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“It’s All In The Eyes” by Phillip Ward

Photo by Georgia Cruse

IT’S ALL IN THE EYES

it’s all in the eyes you know
that’s where language begins
all language begins there
you speak with your eyes
and then the rest follows
so does everything else
that’s where connection lies
it all begins within the eyes
speaking out with the words

Phillip Ward is a writer, poet, artist and photographer. Ward’s photographs and writings have appeared in an array of journals, magazines, books, and Internet, including The Purple Journal, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Chiron Review, The Onion, HX, Bent Voices, Priapus, and The Sentimentalist, and has participated in exhibits in New York City, London and Japan. Mr. Ward is the archivist and curator of the Crisperanto: The Quentin Crisp Archives (crisperanto.org) and executor of Quentin Crisp’s estate. Phillip Ward lives in Manhattan.

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“In Praise of Surf” by Elizabeth Ayres

In Praise of Surf

At Point Lookout, Maryland, earth turns into a sharp needle, stitching St. Mary’s County into the Chesapeake Bay, and all along the beach, a snaky filament of white cotton surf tries to thread itself back into the needle’s eye.

These waves. Wind beating ocean’s drum skin thousands of miles away, wind switching on ocean’s lamplight, thousands of miles away, wind gifting itself to ocean’s embrace, thousands of miles away and precisely now, the energy that was wind, precisely and exactly here, the energy gifts itself onto the shore as waves of water, tumbling, surging. As waves of sound, crashing, dashing. As waves of light, throbbing, pulsing.

These waves. Even as they leave the bay for the beach, they depart the beach to return to the bay. The simultaneity of them. Not this coming then that going, but both together, coming and going, arrival and departure, the boundary between this and that, between then and now, blurring, in the swirling surf, blurring, in the watching woman, blurring, the waves and the woman, two tines of a tuning fork, struck, reverberating as one pure note. Call it eternity, or infinity, or forever.
Or call it love. On the way down to the beach, I passed a family out for a stroll. Mother, father, child. I asked the little girl, “Are you having a nice walk?” She replied, “I love my Daddy.” I thought, Out of the mouths of babes! Love is the answer to every question, a perpetuity of give and take, the child offering to me what she received from her father, the tumbling, surging surf offering to earth what it received from air, giving back to water what it’s taking from land. A triune transmutation of energy, endless in its duration, constant in its changeableness.

Yes, call it love, the surf, and hold fast to it through your days and nights. As you wake, with salty dream-fingers still clutching the pristine sand of your barely conscious mind. As you plod to the bathroom to brush your teeth, each footfall a transmutation of energy given to the floor from your body, from yesterday’s meals, last month’s crops and critters, last year’s sunshine, all of that now offered back to earth precisely and exactly here, in each shuffling footstep that echoes – doesn’t it? – the sibilant shuffling of waves on the shore.

In all your hours, hold fast to it. In the crashing, dashing cycles of grievance and forgiveness. In the throbbing, pulsing revolutions of mistake and rectification. In the comings and goings and arrivals and departures that crest, fold in on themselves, wash up onto your experience then wash back down into your memory, the boundary between this and that, blurring in the swirling surf, the boundary between then and now blurring, in the watching soul, the surf and the soul, two tines of a tuning fork, struck, reverberating as one pure note called eternity or infinity or forever or love, until all that surging, snaky filament threads itself back into the needle’s eye.

(Editors note: This poem originally appeared in Invitation To Wonder: A Journey Through The Seasons (2010 Veriditas Books)

Elizabeth Ayres, author of Invitation to Wonder, Know the Way, Writing the Wave and two Sounds True audio albums, is the founder of the Center for Creative Writing, now celebrating its 22nd anniversary.  Her award-winning newspaper column has been delighting Maryland readers for over four years. Elizabeth lives with two cats, and spends long hours pacing shell-strewn Chesapeake Bay beaches, plucking words from the soft salt breeze.  Her spiritual autobiography, Home After Exile, is forthcoming from Veriditas Books in 2013.

