modernpoetryreview

Captured

1
Me dad worked on the docks. Sometimes a banana managed to fall out of a crate and he would bring it home as a treat.
He’s just sitting there blinking beneath the lights and Virtual Reality cameras. The beads of sweat running down his cheek.

He got me a sheetmetal worker apprenticeship at the ship yards. Me mam hit me over the head when I tried to keep the money.
No one’s going to care about, let alone watch, this rubbish. A shrivelled old man talking about last century and another place.

Am I doing alright? Is this the kind of thing you want?
He thinks I can’t see him assessing me from under his lashes. Him and his blood shot eyes. But I can. Next he’ll be sucking his teeth and laughing.

Jazz night at the Tavern brought in the best girls. Your mum didn’t normally come in on jazz nights but she came that night.
Oh, there he goes. Choking on his own laugh. I’ll have to try and get the right shade of blue when they re-colour his eyes.

We wanted a better life in Australia but the desolation nearly killed us. Then there was the flies and naked flames in the workshops. Bastards!
A shame I can’t completely edit him out of my life.

All that talk of the Tavern and heat has given me a terrible thirst. Ah, a liquid lunch?
A photo would have been much quicker.

2

Me dad worked on the docks. Sometimes a banana managed to fall out of a crate and he would bring it home as a treat.
I adjust the VR goggles to bring Grandad into focus.

He got me a sheetmetal apprenticeship at the ship yards. Me mam hit me over the head when I tried to keep the money.
He’s staring at the floor. Like a scared rabbit. He knew she was embarrassed. Angry.

Jazz night at the Tavern brought in the best girls. Your mum didn’t normally come in on jazz nights but she came that night.
No wonder she died early.

We wanted a better life in Australia but the desolation nearly killed us. Then there was the flies and naked flames in the workshops.
The need for a wine worms in the pit of my stomach and up my throat.
 
Time for lunch?
Mum’s AI wouldn’t approve if I turn up smelling of wine. Those things are too bloody clever.

 

About the Poet
Helen Doran-Wu lives in Perth, Australia. She is a mature-aged MA student at Curtin University. Giving up full-time work was the best decision of her life.

 

Amuse-Bouche for Lulu

.                                        –       a pantoum

I sit at your scrubbed wooden table, in that perfect hunger

before you pick up the mortar and pestle, a few small olives, garlic.

Outside the window grow the flavors of Provence: smoky, sweet.

Like this, you show me, grinding the pestle.  Now, you try it.

 

Before you pick up the mortar and pestle, a few small olives, garlic,

you remind me it’s not about how it looks. It’s humble, this small toast.

Like this, you show me, grinding the pestle.  You try it.

Garlic, olives, oil.  That’s it.  Don’t get fancy, don’t show off

 

you scold me.  It’s not about how it looks.  It’s humble, this small toast.

I bring it to my mouth, and I fall in love:  with garlic, with Lulu, with my body.

Garlic, olives, oil. Maybe capers.  But that’s it.  Don’t get fancy, don’t show off,

just taste, just breathe.  Just remember.

 

I bring it to my mouth, and I fall in love. Garlic, Lulu, my body:

eyes closed, I see my pure self, in the kitchen in Berkeley.  At my table.

I just taste, just breathe.  Then I remember

that the secret is foraging.  To find the farmer who loves garlic.

 

Eyes closed, I see my pure self in the kitchen in Berkeley.  At my table

a farmer tells me about a woman growing olives, out in the foothills.

Learn the secrets:  forage, meet the farmer who loves garlic.

I stand in the market, and the olive grower hands me one olive.  I bite its dark skin.

 

That farmer told me about this woman who grows olives out in the foothills.

Jeremiah and I could use these.  I think of a hungry woman, who will come tonight.

As I stand in the market, the olive grower hands me another olive.  I bite.

That hungry woman, who has maybe never felt the weight of a pestle, needs this food.

 

Jeremiah and I can use these tonight.  I think of the hungry woman, who will come

and how this olive grower, and me, and the woman, will touch: hand to table to tongue.

This woman, who has maybe never felt the weight of a pestle, needs this food.

I open my eyes, and there you are, Lulu, pure oil on your hands. Anointed.

 

This olive grower, and me, and the woman, will touch: hand to table to tongue.

Outside the window grow the flavors of Berkeley: smoky, sweet.

I open to you, Lulu, pure oil on your hands. Anointed,

I sit at your scrubbed wooden table.  In perfect hunger.

