Issue 2

Image (Copyright © 2008 Peter Schwartz)

Sally Rosen Kindred

Mary Owens

Zhuang Yisa

Changming Yuan

Peter Schwartz

Nicholas Karavatos

Ingrid Andersen

Wendy Vardaman

Janice Vernon

Daniel Zimmerman

Anne Higgins

Sally Rosen Kindred

Flight

Sparrows of nightbreak, sparrows of moss—
birds of Watauga Creek rise
through sleep to lift me

from small bed to chipped porch
before light dries the grass and splits
the house to waking. This morning we leave

for somewhere far—Richmond, Atlanta,
let my father or mother remember. Mine
is the secret body laying claim. Air

stirs out apples and the silver sea of feet
soft through weeds. The trees
won’t speak: they could be glass, they could rattle

like bells or angels. They might never
take back hands like mine. Moss in the face now:
wet pearls green my cheek. I need

to press into this place, need my lips
on the underside of a broken nest
tipped beneath the sweetgum. They say

we’ll come back, as if back
were a dreaming thing some muddy flapping
could flame awake. I need

to grow bracken wings that kiss
and extinguish this first leaving—
the silent body’s cry,

the marrow’s birds burning.

Sally Rosen Kindred: My chapbook Garnet Lanterns was winner of the 2005 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest, and I received a 2007 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Maryland State Arts Council. My poems have appeared in journals including Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, Spoon River Poetry Review, Passages North, and RUNES.

Mary Owens

Lessons

Your lazy left-step right-step
  puts ground behind you,
  but it's your life
you grind
under your reckless leather.

Your spirit stays a step ahead;
  shakes your shoulders,
  slaps your face-
puts cats on the road
‘neath your feet.

Left step tick, right step tock,
  and your countdown sounds
  while you gaze behind,
tossing seconds like sand,
and whistling.

A stray cat  follows you
  like a poor grade does a child;
  but you don't study, just keep walking,
now it trips you-
left step right step.

You disentangle
  your feet from the cat,
  your favorite tune fills your mind;
the cat shakes his head and trips you
repeatedly, through your lifetime.

Orchid Prayer

A deep purple orchid
  and its graceful bend;
  the shy loveliness

so exquisite as to send
  a stab of pain, the depth of
  which I willingly embrace;

makes me wonder,
  is the prayer in my pain,
or the gratitude on my face?

Mary Owens writes poetry, fiction, essays, plays and personal histories, and has won awards for poetry, short story, essay, and playwriting. Her first poetry manuscript, What to Whisper When I Pass includes The Fortress of Your Face, a top 100 winner in Writer’s Digest’s 2007 Writing Competition. As a member of Silver Creek Writers she speaks on Writing for Social Change, and conducts workshops and seminars. www.silvercreekwriters.com

Zhuang Yisa

A Gradual Acceptance

In Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy
of a little girl with extraordinary imagination
she could draw the way out of her prison
with chalk (first the outline of door, then
a slight teasing of stones
to push back the barrier
between here and the preferred
elsewhere) the world as she knew it
before she was shot dead
by her stepfather
was a world, given a chance
to continue
(in the way all things continue
living nonetheless, even under the judgment
that constitutes war), could bring
something of a glimpse
of what lies behind the perceived
meaninglessness of the living
and the dying, or the perceived meaningfulness
of this steady, indifferent motion
pulling or pushing us
towards what we can only hope to be
a gradual acceptance
of our own helplessness against
happiness
and the pain that gives it form:
one slow breath after another,
each making its way out
of the expiring body
that has long since been emptied of regrets.
But the little girl knew what it meant
to love, and what love asked
of her: pain, then
no pain; only the peace now, returning
the dream
to complete her sleep. The dream
is not the nightmare, but of the living.

Joint

Penniless and facing eviction,
Billie Holiday slipped into a jazz joint
with Travellin’ All Alone
and reduced the audience to tears.

Did I love as much
as you thought you did?

The stud next to me
belted out a Faye Wong’s number
in the original key.
Then an Anita Mui’s
about grief and the letting go.

The doctor said you could
die in five years.
Would I still think of you, then,
as much
and with such regrets
of not knowing
how to return whatever that was
you gave, and made bliss
seem something that was
even possible for me – as I do whenever I am
this lonely?

Even now, nothing
would bring you back.

That night, I started
to speak to an invisible being
I hoped was watching over you.

Is this what we are
reduced to, in the end,
by love? If love it was
and is,

these prayers for forgiveness
we cannot bear to receive.

Zhuang Yisa lives in Singapore. His poetry has been published or forthcoming in Yuan Yang (Hong Kong), Eight Octaves, Houston Literary Review, Red River Review, The Smoking Poet, Lily Literary Review and SubtleTea, amongst others. He also reviews for The Substation Magazine, an online arts journal based in Singapore.