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The photographs of Ray Ramos

Brittany Murphy

John Gilmore and Carolyn Blais on the set of Rosendo’s video Call Out To Me

The Phantom Lady of Coconut Grove

Rosedale Cemetery, Los Angeles

Vine Street, Hollywood

The Bellman, The Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles

Ray Ramos is a native of Venice, California. He’s a writer, director and a photographer. He recently directed the, Call Out To Me, music video for Los Angeles singer-songwriter, Rosendo (featuring his friend, L.A. writer John Gilmore.) And will premier four of his original one act plays in a show called; To Love Somebody, in the fall of 2012 at The Raven Playhouse in North Hollywood, California. He still continues to lives in Venice and enjoys a cold beer (usually a Heineken) whenever possible.

http://www.thatmanray.blogspot.com/
 

Ray Ramos

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“Dress Up” by Rae Armantrout

DRESS UP

To be “dressed”

is to emit

“virtual particles.”

The spirit of “renormalization” is that

an electron

all by itself

can have infinite

mass and charge,

but, when it’s “dressed”…

*

A toddler stares at us

till we look up.

“Flirtatious,” we call it.

She waits

until we get the joke

about being here,

being there.

 

 

Photo by Rosanne Olson

Rae Armantrout’s recent books are Money Shot and Versed, both from Wesleyan University Press. Versed won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A new collection, Just Saying, is forthcoming from Wesleyan in Feb. 2013. Armantrout teaches writing at UC San Diego.

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Portrait Artist Darrel Bevan

Self Portrait

Marilyn Monroe

The Joker, Jack Nicholson

Marlon Brando

Laurel and Hardy

I am a portrait and figure illustrator, specialising in pencils. Colourblind, I focus mainly on black and white images. In my portraits, I attempt to capture reality whilst retaining the freshness of my chosen medium. My figure drawings often explore the contrast of beauty and distortion, and I have a particular fascination with the organic form.

I’ve been drawing, and drawing people, since I was able to hold a pencil. Why? I think drawing was and is a way to control something in my environment, to have some measure of control in a world that is out of control. But why people? And why faces? Well, I’ve always been obsessed by why we are here, why I am here, how man evolved, how we fit into our world, the physical manifestation of personality, physiognomy and expression. I just see people and want to draw them. So I do.

I came out of higher education with a Btec Diploma and an honours Degree, but these were in Three Dimensional Design and Ceramic Sculpure respectively. Drawing is something I always did in my spare time. I have taught in various schools and colleges around the West Midlands and also in Cornwall, including the Eden Project.

https://www.facebook.com/DarrelBevan

Gollum

Clint Eastwood

Aborigine

Boris Karloff Frankenstein’s Monster


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Lyn Lifshin’s “Allen Ginsberg Gives Me a Rose at Art Park, Just Buffalo, Schuper House, June 8, Near Buffalo”

ALLEN GINSBERG GIVES ME A ROSE AT ART PARK, JUST BUFFALO, SCHUPER HOUSE, JUNE 8, NEAR BUFFALO

it wasn’t the first time we met. I’d been

at his place in the East Village with another

writer who refused to believe it

wasn’t safe after dark, insisted we

stroll thru garbage strewn streets at

midnight, not call a cab. Another

time I wish I’d taken a camera or

kept notes, a diary on the places I

read, kept a photo in my head. Those

years it was as if I lived from suitcase to

suitcase, came home only to pack

again. I wrote Glad Day after that trip

or another one like it. I was happy

to be reading with Ginsberg tho I

hardly see myself in the line of the Beats,

never understand why others do. It

was probably a couple of years later,

reading outside in the park. For some

reason I remember standing around for

hours, driftwood colored bleachers.

None of this might be true. I remember

little about the reading: the size of the

audience. It must have been hot. I

know someone brought cold drinks

finally and we all ran toward him. More

than anything I remember Allen Ginsberg

gave me a rose, a beautiful red one,

or was it white? No, it must have been

red because when I carried it thru the air

port gingerly as if I was balancing a

rose of diamonds and glass, everyone

turned and said what a beautiful

and so sweet. Of course it wasn’t the

rose but the Tea Rose perfume I was

wearing. Since the rose came from

Allen Ginsberg I wanted to preserve

it, coated it with dripped candle wax

but it didn’t work so I put it in

plastic, pressed it into the heaviest book

in the house, a folio edition of Shakespeare,

all petals pressed into William’s words

(Editor’s Note: This poem originally appeared in Lyn Lifshin: All the Poets Who Have Touched Me/Desire
Edited by Paul Kareem Tayyar)

