was popular, with alluring cruelties:
at bedtimes, pressed, he might manage
some grim anecdote, small and
strangely lacking in heroics or apparent purpose:
the cold or some long dead soldier’s rotten luck,
the terrible grinding of an engine
that promised death or
the Sten gun’s many failings;
nothing any kid would ask for
and all of it given reluctantly.
But that head of his was full of stories
though we only got them later, told by
other mouths than his, mouths not stopped
in turn by reticence and earth:
the great sheds packed with tiny shoes,
the railheads and fences and him,
his weapons jammed and his tongue tied
while ghosts in legions, little groups, wagons
and rusty garments followed him down roads
and occupied the corridors he had to be in,
pleading in babels and when he woke
to smoke a sweat drenched cigarette,
lined by the bed, their fingers trembling,
reproaching him for lateness, for his failure
to fetch their children safely from the gates
of schools he couldn’t name in streets he couldn’t find,
in towns that tanks had ploughed away
and left to rot beneath the rain and failed harvests,
schools whose keys, in any case, were melted,
or crumbled in his fingers as they closed
around his nightly promises of rescue.
Meanwhile we dug garden camps, liberated Normandy,
fought hard at Arnhem, died over and again to overthrow Berlin
and made him join us in our victories, dragging at his sleeves
to make him come
until he sat and watched, fag on, tab end cupped for snipers
and commented on military technique
as you’d speak of something vain or sinful:
the forms of pride, perhaps,
or some vast gluttony.
Philip Nugent was born in London, grew up in Wiltshire and Sussex, took a degree at Edinburgh and lived for a while in Greece where he taught English. Nugent was for many years a police officer in North London. Now he lives with his family in East Anglia.
Delenda est Carthago
by Ron Pretty
I too come from Carthage. I was there …
by Ron Pretty
I too come from Carthage. I was there
as the city burned, as Scipio Africanus
came in from the sea—a bloody sunset,
a fiery night, six hundred years of city
sundered blood and rubble. Scipio
Africanus came in from the sea,
implacable with his legions, came in
from the sea implacable with his mission:
Carthage must be destroyed, must be
rendered void. Rome will have no rivals.
The ancient people, heirs of Tyre
and of Phoenicia, sold into slavery, those
that lived, or buried beneath the rubble.
A victory bloody and complete. I was there.
A victory bloody and complete. Carthage
must be destroyed. Citizens of Rome turned out
in force to cheer the murderous legions home.
A three day triumph through the city and Cato
vindicated. Carthage is no more. But Rome,
what of her, now master of the world?
The Senate in its celebration saw a future rich
with loot, its last rival gone. Instead it got
a hundred years of civil strife, of factions
fighting over African entrails. Assassinations,
riots and the death of the Republic.
I too come from Rome, I was there
in its martial glory and its slow civic
attrition born of triumph. I was there.
Ron Pretty’s seventh book of poetry, Postcards From the Centre, was published in 2010. Until he retired in 2007 he ran the Poetry Australia Foundation and was Director of Five Islands Press. He taught creative writing at the Universities of Wollongong and Melbourne. He has edited the literary journals SCARP and Blue Dog: Australian Poetry.
The Contortionist Speaks of Dislocation
by Rachel Lindley
The trick is not to care about connections. Then there’s no pain …
by Rachel Lindley
The trick is not to care about connections. Then there’s no pain
when ligaments twist and the shoulder pops from its socket,
when ribs accordion intercostals or heels bump
against the base of the skull and toenails scrape skin
from cheeks. The body is abandoned so clavicles can bend
backwards and the spine can arch to carry crown to coccyx.
Tendons forget and never know how to hold
their brother bones. Just a light nudge can push
their lax grip to anarchy. They slip away from woman
into an avalanche of buckled scaffolding, a game
of pick-up sticks, a car crumpled around the Pisa lean
of a streetlight, a cherry stem knotted in a closed mouth,
a crushed spider. The crowd cheers my collapse.
Once I was frozen. A shoebox under my bed holds
photos of a girl who tensed between the steel
of family on porch steps, stood stiff at the gate
of a Catholic school with books mooring her
to the cracked cement, and lay like a stone in the snow.
Each shutter snap clipped the same command
from the secret face behind it: capture a girl
beaten into hands without fidgets and irontight braids.
Nothing could be out of place. She is always out of place now.
Each night before muscles coax flesh to fold inwards
and cameras flash to catch this endless metamorphosis,
a square of memory is tucked away between the skin
and skintight suit. It lies below the left breast and counts
the heartbeats of each change. I need it there, I need it
after I let go, so the girl braced against picture clicks
can remind this body where the bones belong.
