It’s Complicated

Grandpa loved gambling more than Grandma, so just before he completely frittered away the family fortune, she threw him out. He always wanted to be an actor so he moved to LA and starred in a number of porn movies. Of course, I didn’t know him but I do know that Grandma had a “friend” long before Grandpa frittered, and it could be that Grandpa’s frittering drove Grandma to it or vice versa. Dad and Mom met in a bar, had us real fast and before Mom could spit out her first love child, Dad was loving every woman at work, every woman everywhere he went. He blames our love misfortunes on his loving so much. Way down the line, Mom fell in love with a co-worker and told Dad right when they were in bed making love that she was in love with somebody else, but no, she hadn’t done it with him, not yet but pretty damn close, and Dad says he went all soft and couldn’t love properly since then. A while later after he’d moved into a weird hippie kind of attic apartment with absolutely no furniture except a mattress on the floor and an ashtray, he met one of the great loves of his life. It wasn’t six months later that he told her he had loved another lady or two while he was loving her. He actually got down on his knees and confessed, and she stroked his head and never trusted him again. This went on for years. Meanwhile my oldest sister who was in utero when Daddy was doing all his first loving fell in love with heroin. Now that was an expensive love. Her bf who she lived with helped her pay for it by sending her out to love lots of guys who needed quick loving. Then he od. When Mom and Daddy found out, they were devastated, since Mom was living with the man she fell in love with while she was living with Daddy and this man was an alcoholic in AA and 20 years younger. And wow did he make a fuss about sister’s love habits. Soon Mom and Daddy packed sister off to a treatment center several hours away where she met a lot of very loving girls who had similar loves. But she didn’t love any of them. She did love a boy who there, only she was strongly advised not to because it might not be real love but just their both trying to recover from the same love. When she got out, she got a job at a talent agency, because she too wanted to be an actor like Grandpa, and met a guy who was the son of a famous actor who had an ongoing role in a top TV series. And wow, he loved her and she loved him and they went to a lot of parties in very hip after hours bars and met a lot of lovely people. She was so happy with this love. But one day she passed out at dinner and confessed to Daddy and Mom that she was loving heroin again. And so they had this big family meeting where Mom’s guy, being so well versed in loving alcohol, said he thought that sister’s guy must be helping her love heroin.
 Meanwhile, Daddy kept on loving one of the loves of his life, telling the friend who’d introduced them, well, how many great loves does a man get, he can count them on one hand or less. And the man who introduced them agreed as he’d only been able to count two on one hand and even that, he thought to himself was stretching it.
 Do you count deep crushes, he asked Daddy. Daddy didn’t think so. Sister wound up in another center, this time in Arizona, so far from home and her beloved boyfriend. As if southern Arizona wasn’t close to another country where in one day a person could get some love there. And you will never guess what happened to a cousin whose wedding Daddy’s love and us sisters dressed to the nines for because cousin was wearing a $10,000 strapless Vera Wang. Cousin began to love not eating. Not like any of us loved eating. I mean, we loved food but we didn’t love what it did. Anyway, we all loved being together, except Mom wasn’t invited. Mom’s guy said that after so many years of love and marriage if she didn’t qualify for a black-tie event thrown by Daddy’s family, well, then they’d just rent some videos, smoke some weed, and figgettaboutit. Daddy’s love loved him and we never did understand what was going on there but sister wasn’t in love with her, not that that would sway Daddy from loving her and other ladies. She finally got sick, so sick she couldn’t say anything about Daddy’s others and that’s when he said, Let’s get married, except he said it with half a heart and she heard it like he said it. So they broke up. And he was extra loving with us and she was extra loving with her loves but we could all see right through it. In a few months, a girl from work moved right in to Daddy’s apartment, not the hippie digs, but another, decent place he’d moved into some time, I can’t remember when. The girl knew full well that Daddy was still in love with another woman and that they talked a lot on the phone. How are you, he would say to his real love? And she would say, devastated. And you? He would say, same, except I have a girl here whose clothes are in the same closet where you hung yours. Oh, his real love would say. Why did you let her? Daddy was always quick on the draw and said, well, she makes me coffee in the morning. His real love said, but I did that too. And Daddy would say, yes, I know. There’d be a long pause and finally he’d say, she knows I’m in love with you. Meanwhile my family kept up its love life, no matter what. Mom and her AA love bought a house together. But a short time later, he told her he didn’t love her. Mom fell into hell what with having to pay the mortgage on her own. We couldn’t help her, no, we were in debt ourselves even though Grandma, you remember her from early on in my story, had made sure we grandbabies got our college educations paid for. We loved hard and that cost. Don’t you know that?
Mom didn’t and she got a real surprise. One day her former love broke into their house while she was at work. He took everything that anybody would love and give money for, except the dog. He took the pearls grandma had loved and left for one of us, he took Mom’s wedding rings, he took the stereo, how dumb can you get. Then he disappeared. Mom didn’t love that she had to sell the house and move. Then she lost her job and Daddy felt so bad that he announced to Mom that the mother of his daughters shouldn’t have to worry about where she lived and even though the settlement he gave her during the divorce let her buy the house and support her love, he wound up sending her checks every month so she could live in an apartment.
 Have I mentioned my other sister? She only loved one guy before she loved her husband and they got pregnant before they got married which is no big deal and they were so in love. Everybody loved her more than anyone else in my family because she is so smart and loving and almost has a PhD and is pregnant again and her husband moved out for a while since she convinced him to join a day treatment program, and they both had other lovers, she started first, but says the baby’s his and she’s so lovesick from her and her other lover deciding that it would never work and suffering and all right in front of her husband, her child, and her enormous stomach in which her next baby is living until she sees fit to come out and everyone already loves her especially my Dad who loves girls better than boys which can be ascertained from my previous descriptions. He’d die just die if a man he plays sports with would ever, and even though he’s old he’s still very handsome and lots of men hit on him and the rest kind of make fun of him like the friend who introduced him to one of his great loves way back, cause he’s been through a couple subsequent loves with younger women, most notably one near my age who came from a very religious family but loved to wear high heels and pancake make up and lace bustiers and she drove him crazy especially when he promised to love only her but wound up going to a whore house in Costa Rica from which she caught a disease he didn’t know he’d contracted and she never trusted him again and as part of loving him she tormented him by breaking up with him every few weeks sort of punishing him for all the love crimes he’d committed with all the other great loves of his life.
 Mom, she lives alone now, she’s never loved again.