Lyn Lifshin’s prizewinning book (Paterson Poetry Award) Before It’s Light was published Winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow Press, following their publication of Cold Comfort in 1997. The Licorice Daughter was published in February 2006 and Another Woman who Looks Like Me was published by Black Sparrow-David Godine in October 2006. (order@godine.com) Also books include A New Film About a Woman in Love with the Dead, March Street Press, Marilyn Monroe, When a Cat Dies, Another Woman’s Story,Barbie Poems, The Daughter I Don’t Have, What Matters Most, and Blue Tattoo. Lifshin has won awards for her non-fiction and edited four anthologies of women’s writing includingTangled Vines, Ariadne’s Thread and Lips Unsealed. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines. Her poem “No More Apologizing” has been called “among the most impressive documents of the women’s poetry movement” by Alicia Ostriker. An update to her Gale Research Projects Autobiographical Series, “On the Outside, Lips, Blues, Blue Lace,” was published in Spring, 2003. Texas Review Press published her poems about the famous, short-lived, beautiful race horse, Ruffian: The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian. New books include Mirrors, August Wind, Novemberly and just out spring 2008, 92 Rapple Drive and Desire. She is working on a collection about poets,Poets, (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially the Lies will be published by World Parade and Tsunami will come from Blue Heron Press. Other forthcoming books include a book about the courageous and riveting race horse, Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness from Texas Review Press, Nutley Pond from Goose River Press, Lost in the Fog from Finishing Line Press, Persephone from Red Hen. For interviews, more bio material, photographs, reviews, a contact, interviews and samples of her work, browse this website: www.lynlifshin.com.

 

 

 

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“Sisyphus Commemorates Labor Day” (Poem & Paintings by John Sokol)

Departure

SISYPHUS COMMEMORATES LABOR DAY

Today’s a holiday: not that I have it off,
or get time-and-a-half or anything,
but I do have a few minutes
to scribble some thoughts.

In the past, during times like this,
I’ve tried to get Ixion’s spin on the situation,
but he’s no help, nor is Tantalus,
who’s always grasping for straws.

I don’t even know why I confide in them.
They, too, are masters and slaves
of the same-old-same-old.

But I’ve been up this hill before. I know all the scars,
pits and protrusions of this pet rock I’m sitting on.
It’s my life. Up, I push. Down, it rolls.

And it’s all so pointless.
I’d rather be stamping out license plates,
or picking up trash on some highway to heaven.

All I ever get from Ixion and Tantalus
is “misery loves company.” When they put on their
woe-is-me faces and start to giggle, I yell over,
‘remember: “one man’s floor is another man’s
ceiling.”’ And they yell back, “it’s the other
way around, stupid.”

But I remember the day this whole place shut down.
It was the day Orpheus came down to fetch Eurydice.
He played his lyre for Pluto, and that old man
started crying like a baby. Persephone plied Orpheus
with pomegranate vodka and eau-de-Lethe chasers.
The birds went silent, and the rivers stood still.
No one spoke, and picket signs went up everywhere.

It didn’t last long, though. C’est la vie, et c’est l’enfer,
as everyone here likes to say.
Most days life seems pretty good. After all,
we’re most comfortable with what we know,
and what we know, is: things could always be worse.
Here, we’re just grunts for the absurd, proletariats of the futile.
And now, we have to get back to it,
because, somehow, there must be
a purpose to what we do.

John Sokol writes and paints in Akron, OH. His paintings and drawings are included in many public and private collections, His poems have appeared in America, Antigonish Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, New Millennium Writings, The New York Quarterly, and Quarterly West, among others. His short stories have appeared in Akros, Descant, Mindscapes, The Pittsburgh Quarterly and other journals. His chapbook, Kissing the Bees, won the 1999 Redgreene Press Chapbook Competition. In the Summer of Cancer, a full collection of his poetry, and The Problem with Relativity (short stories) are his latest books.

On the Road Perilous

Transformation of Actaeon into a Stag

Guardian