House
by Paul Hetherington
He always lived there— …
by Paul Hetherington
for HRS
He always lived there—
on plum-red escalations of morning
when magpies warbled from fence-posts
and heat ran like streamers through the living room;
during mild winters when rain clagged windows
and someone drew stick figures
of copulating buffalo on sweating glass.
He picked a bougainvillea spike from loping couch grass
and tickled his sister’s feet with its point
as she rolled and squealed.
He circumnavigated his parents’ bedroom
where arguments like smoke snuck under the heavy door.
They emerged shadowed by makeup,
buying Neapolitan ice cream at the local deli
where Mr Georgiades said ‘Soon nobody will have to die’.
He couldn’t believe that
because birds sometimes fell from the air
and his parents inhabited death like a promise of final satisfaction,
their loose bones and flesh seductive
with the knowledge of growing old.
The house was ransacked in his indolent games
by Roman soldiers who made its stones
as slippery as egg-whites, and was finally cut in half
on a day when smoke hovered over the suburb,
a hundred ghosts exiting walls
and sliding from floorboards that twisted and groaned.
It was lifted like a Leviathan in two exposed sections
with furniture taped to its ribs,
and trundled on a truck through dust
like clouds of unknowing.
He was pressed tight to those walls
or running for cover as his father walked with a belt
wrapped tightly around knuckles.
His sister leered from her corner bedroom
where the louvres were open and a boy was looking in,
saying ‘You’re in for it now’.
There was a smell of rising yeast
and his mother’s high voice broke as if she’d been crying.
Crows cawed, settling
on exposed, unsteady ground.
Paul Hetherington is the author of two poetry chapbooks and eight fulllength poetry collections, most recently Six Different Windows (2013). He was founding editor of the National Library of Australia’s journal Voices (1991–97) and is one of the founding editors of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. He edited three volumes of the National Library’s edition of the diaries of the artist Donald Friend and is head of the International Poetry Studies Institute.
Jesus on a Train from Mumbai
by Suzanne Batty
I was dragged from the train by English tourists as the tall man …
by Name
I was dragged from the train by English tourists as the tall man
from Tamil Nadu called “coffee coffee” in his soft, sad voice.
They had been to too many temples, mistaken the pigeon-feeding ritual
for a message from god. All they wanted was for me to sing songs
altered by death but when I opened my mouth I vomited water hyacinth—
they beat me with metal rods from London buses, whilst the school boy bird
whistled outside. Women wrapped in blankets came to view me,
carrying boulders on their heads to mend the roads. When they judged me
bloody enough, we went for chai at a shack by the roadside,
a statue of St. George in a glass case spoke. There was mist and no view.
In damp fields, men sold bags of candyfloss to over-dressed newly-weds,
heaps of carrots sickening as goldfish. Children followed us like skinny dogs
their ribs rotten as railway tracks. In the back yard of his brother’s house
a man invited us into his concrete hut, model trains mounted on the walls
like something shot. His brain was smaller than a mouse’s.
He showed us a dead kingfisher the size of a rat, its enormous
beak open, about to speak, asked me to bless it.
I could not. I had shared a bed with my mother, under the same
mosquito net, had watched my father miraculously pleasure
thirteen women with his thirteen hands.
Suzanne Batty’s first collection of poems The Barking Thing was published in 2007 and she completing a second collection. A short story author, Suzanne also writes for theatre and has taught Creative Writing for 15 years. She is interested in working with people experiencing or recovering from mental distress. Her most recent collaborative project has been with an avant-garde musician, arranging one of Suzanne’s poems for three soprano voices. Suzanne lives in Manchester, UK.
Kennethland
by Brett Dionysius
This is all his now. The front row’s four desks, …
by Brett Dionysius
This is all his now. The front row’s four desks,
habitually rearranged like a swastika throughout
history. They have been annexed for the founding
of Kennethland. He has a pilgrim’s first thrill on
sighting landfall. His anxiety rises from his head
like a tall black hat. Inside its boundaries he raises
a flag of outlandish design legitimising his mind’s
false invasion. He blames others for his border
intrusions. His actions are a grand conspiracy,
dressing up conformity’s corpse in irrationality’s
dun-coloured uniform & dumping it over his
checkpoint. He is fluent in visual propaganda.
