Poetry

Eco Echoes 83
Reproductions, cardboard, of Gauguin’s
Native sarong’s colors have become bleached
Blank by Patio Florida sunlight, and
Have grown longer to cover kneecaps.
Tahiti simulation has been maintained
By coconuts and tattoos. The tiles, white,
Have become mirrors that reflect the bottoms
Of protruding chins. Since most of the chins
Have white beards, the result is white on
White, and the floor is a collection
Of Malevitches. Pots that once had
Plants, now only dirt covered with
Crumbled-up scrapped lottery tickets.
All the tickets looked homesick, old, their faces
Wrinkled by fingernails. The enigma
And monument of their lives is the
Suitcase by the barbeque grill
With its mildewed charcoal.
Someone came to move in, and help
Pay the mortgage, but when he
Saw the life-style, the ping pong table,
Spoons used to flip jam on each other,
And the underclothes of baby sitters
Crowded in the bronze-wire garbage bin,
He left the suitcase with all his belongings
And ran away to find, if he could,
A forest. While running, he shouted
All the way, “Where are you, Pan?”

About the Poet
Duane Locke’s poem that appears in this issue is his 7000th poetry publication. He has 33 books of poems published including Visions and Terrestrial Illuminantions, Second Selection from Kind of Hurricane Press, forthcoming in 2015.  My main book publication is Duane Locke, The First Decade (Bitter Oleander Press, 1968-1978).

Letter from Amsterdam
As I write, three boys are playing poker
in the corner with a deck of nudie cards.
The naked women shush over each other
as they’re shuffled, whisper secrets

from other lives. Can you imagine? Playing
cards when the real thing is out on the canals,
beckoning for their attention, their wallets
and bulges. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so

crude. Is that why my letters return unopened?
The prostitutes in the Red Light District
call out to me when I walk in the morning,
but I’ve been good. They swat at the glass

like manatees at the aquarium. You told me
once that sailors mistook those for mermaids
long ago. I think that happens here, too,
when night falls. Beggars, so far, leave me

alone. Maybe they sense that I am broken,
like them. You wouldn’t like me saying that,
I know. Yesterday, I opened the hostel door
and a cat sauntered in as if it had a bed

reserved. It smelled of burnt lemon
rinds and blood and I thought about the night
you perfumed yourself for me. The owner’s
daughter shrieked and chased it with a knife

that cut the air in front of me into thin ribbons, all
the way from the kitchen. I know even a single flea
could be the end for them, but I wish I could stop
thinking about what happened next. That whole night,

a German fellow on mushrooms kept asking
me if I saw colors and faces in my dreams.
Then, without pause, he asked if I dreamt at all.
He drove me crazy with his questions

and fractured English so I read my braille
mathematics textbook for six hours, to anchor
myself in its numbers. I was on mushrooms, too.
I wasn’t going to tell you that, at first.

I was going to pretend that this trip was all
about tulips, Van Gogh Museum audio tours,
and wooden shoes. You would have believed me, too,
or acted like it, at least. But I’m tired of that.

I’m composing this letter to you in my mind
because all my notebooks have been stolen
from my bunk. It doesn’t matter. This is the only way
I can reach you anymore, anyway.

About the Poet
Ross Losapio is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as Lead Associate Editor for Blackbird. His poetry appears in Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the minnesota review, The Emerson Review, and elsewhere.

Small Pond
Look through the window.
Trees have a singular purpose
and it’s not to be beautiful
or to shed leaves, like tears,

into the pond (which knows many forms)
once more lapping against its muddy borders,
once more housing hearts, heartbeats,
heart leaks.

Yesterday, a month ago, two seasons ago, a year ago,
six-hundred full moons ago, eons ago, star-births ago,
now minus X ago—it was a solid as cinder
and the children were playing hockey—
falling, fighting, learning physical laws.
A nose bled freely onto the ice;
the reeds shivered and bowed.

Nothing is temporary; everything is forever.
Though we must forgive ourselves
for our misinterpretation of time.

At some point along liquid infinity,
our atomized hearts will coalesce again
to pass along one last throbbing missive:

submit sooner—sublimate with grace

and then break apart once more
scattering their quarks
out to the milky perimeter,
the ineffable border of the stretching plane

where they will glide across the black gulf
like pucks slapped towards the net.

