Poetry

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.

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.

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.

 

 

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.

(Matrimony)

Massage Parlor Honeymoon
He was last seen heading toward
that chancel near the pipeline
in Dawson Creek.
Under a moonful of rumor
And a spoonful of dream
The guests arrived,
the trucker, the welder
the clone band drummer
and a guy covered in grease.
The doors were opened wide,
the guests were met
and all were expected to feast
with intentions black as crows
on a highway of flattened fur.
House rules, honey.
Here’s all the things we’re not going to do.
No kissing the bride,
nothing in the hair,
the lights stay on.
Can’t trust the likes of.
Now fork it over, you.
A necktie licked one wrist,
His belt welded the other
To a bed of unanswered questions.
Her tattoo was a sneer of boredom
On the biggest misunderstanding
That ever straddled a Sunday.
Thoughts to yourself, whatever
Your name is.
Ask nothing of stalled migration
Through unspoken want
And the torn fabric weaved
Of what was reached so deep for
In this glittering nave,
where secrets blow
like dust in the breath of forgetting.

(Sin)
Face Focus Burnhole

Here now in this brush
On this wet sheet

Full Moon stokes the rage
Of a whiskered queen,
A ship of fire
Plunges over the edge
Of a flat earth as
Full Moon sails through the tip
Of a ballpoint writing
To the news
Then cuts through the mail
To become the news
As reason and logic
Fall from the sky
In shattered parts.

Full Moon leans in the old arcade
Of the ticket taker’s wish

Lives in codes
Stamped on spoons
Magnetic strips, encrypted slips
And numbers carved in stone

Reckon your metered soul, Full Moon,
And book yourself in business class
Then fly through a careful choice of words

To that foreign land.
Press your gaudy finger
On the down button of chance
And descend to a level
Where you need a special card
To get off
Then kiss, breathe,
thrive, Full Moon
In everything you spawn
In everything you spill.

 

 

(Redemption)

 

About the Poet

John-Ivan Palmer’s literary work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Nth Position, Wild River Review, Wisconsin Review, New Oregon Review, and Other Voices. The Drill Press published his novel, Motels of Burning Madness, in 2009 and he has received the Pushcart Prize for fiction.

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.

The Comedian
Letheredge, known as “that idiot,”
announces with his usual cheery
puerility that he wants to
“make something of his life.”
That fall the Club receives
a tinted photo from some ghastly
river town. (“Is that a crocodile?”)
Rotting docks, ragged somnolent people,
an X incised at the edge.
That’s where I sit. The local rum
has a toxic charm I should not be able
to resist if I tried. Supplies, I think,
are sorting themselves out, and we may be
off by All Souls’. Thus Letheredge

in his crabbed, childish hand;
the rest concerns his invaluable
man Gómez. Then, for a year,
nothing. At times we discuss
alerting some consul (“where?”)
or his family (“had he any?”).
Recollections of his follies become
fond but remain unspoken;
one senses we are saving them
for when he is known to be gone.

He returns one afternoon,
having lost several stone,
quite brown; he looks, not drawn so much
as having lately recovered.
The silliness
remains, but it’s hard,
in that hale frame, to tell if it’s less
or more. “Gómez got me
out of that hole. He carried me,
you know. I was damned lucky
to avoid gangrene. I gave him
enough money to set the family up
as local gentry!” But what, we ask,
were you doing there?

“I fell in. The undergrowth had rotted.
I was knocked out a moment,
and then, of course, I couldn’t stand.
Enough light filtered through that I could see
the murals. It’s apparently quite a find –
I’ll be written up! There’s a chieftain,
a king. He’s very red, sitting cross-legged
on a cushion, his hair is in
a top-knot, his index finger raised
as if he’s teaching;
his mouth is open. The people below him,
captives I guess, look quite
miserable. One especially – he’s staring
at his hand, something terrible
has been done to the nails, they’re dripping
widely separated drops of blood;
his mouth is open like the king’s.
And I thought – I was in pain, you know,
not thinking well – that they looked much alike,
except the king was fatter;
and that I resembled both of them,
though I couldn’t say which one more.”
Ode to Cereals
By the grace of hallowed dead,
unquestioning work, and our planes
and agents ever on watch, I will never –
to quote an old oath – be hungry again. Any
bike-ride under sketchy trees
in the new suburb is a drive in a new
car. Unexpected grace
descends, though the reassuring humdrum
remains, and there appear FROSTED FLAKES.

COUNT CHOCULA has the ahistorical,
timeless appeal of horror.
The brown of ancient stains, sublimed
by fresh arterial violet, spreads
as swiftly as electronics
from vaguely cellular platforms, bringing
adepts where they wish to go:
adolescence, the trans-parental realm;
and is the true milk of childhood.

Then, after the crazed mini-vampire
and all-accepting working-class
tiger, select spirits rally
to a pirate shorn of violence and the terror
of age: CAP’N CRUNCH. In his eyes
the glint of gold, the greed for it, are shared,
are generous. Gold is the special tang
in the taste, the spiky texture,
the dust at the bottom of the box.

Let there be no animadversions
about poison. With or without
blueberries, banana, satisfaction
follows the last or the last extra, “heaping,”
spoonful, clicks like a tab;
it’s a matter of digestion, of pacing,
and I lift my eyes to the clock.
About the Poet

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press), and a collection, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press). Another collection, Landscape with Mutant, was published in 2018 by Smokestack Books (UK). Many other poems in print and online journals.