Gloria Frym’s most recent books are Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Any Time Now (Little Red Leaves, 2010). She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)–as well as many volumes of poetry. A previous collection, Homeless at Home, won an American Book Award. She teaches writing & literature at California College of the Arts.

Prayer to Ganesha

O Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles,
we beseech you to remove the obstacle
Global Warming-denying Republicans have been
to doing anything about Global Warming.

Ganesha a nobler image of the sacred Elephant
than the desecrated image of the Elephant
usurped by a certain political party.

Haven’t elephants been abused enough—
from carnivorous cavemen spearing mastodons
to elephants abused by sadistic mahouts?
from the Roman Circus
to the Barnum & Bailey Circus?

1903: Thomas Edison stages and films on Coney Island
his highly publicized electrocution of Topsy the Elephant
in order to demonstrate alleged dangers of Nikola Tesla’s
alternating current, which, if it posed any danger at all,
it was to Edison’s own competing direct current.
America had used electrocution as capital punishment
since 1890, the year of Wounded Knee.
It took 13 years to get around to an elephant.

Elephants, along with whales dolphins humans,
among the most intelligent beings on the planet.
Elephants renowned for mourning their dead.
The fabled Elephant Graveyard, though,
is only a Tarzan fantasy. No elephants
were present to mourn poor Topsy.
Ah, how the elephants in zoos around the world
would mourn if they knew the remaining elephants
in the wild are so few and so near extinction!

They say elephants never forget. Yet the Repubs forgot
what got us into Vietnam, so went ahead and got us into Iraq.
Or maybe Cheney and Rumsfeld remembered all too well
and used allegations of WMDs as their counterpart to
a fabricated “Bay of Tonkin Incident.”
And now the stampede of Repub attack ads
trampling the minds of America
amid their favorite TV shows!
The berserk rogue Republican fake elephant gives
gentle peace-loving real elephants a bad name!

And now Madison Ave. would have us believe
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
is caused by an elephant sitting on your chest!
A species that killed countless elephants for their tusks
during the heyday of ivory greed and
big-game hunters merrily decimating
the African continent’s teeming wildlife
shouldn’t be blaming elephants for COPD.
The editorial cartoon Republican elephant,
not a real Asian or African elephant,
is sitting on the chest of America.
Yea, the rightwing Global Warming deniers
are sitting on the chest of the planet!

O Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles,
help us remove the obstacles
to saving the world before it’s too late!