About the Poet
Amir A. Tarr is completing his M.D. at University of Miami with a focus on psychiatry and gender identity. He received an M.S. in bioethics from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a B.S. in psychology from UW-Madison. His poetry and fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, One Throne Magazine, Rust+Moth, The NewerYork, and elsewhere. His work in the field of medical humanities has been featured in the The American Journal of Psychiatry, Academic Psychiatry, Medical Encounter, Neurology, Psychoanalytical Perspectives, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and JGIM.

Encaustic Sun
You were told it threw off threads
of flame—coronas—told it was
a roiling star, a ripe orange set to rise.
That its combustion, like your youth,
would never end.

You were shown how, at its heart,
a great store of fusion lay untouched,
the furnace of forever.
A summer’s worth of flies,
blackened swaths burning beside freeways.

Spikes of cadmium yellow,
and plates thrown to break
their china finish. Each new day
like the last, vain for an hour
beneath its fog and frost.

Place of ghosts, of the stick-hands
witches wear when they pinch
to punish children.
Small pane of glassed-in combustibles,
tar-faced grid of fir behind fir behind fir.

Where were you asked to stand
in the picture of your life?
What pose had you to hold?
Who didn’t want to?
Which one had to press a button in order to shine?

Enchanté, you said, on meeting this star
and the sun worked harder
to make you pretty.
Until the earth grew old in its orbit,
years like shells imploding.

Artillery the dirge-song,
a cold-hardened ground
where the shy star stays close
to the horizon, well-behaved
as any mercenary.

About the Poet
Judith Skillman’s new book is House of Burnt Offerings from Pleasure Boat Studio. The author of fifteen collections of poetry, her work has appeared in J Journal, Tampa Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Poetry, and other journals. Awards include grants from the Academy of American Poets and Washington State Arts Commission. Skillman taught in the field of humanities for twenty-five years, and has collaboratively translated poems from Italian, Portuguese, and French. Currently she works on manuscript review. Visitwww.judithskillman.com

The Forgiven
It must be a distant place,
beneath notice, far beneath
the zone where the despised
triumph by despising.
And where the masters, who must have
something of everything and believe
that victims are admired,
proclaim themselves in some way victimized.
They never notice us
and therefore do not envy. There is
an outside, but so compromised
by what’s within, drafty and damp,
that even when we can we seldom
go out into its endless curtailment.
Meals are our seasons, and the expressions
of those who ladle them,
neither kind nor interested nor hostile,
are what we have of nature apart from time.
We eat, and meditate
on what asparagus gave up for us,
the community of soup,
the rumors borne by even the weakest
coffee; then linger
until we’re told to go, and are equally
satisfied with leisure or the command.
There’s a room with books and games,
and an old broken medium whose green-
grey screen shows all we need to see.
Pieces are lost, the cards
have passed through many hands;
the books as is their habit came from elsewhere,
and move too fast, so that no one can catch them
or if we do we let them go.
Sometimes sun breaks through the frayed
curtains or bars. Then on the yellowed
paper in every drawer, somebody writes
for hours, mumbling, bringing
pen to lips, then crumples what was written,
which is what it was for. And sometimes, two
pair off. It’s always obvious,
and we, as subtly, applaud them for it.
When they don’t show up for dinner, breakfast, tea,
we discuss the efficacy
of love. It offers
a world beyond the world beyond our own,
escape, a motive for escape,
a fantasy of the first person plural.
Deliberating which, we fall
silent as dreaming
functionaries in gaudy white
pass through. For they themselves are dreams,
and normally don’t bother us.
But “we” is the most sacred word,
even when casually, unworthily
invoked in kingdoms of the I,
or whispered to oneself behind a wall.

V-Letter
Badiou compels agreement
when he says that the epic
corresponds to the age of the warrior
(king, feudal thug)
while lyric is the art of the soldier,
whose allegiance must be bought, and bought in bulk.
Whatever I wrote, I wrote
on a bunk in a troopship
amid the smell of feet
awaiting a torpedo.
Whoever I was, the “I”
in every other line
was mostly a matter of luck.
And you, who I hoped would read
the words found beside me
in trench or bunker
(they would be handed to you like a flag)
were always the one real thing.

About the Poet
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press, and the author of a collection of shorter poems, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015). He has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Representations, Magma(UK), Iota (UK), Bateau, Main Street Rag, Fulcrum, etc.  His poems have appeared online in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Thunderdome, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, etc. He is currently adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University.

