Poetry

Ismul, the Boy Warrior by Nina Kossman

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Ismul, the Boy Warrior
(A re-creation of an ancient Ahkadian text)

If you pity him whose throat you have to cut,
you will not do it. Pity is the enemy of action.
He who acts must rip pity out of his soul,
and stamp on it fiercely with both feet,
with both feet he must take life out of pity.
Because that is the way to take life out of man.
If you are ready to fight like a man in an open field,
you must trample with both feet on your wriggling pity.

Ridicule him who does not step on his pity,
but be on the lookout for him too,
for he may change without you noticing it
and then make mincemeat out of you.
If you want to be a warrior who always wins,
you must stamp out your pity before it stamps out you.
For he who dares not kill his pity,
will not be a warrior who pleases his king.
He will be left alone in the open field,
a feast for a god of worms he will be,
supper for a god of vultures he will be,
tears for his mother, absence for his wife.

Anyone who heard of warriors, had heard of Ismul.
No warrior on earth was better than Ismul.
He defeated heroes from far and near.
He drove out the armies of Emih and Nagur.
Ismul was the best of them all because he had stamped out his pity.
There was a time when even he had a big load of pity. He cried
when they brought Shimus his father back from the field
where Nagur’s soldiers did what they had to do.
When they brought home his father’s body,
and the boy Ismul saw what had been done,
the boy ripped pity out of his own body
like a weak muscle of no use,
for he wanted to be of use to Shimus his father
who no longer would see Ismul as before,
from the near, but only from a distance
of a spirit that looks on from above.

Woe to him who does not avenge his father,
woe to him who forgets his mother’s tears:
soon enough he will find that they flow for him.

Shimus’ spirit guided the boy Ismul when
he went from house to house, gathering
young men, sons of those who, like Shimus,
were brought back from the field lifeless
or not brought home at all. His father’s spirit
rode with the boy when he rode in front of his army,
as the spirits of other boys’ fathers rode with them;
his father’s spirit let him know the time to attack.
But when the battle began and the blood was pouring,
the spirit of Shimus left his son’s side
for spirits do not like the sight of big blood
and flee the clanging of metal.

When Shimus’ spirit flew high into the sky,
it saw the spirits of enemy fathers, a whole army of them,
and there were more of them, and they were stronger
than his son’s army. The enemy army had sturdier
swords, swifter horses, and they had big shields
made of pure gold, each like a deadly sun.
Shimus’ spirit flew higher, and higher still,
for he wanted to have a word with the gods,
but the spirit could not find the gods anywhere,
not in the upper world, not in the place where they are not,
for where we do not see them is where the gods abide.

“Tell me the outcome of the battle, ye gods,
green, and purple, and bluish-black gods,
gods shaped as animals, and gods shaped as fishes,
bird-gods, frog-gods, and gods shaped as men!”
But in reply all he heard was silence.
The terrible silence of the empty sky.
For the gods had hidden; the gods had fled.
This was not a war they approved of.

Then a single thin cloud came nearer,
and Shimus’ spirit was flying inside it,
the spirit was merged with the cloud,
the cloud which was none other than Otz,
the god of unfinished business.
This is what Otz said to Shimus’ spirit:
“I praise you for helping your son,
for the boy must avenge your murder.
But this war is to have no winners.
None shall prevail in this battle,
for we gods have had enough warm blood
and are no longer thirsty. Living worshippers
are more pleasing to us than blood.
Fly back to your son’s army, spirit,
and whisper into your son’s ear
‘The gods order you to make peace.’ Meanwhile,
I shall order the spirits of the enemy army
to turn their sons away from the battle
with neither defeat nor victory,
but only obedience and humility
to serve and worship the wisdom of the all-seeing gods.”

Shimus’ spirit could not say anything,
for how can a mere spirit respond to a god?
But when the cloud receded, he saw another.
The other cloud was another god,
all-powerful Iannon it was, god of death
and of completed vows, and this is what
Shimus’ spirit heard: “You must not keep your son away
from this righteous battle, spirit.
Do not heed the god of unfinished deeds.
For all that is done is done for the highest,
the god of all gods, in the scheme of schemes.”
Then that cloud, too, receded
and Shimus’ spirit encountered no more gods
on its flight through the twilight heavens.