Jeff Poniewaz taught “Literature of Ecological Vision” via UW-Milwaukee between 1989 and 2009. His 1986 poem book Dolphin Leaping in the Milky Way won a “Discovery Award” from PEN, the international writers organization. Allen Ginsberg praised it for its “impassioned prescient ecological Whitmanesque/Thoreauvian verve and wit.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Jeff’s epic “September 11, 2001” (an abridged version of which appeared in Van Gogh’s Ear and two major 9/11 anthologies) the “best poem I’ve seen on 9/11.” His last name’s pronounced POE-nYEAH-VAHSH and is Polish for “Because.”

Jeff Poniewaz, Allen Ginsberg, and Antler

That Old-Time Religion
for Allen Ginsberg

What would happen if we surrendered silence,
filled the negative space with song? All of us,
voices joined singing, “Glory, Glory Hallelujah”?
    Or, “Imagine There’s No Heaven”?
     Or, “Oops, I Did It Again”?

We sit in polite pews,
embarrassed by our warbling voices;
passively consuming
   the catechism of song.

We, who listen silently to radios,
who fail to dance in kitchens.
We, whose album covers gather ornamental dust,

What prayers for us
   whose sin is silence?
What prayers for us
   who use heartbreak as furnishing?

                  When I was young I clothed myself
                   in violence and poverty,
                   and my voice grew hoarse,
                  fading wheeze in the night

This business of salvation
   has never happened in stillness.
This has always been a parable
   of pilgrimage and transformation.

1927: Hoagy Carmichael quits his law practice
and moves to California to play piano,
plucking melodies from the night to save his soul;

1929: Eleanora Fagan brings her heartbreak
to a Harlem stage, turns the violence of her youth
to song, reinvents herself as Billie Holiday.

1931: Young Robert Johnson,
who can play harmonica but not guitar,
makes a deal at the crossroads, but not with The Devil

                   And somewhere the boy I was
                   has calcified to stone.
                   And somewhere the boy I was
                   fails to pick up a guitar.

What if every voice, on every street, in every country
joined together in one nameless song?
   Surely that would replicate
   the horns that shattered Jericho’s walls.

                  And the somewhere the boy I was
                retreats further and further into silence
                   And somewhere the boy I was
                   vanishes into masonry.

What is The Devil, but what remains
   when pieces of us vanish into night;
that bitter twitch when “Rehab” plays;
   Mark David Chapman’s cooling gun?

                  And somewhere the boy I was
                  fails to disturb the universe.

How are those voices anything but Holy,
those melodies that fill a chasm?
Lena Horne and Elliott Smith,
Richie Valens and MCA

— amen —

all inflections
in a voice that starts in silence
and explodes in a Bang,
in a Word,
in life.

All of them cracks
in the Jericho
between us all.

                  And somewhere the boy I was
               inherits his uncle’s old Stones and Cream albums,
                  devours them in a binge.

                  And somewhere the boy I was
                snags his mother’s copy of “Double Fantasy”
               and doesn’t fast-forward through the Yoko Ono songs.

                  And somewhere the boy I was
                 slams his body in the heat of a pit
                  and finds a strange salvation.

So why is it that
when we raise the lights
and talk plainly of God,
none of us are happy?

Victor D. Infante is a poet, editor and journalist living in Worcester. He is the editor of the online literary journal, Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge, and the author of City of Insomnia, a poetry collection from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have been published in numerous periodicals, including The Collagist, Pearl, Chiron Review and The Nervous Breakdown.

The Unseen

The marble is veined – he says –
Like human skin. It comes from Carrara,
A mountain in Italy. I’ve heard it is pure white,
Like snow in the Alps,
Its side wide open, a curtain of alabaster.

You cut it into even slices
One – two – three –inch thick, whatever you need.
The slices are symmetrical. The veins,
The patterns repeat from one slice to the next.
The marble block opens up like the wings
Of the butterfly . . . smooth, elegant, pristine…

He stops, looks up. The marble mountain –
Too far away from the concertina wire
Splayed over the top of the jail fence.
Symmetrical, patterned,
Its long spikes shine above each locked gate,
Cement block wall.

An artist’s work – he says –
Look, they labored so hard
To place the metal spikes perfectly even,

So close together, you cannot grasp it
With your bare hands…

His fingers move gently
Caressing the marble he remembers
In the stagnant air behind bars –
The butterfly wings of freedom.

