modernpoetryreview

Two Poems by DeMisty D. Bellinger

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I Guide Stevie Wonder by the Hand
I wait patiently at the corner, watching lights
I say nothing, but walk. He walks.
His hand is slim in mine, cold and dry.
He doesn’t know it, but the color collects in the bed of his fingernails:
This is where he is blackest.
I guide him around a corner
The building with cinder glass obscures what’s inside
I imagine rich people there
I say, “rich white people, but we can’t see them working.”
I nudge him a little and he steps a little higher, avoiding
Legs laying out on the sidewalk, splayed
Brown bagged bottle between them.
Beside the bakery
We smell nuts and caramel cooking
I tell him that everything is beautiful:
Cakes tiered for weddings, cookies decked out for celebrations, candies small and brown.
“Rich white people dressed in furs and cashmere, flashing bills I can’t recognize.”
I walk him further and slow my step over ice
Around dog shit
.                 His nose wrinkles
We are near the park and I angle him—
We walk across the block long park.
The grass is crunchy with winter.
In the exact middle of the park,
Stevie stops me,
We stand still and my heart feels too violent.
He says, “Listen. Just shhh.”

Play Date: Tina Turner | Janis Joplin
I painted her toenails blue
Though the bottle said “azure”
We say this word “azure” aloud
Exaggerating the ‘Z’
And share sounds that make our lips
Pucker.
I blow air on her toes
She blows air across the waves.

About the Poet
DeMisty D. Bellinger teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many places, most recently in Driftless Review and Specter Magazine. Her short-short “Tiger Free Days,” first published in WhiskeyPaper, is on the Wigleaf’s Top 50 Short Fictions of 2014. DeMisty lives in Massachusetts with her husband and twin daughters.

Two Poems by Tom Holmes

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The Ephemeral Map
When he arrived in Alaska,
before it was known as Alaska,
before it was known to live
language and stories,
rivers and lakes, and towns,
he was lost with words.

A group of fishers grumbled.
He spread his arms. In the snow he drew
with the corner of his glasses
an X. He drew between them
a circle in the air and pointed
down with his palms.

He continued from the X
a line to where he began.
He punctuated with lakes
and mountains and a forest scene.
He drew a house at the end,
and placed his palm upon his chest.

He pointed forward. He drew
in the unconnected distance
a star. He pointed to the space
between. The fisherman laughed
and piled a snow ball in the between
and rolled it all the way home.

Lesson Plan: Teaching Terroir 1638 C. E.
The first time you’re lost,
scoop a handful of earth.
Rub a smudge across your gums
and tongue. Pocket the clump.

Do this at each occurrence.
When you’re home, redistribute
the dirt along your kitchen
table in regions like a king.

Where you were lost,
press your thumb and spittle
drool into the hole.
Here, you’ll grow your grapes.

And while you cannot mold time,
though it can age, or plot
experience, you can name
your garden, and water and twist the vines.

When you bottle vinegar and wine
and offer it out for trade,
customers will learn your land
by tasting where you found your way.

About the Poet
Tom Holmes is the founding editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose, and in July 2014, he also co-founded RomComPom: A Journal of Romantic Comedy Poetry. He is also author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013 and was released in 2014. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.

Two Poems by Christina Murphy

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“To Curve Nothing Sweeter is the Delight”: A Three-Part Meditation on Love

1.

Sleeping is reddening
evening is feeling;
in mounting feeling,
there is anticipation.

To exchange meaning
and see the difference,
a meadow is useful
more than a memory.

All the circle is thinner
and to hurry the measure
is to shine brilliantly the yellow
sand of recurrence and change.

2.

There is a surface
there is an exception,
there are tears and reestablishment
in a dividing time and every time.

Inside the between that is turning,
there is no place to hold;
to send everything away
is simpler—all room, no shadow.

The space between shows a likeness
and even claims a harmony;
all the rush is in the blood,
bargaining for a little touch.

3.

To satisfy a singularity and not be blinder,
to surrender to one another,
to succeed, to surprise no sinner,
to curve nothing sweeter is the delight.

Not to make a sound, but to suggest
a whole chance to be reasonable,
means nothing precious is excellent
except the precious, stouter symmetry.

The evening is long, and the colder
spring has sudden shadows;
lilacs are disturbed, composed—
this is a result and the rest a remainder.

Source text: This poem is composed entirely of sundry phrases from the prose poem “Roast Beef” in the FOOD section of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.

 

Definitions as if Poured from Time

Remembrance: The sweet smoke of déjà vu clouds.