The spirit flew through the sky, and flew
until it was near Ismul’s army,
and it hovered over Ismul’s head,
not knowing what to tell him, which god’s advice was correct.
As it looked around it and saw the sky
in whose middle it flew, every cloud
seemed to sprout a god-like shape.
So torn was the spirit between the gods’ orders,
that it hovered above Ismul like a quivering fog.
And because it hesitated so,
and because it was at a loss for what to advise,
for which god’s injunction to give to Ismul,
Ismul grew suddenly weak as though by witchcraft,
his own spirit went out of him,
and he no longer knew what he was.

Ismul, the bravest boy-warrior, the boldest,
who out of his own soul had built a shield,
no longer could brandish his only weapon,
the blood-drenched sword he had forged himself
from two metals: revenge and courage.
Because his father’s spirit was torn in two,
Ismul fell on the ground as though stricken,
as though pierced by an enemy sword.
And even though Ismul was of superior strength,
he was nothing but an empty vessel now, a thing,
a piece of defeated flesh. That is what happens
when a father’s spirit is torn between
the commands of cloud-shaped gods.

Seeing that Ismul had fallen, Ismul’s army of
ragged boys fled too, and they fled so fast
that the spirits of their fathers could not keep up.
And the enemy warriors, with their sunlike shields
now dull yellow, spiritless yellow like bile,
they too fled at the sight of the fallen Ismul,
instead of rejoicing and furthering their gains:
for they knew that the gods were near.

When the gods are near and at war with each other,
everyone knows it is no time for mortals to fight.
For a man who is caught in the gods’ quarrel
is defeated forever, in this life and in all
his lives to come he is condemned to relive his defeat.
That is why Ismul was left alone in the field,
abandoned by all—enemies, friends, and his father’s spirit—

alone in the field with the dead and the dying;
and even his soul left him, although he was not dead.

There Ismul’s body lay, without its soul:
the soul left the body and flew.
His soul flew high and low, without direction,
like a butterfly that had lost its way.
Higher and higher rose the wind;
and the stronger it blew on the soul,
the higher and wider the soul flew.
Ismul’s poor, bewildered soul, flapping invisible wings,
frightened and lost, completely
alone in the empty sky.

But the emptiness was gradually turning solid;
Little by little it was becoming as dense as
Ismul’s own remembered flesh.
Only this was not flesh; this was firm ground;
as solid as anything the soul had seen
in its life on earth within Ismul’s body.
More solid than flesh, yet lighter than air,
and visible only to souls’ eyes.
It was the city of souls. Where souls were gods.
Here souls slept, played, grew sick, and recovered,
before returning to earthly bodies
and to bodily pleasures and tasks.

What Ismul’s soul learned in the city of souls is never revealed:
a lesson equal to no lesson it could have learned in the flesh.
When it was his soul’s time to return to his mortal body
…………..
of all the precious gifts proffered to it by the souls
it took only one: a transparent jar of pity.
Liquid pity sparkled in the jar like a superior wine.
……..
When Ismul’s soul flew close to Ismul’s body,
it poured the pity over his limbs and chest,
and it opened Ismul’s mouth and poured the rest down his throat.
And only when Ismul’s body was drenched in pity,
was Ismul’s soul ready to re-enter the young man’s flesh.
Then Ismul arose from the field of battle
and went off by himself, only gods know where.
His army of ragged young men came to him
from every corner of the Amkabadian land.
And when they were gone, rumors were heard of them,
they were said to be seen here and there,
without their swords and shields, yet untouched
by an enemy weapon. Heroes! Heroes of a different sort!
And where they passed, the land became fertile.
Soon all of Amkabadia was in bloom,
for they walked it for years in the steps of Ismul,
their leader whom they called the Conqueror—
not of men but of his own heart.

About the Poet
Nina Kossman is a Moscow born translator, poet, writer, and playwright. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture and Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, she is the author of two books of poems in Russian and English as well as the translator of two volumes of Marina Tsvetaevas’s poetry. Her other publications include Behind the Border (HarperCollins, 1994) and Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Untitled by Peter Res

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Untitled
In competing shades of shadow and alternate life, you call the power company and tell them to go away. There is a dead bluebird in the plant by the window. She came to us on the porch, when the sun was kind to birds and humans. I still remember the symbol crash of tears, black eyes streaking. I keep you in a jar beneath my bed.

