Belles-lettres
Ali Abdolrezaei - Deepika Arwind - J.M. Bauge - Mark Baumgartner
Rumjhum Biswas - Bruce Bond - Taylor Collier - KJ Hannah Greenberg
James Kendley - Barbara Kussow - Roberta Lawson - Duane Locke
Valery Oisteanu - Christopher Perkins - DLW Pesavento - James Ragan
Elizabeth I. Riseden - Shahidul K K Shuvra - Sean Tribe - Jeanann Verlee
Levi Wagenmaker
trouvère
Ali Abdolrezaei
Story
translated by Abol Froushan
A sky was enough to make rain.
A sunlight - to make a city awkward
Summer like a head-down elephant with a long trunk was lifting the day
the hand of night lost its quiet like a lieutenant divorced of his platoon
from the edge of my humming voice that lived on the edge of a hamlet of voices
threw rips of Buddha’s laughter which my mouth ripped in Lhasa
so to have a think of my being which in Persian has copious meaning
under the lazy moonlight which showed up as daylight to cry a little
A sea was enough for drowning
a snare for the harpooned whale that I would be
The world like an antique rug stuck in a corner
in a piazza with a vast dizziness that was empty
a woman that in a quiet cloud took habitat
and threw a net in the deep swamp of my solitude
to net a goldfish that was my heart
we had to stay together like two uneven fingers
and love like lovers love
to go uphill with a head-down horse going down on the chiefdom of neighing
I go!
No longer have I any long feathered dream
A sky
Only a sky is enough
To make this city awkward.
Deepika Arwind
The Studio
I) Where the riot began
The man I will remember -
dull turban, pleated eyebrows,
black spectacle frames, the eyes that spit
the Bhagat Singh variety of courage, that look –
he ousted the topper of the class
the look that says: I will be alive at 69, because
I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I will only cry when
Saira Banu dies.
Scanty beard of pubescent modesty
with it - the fear of being reckless
the heart through the thin polyester shirt
and pocket-tucked ink pen
the heart through the polyester
shirt, narrow chest, its inevitable broadness
the heart through the shirt
the boyish arm, slim kada,
the heart that knows these are the 60s,
his belly burning with fireflies -
that taut heart ablaze in his eyes.
The man I will remember is agog in
a clear day's monochrome.
But the man will remember the studio,
much later a cycle garage.
(Kada: a religious bangle worn by Sikhs, Saira Banu: a famous Hindi film actress of the 1960s, 70s, 80s.)
II)
It may be Bilaspur. But we may never know.
She sits before a flattened tin of odd things -
safety pins and bottle lids -
in which chocolates were brought to her from Denmark.
(from a member of her feudal family, now dissolving into
the modern-moneyed world.)
Behind her, the ornate wallpaper,
from which she can dress a thousand dolls.
It must be early evening.
Before the jalebis are fried outside the studio.
Before she takes her darting eyes lined with kohl,
before she lights up the street for Amma, with the
light of every mosque and sweet shop in this small town,
before she says to Amma, I want to go, but you can’t see,
before she is told to run along
before she lifts her ferozy frock to avoid
the soiling of its frayed crocheted piping,
Before Amma screams a murder of crows in high-pitched chorus:
“Firdaus, bhaaaag!”
Before the mob sweeps her in a swift moment
leaving behind a small round of ochre and the flies around it.
But we may never know.
(Amma: mother, Jalebis: An Indian fried sweet, ferozy: turquoise, "bhaaag!: ruuun!")
J.M. Bauge Generations
After Terrence Hayes
I come from a long line of women who collapse into self
who know of potato peels and black shoes.
The eldest daughter born into distance, frailty
and the shape made by a thumb and forefinger before the pinch.
I come from random acts of isolation and carnival tunes;
from a woman who wrung chickens’ necks
and placed hot bricks in beds of cold sheets, told
her granddaughter, zimno, cold, before climbing in.
I believe in the vaulted ceiling of nothingness and a bedroom
full of woe where harborless winds dwell and a vortical
memory feeds. One summer I used a ladder to escape
that room. I battled the jaws of that house,
climbed through the skin of a window and descended
into night air painted by the smells of chlorine and beer.
I took the ladder and carry it forward in search
of fire, redolent of pine and rising. I come from pignuts gathered
by my own hands, broken locks and gypsy moths
chewing their way through earth, as determined as any
to get across, get done, get reborn. I come from hands
held high in ecstasy and a mother obsessed
with the white lengths of cloth that roll
from heaven, from winter, from God. Tell me what she said
about the glacier stuck in her eye. I will not find myself there.