© 2012 by Maja Trochimczyk

Maja Trochimczyk is a Californian poet, scholar, translator, photographer, and non-profit director from Poland. She studied musicology at the University of Warsaw, Poland (M.A. 1986) and sound engineering at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw (M.A. 1987). In 1988 she emigrated to Canada and in 1994 she earned her Ph.D. in musicology from McGill University in Montreal. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1994-1996), Dr. Trochimczyk joined the faculty of the USC Thornton School of Music as Director of the Polish Music Center (1996-2004). She also received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2001-2002). Since 2004, Dr. Trochimczyk has continued her research and music history activities as an independent scholar while becoming active as a poet and publisher, as well as working as a development director for healthcare and human service organizations in Los Angeles. She is Senior Director of Planning at Phoenix House in California. She serves as Board member and Officer for the Polish American Historical Association and as President of Helena Modjeska Art and Culture Club in Los Angeles. For the years 2010-2012, Dr. Trochimczyk was elected the Sixth Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, California.

Beethoven’s Last Words

Ludwig Van Beethoven’s final words are said
to be, “I shall hear in Heaven.”
I envy the famous composer his faith
I hope Heaven resounds with the famous musicians
great works and we all hear his symphonies clearly.
Not merely the loudest notes.
Beethoven’s hearing was failing at the time
he composed his third, fifth and ninth symphony.
His gradual loss of some tones must have been so
frustrating and frightening he felt like drinking a fifth.
I know it does me.
Words and sounds make life worth living for writers.
The roar of the ocean in a conch shell, rain on the roof,
voice of a lover, purr of a cat, can only be heard not seen.
Musicians and poets will die for a good hearing device.
A small bud in the ear, comfortable, affordable and
up to date as cell phones that do everything except cook.
So far no hearing device has been created by man
that is a Miracle Ear.
No matter what bureaucrats say the FDA is not God.
I long to hear Ludwig whisper in my ear,
“You’re in Heaven, you can hear.”

Wanda VanHoy Smith started her long journey in Portland Oregon, Took her passion for literature with her to California and picked up a sailor on the way to L.A. A son and daughter climb on board with them. Wanda walks a path paved with words and stories that fill her brain and come out her finger tips. She passes her children along the way. She doesn’t know what to answer when they ask“Are we there yet?” She pulls up weed words and picks poetry along the trail. Some land in round files in editor’s. offices. Her poetry dives into anthologies like Poeticdiversity, Valley Contemporary poets, San Gabriel VPQ, and several others. Recently her poems are included in RKVS an e-book in Canada…She is featured in venues like Beyond Baroque, the San Pedro library, and The Alibi cafe. She is a member of Redondo poets who host a weekly reading at Coffee Cartel. Her out of print book for young readers published by Scribners is a collector’s item offered on Amazon.

Dolphin

deep in the cove moves the curve
of a dolphin,

her calf by her side somewhere
in time

you and I moved like that

what matter that you my son then
my daughter

now on the beach the bony beak
and basket

of a rib cage that could belong

equally to a teenage boy or girl
ends in a fluke

all that remains these remains and
soon after the high tide

even these will be gone

Rebecca Foust was born in Blair County Pennsylvania, known for both its pristine alpine beauty and that beauty’s despoiling by the strip mining, railroad and fabric mill industries. After practicing criminal law and working as an advocate for children with autism, Foust earned her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. God, Seed won the 2011 Foreword Book of the Year Award. And All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song won the Many Mountains Moving Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2012 Poet’s and Paterson Prizes. Recent poems are in Hudson Review, JAMA, Notre Dame Review, Sewanee Review, Woman’s Review of Books and elsewhere.

http://www.rebeccafoust.com/

The wakechimes touched me with the sound of cinnamon. I stretched, turned over, and watched the clockroach play time games against the wall.  It marked the spidery minutes in fine script and left crystal duntracks behind.

It was half-past blue, and a lemon moon spilled color into the room. Its light burnished Bethellen’s hair to silver and brushed her flesh with coffee shadow.

She stirred once, and I slid quietly away, padded to the shower cage and let cool spicewater bring me awake. There were cocoacubes where Bethellen had left them, but I passed them by and trotted back to the nightroom. My Copsuit sprang from its hollow with a dew-fresh scent, and I let it take me in.

I would have liked to look at myself. A small vanity, but mine own. I take pride in the uniform. It’s a Copsuit in the classical cut—basic whipcord in umber and vermilion, sepia pullover, and fringe-leather vest. The jackboots, gloves and chainbelt are traditional indigo. The Marshal’s Star of David is cadmium-gold, and the Peacemaker by my side is finest quartz and ivory.

Set. Ready to go, and a last look at Bethellen. She had turned in her sleep to catch the moonwaves. Citron limbs bared to an ocher sea. By morning, I’d taste lemon on her lips.