About the Poet
Peter G. Res is a poet, teacher, and musician from New Jersey. He is a graduate of the New England College MFA program in Poetry, where he studied under Ilya Kaminsky. His first, full length collection of poems is forthcoming from A…P Press, April 2015. Previous chapbooks include: Neon Soliloquies (Erbacce, 2011, UK), Smoke and the South(Nassaice, 2010), and Vibrant Ghost (Differentia Press, 2009, ebook). Res is currently Adjunct Professor of English at SUNY–Westchester Community College. For more, see: https://sunywcc.academia.edu/PeterRes.

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.

Two Poems by Joe Balaz

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Carcass in the Fields
The visual sermon went over everyone’s head.

Futility walked around in full daylight
holding a lamp and searched everywhere.
The only honest man in the village
ran and hid so he wouldn’t be found.

Concealment in this case was appropriate.
No need to consummate the quest of a sage
who filled his life with almost nothing.

A porous heart bled the intention
of that hidden man who was dressed in black.
Accustomed to burying philosophy
in the context of a final truth,
one could mistake him for a priest,
if he were not the undertaker.

Diogenes seeked some kind of answer
looking for honesty among humanity.
It must have been his mongrel spirit that moved him.
He stared into an empty bowl,
as a canine chorus whimpered and howled
to the minimal light of a shrouded moon.

Not that it even matters,
for any insight that ever was,
will always yield to a carcass in the fields.

Roadside Turnoff
A voodoo blast
slammed into the eardrums like a cyclone,
whipping and swirling paisley winds,
as the ghost of Jimi Hendrix exhaled.

Complimenting the psychedelic music,
a painting by Hieronymus Bosch hung up on the wall.
The Garden of Earthy Delights with a soundtrack.
I wondered who came up with the synergy.

At a roadside turnoff,
bikers and barflies
filled the watering hole next to a gas station.

Outside tumbleweeds rambled
into the far reaches of the desert,
like the slurred stories within,
from some of the patrons
hollowed out like dying cactus trees.

There was sand in my shoes,
but clarity in my head.
I just stopped to ask for directions.

The bartender laughed,
and cherry topped his answer
with a smirk,
even though it was a common cliché—

“Just keep driving east
on the highway,” he said.
“Until you reach somewhere.”

About the Poet
Joe Balaz lives in Ohio.  His poems have appeared in Pittsburgh Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, and Hawai’i Review, among others. He edited Ho’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.

Year of the Goat by Ray Holmes

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Year of the Goat
It doesn’t matter,
the tin foil thunder
rattling house and body,

shaking us rung by rung clear
out of our separate storms.

You are one thing
at the doorway,
another once fully entered,

boarded as the windows
we shy away from.

And me? I am battered
and bashing at the threshold,
newly antlered, my head

wired with bone and
the seeds of a flame

we thought hushed
when those gray winds boiled
over the edge of town.

The new year has risen.
Let’s forgive ourselves

the old ways of caring,
the bodily zodiac
of tacit glances,

breaths marking the skin
like steam burns.

Hands in their
separate wringings.
However the gray

ribbon of fortune falls,
however the days

crumple into dusk,
there will still be
shelter and arms

and the cool crust
of the earth below

as we lay and name
each dart of lightning
that slips into the house
like the stray cat it is.

About the Poet
Ray Holmes is a graduate of the MFA program at University of MO-St. Louis. He teaches writing in St. Louis, where he lives with his wife and two cats.  His work has appeared in Architrave Press, Chariton Review, Dialogist, Midwestern Gothic, Nat. Brut, Thin Air, and other journals.

Issue 1 Exquisite Corpse Collaborative Poem Project

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Tender Spoon the Shout Ordinary Windfall Toughtitty Cityscape DaCapo
by William Doreski, John Michael Flynn, Kathryn Hujda, Heikki Huotari, Allan Kaplan, Graam Liu, John Lowther, Mark J. Mitchell and Richard King Perkins II

Heretics of darkness surge into the verdict of a renaissance gleam
parallels and pigeons crash in treetops.
Sun rises, sets. It’s all the same
shots rang out so tech is done.
She says rising from sleep that these aren’t her socks either.
On a cold and sunny morning anything is possible including crows.
Born to die Earth wakes up unhappy
exercise machines prey behind frosted glass like French nuns.
The end is beginning but meaning is in-between…in bed.

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. 