He shoots a history of his new world order
in grainy super eight. The assault was sudden.
He keeps a guarded airspace over his meticulous
kingdom. He has measured every perimeter’s inch.
He keeps equal distances apart. There is no other
landscape like this, so worth protecting. He writes
his inaugural constitution in red crayon pictures.
His weapons are literal, his thoughts fire rapidly
like a gun-mounted camera. They hurt. Any breach
to his sovereignty is dealt with fiercely. His left fist
hangs in the air like a bulbous-headed drone. His
neck is rigid undercarriage when he makes a decision.
He draws computer game screenshots to prophesise
what exactly will happen. Like a robot, he doesn’t mix
his words, but acts by instruction. Missile-pens launch
from his fingers’ slim silos buried in the cornfields
of his jean pockets & stab at their flesh’s no fly zone.
He is steeped in Armageddon’s instantaneous results.
This land is lost. He has already begun to print his own
currency. The denominations don’t make sense, but
they are as nostalgic as soil & well worth collecting.
He doesn’t want them to open his nation’s tidy box.
There are some inner workings they don’t get to see.
He craves the sensation of a cattle crush pinning him,
but without the iron touch. He patrols. Outside his wire
enclosure everyone has been reclassified as an enemy
combatant. He keeps just one true prisoner of war.
He has no plans to exchange him for the present.
B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online. His eighth poetry collection Weranga will be released in 2013. He lives in Ipswich, Queensland where he runs, watches birds, teaches English and writes sonnets.
Legacy
by Karen Warinsky
We have the Pompei dog, …
by Karen Warinsky
We have the Pompei dog,
DaVinci’s paintings,
Shakespeare’s gloves,
the 32 plays, the 154 sonnets.
We have world-wide ruins where people
baked bread, told tales,
fought and loved
their children and friends.
Feudal swords hang on walls in Japan,
the hands that wielded them
rested into dust.
Eyes in ancient mid-eastern mosaics still
look out on scenes where people
once passed; thousands of vanished people.
And we have grandma’s cut glass sugar bowl,
her leather bound Rubaiyat,
her lace scarf legacy,
her lessons of love.
Karen Warinsky was a semi-finalist in the 2011 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her work can be seen on several online sites, and she recently published two poems in Joy, Interrupted, an anthology on motherhood and loss, available through Amazon.com. She has lived in Illinois, North Dakota, Washington state, Japan and Connecticut. Mrs. Warinsky holds an M.A. from Fitchburg State University and currently teaches English at a high school in Massachusetts.
Medusa is Crying
by Ilya Tourtidis
Sobbing bitterly like a ravished maiden, …
by Ilya Tourtidis
Sobbing bitterly like a ravished maiden,
Medusa wonders why vipers were matted to her hair,
hissing, and spitting, and arguing with each other
like deformed children. Perhaps it was her fault,
she thinks. If only she had not kindled the ire of the living
gods who were so very fond of punishing their creation.
If only she understood then as she does now, how much
deceit there is in love, and how willingly it can be tricked
in and out of its harness. Her greatest fear is not death,
but the shame that she would live so favoured as a sliver
of her former self, forever…She will never be appeased,
she thinks. Never again live undisguised, she tells herself
as a ganglion of eyes suddenly fix their gaze
and prepare to strike.
Something underserved happened.
Something big and cream fed was wrested from her body.
But she has no time to thread through the tangle of her thoughts
because another cutter suddenly appears out of a clot of light
and steps towards her.
At first, the young girl Medusa sees staring back at her
is hazy and unclear, but too familiar to be ignored.
Then as the memory of her former self thaws and bleeds
like a dark red seed, it dawns on her that she is no longer a fragment
but a mere reflection, and hesitates for just a moment.
Just until the gorgon in her stirs
and hunches over the water blossom on her lips.
And then, in the certain knowledge that all is lost,
that she can not possibly endure
the very bottom of things,
she growls defiantly
as one already slain
and turns to stone.
Ilya Tourtidis was born in Greece. He moved to Australia when he was four years old and to Canada when he was fifteen. He worked as teacher and counsellor in the Comox Valley where he now resides. He was cowinner of the Gerald Lampert Award in 1994. His poetry publications include Mad Magellan’s Tale, The Spell of Memory, Path of Descent and Devotion, and Bright Bardo. He has also published several e-books.