Candlelight is a Form of Good-bye
This is my caged bird, that’s roasting night sounds,
measuring secrets. In the meadow, a wicker-haired

godmother waits with clear eyes, taking slugs of the
overripe darkness. We dive headfirst into a steel

canyon, distend to a sky-worn quilt. Prince watches
from his balcony; wants to say forever, or till I

break the spell.  But lies rattle on branches, erase my
candlelight. At the birthplace of our de-creation, the
sky leathers clay furrows.

I offer cinnamon thrushes. He already knows. Memories,
just as hearts, became ungenerous with time.

About the Poet
A Prundaru is a visual artist, writer and translator, who lives a stone’s throw away from the birthplace of milk chocolate. Her work is forthcoming in Litro Magazine, 3 AM Magazine and Rattle. She has a photo blog at https://socksinflipflops.wordpress.com/.

Cutting Edge
Note: This poem is written in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin.
Dere’s wun invisible razor
slashing through da ages

forevah sharp
and constantly in motion.

It wuz always moa
den just wun passing whimsy.

It wuz wun ascendance
from biological servitude.

Da progression has been moving along

evah since da big bang of da mind
wen explode into da brain.

Take wun look
at all da accumulated knowledge to inherit

in da awakened realm of homo sapiens.

While da earth spins on its axis
and da universe keeps expanding

it’s amazing to realize
dat evolution is wat you make of it.

Units of culture
and replicated means

passed along in wun baton
can now double as wun scepter.

King of da apes
is presently emperor of da solar system

and to tink
it started somewheah back wen

aftah our simian ancestors
left da safety of da trees.

Wit one slice into da darkness
all da neurons wen flash

and consciousness wen advance itself
to set da world on da cutting edge.

About the Poet
Joe Balaz writes in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai’i Creole English) and in American-English. He edited Ho’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.  Some of his recent Pidgin writing has appeared in Otoliths, Snorkel, Juked, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Revolution John, among others.  Balaz is an avid supporter of Hawaiian Islands Pidgin writing in the expanding context of World Literature.  He presently lives in Ohio.

Phonology of Shadows
A Shadow moved suddenly from its Place
in the corridor that led Away
to a Staircase that gave no Issue
onto any Human World—
the Shadow moved abruptly
as is their wont
when upset or distressed, when having
an urgent message to impart
only that, having forgotten our Tongue, and we
having never learnt theirs
the Words are lost, bygone,
surrounded by their own eddies
of Oblivion, and the form
without contours would
tell us, only its sudden
desperate gesture speaks
and we glance over, seeing nothing, and
after a careless scribbled note
the Shadow entombed in its
dead, half-remembered syllables
like the invented code of a secretive child
in which there are no copulas.

About the Poet
Ottilie Mulzet has been published in The Missing Slate, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Muse, Morphrog, and Sand Journal, among others, and will be forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Copy Right
I hope someone tries
to steal my words
and pass it off
as their own.
This poem is yours
if you grab first.
I don’t want
to be the only
crazy one.

About the Poet
E.T. Milkton writes from the clouds beyond the horizon. He enjoys hiking, fishing and eating meat.

Light Thinking
Think of light, that’s one move one
ought to be able to make,
for surely the thought

of light is light, a light thought,
say, of the lovely lift
of a blue balloon

slipping out of the grasp of a
small child’s hand,
the sudden puff

of a light breeze,
the loosely held string
slithering right on through,

nudged along by the thought
of winning a goldfish by
simply tossing a dime

out to a small glass plate, and
having it stick, why I
could certainly do that

and the goldfish will
be mine, a pleasing thought
to keep in mind, and thus

the balloon simply sailed off and away
into the blue, now gone, that blue
balloon, and the child

pondered his weighty loss,
until the goldfish, the dazzlingly
golden goldfish, came back to play.

A Jelly At The Pier

                                               For Barbara

1.
The drift of me so often hard to figure,
Me, a freely floating jellyfish,
Slopping around
As the current tends,
Permanently on vacation,
Luminous easy thing that I am.
I wonder why I sting on contact?

Hardly neighborly, but then
I sense that, I know that.

Settling down for me, maybe not an option.
Spurned and spurning, the natural me?

Yes, I am touchy, so don’t you touch me.

2.
I’ve been often asked this:
Why not simply shift to a let-down-all-defenses mode,
Open to experience,
A curious harmless companion?