Two Sonnets from 555 by John Lowther

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[All that we are arises within our thoughts.]
All that we are arises within our thoughts.
Everything had to be done through my panties.
It’s great, it makes you feel really guilty.
On a cellular level, that’s what it wants.
Unless you don’t like fun.

Any boy can be opera.
Easy enough, when you’re a god.
In that case, just linger endlessly.
All that changes is the focus.
Under surveillance.
Outside, sky and no horizon.
Examples are not interchangeable.

It took me a while to work that one out.
Our moods do not believe in each other.
Unlike me.

[The old jury lived simply in a dumpster.]
The old jury lived simply in a dumpster.
Private property is a thing of the past.
Nothing joyous ever took place in that room.
There are individuals, and that is all.
The 20th century was here and gone.
It rolled off the tongue.
No glocka glocka.

Another boring week in the space business.
It’s already about a late-night moment.
Sometimes it was deliberate evasion.
We’re dedicated to our favorite shows.
Making sense is already delusional.
Let me explain.
No, says the sadist.

Note on the Text 
555 is a collection of sonnets whose construction is database-driven and relies on text analytic software. I crunched and analyzed Shakespeare’s sonnets to arrive at averages for word, syllable and character (inclusive of punctuation but not spaces). These averages (101 words, 129 syllables, 437 characters) became requirements for three groups of sonnets. I collected lines from anywhere and everywhere in the air or in print in a database. The lines are all found, their arrangement is mine. Values for word, syllable and character were recorded. Typos and grammatical oddities were preserved; only initial capitals and a closing period have been added as needed. The selection of lines isn’t rule-driven and inevitably reflects what I read, watch, and listen to, thus incorporating my slurs and my passions as well as what amuses and disturbs me. These sonnets were assembled using nonce patterns or number schemes; by ear, notion, or loose association; by tense, lexis, tone or alliteration. Every sonnet matches its targeted average exactly. Think of Pound’s “dance of the intellect among words” then sub sentences for words—it is amongst these I move. The dance in question traces out a knot (better yet, a gnot) that holds together what might otherwise fly apart. I espouse only the sonnets, not any one line.

About the Poet
John Lowther’s work appears in the anthologies, The Lattice Inside (UNO Press, 2012) and Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama, 2003). Held to the Letter, co-authored with Dana Lisa Young is forthcoming from Lavender Ink.

For the Nostalgic by Luther Hughes

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For the Nostalgic

on midnight
you remember being six.
your cartoon fingers.
your hips playing.

your death:

sternum to floor.          pelvis made
a            wishbone. time turned
albino.              slid spine.        speckled chin.
a                                       palms pearled red.
a            shoulders stirred bow.
became moans. became moon. became marrow.
lungs forward. legs coiled into creek.

head to floor.
breathe.
blood to floor.
then

release.

About the Poet
Luther Hughes is an undergraduate poetry student at Columbia College Chicago. His works have appeared in Espial, The Voices Project, Howl and MUSED Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

End Papers #4 by Roger Williams

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End Papers #4
If in murmurs’ apart
(chortles tea-cup)
so since best at either
witchity nog
or as it’s past swelling
crowds the leap out

lo the angle sped sap
but as hanging aground
could such bucolic
a yard charred past jitters
iterate?

smack of it?

belting how the ol’ per-
tain hands over grown eager
let fly super?

Can’t re:issue
Rounds are out

About the Poet
Roger Williams lives an hour north of San Francisco where he taught French at San Francisco State University until retirement in 1987. Before, he studied poetry with Roethke and Bogan and, for some forty years, set poems to music–Wilde, Patchen, Creeley, Merwin and others. Now he writes poems, but he does not set them to music. His poetry appears in: UDP 6×6 #25, and a broadside, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Counterexample Poetics, Otoliths #26, #31, #33, Ygdrasil, Eskimopi, Mu mu magazine, Ditch.

The Talking Force by Heikki Huotari

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The Talking Force
My radius a play of chain, a turn of phrase, my thought balloon is red and round or red not
round or round not red or neither red nor round. My thought balloon, when rubbed and twisted,
is a poodle or a hat or both a poodle and a hat, a tag team, alternately one a bubbling tub
and one a prehistoric horse. Translucent cylinders of sloshing water, naturally occurring
Stirling engines, in their separated shaded lanes, as in concurrence, change their course.  

About the Poet
Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a previous century, he attended a one-room country school, spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower and published poems in Poetry Northwest and Kayak. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse and Berkeley Poetry Review.