Moon Jellyfish
by Sharon Black
Unhitched, you rise—a Chinese lantern trailing ribbons, …
by Sharon Black
Unhitched, you rise—a Chinese lantern trailing ribbons,
clenching and unclenching,
swallowing space as you sail
with fathomed grace through the dark;
now motionless, adrift; now climbing an invisible cord,
more trick of light than living thing,
a palpitation, a visual echo
of your old name, sea lung.
Your bell’s a nerve net, frilled with cobweb
strands; four pink gonads glow
like sun-shot cherry blossoms; tentacles waft
plankton into the harbour of your mouth—
like the mind feeling its way into a half-remembered idea, the tongue
into a familiar sex, the way we sense, by degrees,
the murmur of wind, the brush
of weed against ankles, the shiver of wing-beat
as a fulmar skims the foam.
On bright nights you gather in your thousands,
phosphorous, moon spawn,
utterly dependent on your mother’s pull, a bloom
of photons returning to their source,
a fleet retreating to the carrier, the flux
of neurons during each inhalation
as the breath journeys through sleep,
washes up with a sigh.
Sharon Black is originally from Glasgow but now lives in the Cévennes mountains of southern France. She is widely published and won The Frogmore Poetry Prize 2011. Her poetry collection To Know Bedrock was published in 2011 by Pindrop Press. And here’s her website.
Morely
by Andrew Fitzsimons
As in: he’ll morely be sitting there, …
by Andrew Fitzsimons
As in: he’ll morely be sitting there,
the butt of a roll-up between index
and thumb, the makings of another
in his lap, for why wouldn’t the next
world be much like the one here?
As in: the crane this morning
alighting on the shed roof, morely
knew to expect the Sunday chicken-
scraps, the leg, the wings. Did he scry
into the kitchen window last evening?
More than likely? It must be, I suppose.
I’ve never heard another soul
utter this mind-made shortcut. His
and his alone. Now he’s gone, is that all?
Morely. This shatterable ves-
sel; the mini urn on the windowsill.
Andrew Fitzsimons was born in Ireland and has lived in Japan since 1998. He is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Cultures at Gakushuin University, Tokyo. His publications include The Sea of Disappointment: Thomas Kinsella’s Pursuit of the Real (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008) and Thomas Kinsella: Prose Occasions 1951-2006, ed. (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009). His poetry has appeared in Ireland, Britain, and the U.S.A., and he has also published translations of Italian poetry, including Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Andrea Zanzotto.
My Head Is Full of Pakistan
by Susan McMaster
Riotous confusion—colour, light, noise—a bowl of jewels …
by Susan McMaster
Riotous confusion—colour, light, noise—a bowl of jewels
poured into my hand by my friend, who keeps leaving
Canada to return to its gardens, its temples,
its feasts and ululations.
Its sudden kills.
A bomb in the street crashes without warning
on the vendor who yesterday sold sweet almonds.
And on his child.
Walls lock Westerners into deeper and smaller spaces
as the barrage grows.
North, where I sit at the table on my porch in pale spring sun,
a bowl of stones—clear quartz, blue calcite,
fool’s gold, haematite, lake-polished glass—
gathers the light.
The river, in May, is almost ice-free. A swimming beaver
crosses the flooded road in front of the truck.
My husband will tell me this
when he returns bearing rainbows—
more trout than we can eat.
For now, the radio is my link to Sunday acts.
In Sweden, a pill frees a woman in pain
from too much life.
Twins in Belgium who are losing both sight and sound
decide they’ve had enough.
My mother asks, Why am I still here?
Her brain has turned to snow.
My father’s is a blizzard.
The garden beyond the railing is pink and ferny green.
The sparrows never stop, robins insist, blackbirds whirr.
February hovers behind their songs: not bombs
but snow, thigh deep, shoulder deep,
a path unmarked.
“I’m just going outside and may be some time.”
Unearned riches. Undeserved cold.
Too many jewels. Too many stones.
I can’t use them all.
I don’t know how to save them.
[Note: the quotation is the reputed last words of Captain Oates, who walked into a blizzard on Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition to save food for the remaining explorers. They died anyway.]