Rachel Lindley has had both dramatic and light verse published in the CBC Alberta Anthology, Margie Review, Alsop Review, Light Quarterly, Stitches, and the anthology Kiss and Part. Rachel is currently working on two poetry series: Seven Chakras for a Split Brain and Fair Voices: Songs in Three Rings.
The Earth Moves and Bright
by Linda Rogers
Hold on, the mother sings to herself …
by Linda Rogers
Hold on, the mother sings to herself
in the rain, holding her infant child
above the floodwaters. Hold on,
the orphan who sleeps standing up
will not let go of her doll. For one
hundred and one days they’ve been
waiting for the toxic waters to release
the souls of their loved ones. For one
hundred and one days they’ve been
praying for the children left behind.
We are a prehensile species, holding onto our children:
mothers giving birth in trees, remembering the lessons
of our simian ancestors, mothers holding on through
earthquake, hurricane and plague, when the earth
moves and bright angels, their bones bleached white,
the colour of mourning, fall through the cracks.
Now, after one hundred and one days,
the trees are receiving the voices of
souls come back. Does water polluted
by death without blessings, le dernier
priye, release the voices of angels or devils?
Who is it that speaks when the wind of
savage gods whispers in leaves watered
by innocent blood? Do not question the
mothers and children with the world in their
hands, just praise them for holding on.
Linda Rogers is a poet from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and the author, editor and illustrator of several dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Currently Rogers is editing an anthology of Victoria painters and poets, while tweaking a novel set in Turkey, where her husband plays New Orleans blues with Sweet Papa Lowdown.
Earthquake Light
by Robert Wrigley
Earlier tonight an owl nailed the insomniac white hen. …
by Robert Wrigley
March 11, 2011
Earlier tonight an owl nailed the insomniac white hen.
She’d fluttered up onto a fence post to peer at the moonlight,
to meditate in her usual way on the sadness of the world
and perhaps the hundreds of vanished eggs of her long life here.
I was watching from the porch and thinking she ought not to be
where she was, and then she wasn’t, but taken up, a white hankie
diminishing in the east, one the owl would not ever drop.
Now an hour after, the new night wind spins up a leghorn ghost
of her fallen feathers under the moon and along the meadow grass:
corpse candle, friar’s lantern, will-o’-the-wisp chicken soul
dragging its way toward me, that I might acknowledge her loss
and her generosity, and wonder again about her longstanding
inability to sleep on certain nights. There are sky lights
beyond our understanding and dogs whose work it is to scent
the cancer no instrument can see. On the nights she could not sleep,
the hen Cassandra Blue perched herself with clear view to the east
and studied the sky, every two seconds canting her head a few degrees
one way or the other. What she saw or if she saw it I cannot say,
though it seemed that something always somewhere was about to go
badly wrong. Then again, it always is. Now there’s a swirl
of wind in the meadow, spinning three or four final white feathers
west to east across it, and there’s a coyote come foolishly out
into the open, hypnotized by feather flicker, or scent, then seeing
by moonlight the too-blue shimmer of my eyes, and running for its life.
Robert Wrigley teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. His books include Moon In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois, 1986); What My Father Believed (Illinois, 1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995) winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003), winner of the Poets’ Prize; Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); and most recently, Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Among his other awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize; and six Pushcart Prizes.
An Embarrassment of Riches
by Phillip Crymble
Our first full day in Zambia, a family in an old oil-burning Beetle called …
by Phillip Crymble
i
Our first full day in Zambia, a family in an old oil-burning Beetle called
to welcome us to town. While the grown-ups talked, I opened crates
and boxes: found a pile of Marvel Comics, scale model die-cast toys,
the Field Commander Action Man with life-like hair and gripping hands
I’d got for Christmas. The shoeless, wide-eyed neighbour boys stared
openly, stood mesmerized, as if suddenly exposed to works of alien
pornography, or posing in an amateur tableau evoking Sodom, Lot’s
defiant wife. My new friends left with borrowed Beanos, dog-eared
Famous Five adventure books, a stack of Captain Britain weeklies—
said they’d pay me back. That night I slept uncovered, left the light
on in the hall—awoke to a cacophony of crickets, croaking frogs.
In the shadows, tailless geckos moved sure-footed on the walls.
ii
Food shortages were commonplace. Rhodesia cut off milk and meat,
blocked the open trade of cocoa beans, preserves and packaged sweets.
