Issue 3

Image (Copyright © 2009 Peter Schwartz)

Annie Finch

James Lineberger

Peter Hughes

Douglas Basford

Peter Schwartz

Ash Krafton

Mary Belardi Erickson

Jim Rioux

Tendai R. Mwanaka

Annie Finch

Goddess

The gravity of goddess moves above
my eyes, when I look up like someone’s child.
There is no spoken sentence. All she moves
Will leave. And I will always know she smiled
(she stays, so we both stay both quiet and wild).
She looks down until her death is unashamed
Undimming holding like receding caves,
Waving inside our time with grains and waves
of growing, and in calls of ancient names.
She does not take me out from presences—
She stays to go—her presence is the loss.
And now I know each knowing’s made of senses,
Looking up or looking down. Or this. Or moss.

*3rd Prize Winner of the 2009 Numinous Magazine Poetry Prize

Annie Finch is the author of several books of poetry, including The Encyclopedia of Scotland, Eve, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses: An Epic Poem Libretto. She has also written or edited books about poetry, most recently The Body of Poetry. She lives in Maine where she directs the Stonecoast low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her website is at www.anniefinch.com.

James Lineberger

everything i start out to say

everything i start out to say
has come to be
self-serving even
these so-called
prayers
these earnest claims to innocence
this goddamn
snivelling beneath my bridehood’s
veil
but oh god my god

my only

please just try to believe
me and accept me
the way i keep on telling
everyone
i believe in you

Peter Hughes

Monday 8th October

they tied up the Temple of Apollo
in a canvas bag to keep the rain off
now it can’t see over the vale
to the sea past the charred leaves
of Arcadia for miles
conceptual art in pewter
copper & matt black
the dark edges of the road
feathered with soot
& printed shadows flicked the way
the roaring wind of fire went
limping & sprinting
some of those caught
on the tinder slopes died
some were elsewhere
& lost everything
but their scorched hunger
& a sifting ache
for continuity that still
whispers the landscape
hurts most where local people
through dignity pride or modesty
had already pared things down
in their old age
which was swept away
in one the century’s brightest nights
black empty tins on the lintel

Peter Hughes is a writer and artist who is based on the Norfolk coast where he runs Oystercatcher Press. His own poetry publications include The Metro Poems, Paul Klee’s Diary, Blue Roads, Nistanimera, The Sardine Tree and Physical Geography. His work on Berlioz can be found on Intercapillary Space, whilst the Pistol Tree Poems continue to emerge on Great Works.

The Summer of Agios Dimitrios is a sequence of poems written during a seven-week stay in the Mani region of southern Greece in the autumn of 2007. There are 49 poems, one for each day of the stay. The fishing village of Agios Dimitrios is where Peter and his wife Lynn were based, but ‘The Summer of Agios Dimitrios’ also means an Indian summer.

Douglas Basford

Hunt

God, when I feel like a pedestrian
compared to you, gamely propelled a pace
further, then another, but with no chase
in my heart's acerbic quail-hound rhythm,

not only am I driven to question
why it is I get jittery in the same space
as a drawn gun, but also how my face,
reddened and squallish, is something anyone
would want to see.
                                It's angelic, claims my wife.

If you let Heston's coifed Moses come down
to us, with cocked rifle practically in hand,
how can I breathe easy if I stand
prey, hunter, faithful pointer in one, alone?

I think I’ve been asking this all my life.

Douglas Basford teaches at SUNY-Buffalo, and his work appears or is
forthcoming in Poetry, Subtropics, Two Lines, Sewanee Theological
Review, The National Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Jacket, and
elsewhere. 

Peter Schwartz

the conservationist

I’ve shed layers of worldy
curtains until I barely was-

I’ve crawled from post to
post for mouthfuls of any-

thing to grasp the price
of my conservation.

Peter Schwartz’s work has been featured on such sites as Arsenic Lobster, Diagram, Opium Magazine; and in such journals as The Silt Reader and the Asheville Poetry Review. His third chapbook ‘ghost diet’ will be published by Altered Crow Press in late 2009. See the extent of his shenanigans at: www.sitrahahra.com.

Ash Krafton

Line

The difference
between mystery and darkness,
challenge and despair,
doubt and defeat:
love.

Unconditional love
surrounds us,
strengthens us,
saves us from ourselves.

Love offers itself
like a favor
when we feel unworthy.

It is love
from which we may draw,
and love that we return
even as we share it.

This love is the line
we use to draw
the shape of
God.

Ash Krafton: I am an emerging writer who has earned a number of distinctions in various national writing contests for essay, poetry, and novel-length fiction. Most recently, my novel Bleeding Hearts won grand prize in the 2008 Maryland Writers’ Association writing competition.