Susan McMaster is the past president of the League of Canadian Poets and has published some 20 books and recordings, recently Paper Affair: Poems Selected & New, Pith & Wry: Canadian Poetry, and Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Acorn-Plantos, Lampman, and Ottawa Book awards finalist). Projects include Branching Out, the first national feminist magazine; First Draft, SugarBeat, and Geode Music & Poetry; and Convergence: Poems for Peace, which brought poetry to every parliamentarian in 2001.
Note to Ex-Husband
by Elizabet Stevens
That old jacket (the one with just the right slouch) …
by Elizabet Stevens
That old jacket (the one with just the right slouch)
has been found
in clothes for the Sally Ann
by mistake. You called several times.
I picked the pockets long ago,
found nothing but the gritty lint of bad times;
not one pinched penny,
no rumpled hankie softened by my tears
or hardened by the snot of your anger,
no ticket stubs for puny promises,
no endless lists for domestic harmony,
and that pen you lost
which produced a sulk lasting long as winter,
heavy as wet snow,
it isn’t there.
The jacket that wore you
smells like a stale Christmas tree,
shed of its light;
makes a handy gift
from the heartless to the homeless.
Elizabet Stevens has an M.A. (Creative Writing) from the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction, have appeared in New Brunswick Telegraph Journal’s literary section. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and has received recognition in competitions in Nova Scotia, Ontario and in the Maine State Writers Conference. A former journalist, she has worked for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and contributed to several newspapers including the Globe and Mail.
Nights in the Gardens of Priapus
by Tracey O’Rourke
It was the third year of the recovery: …
by Tracey O’Rourke
It was the third year of the recovery:
Persephone showed up. Pale, and dusty,
she looked tired; feverish; and the pockets of her coat
were frayed. I’d seen her look better.
‘Funny,’ she said, some glasses later, ‘Funny how that cunt
Oedipus hides his limp so well’.
She chewed a scagged nail.
I felt easier—about the frayed pockets.
Some shook their heads at the state of her
as if they hadn’t seen themselves lately.
~
‘She’s a miserable bitch, that one,’ said Oedipus.
For two heartbeats, I felt sorry for him.
I should’ve known better:
the way he looked at me.
Later he’d slip his hand
between my legs
without touching me.
Tracey O’Rourke divides her time unevenly between England and Mallorca. She is a published poet and has been involved in several writing initiatives in schools and has taught Creative Writing at a well-known university in the north of England.
Pelicans
by Lisa Brockwell
Something in the slow gait of their wings says …
by Lisa Brockwell
Something in the slow gait of their wings says
fuck you. They don’t mind dominating the scene.
A grey silk estuary of fine boned terns,
spoonbills, black swans from a chocolate box
and the pelicans crash into my line of vision
like a gunship, tilting the landscape off its axis.
One dwarfs the top of a lamp post. Odd, but
nothing like a circus elephant forced to
balance on a piano stool, the applause
worse than jeers and no chance of escape, not
even the feel of earth beneath her feet.
When I was a girl I was too large;
by ten I was built on a different scale
entirely to the approved models,
the little slips of things, slivers of
pink with lisps and tidy hair, no scabs.
I blundered around the playground
with all the grace of Godzilla but none
of his confidence. There’s a flinty mob
in me that wants to join in the laughter
but I don’t see the Lamb of God in the pelican,
that old Catholic symbol has it wrong.
She’d never let herself be nailed to a cross
or scratch open her heart to feed her chicks.
Who would feed them tomorrow, then? No, the
bloom on her chest just a mess of spewed fish;
something in the slow gait of their wings says.
After spending a large chunk of her adult life in England, Lisa Brockwell now lives near Mullumbimby on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, with her husband and son. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Bridport and Magma prizes, and this year she won second place in the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival poetry prize. She is working towards a first collection.
Photographs of Jews
by Lisa Jacobson
1) An orphan child …
by Lisa Jacobson
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
1) An orphan child
crawls in the ghetto
like a dog.
2) A woman, wild-eyed as a deer,
stares at the muzzle of a camera.
3) A father points up to the sky
to ensure his son sees this
and not the brink of a muddy pit
where corpses lie in a casual heap.
The guards have raised their guns.
Birds wheel above, unimpeded.
I have dreamt of rough serge coats,
of escaping camps
and being sent to them,
of hiding in groves of trees.
I am a Dachau Jew with a yellow star
staring down the barrel of that camera.
I am digging potatoes from the snow.