Well, think about all that I don’t have:
No feet legs hands arms eyes, face,

None of it wired into
A unified and unifying
Control system,

I mean a viable me, a ready at hand self
To do as it wills and can, given its circumstances,

I could deal with being so, but not me as now, not me as a patsy.

3.
Do you think I like this free floating slavish
Rolling in and out water-bound life style?

You call this stylish, being swept into pilings?
Sharp mussels ripping me.
My jell, like your flesh, does rip.
Did you ever think of that?

Being pummeled by pilings!
It’s not much fun, pushed in, out, back, forth,
Helplessly adrift, then scorched by a rasping wharf.

An unintentional bumper into everything I’m not.
Listen, I’ve got big stress, my life is a mess.

4.
Would that I could shape up and have a say!
If I did, I’d scurry everything out of my way.
I’d hold real sway, I’d scuttle the kids, those brats
Who poke me with sticks, and giggle when I quiver,
Flip me like a pancake, but wary of my stingers.

5.
I oughta get in shape? I gotta get a shape.
I thought about doing push-ups,
But I’ve got no hands, how could I push?
And as for running, you see any feet?

Like I said, I’m poked by kids with sticks!
It makes me want to change, improve,
Makes me want to shape myself up,
To stand tall, erect, commanding, dangerous,

Able to defend myself, get my way, make use of
Newly formed fully functioning fists,
From Jelly to granite in one swift move,
Not cowering in my gooey field display
Of sloppy slurpiness, that would be over.

6.
Behold the prompting sweep of a rock hard left, a right,
Then a solid sock to the jaw, I’d lay them out flat,
Then let the tide wash those cads away while I stand firm.
Sure I’d stay around, be notable, not a washed-up has-been.
I’ll start right now on learning how to seed my jelly sag self
With legs feet toes hips a towering spine, everything.
That done, I’ll step out of the sea, I’ll stand tall,
They’ll all fall, and the loud crowd will quiet to a hush
As I bellow out of my newly freed mouth, my mouth
Finally rid of anus sharing- talk about a
Screwed up design! An automatic potty mouth!
And that was for openers!
That’s just part of what I’ve had to deal with,
And I have dealt with it! Moving on:
Into my now mostly clean mouth hole
I’d take in a breath and then
From that fine mouth I would shout out loud and clear:

This beach is mine!

7.
I’d be an astonishment,
Venders would gather around me ,
Offering up their trinkets,
Jewelry blankets t-shirts various ointments,
They’d freely give me most of it for nothing,
Asking only my protection in return.

I’d rule them, rule them all,
Beach beauties cooing at my many sides,
Celebrity volley ball tournaments held in my honor,
That would be so cool.

8.
But I might lift myself only to find myself
Still down, stranded by the tide,
A broken egg yolk,
Sand grit rough on my under belly,
New structures of limbs and laden spine,
Fallen back into formlessness,
Any efforts, any trials, quickly lost
To boat wakes,
Tide wash,
Moon shifts
Lifting me back to where I was, nowhere,
Alone, helpless but for my trailing tentacles.

But they do have their sharp stinging points.
Points? instruments of pain!
Even as I am, you better watch out.

9.
Beware, don’t you ever touch me.
And if you do,
Be ready to scream and jerk away.

And don’t you dare blame me,
Fault me for being what I am,
An unwilling formless left behind
Menacing lurk of a passive retributive violent
Attack mode innocent victim of the sea, but also

A bit of jelly fully formed beauteous flower too, so true,
But only if left isolate, statuesque stunningly
Elegant unworldly balanced design
By a god who knew beauty when he saw it,
And who said yes to me completely,
And in saying yes saw himself anew,

Basking in early light, a penetrative being,
Held beyond gloom or joy, saw and still
Sees an instantaneous wonder, wholly itself,
Forever unapproachable, so step back why don’t you,
Take a good look at me, I’m so far beyond you,
Really, what more could you ever possibly want to be, but me.

About the Poet
Ken McKeon is a retired teacher and active poet living in Berkeley. He has been writing verse for most of his life. published two books: Winter Man and Spring Equinox, studied with Thom Gunn and Josephine Miles at UC Berkeley, also served as Miss Miles’ T.A., and was a founding member of the Rhymer’s Club. He presently teach meditative inquiry at Berkeley’s Nyingma Institute.