I will not hammer the edge of infinity to extend it
another inch. It is everywhere and I am a bit of nothing
lodged in matter. I come from nothing and to nothing I want to go.
Mark Baumgartner
The Chemo Ward
Darkened eyes and melancholy,
Hairless patrons waiting for death’s sweet release,
Lost in an unknown world among us,
Poisons slowly killing each targeted cell,
Dreams now as freezer burn in an unmarked container,
The will to live in anxiety's olive press,
Hope flashes in the distance,
A card from a loved one,
A wish from a distant friend,
The joy of a gentle embrace,
A prayer offered in mercy,
The laugh of a child,
The long awaited sunrise,
A New Understanding
From deaths door, life begins,
The moments of pleasure taste sweeter,
Social standing and wealth all understood as folly,
A “Good Day” is beyond value,
Prayers connect as never before,
Gold emerges from a cruel kiln,
Cycle 2 Day 6
Rumjhum Biswas
Diatribe after a Pseudo Poetry Session
You do yourself an injustice my dear,
to feel such anguish. What poetry do you seek
In these cold vaults, this crypt of timid breathing?
Poetry cannot be contained; lighter than air, more fluid
than water, it will leak. So if you must hold it
in your beak, be careful not to choke
Dead poets stink just as much as other corpses. Yet
there is poetry in graveyards in crematoriums and
other resting places, perhaps purgatory too!
So if you must screech down a well or a crypt or vault,
please be prepared to hear your voice again,
of course much diluted, like an echo eerily blowing back.
Don’t run away with fear in your heart. Dead poets don’t
carry tales. But if there is one, just one, living out there,
please. God damn it! Can you just rise up and speak?
Bruce Bond Dream Vision from the Book of Dogs
A man was talking to a dog
in a voice that threatened to consume
them both: but this is a metaphysical poem,
he said, not an erotic one,
at which the dog cocked its head
with the look of bewildered worship,
as if the words were all one high whistle
out of the sky, when finally
I could no longer contain myself
and said, but wait, what of the poetry
of Israel and Persia - though in truth
I hardly knew what I was saying,
and it felt a little selfish,
interrupting like that - what
of the tradition of poems for dogs
whose erotic fantasies are all about food,
like the one where god appears
as a hamburger and sayeth unto the hounds,
come, come closer my little ones
and repeat after me . . . no, wait,
ouch, please don't eat me, not here,
not now, there's more, I promise . . .
Taylor Collier
Hearsay
My Aunt's
husband's cousin's
sister's friend,
whose boyfriend lost
his left arm in Iraq,
told me her friend's
second cousin's uncle
from the other side
(the one she slept with
at that family reunion)
knew a guy who
had been working
at the psych ward
in Glendale back
in ninety-six,
and his friend,
the one who usually
worked the night shift,
was the first person
to find the former host
of the game show,
Family Feud,
in his closet,
broke in early June,
with a bed-sheet
noose strapped
taught around his neck.
Said he never
told a lie.
KJ Hannah Greenberg
Droving Last Year’s Love
Moving from place to place,
Grazing by beastly means,
Upon innocence demands
For face work.
Our ghastly talks idle,
Bringing tears, evoking hearts’ labor.
Until such efforts morph deeply
As gaucho stew.
Working dogs, some supervising flocks,
Look askance;
They’re accustomed to corralling
Like-minded critters.
Lassos, packhorses, all mechanisms,
Plus lowing stock,
Aid in feeding, mating, sleeping,
When ushering in fancies.
After all, mustering’s a long job.
It’s difficult for herdboys, manhood blooming
Close to nightclub indulgences,
To understand.
James Kendley
The Algerian Witch's Abandoned Brood
What secret tide stole in without a sound
to drag you from our hearth, then to its breast?
What stars shone false to steer your craft aground
while beacons hid behind the towering crest?
No chart betrayed to us the sweeping course
that spun you always deathward, always in
an ever-tightening gyre around the source
of all our family's infamy and sin.
So in your wake we spiraled, innocent,
as word and world flowed past in aspect vile
until we drifted--haggard, soiled and spent--
to razored shoals that gird your prison isle.
Though sorcery would keep us in your sway,
a mother's love should speed us on our way!
Barbara Kussow
After
Two years and some months after you had to leave us
a surgeon and his interns gathered around a hospital bed
dispassionately poking and probing pronouncing me cured.