I am hiding with my baby birds,
who will not keep quiet.
I shall not tell my daughter yet,
put off the moment, can’t speak of it
in the trail of her bright innocence.
Some say God no more abandoned them
than the wind abandons a swallow’s wing;
that the answer is as close to the question
as breath.
Can you not feel the ethereal dead
tearing at the veil till it’s almost rent?
And what if I told you all those bones and teeth
hold for me a terrible beauty?
Lisa Jacobson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her verse novel The Sunlit Zone was shortlisted for the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the 2013 Stella Prize. In 2011 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Australia, New York, London and Indonesia, and she has just completed a new poetry collection South in the World. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.
Photo Credit: Tess Flynn
Prayer Is Scrubbing
by Mia Anderson
Prayer is scrubbing a carrot with plastic bouclé bath-gloves on. …
by Mia Anderson
Prayer is scrubbing a carrot with plastic bouclé bath-gloves on.
Prayer is another carrot, and another.
Prayer is opening the door to the mudroom and then the door
from there to the garden steps
and throwing the muddy water out into the leaky bucket.
Prayer works like the leaky bucket:
there’s an ‘is’ and an ‘ought’ but the ‘is’ takes precedence.
Prayer is standing at the other garden door after midnight
and breathing in the dark and
seeing someone’s white cat the White Cadger mid-stalk stand stock-
still in the middled night
and watch the watcher—and watch the watcher watch her,
another cadger cadging prayer bytes—
then stalk off into more dark, more garden, more bytes.
Prayer is dreaming that you asked if he had any time today,
the last day, for a chat,
and he confesses with alacrity but chagrin that he hasn’t,
and you have asked because
you are pretty sure this is the last time you will be on the same
continent, before the great divide.
And you are dreaming of Last Things. Prayer works like that.
Prayer is that sudden intimation that just perhaps you might
forgive the one you know best,
(who is that? you? him? the other?)
might find how to be able to let or might be empowered
(as they tediously say) to let at last the last
nearly midnight shadow of whatever it is that stands between
you and the shining carrot
shuffle off its muddy coil and let the soil cleanse it.
Prayer is soil.
Mia Anderson is a writer, an Anglican priest, a gardener, an erstwhile shepherd and a long-time actress. Her one-woman show 10 Women, 2 Men and a Moose showcased then-contemporary Canadian writers. She has published four books of poetry: Appetite (Brick, 1988), Château Puits ’81 (Oolichan, 1992), Practising Death (St Thomas’ Poetry, 1997), and most recently The Sunrise Liturgy (Wipf & Stock, 2012). Her Long Poems “The Saugeen Sonata” and “from The Shambles” have won awards.
The Problem with Love
by John Wall Barger
My brother died and I got his tarantula …
by John Wall Barger
My brother died & I got his tarantula.
Ma asked if I was fucking man enough
& I said “Yeah” so she handed me a book,
Tarantulas, Their Captive Husbandry
& Reproduction, & went back to her TV shows.
It was a girl spider. She lived in a fish tank
with plastic ferns & a tiny house
just big enough to hide in.
She let me hold her & she never bit.
She spun a silk forest to decorate her house.
I fed her bugs & told her tales
I made up about Pa. I came in the room
& she rattled her little pedipalp hands,
which they do when mating,
hoping I’d pick her up. One day
she fell off my arm onto the floor
& just lay there a second
before creeping toward her fish tank,
& one of her legs fell off.
I placed her in, gently.
She crawled, wonky, into her house.
I had a bad dream that night.
I woke in the dark, found Ma’s hair scissors,
reached into the spider’s house
& cut off a leg. She hissed at me
& hid. Next morning she wobbled
out to greet me, & I cut off another leg.
Each day I cut another leg.
She stopped spinning a silk forest.
Her legs grew back
& I just cut them off again.
Soon she wouldn’t come out
of her house, or eat her crickets.
She tossed sharp hairs at me,
teeny spears. Then her legs
did not grow back. She sat in her house,
gray, hissing like a punctured
basketball. One morning
I scooped her into my palm,
chatting like the old days
& she just sat there, not biting.
In the backyard I lowered her
onto an anthill. As the red ants
climbed her, swarmed & lynched her,
I hosed down the fish tank.
It took ten minutes to scrub it spotless,
so the sun really shone through the glass.
