The Single Woman Traveller, Latin America
by Ros Barber
England’s frostbitten fields laid out like circuit boards. …
by Ros Barber
England’s frostbitten fields laid out like circuit boards.
Ice-filled bomb craters, north of Leeds,
write a long sentence to the coast, spelling out
the O, O, O distress call of men at their own throats:
abandoned payloads of a long-past war
which had your mother, at six, dreaming bananas.
Silver seams of lights across the southern States,
earth rumpled below, make your flight
the zig-zag mend of a woman’s knuckles,
a woman who hums to her porch as mosquitoes
fizz her children’s blood onto the glass of the bulb,
sticking there, like dropped stitches.
Your Spanish turns out to be useless.
At Arrivals, you side-step the locals,
their wreck mock-taxis. The high-priced bar,
you discover, translates into brothel.
Waiters don’t ask what you want to drink,
but “¿Para tomar?”: for to take?
Take care. The night is done up like a corset,
and kittens with prominent spines
teeter, oblivious, over the gullies.
Take this language that falls apart under the tongue
like fruit dropped from a market stall
undressing itself beneath the moon’s glare.
Take the eyes of the Robert Mitchum lookalike,
which sleep through his nightlies on the desk,
waking only to push up the hem of a passing dress.
A shift away, pregnant turtles reject the Atlantic
to oar up the black volcanic grit of the beach
and bury their futures: wet, delicate, out of reach.
Ros Barber is author of the verse novel The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre 2012), winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, joint winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and long-listed for the Women’s Fiction Prize 2013. She has published three poetry collections, the latest Material (Anvil, 2008), received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Born in Washington D.C. to British parents, she lives in Brighton, England, and is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex.
Sonnet for the Tiny Neutron
by Arnold Seong
At first it seemed to have no mass—just dazzle, …
by Arnold Seong
At first it seemed to have no mass—just dazzle,
flavored with zip and bang. They called this cosmic,
quirky weirdo the Ghost Particle:
space partitioned to mere verb, mere spirit,
mere form. Though it’s not, of course: it tropes,
changing states at random as it whizzes
through space, its flavor a matter not, as hoped,
of order, but probability. Thus:
change. Thus: time. Thus: mass.
And the Standard Model’s calculus?
Empty. Beauty doesn’t prove the math
(Einstein’s famous malcontents). But what is
content if not form? Everyone knows
God does not play dice. He merely throws.
*Italian physicist Enrico Fermi gave the neutrino its name, which translates to “little neutral one.”
Arnold Seong’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets and Poetry Northwest. He lives in Southern California and teaches ESL and Academic English at UC Irvine.
Tennis Court Road
by Vincent Marksohn
I like to remember my grandfather …
by Vincent Marksohn
“The rows of bags grew. A priest stood in the McEnroes’ yard, in the midst of the white bags, making the sign of the cross. He appeared to be praying.”
–Michael Winerip, New York Times: Jan. 27 1990
I like to remember my grandfather
as sitting in his sunroom
full of vhs tapes
fake turf flooring with a bocote wood desk for coins and taxes
all the orchids my mother gave him as birthday presents
displayed around the jacuzzi nearby
my grandmother across the house
getting ginger ale from the frigidaire in the garage
the amoeba pool out the window closed for winter
the garter snake that bit my cousin
dead in the snow
or my mother herself
a couple miles away
first hearing the sound of something big and dark
sailing over the frozen creek
with paint dripping off her brush
pauses
with a couple minutes gone
to call my pa
aluminum and wood shear
an albatross
or the sound of one sailing
everything silent along south st & audrey
everything crisp and rolling as january—
gravel on metal
the foggy hills of tennis court rd.
the bird descends
but only to lay eggs
my grandfather drawn away
from green books of tax code for a moment
to see what landed in his pool
and explosions of police lights
projecting on the bare trees
up the hill
on hills like I sledded down
kids with bloody foreheads
scream Mamá!
kids from bogotá
where I have never been
are roaming my grandparents’ yard
where I spend the fourth of july
and watch my father
grill steaks
and now I sit in the sun room
wondering which video tapes fell off the shelves.