Outside, the prowlbug hummed to electric life. The moon was high now and a second had joined it—a small saffron tagalong. Lime shadows colored the streetways. The dashglow winked me into service, and I switched the roadlighs and moved along.

The street ribboned over soft hills furred with bonebrake, and through dark groves of churnmoss. Raven blossoms hung from high branches nearly to the ground. I swung the prowlbug into Bluewing, whispered through Speaklow, and coasted down the steep circle to Singhill.

There were people all about. If I listened, I could feel the sound of their sleeping. From Tellbridge I watched the lonelights far away. Not everyone slumbered, then, but all were snug in their homeshells till the day. None would stir before Amberlight polished the world. For that is how it is—the day belongs to us, but not the night.

I have often stopped the prowlbug and dimmed the lights and watched the darklife. In moments, the night fills with chitter-hums and thrashes. A beetlebear stops to sniff the air, pins me with frosty muzzle and razor eyes. For a while there is pink carnage in her heart; then she scutters by clanging husky armor. Jac-Jacs and Grievers wing the dark hollows. A Bloodgroper scatters his kill. There is much to darklife, and few have seen it as it is.

A quarter till yellow. The dashglow hemorrhages, coughs up a number. The prowlbug jerks into motion, whines up the speedscale. Sirens whoopa-whoopa-whoopa through the night, and I switch on the traditional lilac, plum and scarlet flashers overhead.

There are no strollers to pause and wonder. No other bugs abroad to give me way. Still, there are customs to keep alive, bonds with the past.

. . .

The address was nearby. Prowlbug skittered up the snakepath around Henbake. Pressed me tight against the driveseat. Pink lights to port. A homeshell high on Stagperch, minutes away.

Around a corner, and green sparkeyes clustered ahead—nightmates and shadlings hunkered in the streetway. The prowlbug whoopa-ed a warning, and they scattered like windleaves.

They were waiting for me, portal open. A big man with worry lines scribbled on paper features. His handstrobe stitched my path with lightcraters to shoo stray nightlings. The woman was small and pretty. Hands like frightened birds. I moved through them up turnstairs past buffwalls to the boy’s room.

I’d been there before, but they didn’t remember. No-face in a uniform.

. . .

A child in Dreamspasm is not a pretty sight. I punched his record on the bedscreen, scanned it quickly. Twelve and a half. Fifth Dream. Two-year sequence. No complications. I gripped one bony arm and plunged Blue-Seven in his veins. The spasms slowed to a quiver. I touched him, wiped foamspittle from his cheeks. His skin was cold, frogdank. Waterblue eyes looked up at nothing. The small mouth sucked air.

“He’s all right,” I said. The man and the woman huddled behind. “Take him in in the morning. Don’t think he did internal damage, but it won’t hurt to check.”

I laid a vial beside the bed.  “One if he wakes. I don’t think he will.”

“Thank you,” said the man. “We’re grateful.” The woman nodded his words.

“No problem.” I stopped in the hall and faced them again. “You know he could Secondary.”

They looked startled, as if they didn’t.

“If he does, stay with him.”

They frowned questions, and I shook my head. “Punch in if you like, but there’s nothing I can do. He can’t have Seven again. And a strong Secondary’s a good sign.” I sent them a Copgrin. “He’s old enough. You could be out of the woods.”

They gave each other smiles and said things I didn’t hear. The prowlbug was turning all my buttons red and shrieking in the night. I bounded down turnstairs and tore out the portal. No time for strobes and such. If nightlings got underfoot, they’d get a jackboot for their trouble.

The prowlbug scattered gravel, skit-tailed into the streetway. It was wound up and highwhining and I held on and let it have its way. Stagperch faded, and the snakepath dizzied by in black patches. I prayed against sleepy megapedes bunked in on the road ahead. A tin medal for Bethellen. Early insurance.

The dashglow spat data, but I already knew. Bad. Category A and climbing. Name of Lenine Capral and long overdue. First Dream and Fifteen.

. . .

The Rules say punch before you practice. No way with Lenine Capral. No record, no time, no need. The Dream had her in night-talons. Down on the dark bottom, and nothing for it. Lost, lost Lenine.

I drew the Peacemaker, pressed the muzzle between her eyes. Her body arched near double, limbs spread-eagled. I pulled back lids and looked. Milkpools. Silverdeath darting about. The little shiverteeth nibbling away.

I tossed my jacket aside. Grabbed a handful of hair and pinned her neck where I wanted it. Put the muzzle low behind the ear and up. This time, shock jerked a small arm and snapped it like crackwood. But nothing snapped Lenine.