Cars were much the same—my father searched for weeks to find an old
estate, bought a third-hand Morris Minor crank start off of Jimmy Crabb,
a Scotsman fond of crimplene, garish stay-prest slacks—short-sleeved
shirts and belted jackets in the style of early African explorers. Along
with outsized hedgehog flies and bees came painted locusts, mixed|
varieties of lizard, praying mantids, raids of army ants—our garden
was a lush and unspoiled paradise of sub-Saharan fauna flanked on every
side by cyclone fencing topped with razor wire. A neighbour told my father
that the local Bemba children often shimmied underneath to steal ripe fruit—
claimed he kept a rifle in the kitchen, said it put the wind up thieving munts.
iii
The motionless agamas found on rooftops, wide-trunked mango trees
and flowering acacias often plagued me in my dreams, freed fight-or-flight
anxieties, released inchoate feelings of aversion, fear, hostility. Blue-throated
alpha-males would bob their heads aggressively, engage in combat—use
their armour-piercing tails as deadly weapons. When chased they reached
alarming speeds. The one I chance-encountered after running to retrieve
an errant cricket ball was monstrous—hissed like a corn snake, made
my muscles seize. Though charmed, I kept my wits and backed up slowly,
called for the garden boy in Bantu—found him underneath the shade trees
rubbing wax on our estate. Once murdered the agama lost its colour, left no
ornament to decorate its death—just lay there flattened in the dust. We left
it belly up, went in—ate pickled beets and tinned ham sandwiches for lunch.
Phillip Crymble’s poems have appeared in publications around the world, including Vallum, Arc, The Malahat Review, The Hollins Critic, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and The New York Quarterly. Crymble now lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he serves as a Poetry Editor for The Fiddlehead. Not Even Laughter (Salmon Poetry, 2012) will be his first full-length collection of poems.
Four Trees
by Donald Givans
As you narrow your eyes and focus …
by Donald Givans
As you narrow your eyes and focus
I follow the line of your sight
to the prospect of order before us:
four trees in equipoise. The thrust
of it—symmetrical, plumb—excites
you. I narrow my eyes and focus
on colour, nonplussed
by this arboreal (your favourite)
prospect of order. Before us
were water-lilies—all blooming fuss
and clutter—but right
now you’d rather all eyes refocused
on this long-extinct border—this locus
amoenus, you call it (lost overnight
on a prospector’s orders). Before us,
I say, the proof of disorder—life on the cusp
of loss. You save that fight
for later, and narrow your eyes. You focus:
the prospect of order before us.
Donald Givans was born in 1990 in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He recently graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in English from Queen’s University Belfast and is currently reading for a Masters at Queen’s in Modern Poetry.
The Garbage Truck Trashed the Sunflower
by Jeff Steudel
It had just overtaken the fence, springing …
by Jeff Steudel
It had just overtaken the fence, springing
colour over the grey-flecked cedar boards
that enclosed the small garden and yard.
I imagine its big head hit with a thwunk
on the lane of compacted gravel and dirt.
Of course, nobody heard it, and the chances
are nobody saw what were the pincer-like
hydraulic arms side-swiping the tall stalk
during the dust-up of high-pitched stops
and starts forking from bin to bin. I don’t
blame the driver—there isn’t much time
to collect all that garbage. What’s the life
of one sunflower? Sure, I planted it there
and it grew heavy-headed until it leaned out
into the lane a little, but I didn’t want to tie it
to the fence. Besides, a magnum opus of sun-
flower centres the yard like the tuba’s high
note blasting the brightest yellow of the year.
Its six-foot stalk stands straight against gravity,
but its hunched neck bends as if it’ll break
under the weight of its seedless head peering
onto sweet peas, salad blooms and the carrot
leaves that dance in the gentle breeze. For some
time now, carbon has questioned many things
green. Though the end is certain, the sun will
only shine through the spindles of red maple
that way this time. The fractured light will stay
on the gold band of petals like fire licks only
so long. If I look long enough, I feel happy,
even laugh. And the light has changed already.
Jeff Steudel‘s work has appeared in several Canadian literary magazines, including The Fiddlehead, CV2 and Prism international. In 2010, he received the Ralf Gustafson Poetry Prize. In 2011, his poetry was selected as a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Photo credit: Susan Steudel
The Grasshoppers' Silence
by Linda Rogers
Listen to the story the prisoner’s wife …
by Linda Rogers
Listen to the story the prisoner’s wife
hears in the Bengali darkness: the
one he’d told her about a grasshopper
he’d caught in his sweep net at dusk
and taken home in a glass jar with
breathing holes punched in the lid.