Vincent Marksohn currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of the University of Vermont and Co-Editor in Chief of The Cause Arts Quarterly. His work also appears in Cocktails at the Apocalypse (Ra Press). His poems often imagine historical or familial experiences he was unable to witness. Vincent hails from a small fishing village on Long Island’s muddy North Shore and although he’s caught many fish, none were in the vicinity of home.
Supreme
by Frances P. Adler
Atta wants to go harvest his grapes …
by Frances P. Adler
“A petition was filed to the Israeli Supreme Court to let Palestinians harvest their grapes, and the High Court told the Army that they must let them harvest...People have rights to this land and there’s no law that takes these rights away.”
–Avital Sharon, Israeli lawyer, Rabbis for Human Rights
Atta wants to go harvest his grapes
and he can’t go because what used
to be his vineyard, the settlement took
as their shabam, their security zone,
and he can’t go because he doesn’t
have a permit and he doesn’t have
a permit because they won’t give him
one and this is the problem, so I
called the Army and they said he can’t
get a permit because he has to prove
this is his land and he has to get an
expert to show that this is his land
and I said that he did that, he came
to your office and showed you the map,
and he said I don’t have it, and I said,
could you look again because he even
remembers the date he was there and
Palestinians don’t usually remember
the date and he called me back and
said, yes, I have his date, but I don’t
have his map. But a map costs a lot
of money, I said, could I send it to you
on the computer and he said, no, I don’t
like that and here’s what we could do,
I could come to his land and you and I
and him, we could walk and he could
show me. So we agree on a date and
Atta and I are there and this guy doesn’t
show for the meeting, and here we are,
this has been going on for three years.
Last year, they let him come in to harvest
his grapes, just for a day or two, and you
should’ve heard his voice on the phone,
calling from his vineyards, picking his grapes,
the joy. And now he wants to go in again, and
they’re saying ever letting him in was a mistake
Portland poet Frances Payne Adler is the author of Making of a Matriot, Raising The Tents, and three collaborative poetry-photography books and exhibitions with photographer Kira Corser, shown in capitol buildings across the U.S. Work-in-progress: Dare I Call You Cousin, poetry & visuals about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, collaborating with Israeli photographer Michal Fattal and videographer Yossi Yacov. Adler is Professor Emerita and Founder of California State University Monterey Bay’s Creative Writing and Social Action Program.
To Feel
by Tim Bowling
The past tense of the verb …
by Tim Bowling
The past tense of the verb
and I am back in childhood’s
art class—“Today, we are going
to make a present for your parents
out of macaroni and felt
out of paper clips and felt
out of the tears of divorce
and long November rain and
the corpse of a grasshopper
and the back-of-a-baby’s-
mouth-silk smoothpool pocket and the terrifying
clunk of generation and
felt. There are no lines
to cut along or keep
the colours in. You’re
on your own. At 3:15
outside this clutch of years
no longer than your dog’s
life span, Time will arrive
in the Halloween mask
your grandparents fashioned
out of polio, foreclosures
and papier-mâché
to take you to the sea
where you will go like gleaners
between the velvet water
and the felt indifferences
over this spinning clay sphere
held in no hands, made
without love, lovelier
than the intense attraction
between your eye-songs
and these desperate invocations of your little wanting heart.
Tim Bowling of Edmonton, Alberta is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently his Selected Poems. He has been twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award and is a Guggenheim Fellow.
Transit
by Danielle Cadena Deulen
The horizon is doing my favorite trick, flattening itself …
by Danielle Cadena Deulen
The horizon is doing my favorite trick, flattening itself
into a blazing line. I’ve been watching the sky from
this plane as the plane burns through it, the dark
streaming behind. It’s an illusion of space and light
I’ve stared at so long now that I’ve become confused.