I couldn’t shoot her again. More would burn her skull bone-dry. And nothing in the little glass tubes. Blue Seven was fine for the boy—about as good as mouse pee for Lenine.

Okay. One deep breath and down to dirty fighting. I ripped the sheet away. Stripped her bare. She was slim and fragile, too close to womantime. I spread her wide, and the motherperson made little sounds.

“Out.”

The man understood and moved her.

Dreamspasm is a thing of the mind. But that door’s closed for helpers. The physical road is the only way. Blue Seven. Redwing. And after that: physical stimuli to build mental bridges back home. Countershock for young minds. For Lenine Capral, therapeutic rape. Thumb the Peacemaker to lowbuzz and hope this one’s led a sheltered life.

Hurt her good.

Whisper uglies in her ear.

Slap and touch and tear. No gentle Peacemakers funsies. Only the bad parts. A child’s garden of horrors. Everything Mother said would happen if the bad man gets his hands on you.

Orange.

Red-thirty.

Coming up violet. Cream-colored dawn on the windows.

And finally the sound you want. Lenine the wide-eyed screamer. The violated child awake and fighting. Afraid of real things now. Scared out of Dreamspasm One.

Quickly out and past the hoverfaces. No gushy gratitude here. Mother doesn’t thank the Coprapist.

. . .

Outside, dawnbreeze turns the sweat clammy cold. A medbug has braved the nightlings all the way from Fryhope. Lenine will get proper patching.

The prowlbug has a homepath in mind, as well it might. Only I am not ready for Bethellen and breakfast. Both are out of temper with the night’s affairs. Instead, I brave the prowlbug’s rumblings, move past Slowrush, and wind down to Hollow. The road ends, and prowlbug will duly record that I have violated Safecode and am afoot before the dawn. The nightlings don’t concern me. They’ve fed before Firstlight and bear me no ill. At the stream I hear their thrums and splashings as they cross back over to find hugburrows for the day.

The stream is swift and shallow and no wider than a childstep. It makes pleasant rillsongs and winds beneath the green chumtrees. It has no name. It is simply the stream that divides the world. Dark from light. Night from day.

There is still nightshadow on the other side. The groves are thick and heavy. I watch, wait, and listen to the stream music.

Timebug says half-past violet. While I wait, I polish dunglasses. Put them on. They help me see what is, and temper what isn’t at all.

Wait.

Watch the waterlights.

A blink, a breath and he’s there. As if he’d been there all along.

For a moment my stomach does its tightness. But it’s not so bad for me. They make teetiny headchanges in policemen. Little slicecuts that go with the Copsuit. But there is still a childmind to remember. Dreamspasms in dark nightrooms.

Through the dunglasses I can see bristly no-color. Hear his restless flickersounds. See him move with the shape of frostfur. Hear him breathe hot darkness. Sense his crush-heavy limbs. Only, I cannot see or hear these things at all.

I wonder if he watches, and what he sees of me. I have to look away. And when I look again, he is gone. Nothing has changed in the thickness over there.

. . .

Back to the prowlbug. Ten till Indigo. Amberlight dares the high ridges. Sucks away the darkness.

I imagine him. Thromping and shifting. Dark fengroves away. Safe against the sunstar. All the young darklings purged of manfear. Only fright thoughts now—fading daydemons named Lenine.

What would I say to him if I could? Whatever could be said is what he knows. That the stream divides the world. That there are pinchfew places left to be. That mostly there is nothing left at all. That we have to make do, now, with what there is to share…

Neal Barrett, Jr. is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, mystery/suspense, and historical fiction. His story Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus was nominated for both the 1988 Nebula Award for Best Novelette” and the 1989 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Barrett was born in San Antonio, Texas but grew up in Oklahoma City,after his family relocated there when he was 1 year old. In 1997, he was the Toastmaster at the 55th World Science Fiction Convention held in San Antonio. In 2010, he was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His 500-page “Best of Neal Barrett, Jr, OTHER SEASONS, has just been released by Subterranean Press.
 

On January 31, 2012 Dorothea Tanning passed away at home at the age of 101. Dorothea was a woman of many talents. She worked as an author, sculptor, and painter, as well as a set designer and costumer for theatre and ballet. Tanning’s second book of poetry was released by Graywolf Press in 2011. She most widely known for her work in Surrealism. More examples of Tanning’s work can be found at  http://www.dorotheatanning.org/, the site maintained by the Dorothea Tanning Foundation to honor her work as well as her life.