Mary Belardi Erickson

As a Leaf

left at last by that wanting tree
to fall, is what you view

could be what you become
as the ground, anywhere, takes hold of you

for its own flowing moments:
like floating onto your back

held buoyantly by water’s body
looking up far to swimming clouds

feeling who you really are
in the stillness a dreaming shape

having been mesmerized by blues,
grateful for being free from gnashing
waves of wind and pelting sprays.

This is where you come to in the falling
away, like the leaf from its season—

drifting down, until a gust may lift it,
and the tree’s other leaves, like you waiting

to be transformed in a remarkable rush
toward a spot inviting settlement

somewhere else, into being there—
more important than flight’s feel
or your look—

stilled motion floating peacefully
attentive to your center
as on a watered ground.

At first veined shapes
and then still here humbly formless

having reached time’s outlet
into unnamed ceaseless currents
of knowing.

So finding a leaf falling or about to fall,
and making yourself suited for water:

touching ground means finding
waters, yourself flowing from time
to time.

*2nd Prize Winner of the 2009 Numinous Magazine Poetry Prize

Mary Belardi Ericksonn majored in English and minored in Religion at Augsburg College, Minneapolis. She further studied literature and writing at both Drake and Purdue Universities. She has taught, and now helps people with their health care and volunteers as a musician, playing clarinet. She reads and enjoys others’ poems, and writes. Forthcoming is publication in Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems this Summer, 2009.

Jim Rioux

Gnosis

Behind my eyes, slugs haul the moon,
my spine a godsnapped whip…The sky
knows no language— examine then
these specimens: my blood hum-hungry,
climbing high into the night, the earth
a scorched-black bible…I confess
only to the heresy of sloth,
the orthodoxy of oblivion.
I’ll say lonely, but mean something
else: days hinged clutch by clutch
with alien hands, the mind blooming
hollow over specificity…
Lord, my tongue is pierced with bird bones—
forgive me then these singing teeth.

Tendai R Mwanaka

I Have Achieved Me

A palimpsest bliss is the green glimmer of the sun corona
People in huge huge numbers as they dips into shadows and their meanings are lost

The colours of the distant rocks; grey, gold- a deep amber
A line of brown- grey pale-pasted ribbons of rocks are like Hues of an egret’s feathers flying past me, the past-
Is like rocks flying on their own fingertips

The faint sound of voices fixing into my memories and I restowing the inward view and give myself a little rope to haul myself inwards
I know it myself, I have always known it, that something is broken inside me

But I will tunnel in like victims always surviving the abuse by speaking to fish in my own dreams without even the need to respond to myself
This is an ancient conceit

There is nothing I can do now but don’t ever think that I am a coward for once I was human
And I loved her, those wild wild shores
And I am now thankful that I have achieved me

For you are studying me and I am the tamed records but you only have a face to measure me by

Don’t sheath your blade but draw the blood of your finger
Who owns this river passage that flows from your finger?
Not you, none of us, no one is— more transparent than these maddened waters that are the blood waters of our fingers

I Cannot See You

What adventures have you experienced from animal furs to human garments?
What hardships of your youth are the long steps of the ladder?

We would make another long leap but we need water rings because this room would reject us.
I mean here—, this time.
Testing us—, this time is always testing us.

Too much has happened, too much and there is no honest reality anymore.
And if you don’t trust me, I must pity you for trust is my first reality.

It is the designs of my religion.
Wheels and wheels upon wheels rolling like an insane wheel and even this will go—,

You are looking for another frontier?
We could go there and never return and we will grow, we will evolve!
Are there any strange animals where you are going?

Find it in your palms, this planet for you are holding it—-
Find it!
You anger knows it where your reason does not.
Cling to it
Wallow in it.

How does a child knows it and what would a child choose?
Your youth still demands that you be given your moment.

But if one of you dies—
It is only the required event for one direction is as good as another.
You cannot go back—

The sun comes up and sand is soft beneath out feet.
This is what we drink for sand is our enemy.
The longer I endure it the more vulnerable I am.

I love you by right of loneliness and I read you by your emotions.
This is the worth of your measure-
The motivation for the leap is lost in this revelation.

My love does not discard, accumulate, stimulate, delude.
My love is without centre, self,
My love has no desires of results, goals, perfections, visions—-.
My love accepts your nakedness.

You say you are not arguing, but that I permit you to know nothing else.
This derives from our ancestors for we can create nothing, but ourselves.

We can see our tracks on the sand but our tracks do not have flesh.
We will go—, but may never return.
And I cannot follow you because I cannot see you

Tendai R Mwanaka: I have published several poetry and short stories in UK, USA, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, INDIA AND SOUTH AFRICAN MAGAZINES, inclusive of the following; wordgathering, decanto, winningwriters, earlscourt, newcontrast, itch, poetrylifeandtimes,languageandculture, kota, kritya,barnwood,beyond the rainbow, curious record,idiom and I have work forthcoming in decanto, newcontrast, wordgathering, snailpress and newcoin