John Wall Barger was born in New York City, but grew up in Canada. He currently lives in a village house in Hong Kong, and teaches Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has published two books of poetry with Palimpsest Press: Pain-proof Men (2009) and Hummingbird (2012). Hummingbird was a finalist for the 2013 Raymond Souster Award.
Rain 48
by Cróna Gallagher
The shape of the landscape spoke of her lips. …
by Cróna Gallagher
The shape of the landscape spoke of her lips.
The way the ranges lay low in the rugged distance
all chapped and scaled from the constant squalls; the whittling ice.
She opened the crag of her mouth, and the tongue was a salt marshland
stocked with waders and stoats. They fished through the reeds and the bitter vetch.
They ventured into the dome of her corbelled palette to orate their foraging thoughts.
The dusk moves on, the dawn moves in and they move off, as light slices down through the gap
in her capped front teeth. She holds a wedge from the gap in those limestone teeth.
Keeps it as a tool with which to test the way the winds blow.
Her eyelashes come from the wandering hedgehog; strong rushes woven into hoods, thatched
visors to shield her hare quick eyes and to house the long stag-heart gaze. The hedgehog made
off to become a mole, was part mole already with the long brown nose, and glad to be rid of his
quiver of quills, as he dug down deeper away from the Queen. She took her nose from the beak of an eagle
recycled her mind from the dog fox, and a bearded jackdaw made up her chin.
She has the frantic fingers of a spider but the palms of her hands are badger big.
A garland of blackthorn and oak twists around her hair, beech clogs clad her feet
and between each toe grows the rowan and the scarlet holly.
The berries she gives to the fortunate rook.
Now the canine frosts are cast in cold iron,
and winter storms suck the sap out of prong tongued trees.
This is when the hare in her eyes will saddle the wind, will race the long shadows,
and chase mountain goats, chase mountain rams to be sacrificed for her own good.
She employs a gizzard to chew on their entrails, grates fog into sleet from the bark
of their gnarled horns, and then sounds out a summon to the wolf hounds waiting in the woods
as her eyes shine like demons and she moves across the peaks, swift as a swallow.
She roars her orders through the rain; a report comes baying back from the distance.
A sad and desolate call from the hill, from the throat of a scorched vessel
thousands of years old, and covered in stones.
She is bound to our time through the weight of the ages
and she watches from the wave of the mountain, in the coil of it
as the rusting wind plucks at the wire in the lyre of her larynx.
It suckles on her nostrils, fights the foxes in her ears,
and drives home an air, through that shining gap
between her teeth.
Cróna Gallagher’s poetry has been featured in Revival, The Chattahoochee Review, Magma, Popshot, The Moth and PB3. Her fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crannόg and Drunken Boat. Her work was commended at iYeats 2013, and her piece “Ballypuca” was nominated for a Pushcart prize. She has received a Literary Bursary, and a Travel and Training award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her collection of poetry is The Doves of the Forest Night (Lapwing P).
The River of Forgetting
by Paul McMahon
Standing on the riverbank, the man cradled a small package …
by Paul McMahon
Standing on the riverbank, the man cradled a small package
as he negotiated with a nearby boatman.
Then he waded into the River Ganges and placed
the package—a loaf-sized bundle wrapped in gold cloth,
tied to a flat stone—onto the v-shaped keel
before climbing on-board.
The boatman dug the oars in
and moved them out towards the middle.
On the riverbank, a youngster was playing a kite,
his gleaming eyes, black as headstone marble, looking skyward,
to where a shovel of white pigeons flew out from a tower.
Barking dogs broke into a fight and I looked over to see them scatter
between the black cows, garlanded in marigolds,
standing entranced on the riverside steps that fed down into the water
below the sandalwood-orange cremation-fires of a burning Ghat
as people promenaded past enjoying the morning sun.
Near the middle of the river, the boatman raised the oars.
The man stood up, lifted the loaf-sized nugget
and dropped it into the river without ceremony.
The boatman lowered the oars
and rowed in.
The boy’s purple kite,
a diamond strip cut from a plastic bag
and fixed to a bamboo crucifix,
dived and twirled through the air
like a dolphin swimming invisible currents,
its nose sifting through the unseen
as it surges down into the blind sea.
When I looked down again the man was gone.
The boatman, perched at the back of the boat,
was smoking a cigarette.