Notes for an Apocalypse

Waiting

Back then, with time on my hands
and in our back yard, I waited for the future.
The Future. For me as for everyone else,
the very words had a whiff of promise.
If things were not going too well at present

they would surely delight us in the future.
Long in coming, the future, it never came
to the back yard, front yard, palace yard,
church yard, prison yard, and especially
the junk yard that prefers the past.

Later I understood that waiting is an art
and the best place to practice it is in waiting
rooms where you can wait for hours on end
for the train you’ve already missed, for the
sky to fall, the doctor, for hell to freeze over.

The sky hangs higher than ever and
at night is studded with stars
“The Doctor had an emergency.
He’ll be here tomorrow.”
And hell? Nobody goes there anymore.

Still later, when I was more in touch with
the world, they told me, “You have a future.”
I thought that over. Even if I believed them,
what did my little future, whatever that was,
have to do with the real thing, whatever that is?

Surely this everywhere present is real
enough and eager, yet unable, to tell me
what I am waiting for now.

For a further example of Dorothea’s work as an author please see the short story Legend from 1949. All material provided by The Dorothea Tanning Foundation.

photo by Peter Ross

And in her own words :

“Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois and attended Knox College in her hometown before studying painting in Chicago (haunting the Art Institute where she learned what painting was.) In 1941, now in New York, she met the art dealer, Julien Levy, and his surrealist friends, refugees from Nazi occupied France. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. They would have 34 years together, at first in Sedona, Arizona (a mere outpost at the time). Here she would continue to paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out: The Guest Room, The Truth About Comets, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Interior with Sudden Joy, Insomnias, Palaestra, Tamerlane, Far From. By 1956 Max and Dorothea had chosen to live and work thenceforth in France. Though Paris was headquarters, they preferred the country quiet lure in Touraine and Provence. These years included, for Dorothea Tanning, an intense five‐year adventure in soft sculpture: Cousins, Don Juan’s Breakfast, Fetish, Rainy Day Canapé, Tragic Table, Verb, Xmas, Emma, Revelation or the End of the Month, Hôtel du Pavot Room 202.

Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976 and Dorothea faced a solitary future. “Go home,” said the paint tubes, the canvases, the brushes. Returning to the United States in the late 1970s, and still painting, Tango Lives, Woman Artist, On Avalon, Door 84, Still in the Studio, Blue Mom, Dionysos S.O.S., she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write. Words, poetry. Written, read, heard. Would she join these voices even then? Her poems have since appeared in a number of literary reviews and magazines, such as The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, The Southwest Review, Parnassus, and in Best Poems of 2002 and 2005. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm.

At present Dorothea Tanning lives in New York City, breathes words, as well as air, and looks at her paintings with amazement. It is 2009.”

Time Is a Two-Way Equation

I. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

All will be washed downstream
in time’s wake: our teeth,
my calloused heels, the curve
of your laughter hung in the air.
Our names will fizzle like wet squibs
and then poof! Out like a candle!

But here is today’s newspaper crossword,
so definite in its smudged ink. An old friend
remarks upon a small kindness, an act
you can’t remember. The kiss we shared
as you left on your way to work wraps a satin bow
around my mouth all day and tomatoes in the garden
have just begun to ripen.

Look at time like a farmer appraising river silt
after the flood: all this dirt awaiting seed.

Let it flow. Leave mourning’s sound and fury
to its place, which is not now.

II. Après-moi le deluge

Every little emperor wants to believe
their end is the end of everything.

Louis XV shook a sceptered fist
full of dire predictions for the future while
Mme. de Pompadour smiled behind her fan.

Courtiers thought her impossibly common –
a lamprey latched tight to the sweep of a shark.
Her smile never wavered.

So I come from fish guts and fat merchants:
I am not any yesterday’s prisoner.

My tongue’s a subtle soldier
on sheets stretched wide as a general’s map,
one ankle each in Spain and Austria.
This is how I conquer on my back.

Ajourd’hui, l’État, c’est moi.
Demain…C’est une autre nation.

IV. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

There’s an old man who busks on the corner,
sings oh baby, baby, I got blues like you don’t know
every day like the emperor of love gone wrong—runs
that sad song through its abacus and ticks each bead —but today
his dedication to heartbreak plays off-key, a hurdy-gurdy
ringed with dancing monkeys. He smiles
when they throw silver in his cup.

Tomorrow is another country
full of strange language whose phonemes
stretch the tongue to form new syntax.

When the flood comes,
don’t pile the shore with sandbags
all around your sorrow—

let time take it, if it will.