Recuperating, I listened to Dr. Laura, that heartless bitch
hardening back into life, knowing that I must place you
in a file where I could take you out and put you back
more or less at will. Cellular empathy turned me away
from the seductive invitation, you and your celestial
colleagues, solemn and serene, an Easter Island tableau
beckoning in our moonlit yard, a squadron of ready pilots
of consummate skill. Sorry baby, I can't come, not yet.
There are things I’m supposed to do, or so I’m told.
If at times I still question why I send out my messages
in bits and bytes of futility, force smiles for grimaces
I am keeping the counsel of those who surely know best.
Always I manage to close the file and return to all
the important things they earnestly say I have yet to do.
Roberta Lawson
Picture Book
A girl in a royal blue
cap fell into the arms of
a man in bottle green
corduroy.
I mean
a girl in a royal blue cap
fell out of the arms of a
man in bottle-green
corduroy. (Like a
dance-step. Like a
wind-up.)
I mean a girl
in a royal blue cap fell into
the arms of another girl
wearing no colours.
I mean:
a girl in a royal blue cap
lost her hat in a midnight
breeze blown-in from nowhere.
I mean:
a pigeon beaked your sandwich
whilst you were inside your
sketchbook.
&
A tired busker
searched for your eye;
piped a tune
with a silkworm
promise.
(And you still
weren’t paying attention.)
And the night closed
down into doorways, and
took you, dreaming, with
it.
And the pavement
café shuttered for Winter
& folded you into its
memory.
Duane Locke
Yang Chu's Poem 83
Socrates, barefoot, his straw sandals
Sent up
Crimson and gold flames. His lips
Blackened
After being rubbed with a fistful of ashes
From burnt straw sandals
Spoke,
"Our greatest blessings come to us by way
Of Telestic magic."
Eyrsicktcus-hired Hermes
Came, silenced
The drums, the rattles. Transformed
The cymbals into bats, the pipes
Into keyless pianos with flour-sack shadows
For legs. Hermes turned
The ekphones, those out of their senses,
The trance dancers
Into owls.
The sounds of owls traveled from oak and oak,
The wings
On Hermes' shoes broke and snow fell on tropical
Mangroves. The crab eyes turned red.
Chrysanthemums ran out of the ale houses.
Shadows from the arrows stuck in the sun
Darkened the grasses.
Mainades, Oh, Mainades.
Appear. Appear,
Reappear.
No one came.
Mimallones, Klodones, Phoibades, Potniades, Bakchai
Appear.
Appear.
No one.
Bassarides, Thyiades, Potides, Lapsistiai.
Appear.
No one.
Erysicktcus and his
Axe, oak blood stained, ruled.
There was only common-sense, popular opinion,
The slave mentalities' consensus, practical wisdom,
Street wisdom, rationality and logic, thus no
Truth.
There was only lies, the people spoke a language
Of lies.
Come back, appear
Ammisiades, Dodonides, Epimeliader, Heliades,
Naides, Dryades,
Oenone
Come back.
No one came.
The sky turned red, darkened
To a darker red, and then a still
Darker red.
Her body born out of red darkness,
A Dakini appeared.
Valentinus appeared, spoke "Men made the gods,
And men worship their lies."
Thriae appeared, their wings
Moved as hummingbirds' wings move, rainbows
Flashed from the waterfall wings.
The Thraie, faces sprinkled with white meal,
Kissed pebbles,
The Thraie,
Leaped, buzzed,
Became leopards,
Became Dakinis,
A Dakini, unseen in the red darkness, spoke
The twilight Dakini speech, and when the
Dakini spoke,
Truth was heard once more
Spoken on the earth.
Valery Oisteanu
Remembering Anne D’Harnoncourt
Poetic coincidence? Unlikely
You were born four days after me, September 7th, 1943
The artsy Virgos have a special role in art history
We met at the Dali’-Centennial 2004 in St.Petes/Tampa
Her story was a golden one, from MoMA to Dada
To the underworld of Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists
Anne the quintessential collector and guardian of the avant-garde
Duchamp spun the magic wheels for “the tall girl”
His ghost is still a host at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Anne has a rendezvous with Marcel and Alexina Teeny
In the basement by Étant donnés’ door
Which hides many ethereal white shadows
Brancusi waves his hat: “Welcome to the Avant-Gods!”