And not a simple confusion, in which I equal the zenith
of my own perspective and you equal the burning horizon.
You are in the horizon and so am I. I’m also on the plane
and you are nowhere, though several times now, I believed
I heard your voice, turned from the window to look down
the aisle, as if you could possibly be there. Like a dream
I often had in the years after we split—how I followed your
echo through an apartment (that one built like a thin-walled
cinderblock) where the rooms were infinite, filled with
people I didn’t know and your voice steadily disappearing
into the next room. I always arrived late, just in time to see
a glimpse of your heel or elbow slipping around a corner
into nothing, just past a doorway. I never caught you before
I awoke. Between the dream and the years after, I began to
wonder if any of it was real: you, me, the way I could feel
my pulse like a moth in my throat each time you moved
past me. When I blink toward the aisles, I notice a circle
of light obscuring my view (penance for staring too long at
the sun), a transit in negative. Not the astral spot of Venus
across the broad sun, but a bright tiny form on a body so vast
it could be the dark sky itself. It could be the infinite, God’s
Love, as Augustine imagined it in a time before space could be
measured, before we understood that everything is finite, that
everything is only as we perceive it. So, I know that I loved you
from that knowledge alone, though I can no longer feel that heat.
The dark has caught up to the plane and the horizon has burned
itself out. Not even the faint light of a city below, as if we are
flying over nothing into nothing. When I rest my temple against
the glass, I swear I hear the Atlantic shifting below and think of
a water current in the southern hemisphere unbroken by land that
circles the earth. You told me once how a solitary note at certain
depths will echo the same path endlessly, how if I whispered
into that water, my wish would follow its own song of longing
through every ocean, hypnotized by the rhythm of waves, until
someone reached far enough down to lift it into the singular air.
Danielle Cadena Deulen is an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati and has authored two books. Her poetry collection Lovely Asunder (U. of Arkansas Press) won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir The Riots (U. of Georgia Press) won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. Formerly, she was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Two Days in Spring
by Kim Trainor
The nun Tenzin Choedon, at a crossroads near the Mamae Convent, in Aba Prefecture, …
by Kim Trainor
i. Sunday 12 February 2012
The nun Tenzin Choedon, at a crossroads near the Mamae Convent, in Aba Prefecture,
Sichuan Province, sets herself on fire—this girl of eighteen—and dies.
I scroll down the blue film of words this afternoon, then pull on boots, a raincoat, and head outside
to dig through black clumped earth and the fleshed roots of day lilies.
Now she is salt, water, bone. A line of charred letters. Rain falling on the trees’ blackened skin.
It falls so quietly, fingers the guttering eaves, stains the concrete path and the metal blade as it cuts
through chestnut leaves which seep a dark fluid. Falls, soft, into the opened earth.
Now I bury the roots of this small apple tree—a stick and a bare root—scrape back the dirt
and tamp it down, tie the espaliered arms to the wall.
It seems impossible that it will grow. And as the rain comes harder, I stand stripped and rooted,
can only wait—how long—for the bud to swell and tear the bark, stiff blades
of crocus to cut through earth, the quince to blood-redden.
The sudden flowering.
(In Aba Prefecture, Sichuan Province, the soldiers who took her away
will not release the body for last rites.)
I put away the tools and pull the shed door closed. The light to the west is indigo, dried ink, rust.
Shadows deepen. New earth a black stain in this early spring.
ii. Monday 12 March 2012
Bloody dock has survived the winter, rosemary, green sorrel.
The earth labours in the dark.
In Syria, Homs has been under siege a year now.
News comes of a massacre of women and children and some men—beaten, mutilated, throats slit.
News comes like water, a rumour, trickles through cracks and underground channels, then a torrent.
Here is a child. Here is another. Another. Look away, look away.
Their suffering does not end.
In Book One of the Georgics, Virgil tells us how to occupy the long winter months with small tasks,
waiting for the spring. How to read the signs:
A crimson shadow darkens the sun.
Wells seep blood.