Romance: Velocity in slow motion.

Symmetry: Moonlight coins on tranquil rivers.

Philosophy: Answers reshaping the questions.

Genesis: Space-time kisses away darkness.

Chaos: The half-life of infinity.

Dasein: Being there is having been there.

Folly: Wisdom blindfolded by love.

Melancholy: Ghosts shaping the deep blue of loss.

Solipsism: The outcome of landlocked feelings.

Whimsy: A toehold in the looking glass.

Satire: Irony set to go dancing.

About the Poet
Christina Murphy’s poetry is an exploration of consciousness as subjective experience, and her poems appear in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including, PANK, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and the anthologies From the Roaring Deep: A Devotional in Honor of Poseidon and the Spirits of the Sea, The Great Gatsby Anthology, and Remaking Moby-Dick. Her work has been nominated multiples times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net anthology.

Marston Moor by Matthew Wilson

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Marston Moor
The dead advance in gun-smoke
Between the grey of stars and grass
Lighting wicks of waiting cannons
Where king on white horses pass.

Men with grapeshot filled chests
Stumble without heads round the field
Not knowing the gunplay has stopped
Waiting for their orders to yield.

Men run through with swords linger
Jabbing the air with glinting steel
Beneath a rising fat and evil moon
Soldiers thinking their lives are real.

Survivors of the battle have gone mad
Watching dead friends standing tall
Now the king has lost his head to tyrants
His lifeless eyes watching heroes fall.

About the Poet
Matthew Wilson has had over 150 appearances in such places as Horror Zine, Star*Line, Spellbound, Illumen, Apokrupha Press, Gaslight Press, Sorcerers Signal and many more. He is currently editing his first novel and can be contacted on twitter @matthew94544267.

Two Paintings by Allen Forrest

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 Burnaby, B.C., Morning Sky Train (oil on canvas)
forrest_morning_skytrain_burnaby_bc_oil_on_canvas_panel_11x14_2015
Girl and Horse (oil on canvas)
forrest_girl_and_horse_oil_on_canvas_20x30_2012
About the Artist
Allen Forrest is a graphic artist and painter born in Canada and bred in the U.S. He has created cover art and illustrations for literary publications and books. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University’s Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation’s permanent art collection. Forrest’s expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.

 

Issue 2 Exquisite Corpse Collaborative Poem Project

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Snow Unfathomed Spring-sick Creole Thyself Carving Dawnknots
By Joe Balaz, Franklin K.R. Cline, Ray Holmes, Nina Kossman, Peter Res, James Sanders and Judith Skillman

Chiefs will win the next five Super.
Poker dogs silently mourn the death of the Great Poet.
The heavy fat blossoms like constellations
and da pidgin words wuz like foreign wings.
Do not listen to the knowing ones. Listen only to the wind.
Since kindling that angry buzz
g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-hosts

Note: This is a different version of an exquisite corpse with no restrictions. Each poet contributed a word for the title and a line for the poem. Everything will be organized according to whoever responded first. The resulting poem can be a little chaotic, since each poet does not know what has been written or what will be written. 

Methodologies of Grace by Carol Shillibeer

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Methodologies of Grace
1

There is a window that cracked. In the blistering heat of language,
there hissed by cool and faint, mountain air, far,
over the ranging hills, the walking
earth (the Cool Mind) tireless the breeze seems,
sweet with the ghost of flowers blooming leagues,
far into the body’s stoney green,
loops and loops of infinite iteration.

There is a window cracked. The watch tower roasts
above its linguistic stilts.
Before, it was other than this. It was never other than this.
And yet, the desert heat of words breaks holes in their own floors,
(there is always a way out) recursive seed, bloom, bee and seed;

roots gleam at night, they, thorns, petals,
reflective morphemes of competence,
between house and earth
cognition bees hunt their aromatic signals,
bees in the skull, and hives,
through the glass pane of linguistic separation
from the thingness of the world,
hiding the thingness of the self. This is
not. This is only this. Flowers break open with the beauty of it.

2

Asked once, if “approaching seizure, then later” was based on a real event, I had to agree that it was. It was the least false thing I could say. This poem you are reading tumbles down the same rocky slope of facticity. I will say, for example, that the crack in the glass is my particular form of epilepsy.