Cezanne paints a peach inside a giant peach
Dali brings his soft piano as a present
Dali's spectrum shines as a halo above her head
Alfred Stieglitz and John Cage create Silence for you
Frank Gehry running with a drawing to catch you
His vision of expansion of Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frida Kahlo and Lee Miller salute you
For breaking cracks in the gender-ceiling
Bravely educating Philadelphians
Without breaking a sweat
Exiting quietly, suddenly, June 1st, 2008
The new summer moon is broken
We pray for you Anne d’Harnoncourt
The saint of artists and a captain of art.
Christopher Perkins
a scholar/poet whose sex is geo-grammar
what kind of land
do we live in?
common place.
goodpoet discards.
I can prove nostalgia
is a virus.
I can!
immune to oblivion:
in dialogue the goods
could not reconcile
the rough with the ice
to make rough ice. (Oops.)
the paradigm
wants an exception: one right, one wrong.
what now goodscholar?
it is not closer
in a place like this:
deeds, the only reliable talk.
I want to role play
my binary play on character:
a diversity holiday, an executive holiday from diversity.
ascending: a kind of nostalgia, its partition.
DLW Pesavento
Simple Heart
You and me, 32, 33, alone, discussing mastectomy.
I asked about your paperback Madame Bovary,
a difficult read, you said, and I agreed, suggesting,
perhaps, as a better start, Flaubert’s A Simple Heart.
After surgery, and adjuvant chemo-radio therapy,
you returned, saying hubby called you repulsive,
and how papa said be more understanding, as he
was having a hard time, and then you
sobbed again, love had turned its back on you.
And the last time, I came to see you,
on your birthday, in the hospital
where you slept, intubated, morphine-dripped,
arms outstretched, wrist restrained to the railings;
no longer an object of a cruel joke,
but now angelic and paraclete-ascending.
James Ragan
The Mayor Boils a Speck of Dust
FOR THE "YOU KNOW" GENERATION
One day we are walking in the desert,
the next, entrancing on a verb.
The mayor asks us for a speck of dust to boil.
The rain has moved to Eastern earth.
We had never missed the water,
reason being absent in the West.
North and South our hands had mimed a language
for the tongues we mottled in our mouths.
But while the words are thinner,
and sentences are worse;
the subjects, once agreeable,
now disagree on course. Syntax bows
to "you know," and simile to "like."
And while the mayor boils dust
to gain a speck of water,
we will talk, you know, into the desert
and verbalize, like, you know, our verse,
and dust will fill a fossil
for the law Pascal our mayor quotes,
that while the pressure in a fluid
spreads equidistant to every border,
dust will be rationed coast to coast.
Elizabeth I. Riseden
Biker Babe Passes up Candy
She hangs on the Middlgate Bar
like she needs a prop.
By 3 p.m., she’s got a good start going.
Skin tight black leathers mold her ass.
The fringed chamois vest shows off her
tat just right---long-eyelashed smiling octopus,
a man’s head wrapped in each
tentacle.
A feathered dream catcher
dangles from her platinum blond pony tail,
pulled to the right.
She’s ridden this ride for twenty years,
knows most everybody,
has tried what she wants,
teased the rest to distraction.
In walks a newbie---25 at most---
tanned like turned-on-a-spit,
his hunter green t-shirt
caresses pects to die for. Tall but not
gargantuan, features chisled a la Michelangelo,
with five older men from California---the
valley and Half Moon Bay.
She learns he’s the engineer
of a hotter than hot three wheeler
with a Toyota engine, that cracks a hundred twenty
easy. His smile gleams like some lamp, welcomes
the whole world---his gig the next
rad design, svelte scupture of chrome and enamel.
The older dudes dig him, keep him revved,
getting richer all the time.
Finally, she has to admit she’s absolutely
a dirty old woman. Her friends
egg her on to seduce him; she
stalls; my body’s not what it once was.
So I’d rather watch this georgeous boy
than take him out to play, let him see my droops.
Hell, I can imagine him all day and all night.
Dream his every crack and cell like I’ve inhaled him.
Moan with the come I conjure---again and again.
Leave him loose, untried
seduced in mind over each luscious inch.
So much better than the real
deal with anybody else here.
Shahidul K K Shuvra
A Question from the Silent…
I recited the question delivered from the silent…
A result with uncountable meaning of abstract algebra
The only tone poured from infinity
I am not a mathematician,
But I like numerical rhymes
As well as plays in poetry
In search of alternatives than
Fixing at any Zenist answer
I went beyond the feeling of zero
And I was at Nothing of an illusive night
Cool breeze was blowing
Icy body of mine alive to the infinity
My frozen soul mimicked dead man.