V. Valediction Forbidding Mourning

When feet are set to floorboards, their imprint
is fleeting. Even bootmarks on the moon
fill one dust mote at a time, which makes it no less
amazing to have walked there.

There will be more embraces until there aren’t.
They are no less warm for that. Without
the closing door, how could we forget
everything for one frangible kiss?

Fuck funerals. Throw my corpse a party.
When else is merry-making needed more?
Laugh until your cheeks are white with salt.
I will know nothing of what you do, so do it
for yourself.

This is how to conquer the flood:
today and today and today, floating
on your back without struggle.

When the waters recede, get off your ass
and whistle while you build into new space,
grace sprouted from hard toil and fertile muck.

Off to work, now. If you return
and I’m still here, we’ll welcome
each other home like no tomorrow.

Lea C. Deschenes lives in Worcester, MA and holds an MFA in poetry from New England College. Her poetry has appeared online, on stage and in print. A former member of four National Poetry Slam teams and a coach to two more, she has received a Jacob Knight Award, been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and represented Worcester in the 2005 Individual World Poetry Slam. Her first full-length collection, The Constant Velocity of Trains, is available through Write Bloody Publishing, as is the anthology she co-edited with Lisa Sisler, Knocking at the Door. She once found a five-leaf clover during a solar eclipse.

http://www.quantumredhead.com/

Van Gogh

There’s a man who looks like Van Gogh cartwheeling through the sky again.
I said what brings you here.
He said I get bored in heaven sometimes.
Everything is taken care of.
All the chocolates, all the paints,
all the books, nothing on TV of course.
I want to come closer to all the scurrying people.
Rushing quickly as though they could outrun death.
I used to take all day to feel what the peasants felt.
What the crows were cawing at.
Life was simpler then but still so hard.
I knew someday I’d make a living but I didn’t live to see that day.
If you knew Vincent, why?
Knowing and actually seeing for your own eyes,
Its such a chasm.
No it’s more than that.
I was lonely. The colors I made.
red yellow blue
became orange green purple
I could make one color disappear into another.
It was seamless.
I thought my loneliness was like that.
Some other feeling would mix with it and I’d have serenity.
But my palette was a little short.
I don’t know. It goes sometimes like that.
I made good use of my time.
I’ve had a long time in Heaven.
Vincent, are you saying this to make me feel better?
Well, yes and no.
I wanted to know the Earth more.
So I come down on the biggest playground slide God ever made and look at life each week.
Once a week I feel everything on Earth as thought I were still human, more than spirit.
I used to come down every night. Now once a week is all I can take.
The 20th Century was more than I could bare.
We look at you from Heaven.
You’re living in Guernica. Picasso agrees.
We thought you’d learn from the Inquisition, the many Joan of Arcs we don’t know about.
We thought you’d become peaceful.
When I say you I mean your species.
He spat the word and I knew exactly what he meant.
World War Two
We were dead so we went to the camps to say prayers for our breathren.
There are people who refused to go back to Heaven for a few years after seeing what went on there.
They painted shrouds.
They painted landscapes inside their eyelids.
Many went crazy.
Heaven is not just cotton candy clouds, harps and angels.
We watch you.
Yep, you are our movie of the week.
We don’t want you more than once a week.
Even the dead need peace now and then.
I said Vincent, did you ever find love?
There was this day the print in my favorite book began to dance with me. I took it for love.
There was this day I heard the music the birds sang and I became a bird but more I became music.
There were many days.
Yes that love I found.
Suddenly I said Vincent
Are you my guardian artist?
He said yes.
He said all I needed to know.

(From the chapbook Praha and the Poet (2006)

Ellyn Maybe has performed her poetry all over the country, including Bumbershoot,the Poetry Project, the New School, Taos Poetry Circus, South by Southwest, Lollapalooza, Albuquerque Poetry Festival and Seattle Poetry Festival. She has also read in Europe at the Bristol Poetry Festival, on the BBC, and in poetry slams and readings in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart. She opened the MTV Spoken Wurd Tour in Los Angeles. In addition, she has also read at USC, UCLA, CSUN and Cal State Fullerton, among other colleges. Writer’s Digest named her one of ten poets to watch in the new millennium. Her work has been included in many anthologies, including Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, Poetry Slam, Another City: Writing From Los Angeles, Poetry Nation, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and American Poetry: The Next Generation. She was on the 1998 and 1999 Venice Beach Slam teams. She was seen reading her work in Michael Radford’s (Il Postino) film Dancing at the Blue Iguana.

http://ellynmaybe.com/