Gilded into the alluvial veins of my memory
is myself turning to look out towards the middle of the Ganges:
the surface was still—sealed over,
like the mind of the father,
through whose unfathomable waters,
embossed deep down, tied to a flat stone slab,
his shrouded child plummets.
Paul McMahon, from Belfast, Ireland, holds an MA in Writing, with distinction, from NUIG, Ireland. He won first prize in The Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize (2012), The Nottingham Poetry Open Competition (2012), The Westport Arts Festival Poetry Competition (2012) and in The Golden Pen Poetry Prize (2011). He received a literature bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2013. His poetry has been widely published in journals such as The Threepenny Review and Southword.
The Screen
by D. Nurkse
She writes: I work at a think tank now. I’m an intern. …
by D. Nurkse
1
She writes: I work at a think tank now. I’m an intern.
No pay, but a possible reference and resumé credit.
I have my own badge, I hold it to the scanner,
the gates open of their own accord.
The windows are tinted and the light filtered.
All day down the astro-turf corridors we wheel
carts overflowing with print-outs: drought,
Kiribati overwhelmed, Bangladesh flooded.
There is a screen you may touch, cold as a lover’s hip,
and it will tell you the future.
The fatigue of this labor is beyond belief.
We download the model of the Himalayas melting,
the Ganges and Yalu River, that irrigate a billion farmers,
petering out to a scratch in dust.
There are further predictions, but we can’t access them.
Sometimes even here you can sense the hum of traffic.
Once I swear I heard a sparrow. Perhaps
it was a digital cue in the background music.
2
When I was a child, I had a recurring dream.
I dressed for school methodically.
I had just learned to button in the grownup mirror
where each of my gestures countered me.
My father had shown me how to wait at the sign
and trust the bus emblazoned on the shield
would actually arrive, loud and full of strangers.
I came to the brass-shod doors just at the bell.
I helped the teacher beat the erasers, the dust
choked me, except it did not, I realized
I was still deep in the dream, I had forgotten to wake,
and I had to go back and find out how, no clue
except suffering, or else my father’s gentle hand
that smelled of shallots and Burma Shave.
But now if I go back it is to the simulations
and the wind that moves across the screen
at three miles per minute.
D. Nurkse’s latest book of poetry is A Night in Brooklyn (Knopf, 2012). He is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and recently served a term as an elected board member of Amnesty International-USA. He teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.
Sealed
by Natalie Shapero
The manmade biosphere was sold at cost …
by Natalie Shapero
The manmade biosphere was sold at cost
today, the planned savanna’s crinkly plants
punched and tagged. I’m lost
in this dark wood
four-poster, wondering: could
a brand-new biome possibly supplant
its monolithic elders? Love, we can’t
go quiet, as our systems do in sleep.
We can’t partition off our ruined realms
from the panoramic sweep
of consciousness.
The earthy, blithe redress
of those eight neo-greenhorns overwhelms
me now; they medicated slippery elms
and infused rhizobia in clover roots
beneath bright skies of high-performance glass.
Their insulated suits,
advanced degrees,
their stellar indices
for good cholesterol and body mass:
the cleanliness is gorgeous, gone. We pass
a dull shame back and forth, find it rejected
as a corroded organ: chargeless, capped,
a fern someone neglected
to repot.
Geodes with peridot
hearts, we burn and scar and overlap
our layers in a topographic map,
encroaching on ourselves like caves that cut
their ice incisors early on. Basalt
blood in hard pools. What
could have possessed
you, head on my rain stick chest,
to love me? Every vein a hairline fault,
I shudder with their secrets and their salt.
Natalie Shapero is the author of No Object (Saturnalia Books, 2013), and her poems have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, The Progressive and elsewhere. She writes and teaches at Kenyon College, where she is a Kenyon Review Fellow.
Sing
by Susan Glickman
When she expressed not only shock that her father was dying …
by Susan Glickman
When she expressed not only shock that her father was dying
but resentment that such a thing could be happening to her, her naiveté
provoked me, outweighing the compassion I like to think I feel,
so I stated primly that my first memory was of my grandmother’s funeral
and, it having being followed by too many others to count,
my most reliable expectation was loss.
“What is it about you,” she shot back, “that attracts so much death?”