Pale ghosts come walking through the fields at dusk.
(Think of the farmer who will plough his land a hundred years from now, harvest weapon and bone,
how seed will take root, grow through socket and blue-black soil, towards the cold light.)
Sometimes the small tasks of custom and routine are not enough.
War creeps over the surface of the earth.
Kim Trainor’s poems have appeared most recently in Grain, Qwerty, and The Dalhousie Review. She won The Fiddlehead’s 2013 Ralph Gustafson Prize and was co-winner of the 2013 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. She has recently completed a first collection of poetry, entitled Karyotype. With the exception of five rather cold years in Montreal, she has always lived in Vancouver.
The Uninvited
by Lee H. McCormack
If I do not often think of the dead …
by Lee H. McCormack
For Charles Simic
If I do not often think of the dead
it is because I know they are with me.
They come from their strange distance
carrying gifts in their misshapen hands:
books, string, cabbages, poetry and bread,
or less desirable things—a yellow word,
blue corroded thoughts, shriveled black
plums of something said or left undone.
Watery and vague, they still know how
to penetrate the deepest, sleeping self
lost in the daily relief of labor and light;
no matter how I deny it, they use my grief
to unlock the twilight gate of my defenses.
But I don’t mind their unannounced arrival,
their fingers of willow, their unfocused eyes. . .
Like friends, they linger aimlessly, counting
flies or kicking stones, or pacing in the grass.
Then they simply pass away, and the day
is my own, to slough, or tear and mend, as I
see fit. Alone again, I see how easy it is to be
like them: to let the numbing autumn sky
chill my eyes until nothing human remains,
iris and cornea dissolved into a gray flat
mass without an echo in the sea. And gifts?
Well, I admit, I’ve got some rubbish to lug;
it’s summertime and the livin’ ain’t easy,
and things I offer seem to slip and fall
between their rainy, treeless lifelines
and foggy, missing palms. But at midnight,
though I’m not sure I should invite them in,
I think some evening I could set the table
and leave out a glass of milk, so they will
know I welcome them, as I hope they will
me, when my time comes, to the other side.
Lee H. McCormack has been a year-round resident of Martha’s Vineyard for 43 years. Poet, master carpenter, sculptor and guitar-maker and cofounder of The Savage Poets of Martha’s Vineyard, he has written poetry for over 50 years. He is the first Martha’s Vineyard Poet Laureate in the history of Martha’s Vineyard Island, selected in 2012 by ten judges representing the Martha’s Vineyard Poetry Society. Intensive studies with Howard Nemerov, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky and Thomas Lux.
Walking Without Feet
by Rosamund Taylor
You do not return complete. …
by Rosamund Taylor
You do not return complete.
You return with broken teeth and bleeding gums,
sores on your heels down to the bone.
You return blind, you have stood too long on the prow
watching the place where sunlight meets the sea.
You return unable to eat, with flesh turned inwards,
you return with a duodenum heavy with parasites,
you return with visible bones.
You return silent, you return deaf.
You return without names for the garden birds, for
the robin’s territorial disputes, the magpie’s indifference.
You return with vomit staining your clothes,
you return open, you return having lost your defences,
you return choking on flies and cockroaches.
You return from a long journey, you have come further
than Odysseus, than Dante, than Frodo.
You do not return complete. You have walked without shoes,
you have had cholera, you have walked past exhaustion,
past drought. You have walked past language,
past sky burials and cities too ancient to have been given names.
You return and stand on the other side of the wall from me,
as I hang my washing, white and yellow and fresh
against the sky. Bile in your throat. I smile, raise my hand:
you look the same to me.
Rosamund Taylor was born in Dublin in 1989. She was shortlisted for the 2012 Live Canon International Poetry Competition, had two poems long-listed for the 2011 Montreal Prize, and was a runner-up for the 2008 Bridport Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals in the UK and Ireland. She has worked in animal shelters and veterinary surgeries, but is currently writing full time, working on a novel for young adults as well as on poetry.