It is true that I was diagnosed as a petite mal epileptic. Epilepsy does run in my family, but really I have no idea if the identities that erupt during “seizures” are erupting due to the particular neuronal organization we name petite mal, or if there is another odd cognitive process going on. I don’t even know if such fissures in cognitive constructed-reality are an oddity. Sometimes I think these alternate assessments of identity and reality are always there; but normally, they are unconscious thoughts―unconsciously active ones, ones that carry sharp objects, ones that have managed to poke a hole in the monolith of their absence from awareness.

3

I don’t resent language for the presence of such absence. I’ve come to realize, with repeated attention to the form these quiet breezes take, that they are always there. In fact in sleep, when the blaze of language is at its most dormant, that which we imagine as mountain air, takes on shape, colour, tactility―in dream, in sleeping  memory―and thus (escaped through the floor boards of the linguistic watchtower) parades itself, for itself. The body thinking.

It is the watchtower, a newcomer, useful for Neighbourhood Watch, but with some peculiar ideas. Reminds me strongly of the lantern fish, as if the symbiosis of luminescent bacteria and a pendant fishy corpuscle—(dangling with an evolutionary attitude from a modified dorsal spine) in which they house themselves—as if they were all that.

So it’s useful for hunting in the dark of the sea—the lantern is not the fish; language is not the human. Dude, I want to say. Dude. Get a grip.

4

The glass, with language, ceases upon sleep.
The poem, ceaseless in its breath,
with no known impediment
(except for death),
an elbow pressed
.         between feather and bone
.                                takes on stanzaic proportions.
The limit of the legs’ ability
to reach beyond the warm pocket,
a line
.          break.

5

Having realized the ubiquity of the Cool Mind, as a child I set about attending Her. As if she were my Queen, I carry Her prize possessions. By becoming the stone carrier, I have learnt to recognize the first curling strands of wordless thought, or at least, I have reached out toward the edges of my perceptual ability and am thus able to perceive the body thinking. In other words, I keep my person, as much as is possible, tactile and aware of the cool that sparks the blaze of language.

I am quite sure that much goes on in the world
.                                                             (beyond the watchtower)
goes on
.                             the inner stones and breezes
.                            which I cannot perceive,
.                                                           which we
.                             a                                cannot
but I remain vigilant, and hopeful
that I
.          that I will manage
.                          more violence              against absence.

6

These are the methodologies of grace.

About the Poet
Carol Shillibeer lives on the west coast of Canada. Her publication list and contact information is at carolshillibeer.com.

Two Poems by Richard Fein

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Relaxing the Grammatical Rules of a Dying South American Language
The language is pronounced as trio. The spelling is uncertain.
The village is in Suriname.

Truth is a grammatical necessity in Trio.
The syntax of this language makes liars speak poorly,
for one must name the direct source for each quote.
So when a stranger entered the village and read
from the talking leaves wrapped in hides,
how the Great Shaman, Jesus,
commanded the tribe to follow the god of the strangers,
that stranger’s sentence was grammatically incomplete.
For if the stranger was never eye-to-eye or ear-to-ear with that Great Shaman
how could he know what words the Shaman actually spoke?
In Trio the outcome of each verb is also part of its conjugation.
There are a half-dozen ways to qualify “to hope”
and a dozen ways to modify “to despair,”
but in their vocabulary of truths “to love” has no meaning.
for that infinitive, to love, is like a wide palm leaf that blocks the sun
and casts a penumbra that muddles clear distinctions.
In their tongue no one loves another,
rather they proclaim shades of affection.
One must speak this language meticulously,
for in this tongue hearsay is defined, lies exposed, and truths heard
in the myriad nuances of inflections.
Once upon a time truth and Trio were linguistic twins.
But enter gasoline generators, radios, and so many other fast-talking strangers.
Now when their grandparents try to teach them the old truths,
the grandchildren reply, “We’re listening,” but without a trace of inflection.

Auditions for My Multiple Personalities
I’ve typed not one character on paper
and so my room is full of my usual characters.
The writer in me issued my casting call.
Variety magazine classifieds must dangle somewhere in my brain,
for how else could this crew so suddenly show up?
The activist demanding to be heard,
the old Chinese guy who mistakes meaningless platitudes for Buddhism,
the disillusioned priest, rabbi, minister, the playboy,
the lonely lover, the baseball homerun king, the woman scorned.
The woman scorned???
Among this casting call of wannabe masculine thespians
is there an actual drama-queen queen anxiously awaiting her cue?
And of course there’s always the penniless writer in his daytime waiter garb,
that generic misunderstood oh so tortured alcoholic soul.
For isn’t every writer a closet-alcoholic puking out Shakespearian drivel?
I tell them all, once again, I can’t pay. All they’ll get is exposure,
exposure for a cast of self-absorbed exhibitionists upstaging one another.
Suddenly the personalities dematerialize, except the one in the mirror.
He yells, “Exposure my ass.”
He rips off his clothes and curses me for wasting his time,
then demands carfare to go home.
But I’m broke, and besides he is home.
So now he’s running around naked in my living room
waving blank typing paper.
I’d tell him to leave but I’d be ordering myself around,
and I take orders from no one.