“Why do boys catch insects?” she’d asked,
and he’d answered: “Because they are lonely.”
He told her the alarmed grasshopper
fiddled, rubbing its leg against its
belly. In Bangladesh, as in China,
ancient violins have one string; and
they sing in minor keys. “Why is their
music so sad?” she asked him, even
though she already knew the answer.
“Their music is sad because grasshoppers are sad.”
In Bangladesh, unfaithful women are
called “grasshoppers,” because the
adulteresses jump from leaf to leaf
in monsoon swamps. “Don’t ever leave
me,” her husband had ordered his
captive insect, pulling off one of its
legs before he made it a suit of rags.
“Did it ever sing after that?” she’d asked.
His wife was a curious woman who’d
gazed past the Chittagong Hills to praise
the sunrise, its clamorous golds and
vermilions. “Don’t you ever leave me,”
he’d said to her every time she opened
a book or looked out the window, her
eyes astonished as water lilies opening
to the first light of dawn. And that one
last time, “You left me,” tearing out her
eyes and leaving them both alone in the
dark—her in a room without windows and
him in the prison he’d made for himself,
listening to the grasshoppers’ silence.
Linda Rogers is a poet from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and the author, editor and illustrator of several dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Currently Rogers is editing an anthology of Victoria painters and poets, while tweaking a novel set in Turkey, where her husband plays New Orleans blues with Sweet Papa Lowdown.
The Infinite Library
by Jillian Pattinson
There’s a man climbing the book stacks, all he’s read …
by Jillian Pattinson
There’s a man climbing the book stacks, all he’s read
behind and beneath him, part now of the firmament
on which he balances his ladder. He has been a long time
climbing, reading as he goes. He remembers it all,
no need to down-climb, backtrack, reread. Long
as his years of climbing, his recollection of all he’s read,
hands, eyes and feet all fluency, economy; deft and steady
his ascent. He keeps to hard-bound literature. Anthologies
and well-read authors make the soundest steps. From time
to time he stumbles upon a slim volume of obscure origin,
whose weight belies the name. These he carries with him,
letting go only when the burden of whispers
buckles his legs, sending a tremor through the edifice.
Like feathers they drift into darkness, no echo returning
to tell of the fall. Even as he climbs, reads, climbs,
the stacks grow taller, yet he never tires, each shelf
firing his attempt at the next. No lack of oxygen
in the bookish air and ever the chance of a fresh breath,
something not quite new but sharp enough to raise a gasp,
release a sigh. Quiet as a dust mote circulating in a light shaft
between the towering stacks he climbs, directed
by the voice of every author, accompanied by every
character. All his life, it seems, he has been climbing,
paragraph by paragraph, page upon page, book stacks
growing ahead and behind. Never enough time, never
enough light for so much yet unread. Still he climbs,
having come so far, unsure now of the way down,
knowing how deep the silence that greets the fall.
Jillian Pattinson is an Australian writer based in Melbourne. Her poems have been published in the Australian Book Review, Griffith Review, Meanjin, The Best Australian Poems 2007, Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008, and others. The working manuscript for Jillian’s first poetry collection, The Infinite Library, won the 2010 Alec Bolton Prize for an unpublished manuscript. In 2010, Jillian’s poem “The Still Point” won the inaugural UTAS Place and Experience Poetry Prize.
The Kingfisher
by Mark Tredinnick
And so each bird throws the idea of herself …
by Mark Tredinnick
For Maureen Harris
And so each bird throws the idea of herself
ahead of herself, up the river—
A line of spiritual thought without a sinker—
And flies after it. As if the actual could ever hope to reel the ideal in. But so it is
That awareness of the azure kingfisher—a dark electricity, a plump
Trim elegance of intent—reaches you on the riverbank
that last warm Sunday of autumn, split seconds
Before the bird; so that when she passes you at light speed, her name
is already a bright blue phrase on your tongue, is already
the unresolved cadence of your second self.
Mark Tredinnick is an award-winning Australian poet, is the author of Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, The Little Red Writing Book, and eight other works of poetry and prose. Mark lives, writes and teaches along the Wingecarribee River, southwest of Sydney. The Lyrebird (2011) is his most recent book of poems, and a new collection (Body Copy) will appear in 2012.