Wedding Service
by Sally Moore
She is plain …
by Sally Moore
She is plain
but he likes that
not, as others whisper
because Another is so fair
nor as rebellion for the act
not for subservience
she is not to be ignored
Her veil, white lace
as pale, almost, as her skin
eyes bright
stance demure
and she has been taken
before
What better scandal
an unexpected wife
like the whispers
a preference
without choice
He vows, this day
one to see happy
the other to serve
Sally A. Moore has been published in The Globe and Mail, Word Weaver, and Heart So Open, Soul So Wide (Amherst Writers and Artists Press). Her writing credits include a prize from the Ontario Poetry Society, a long-list from the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011, and award-winning film credits. Recent recipient of the Len Cullen Writing Scholarship, Sally is currently working on an historical fiction trilogy and holds certificates from Humber School for Writers.
Yawn
by Sarah Rice
Funny how a yawn travels through a room …
by Sarah Rice
Funny how a yawn travels through a room
a pied piper gathering all the rats
In that instant we all draw from the same source
a great swallowed gasp shoved into our lungs
like socks stuffed in a bag
and the long outward sigh
That we try to hide it up our sleeves
makes us culprits in common
like playing truant
with a friend
It’s mostly like this
our bodies that bind us together
despite talk of mind’s united
mutual goals—a Weltanschauung
No, more likely it is that we all pee
bare-footed in the night
with toenails that particular pale shade of shell
and a shadow pressed onto each heel
That at a certain point in the evening
we reel our shoulders in on tiny strings
to catch the small warmth of our elbows
and shrink our silhouette
We all lean the same way as the bus turns a corner
grow a wide-legged stance on a train moving
We all rise
on tip-toe
at the edge
of cold water
And sneezing scares us somewhat
those first few seconds when the breath comes in and in with no end
We know the mundane imperative of bowel
and the incredulity of a broken heart
Our bodies loosen in warmth or water
and we all leave hair on the pillow
We share in the first great O
our mouths make for milk at the start
And the milky grey our eyes
all turn at the end.
Sarah Rice is a Canberra-based art-theory lecturer, visual artist and writer, who co-won the 2011 Gwen Harwood poetry prize, amongst other awards. Her limited-edition, art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (Ampersand Duck, 2010), with prints by Patsy Payne, is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Award Winning Australian Writing and Best Australian Poetry 2012.
You'll Never Know
by Simon Miller
The window confesses a square of summer, …
by Simon Miller
The window confesses a square of summer,
A blue to stripe those bone-white cups,
The farmhouse jug you still remember
Sometimes. The netted curtains tremble
On the shadows of a breeze that, somewhere,
Absent leaves have smothered from the air.
Opaque, your gentle body spent by days,
You rest your brown and knotted fingers
On sheets turned down and tucked in ways
Your unchanged self would quietly adjust.
That was always your method, your routine;
The smoothing, placid ghost, the half- unseen.
Now in open space a child yells in sharp delight,
A throttled bike roars, spiking into the distance.
And in that moment your mind has taken flight
Skimming the dark waters of time—
To the bicycle leant against a whitewashed wall
The muffled ring of laughter from the village hall
Frost-brindled churns, blistered fields of clotted mud
Days imagined before dawn, the flare of his cigarette,
Stocking lines, that one-meek-kiss, flush of blood,
‘You’ll Never Know’ on the vicarage gramophone,
A rhapsody, those days.
When all began to fade,
Still you wept when you heard that love song played.
For you now, no letters lie in no special place.
Too brief the touch of love. Only an imagined
Ending; beneath the Perspex his dying face
Looks up, captures a blue square of summer
Skimming the dark waters, fading from sight
Falling towards home, forever losing height.
Simon Miller teaches English and Drama at an international school in Thailand where he lives with his wife and three growing children. He has written several plays for young people. His own childhood was spent between Botswana and England and he has rarely stopped exploring since. Social history, culture and the natural world are his key fascinations, particularly the points where all three meet.