 

About the Poet

Emily Wall is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alaska.  She has been published in a wide variety of literary journals in the US and Canada, most recently in Prairie Schooner and Alaska Quarterly Review.  In 2013 she won a statewide contest and a poem of hers was placed in Totem Bight State Park in Ketchikan, Alaska.  Her first two books were published by Salmon Poetry. Her most recent collection, titled Breaking into Air, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.  Emily lives and writes in Juneau, Alaska.

Litany
We have sunlight to keep us from sleep, but we take
candles in glass and set them around cut logs

from seasons when cold was sufficient. Squirrels
beg light like seed spread along pottery.

Day- and candlelight compete as our imaginary
bear raises her snout to the fragrance of French linen.

The raccoon stiffens in burial among moss.
We pattern it like a lamp that once swung

across heavens, as if it were a sanctuary.
We fear wounds and know doves will

fly to us for food as we walk from glass
to glass and blow. By then all light will

end, and we will hold hands so as not
to slip on the logs that brace our souls.

 

Catechumens
He is in the niche across from the painting
that says I want to be stolen and sold

for firewood. She rests in the pew
and scratches love letters in the shellac.

Several have found the pain of kneeling
calming in the presence of desire, gold-plated

and on sale in the gift shop. One is leaving
the empty confessional and cannot accept mercy.

I see others running toward the lawn,
cutting their toes on the mower blade.

They scrape the fence and seek balm
to salve the sting. Many choose

to string beads and mark thoughts
to fingerings that float from light

to sorrow to joy, uncertain where each begins
or how to stop this revolve inside ourselves.

About the Poet
Jan Wiezorek has taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at The London Magazine, Southern Pacific Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Bindweed Magazine, Literary Juice, Elsewhere, FIVE:2:ONE, Random Sample, Squawk Back, Tuck Magazine, Panoplyzine, Better Than Starbucks, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. He is author of Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011) and holds a master’s degree in English Composition/Writing from Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. Visit him at janwiezorek.weebly.com.

 

Adjustments  

A cry swerves into sleep.

I fumble for an off switch.

*

A head nods and dips

like a buoy and floats away.

*

We wake towards

a bubbling inarticulacy.

 

About the Poet

Aidan Coleman’s two collections of poetry, Avenue and Runways and Asymmetry have been shortlisted for numerous national book awards in Australia. He writes Shakespeare textbooks and is a co-designer of the MOOC Shakespeare Matters with the AdelaideX project. His poems have been published in The Australian, The Age, Australian Book Review, Best Australian Poems, The Carolina Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Adelaide.

Dear Millennium, on the Nine Orders of Angels

Never easily recall the names, dear millennium, 
                                                of nine angelic orders –
first, ophanims in ocular celestial wheels, 
beryl-colored 
                                           ablaze to the unaided eye,
or else too close to the fire to see a forest aflame, 
                    blinded in a mentholated sequoia grove.
Second, who are the virtues – 
                                                celestially distinct 
                                from angelic hosts, third?  Seraphim, 
archangels, fourth and fifth.  Do you recall?
A dyslexic girl says,
                                     No-name angel at a taxi corral
rich enough in rags, hatless, without a suitcase, 
shone with a clean jaw.
                                                      I offered every penny
out of my purse.
Blessing me, he vanished, coins 
                                spinning light in light.  O heal me.
                                                           Selah.


On God and the Hydroponic System
1.
In this millennium, we say, cloud-based
for an empyrean of shared data. 

2.
Engineer of everything, God sees us 
                err in the same faults over and over 

on a disrupted shore of consciousness,
soul-engine wherein a weight is lifted 
                                                through the heart.

3.
In blindness, we do not confess our sins,
will not even circulate in recycled water  

or say yes
to yield – or combust.

4. 
Hydroponically speaking, we cannot engineer
a system of grace on our own,
                                as an act of our will.

5.
God is a hydroponic engineer who aerates 
                      heads of butter lettuce
in aqueous solutions  
                                                out of nil.  Selah.



On the Proprioception of Beauty Not as Pharmakon  


On language as proprioception, or a ghosting sensation.  
                                                In other words, langue
    as embodied phenomenological experience, a glottal mesh  
          linguistically mediated.  Happiness, for instance – does it exist
autonomously, without estrogenic parole
                              in a hormonal rush of cherry blossoms? 
Say if the cherry blossoms vanish, the frothing corpus 
                                                                              disarrayed by El Niño,
a tousled grove of seasonally affective moods, of absence 
                     as nonattendance or a privation of beauty?
      If caplets of pilled toxins reduce fever, shall we say this is febrifuge,     
                                         or rather, antipyretic?  Is beauty 
pharmakon for pharmakon, poison and cure?      