Now, I am walking in out of the Sunless blind earth,
Tranquil journey with the Inquisitive
The interrogation hallucinated in my ears
After the birth of a response
Suffocation relaxed to dissect the result from the silent…
Freed from other entangled queries
I am at the edge to end or start
To ask and answer…
Sean Tribe
An Ostrich With Its Head In The Sand
The earth shuffles as it sleeps
ants tick, kicking up dust.
Swerving light has no space to cast
shadows over conversations here.
What does you mean?
Beauty in worms
not cicada’s,
or staring birds in trees.
I retreat nothing;
save the distortion of words.
There is no stasis underground
I don’t believe it is still.
Roots pushing to a center.
No, would you explain what you mean.
The noise of Language exists
on the prairie
with gazelles who never speak
and the wind always whining.
The noise of roots,
ticking of ants and
the ferocity of moles is silence.
I don’t believe it is still here.
Jeanann Verlee
beautiful: a legend
He has a bad heart.
No leaking valves, just a bad, dark purple,
slightly deflated, extra-soft heart.
I found it on the lip of the bathroom sink one morning.
I guess he left it there by accident.
I should’ve given it back.
But it was bad and I thought maybe I could make it un-bad.
I put it under my pillow,
(thinking I could dream it into goodness).
It ruined my sheets, obviously.
I sealed it in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator,
next to a box of baking soda to keep it fresh.
Still, after two weeks, the stench was unbearable.
I washed it off, gave it a fresh bag, moved it to the freezer.
It iced over within a few days and I was terribly
worried about freezer burn.
Finally, I pickled it in a mason jar.
I carry it with me in my bag
alongside all my books and asthma inhalers,
between my favorite poets’ poems.
(I figure there’s no better way to turn a bad heart good.)
He hasn’t come asking for it. I guess he has no idea where he left it.
Maybe he grew a new one. Bright red: solid, with a steady thump.
***
She was twelve years old the first time.
But since she didn’t say yes, she doesn’t count it.
The boy’s friends stood in the window and watched. They cheered.
Cords bound her wrists, a boy inside her new body.
The tallest of the faces from the other side of the glass,
whooping and hollering; his blonde bangs flapping as he jumped
and applauded. All his glee, watching her two skinny legs
thrash like that.
She started counting.
The chubby boy with the thicket of black curls,
the one with the blue mohawk and armfuls of tattoos,
the Greek one she eventually married and divorced,
she counted all of them.
Most times, she wanted it. Most times, she was hoping for it.
Some say she was filling up whatever hole that first boy left.
(That’s what they say.) She only knows that most times,
she was hoping for it and most times, they gave it to her.
Sometimes she didn’t want it but already had the gift of knowing
what happens when you say no. She took to saying yes.
There was not much more to be learned than the tricky delivery
but always something festering.
She took to whiskey.
Or call it wine. Ale. So long as it burned.
This made the yes easier.
She did, eventually, lose count.
Manipulative types used words like always and love.
The gullible used words like damage and repair.
The word friends became synonymous with cannibals
after Friend crammed fat fingers down her jeans while she slept
and Friend pulled back her vomit hair and crawled up her passed-out thighs
and Friend brought along three other Friends and together,
they pulled her arms straight off her ragdoll body.
(If you look close you can see where she stitched them back on.)
The people made up stories, called them facts.
They stoned her with silence.
Used her name to scold their children.
Today, she lives alone
in a city with a happy name.
She keeps marvelous houseplants,
wears war paint on her legs.
She refuses to speak; writes notes in Braille
on paper napkins with knitting needles. Rumor has it,
she pickled her last lover’s heart
in a mason jar.
Carries it around with her
everywhere.
Levi Wagenmaker
'his story of cabbage and kings'
cabbages are smellier when cooked
kings are smellier when dead
cabbages if large are rarely cooked whole
kings when dead are seldom dismembered
and shredded or even dismembered and minced
and stature has little to do with that
cabbages the size of kings are vanishingly rare
and so is cabbage-sized royalty rare
the cabbage's cooked goose
and the king's kicked bucket
will lead you by the nose
where cooked cabbage or dead kings
are not immediately in sight
even if
the craving for one would be indicative
of appetite
and craving for the other
of none
hunger may inspire either but
that's history