Dumbfounded, I had no answer. So I closed my eyes
and—summoning my super-power of imaginative retribution—
pictured her in a skimpy flowered bikini, bobbing along on an air mattress,
feeling invulnerable because she remembered to put on sunscreen,
oblivious that the same current leads us all, irresistibly, into the rapids.
I only joke because I’m sad. A heritage of days
responding politely to telephone solicitations, marking papers,
scrubbing mildew from between bathroom tiles with an old toothbrush,
toting up the bills, hoping the balance will be lower this month than last,
scanning the newspaper, stomach churning at atrocities committed here
or in places the names of which I can’t find on the map …
And after people die, what are we left with?
Things left unsaid. The wish to have lived with intensity
every blessed day, to have told loved ones how much we cared
before they were stretched flat under starched sheets
mouths opening for a last sweet spoonful, rheumy eyes blinking
at the squeak of linoleum under the nurses’ rubber soles
as they come in to plump up the pillows, asking brightly
“And how are we doing today?”
Not too well, actually. We’re none of us doing all that well
but words fail us, yet again. So maybe words
are not the answer. Maybe when people are dying what we ought to do
is just sing to them: not vent idle chatter, pretending nothing’s wrong,
or grasp for closure with portentous conversation,
but lift our voices in praise of what they were
each bar of music a step articulating their comings and goings
the way a staircase goes both up and down
at exactly the same time.
Susan Glickman works as a freelance editor, primarily of academic books, and teaches Creative Writing at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. She is the author of six collections of poetry from Signal Editions of Véhicule Press, most recently The Smooth Yarrow (2012), two novels The Violin Lover (2006) and The Tale-Teller (2012), the Lunch Bunch trilogy of children’s books, and The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (1998).
She hasn’t changed places
by Catherine Stewart
She looks no older than she did, …
by Catherine Stewart
She looks no older than she did,
A year ago, when I saw her last. Kept to herself, on view, she is
Not so old as the Madonna, hewn from lime-wood—her joined hands restful.
On a warm, late summer’s day, the Gallery’s shade
Stalls: blandly air-conditioned; temperate.
Swathed outward by reliquary, the Madonna
Is alcoved, hands unmoved.
Eyes sever her bower. Charcoal walls, behind lime-wood’s prayer, are grey.
Arbored, in her bower, she must stay.
Footfalls away, in another room, Miss Susanna Gale
Looks no older than she was, in 1763. She’s still, at fourteen, waiting—
Made here, a lady, within a portrait’s chamber.
I’m tired, I tell myself—and know in my bones, that fixed
Seasons have past me on moving, metal-shelved stairs;
On glass ramps, opaquely frozen.
She hasn’t changed places, at full-length. But then,
The background’s allotted—leafed as a stately garden, actual or dreamt.
Whoever may carry her favour next the heart, she looks, herself,
As if her likeness were set, to prevail.
She’s in good company: un-fretful; genteel.
Arrayed side by side, after a fashion, each singular pose
Would—in any event—serve to
Complement modes of reverberant elegance.
Brought to the threshold of Joshua Reynolds’ studio,
Did Susanna take him, at a glance or at a word’s breadth,
To plantations in Jamaica? An heiress, he’s the artist—politely introduced.
Nothing’s tracked on a cheek, where the artist goes
Ever so sparingly, with white-damped rouge.
In her right hand, a rose is as pink as the folds of her dress. Petals won’t fall,
while
She’s still, as she was.
Being young, had she seen herself run
Into high gales of laughter, high seas of recoil,
Before she stepped, watchful, into a dark-varnished mirror,
And—since an appointment was over—out, again?
A year after last seeing her here, I can’t know.
In this late summer, she looks to a closer season. Her arched brows pre-empt
Any discomposed surprise, at what may pass.
I’m tired, I tell myself. I glance back, moving away.
The Madonna, alcoved against charcoal,
Needs must stay.
Born Sydney, 1960, Catherine Stewart grew up in Lismore, Australia, studied English Literature at Sydney University and at University of London (U.K.), completing an M.A. in 1987. She returned to Lismore from Canberra in 1993. Stewart has presented creative writing through local performance poetry events as well as at the Australian Poetry Slam 2009. She has also experimented with self-published poetry, combining the written text with her own hand-drawn graphic artwork. Writing “shapes” her viewpoint; impressions.