A Quarterly with Salt, Ferries, and Light 
A quarterly should vanish each season,
every three cardinal phases of the moon,
with reprints and back issues on request. 
A quarterly etches a monsoon’s portfolio,
tinkling brass as mini-cymbals for a band.
A quarterly gladly plows up the mundane 
in an obituary, in memorarium. A quarterly
is glued to a spine or a Japanese retchoso.  
A quarterly is ___.  A quarterly is bamboo.
A quarterly accompanies ferry passengers.
A quarterly dispenses sagacious minerals,
sea-foam green, mixed with salt for a bath.
A quarterly can be designed with glassine
and wax with the engravings of a philatelist.
A quarterly should offer quinks and inklings.
A quarterly is not flung over the verandah.
A quarterly has a circulation of a thousand
or more.  Or less.  A quarterly eats quinces,  
postcards.  Salt and light.   A quarterly 
is a quarterly is a quarterly –

About the Poet

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored a novel,Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017).  Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Lee’s work appears in literary journals such as The American Poet, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, IMAGE: Art, Faith, Mystery, Journal of Feminist Studies & Religion, Iowa Review, and Columbia Poetry Review and was recognized by the Prairie Schooner / Glenna Luschei Award.  She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.  Currently, she lives in San Diego and serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Lover Gone Away
Another love disappears, ghosts
echo loss, even derision.

The record holder for shortest affairs
I entreat these misalliances, small

Wonders of dreamscape over reality,
bones with no underpinnings to salvage.

Love or friendship slip away, the knot
always too tight or too loose to hold

Him to seasons, and this hearth where
love bolds and binds passion.

How to hold him close again
his feelings less than passionate?

I know this cooling off rattles
our soured relationship.

His departure, maybe preordained,
hugs the winter season, not me.

Snow shies away from ground, flakes
large but porous too damp to stick.

They disappear like him tumbled dry
of emotion, melted where once my tongue

Left flakes, each unique, my gift. Now
this scene thrives on empty –

Singes of farewell strike my tongue.

 

More Clouds 

White clouds, a pop-up box
of tissues, stain blue horizons—
white to pewter, stormy black.

Sly clouds translate
into hail, tornados, thunder.
Weathermen predict these odds.

nbsp;
They interpret content of clouds
like a novel, uncover piles
of once white towels now soiled,

ivory, crème, smudged
suspicions, just cloudy choices
to end this report.

Thanks to Wordsworth–
we weather clouds,
lonely, cumulus, ever
wandering.

 

About the Poet
Lee Landau writes with raw honesty and tenderness about interactions in a unique, personal landscape: her relationships with family, their dysfunctional backstories, and the many phases of grief that tumble through her poems and life. She addresses an internal audience of the departed, the dead and dying, and highlights unexpected losses.

Contest Between Harmony and Invention
The festival of lights is not about self knowing, or looking inward:
the flags strung up over the festival are a boat race more than
they are prayerflags, where by the docks we hear the harvestsong
from across the lake, and my throat is sore as if I sang it too.
And I tell you a sandpiper that I saw, reminded me of my own
lovemaking—his fleet-of-foot to the tide. Birdsteps, I can’t tell
if they’re cautious, following the tide where it swings, gone out
to where the dark waves are just a sound. Music of a garment
being torn, an orifice of the spirit closes with the stars overpowered
by the festival’s light. The sandpiper, called a curlew here,
becomes a shadow. Most dreams are gray like that, dreams I color-in
upon waking, but two of color, actually of dream color, came to me
last night and in the first, books piled high to the ceiling divided
us two. You lit a cigarette, said only desire could make us poor.
In the second, the wintercoats on the backs of chairs multiplied,
in every style, falling to the floor off the chairbacks like petals.

 

A Walk for Postage
Even I’m impressed at the jaunty tempo
mustered in my footfalls passed the assisted
living for folks in wheelchairs; always a few
puffing out front. I may be dizzy for love,
or dizzy for a provocateur. I see it
in the bobbing boughs. Of course I feel
it pout in my lungs. “Bazaar in a Jar”
is a church function apparently,
and the scalloped Art Deco makes one
wonder at the parishioners. Are they bashful?
Besmirched? — piling in the backseat
of a resurrection. Bleak overhead, the low
clouds in gradations of newsprint. Lonely
as a shepherdess, or however I might deign
to characterize a stranger, a woman in the park
dizzies herself — bowing and circling her tripod.
As though a mortal puncture has depressurized
my cabin, the shutterbug’s spaniel finishes
me in a mosaic gust of still-grain yellow leaves.
To have peace in giving away and receiving
is to become, oneself sacred. There was a limby
thistlebush the color of mica, its flowers demi-
secondeing up then low, floated away, lighter
than air at the touch of a yellow bird’s play
this morning, beholding flowers as though it
were me growing, them breathing. My eyes
dripped like fists.