About the Poet
Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. A Chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as Cordite, Cortland Review, Reed, Southern Review, Roanoke Review, Green Silk Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic, Canadian Dimension, and others.

Ours Poetica by Franklin K.R. Cline

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Ours Poetica
  a                            For Cole Swenson
When I stand close enough, it
peeks into my peripheral
vision. Step back and it provides
a smaller and smaller point
of emphasis. Look into me.
What we make becomes us.
Let me make a world around
you, to show you the world
around me, the shape of if.

***

It can’t be too big. This land is quiet, simple. No murders here. Not anymore. It should honor that. Flatter. Abstract. From bronze. Curved up a bit. Nonsense. Wavy, like the hills. Put it in the middle of the field. Something symbolic of what we believe about nature. Not about what we know. Put holes in it so when someone saunters up to it they can see the sky, the field. An amorphous shape. Humanity doesn’t really befit this land anymore. Holes and waves. Something to frame the view. Circular. Smooth, forgiving curves. Stolen land. Nothing jagged or cruel looking. Maternal. The suggestion of rolling.

***

Give me an atom the size of my head! You
become nature, lucky! If I name it,
they will come. If they come, we can
finally eat all the food that’s getting
cold. I don’t know about
me, but it
sure looks like I want you by the way
my hand involuntarily stretches your
way. I’m so bland compared to
yellow flowers, I’m hardly
geometry. The conveyor belt Earth
ain’t doing me any favors. I graffited
the stop signs in my neighborhood to
read DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’ and now
every intersection is an art museum. My
first inclination is to use
words. The trees all look the same. What
goes into our head is what we see. Easy
peasy, no? The tree grows right into me, and you,
as we look past each other. I love your head, how it can so easily become.

About the Poet
Franklin K.R. Cline’s poems have been featured in Banango Street, Matter, Oyez Review and Word Riot. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. He lives in Milwaukee with three cats and his wife, Rachel Kincaid.

Two Poems by Kelli Allen

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If Fairy Tales in Fall
It isn’t so much that the leaves are dizzy as it is they are lodged in confusion,
the same variety that persuades us to jump when the waters are on the rise. We
say, “look” as our feet reappear after tumbling over our shoulders on the way
down, we tremble and spill over. The repair work is universal
as the rake scratches our sides.

I contain so much thinning, yet lushness is my fresco when I stop at the bottom
of the well, climb back into the bucket and yell up “It matters! It matters!” until
only the rope tail hangs near the stone rim. Nothing whorls up in a shock
the way a name does, when its ours, all peacock and hiss, all vowel and cinnamon.

You have been told how to cut back the trestle, to light the lamp and fold your hands.
This way, we are advocates together for a splayed phrase and retelling. The only
stories we can give back are ones considerate of the moss digesting the ledge.

Suspending Delirious Limbs
Although I do not claw at my own chest, I recognize the desire as just that—
desire. It is a recitation of horrors, spoken in close iambic pentameter, which keeps
my hands, rounded fingers points against palms, close to my sides.  I say the cross
-hatched words in monotonous rounds, vowels slow, consonants exhausted,
becoming flat, and so calming.  Her wrists are the knotted tree where the rabbit sits,
eggs in its belly, waiting for Ivan.

Where my mother’s hands would have caught against pearlescent buttons when she
ripped through one blouse or another, trying to free breath, skin, small
cranberry-red streaks of rising flesh, mine stay this still. There are no legs long
enough to reach the branch where I was hatched.

So she has given me a house I am not to touch, its windows smaller than my
earlobes, its faces through the doors colder than expected. We stand on either side
of a roof peppered with mica, the pinks making me ache, the hues making her clutch
her peter-pan collar as I lean too close, too far inward.

There is no act of rebellion in remembering and I am trying not to hate this self
as compared to her self, compared to both selves one on either side of a dollhouse
made whole by attention, careful, careful attention.

About the Poet
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She is currently a Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. Allen gives readings and teaches workshops throughout the US. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, from John Gosslee Books (2012) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. See www.kelli-allen.com.