Late Breaking News
by Gary Geddes
We’re in Wally’s Renault, driving …
by Gary Geddes
We’re in Wally’s Renault, driving
south in Provence, the car radio
harvesting disaster, swaths of it,
and the fields bloody with tulips,
a brash statement stretching
to the low hills of the Luberon.
Later, in the hilltop fortress
with its catapult and trebuchet,
I ask my friend what happened
to monks, to sanctuary, places
where little pain sears the weary
breastbone, where envy’s rare
as gourmet meals, where even
the spirited horse, grown
accustomed to lassitude, nudges
the pitchfork’s worn handle until
hay falls like manna from the loft,
and where prayers are crafted
in lieu of weapons. Eternity
is long, Pascal has written, so
faith is worth the gamble.
The soul sets sail for a distant
port. Tears mark its departure,
but what marks its arrival?
Planks resound with footsteps,
deep water parts to accommodate
the insistent keel. Wally, amused,
dismisses these speculations,
insists there’s romance
in neither monastery nor rose.
Solace, perhaps, though skimpy,
and only in what the moving pen
inscribes or the stiff horse-hairs
of the brush render permanent
and lovely, those moments, all
too brief, when the anchor holds
and the sea blooms resplendent
with all manner of kelp and with the
scrubbed tulip faces of the dead.
Gary Geddes has won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lieutenant Governor’s award for Literary Excellence (in the Canadian province of British Columbia) and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile, awarded simultaneously to Vaclav Havel, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti and Mario Benedetti.
Leaving the Island
by Talya Rubin
We’ve all gone now, left the place to the sheep …
by Talya Rubin
We’ve all gone now, left the place to the sheep
and the gannet, the puffin and the wren.
For decades only a mailboat of whalebone and oak
came and went from here. Then the tourists
arrived to see if we were more than myth in the Outer
Hebrides. We sold them tweed and spotted
bird’s eggs, let them look in on prayer meetings, count
the stones in the walls we built to keep out the weather.
When we prayed it was for a cease
to things: the wind, the war, the plagues.
In the end, the land choked us out, carcasses
of sea birds and layers of peat moss turned to lead
the constant fog, the solitude, the slippery grass
by the cliff’s edge, that impossible winter of 1929.
We left our Bibles open and handfuls of oats on the floor.
Locked our doors behind us. From this vantage point
our home was just a sketch of land that shrank into the sea—
the island’s sharp crags impossible to understand.
This land, so angry and so peaceful now, without
us. The feral sheep bleat into the evening.
Nothing to bother them but old age and the wind
that made us all walk like bent trees.
Talya Rubin is a Montreal born, Sydney based poet, playwright and performer. Her poetry won the National Canadian Bronwen Wallace award. Her poetry, short stories and non-fiction have been published in Grain, Matrix, Macleans Online and Ascent magazines.
Leopold
by David Mortimer
It’s alright Leopold you can relax now …
by David Mortimer
It’s alright Leopold you can relax now
There’s no need to plan another tour
Everyone can see you weren’t exaggerating
Everyone agrees your son’s a star
And you don’t need leave from Salzburg anymore
With the Prince-Archbishop gone from power
With Colloredo gone (relax) your son’s the power
Who’s taken all before him so that now
Your surname’s not your surname anymore
(More ways than you could advertise on tour
Watching and hearing the child star)
But a byword for music and mastery past exaggerating
For beauty and genius past hope of exaggerating
The whole world knows his power
And follows the Mozart star
Even to praise or blame his father now
(Don’t laugh) for attitudes or incidents or risks on tour
To royal houses that don’t matter anymore
Leopold it doesn’t matter anymore
What anyone or Wolfgang tries exaggerating
In home town service and on European tour
You’ve done your best with your employer and every other power
So prodigies and parents then till now
Can hate or hail you as a guiding star
From your first joy in your infant star
(The play of fear) till after you couldn’t teach him anymore
As child or adolescent or as adult now
With warning and advising and exaggerating
Dangers of travel and marriage and power
By letter when you couldn’t be on tour
Like when your wife instead of you on tour
Died past planning in Paris leaving the young star
All alone and all grown up to power
Leopold you just can’t do this anymore
With the Prince-Archbishop dead and no exaggerating
You and your son more than two centuries dead now
Leopold the tour is over you can rest now
With all your family with the star raised to a higher power
Needing no strategies for exaggerating anymore
David Mortimer is working on a third collection of poems to follow Red in the Morning (Bookends 2005) and Fine Rain Straight Down (Friendly Street New Poets Eight Wakefield 2003). Mortimer lives in Adelaide. For further information please visit the South Australian Writers’ Centre website.