 

About the Poet

Taylor Harrison Micks is a poet from Columbus, Ohio and an alumnus of Ohio State. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, studying for an MFA in Poetry at the University of Illinois, and has had poems published in Ninth Letter.

 

The Virgin Mary Burns a Self-Portrait in Toast

I imagine the churches, their

pageants, their individual respective

marys, wearing blue

atop pale skin.  I pulled this strip

of barbed wire out of my bare heel

after a walk across the lawn.  I tap it

with my finger, and chip away

another crumb.  I think

of these midwestern marys, so

very new, like crisp corn.  Maybe a strand

of hair peeks out from a white head covering,

and it’s blonde, always blonde, or maybe

with a touch of strawberry,

like that willowy girl in Missouri who at sixteen is cast

as Mary for Christmas while her older sister, two inches shorter,

thirty-five pounds heavier, with auburn hair kept pixie cut,

picks with her fingernails at a wart on her right thumb.

I laugh, imagining them,

as I twist the wire,

burn my face darker

.                               into coarse bread.

About the Poet

Anna D. Ralls is an emerging writer from Columbia, MO. She is a graduate student at Oxford University, and her works are forthcoming or previously published in Contrary, Atticus, and Colorado Review. She currently lives in Bloomington, IN, and loves to spend her spare time singing opera with her husband.

In the Land of Opaque Realities
Pondering in the land of opaque realities
Where facts are fictionalized
And the aberrant notion of post-truth
Emerges with despicable pomp
Asking the difference between
Fantasy conspiracy and utopia
incessantly on an increasingly
Silent confused bewildered crowd

To distribute due blame and shame
Distinctions among the three shout urgency
Urgent emergency potency now
Distinguish us, they unabashedly shout
Whipping each other to keep each discrete apart
Now, distinguish us to keep salutary distance from
The incipient catastrophe of language meaning
Everything and nothing all at once. One breath.

Strained drained now lethargic mind
Must be summoned this autumn night
When most sleep and some weep and few plot
Mind, distant and cool, leveled and constant
In an multiplying territory of transcending lies

Mind, wake now
From slumber dormant rhythm
of numbing requiems
Heed the towering voices of Brahms’s chorus
In his building German requiem otherwise
Follow the sharps and flats to draw the labyrinthine outside
From

Slumber distraction soul-slashing sameness
Where both the aesthete and philistine perish
Both in the name of unclassified art
Wake mind, emerge from phantom state
Rise susceptible to emanating gradations of
Warm icy lights generating placating
shrill sounds
Inhabiting the raspy silky blankets of skin
Grown parched and sullen gradually
Suddenly
Upon the nocturnal bright concealment
Of truth running frightened away from lies

 

 

Excess
Times of a putrid self-inflicted inability to say
.                                                        no
enough no more
.                       have alas arrived. Where has the preference
for just balance scampered to?

Golden teeth through which bolstering lies

jump

like spigots filled with ancient venom

A bewildering taste for
.                            the monstrous aberrant

conditions preserved conserved pickled for a long howl

in mouths palates once inclined for palette shade regularity

many are the names to call this existential, moral

malaise

even the burden to name has ceased to matter

whatever compass worked last year and the many

before doesn’t anymore
.                                             alarm sirens go off
all night and day: every single instant of the regulated
clock and the insensible mind

what is that?, mounting they ask

… thunderous silence strikes

we have lost the ability to name excess as well

doesn’t matter if you its excreting insides inhabit another word
the broken puncturing shell of another word

its greenish yellow with putrefied odor yanks quick allusion

.                       . to itself

 

About the Poet

Eunha Choi is an Adjunct Instructor at Lehman College. Situated where literature, cinema and philosophy meet and fail to meet, her research interrogates realism less as an aesthetic or literary form of representation than as an always in flux theory of the real and a model of critique. Her recent publication appears in Pacific Coast Philology, Confluencia, Ciberletras and Chasqui among others.

Nine Walking Dreams