Changming Yuan

Fragments

If I lend my soul-shaded mind
To the other me in the mirror
Then I would become a human
Reflection of my authentic being

Long and abstract is this process
To relocate my lukewarm soul
In a world of engulfing glass
Its cold surface is all its bold depth

Let me be as careful as I can
Not to break this spirited mirror
Or I would be cut to blood
By the sharp shreds of selfhood

Changming Yuan grew up in rural China and authored three books before moving to Canada. Currently Yuan teaches writing in Vancouver and has had about 200 poems published or forthcoming in literary journals, which include the Dalhousie Review, Descant, Exquisite Corpse, the London Magazine, Rampike, Sentence, and Vallum.

Peter Schwartz

Faith

“Faith lives through three stages:
summoning, testing, and thankfulness”

1. summoning

there’s medicine in repetition; I
puppet myself to build a presence
the presence of God

a hundred pseudonyms slip from my hands
from my hard fortress of little names
to name the ordinary

a hundred more to soften my reservations
like an old love letter.

2.

I test the strength of my resolve
that repetition will be my medicine

I place a silver locket in my
foothold and invite storms of birds
to punish the picture inside
with daylight

it remains; another faithful phoenix reveals her
working reflexes under the needle
of midnight

I watch her migrate past the quicksand of shadow
on shadow and thank God for that part
of the sky.

3. thankfulness

repetition, repetition; you’re the roof
I lost at twelve, the ransom I hallucinated
at twenty

the signature I walked away from at
twenty-seven then the trigger that woke
me at thirty

but now I’m old enough to know
that the lightning of loneliness ends
at my window.

Peter Schwartz has been practicing the craft of poetry for over 20 years. His work has appeared in over 100 print and online journals. Those journals include: Asheville Poetry Review, Epicenter, and VOX to name a few. He’s an art editor for the literary sites Mad Hatters’ Review and Dogzplot; his own artwork can be seen at: www.sitrahahra.com.

Nicholas Karavatos

Dear Kama

To like you to desire you to
act like an adult for
personal gain isn’t
our condition the highest form of love?

Touch me dearly, Kama
though I am not Hindu and have
made a whore of the law.

Be my hookah and I will be your hubblee-bubblee.

I want to touch your Christian love
the alms all humanity you affect
for I am poor in spirit and need
relief in body bared and held dear
dear Kama. Desire

laid down and done in
a state of
power outside judgment.

Nicholas Karavatos was a manual worker by day and a poet-musician by night before going into debt to complete his formal education. A graduate of Humboldt State University in Arcata and New College of California’s Poetics Program in San Francisco, he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. His poems have appeared in After the Fallen, Blackbox, Certain Stones, Cherry Bleeds, Country Activist, debt, Earth First! Radical Environmental Journal, EcoNews, Edge City Magazine, Humboldt-Central American Solidarity Newsletter, Juke Jar, Log, Minotaur, mirage[periodical], Paisley Moon, PoetsWest Online, Prophetic Voices, Prosodia, Red Fez, San Fernando Poetry Journal, Smack, Steelhead Special, Surfing the Mosh, there., Thieves Jargon, Tight, Travelling Poet, Toyon, Unlikely Stories and What the Hell. He returned to the United States and read in a dozen cities during the summer of 2008 before returning to AUS in the United Arab Emirates. http://nicholaskaravatos.blogspot.com/

Ingrid Andersen

Bound

Holding white-knuckled to
ties from every side
binding me to
this life, this self, this now.
Feeling the ropes pulling free,
bruising hands, twist by twist.

To open my arms
palms up, fingers wide,
to surrender the tensions
in which I stand
is unthinkable,
irresistible:
inevitable.

Shema

“My prophets and prophets,” mourns the Lord.

His sad and weary messengers
who see,
who hear

and are not understood.

Ingrid Andersen (born 1965) is a South African poet. Andersen was born in Johannesburg , lived in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape from 2003-2007 and now lives in Kwa-Zulu Natal. She worked as a theatre publicist in the 1980s, the days of political protest theatre, at the Market Theatre and PACT, amongst others. As South Africa began to rebuild after the first democratic elections, she became active in community development, first as CEO of the Rosebank Homeless Association and then at Rhodes University as the Community Engagement Manager. She currently works as the co-ordinator for the Pietermaritzburg Anti-Xenophobia Coalition. She is also researching for her Masters in Community Development Theology. Seventeen years of writing culminated in her debut poetry collection, Excision, which was published in 2005. It was reviewed in Wordstock, the National Arts Festival WordFest newspaper, as “well-crafted, controlled and concise…a strong debut collection containing sensitive and poignant sketches…Andersen wields her pen with surgical precision” (Warren 2005). Her poems have appeared in several South African literary journals, including including Imprint, Green Dragon, Aerial, Carapace and Slugnews. She presented her work at WordFest at the National Arts Festival in 2004 and 2005. (adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Andersen)

Wendy Vardaman

Mother Contemplates Paradise

Walk into winter dazzle, sun-light
bouncing off every blank and blanketed object,
listen to traffic’s intensified roar,
each particulate car
part of the total stream, like blown
flakes that saturate this blue-sky air;
they’re everywhere: the storm
that echoes beyond the storm’s life.
Wind whips loose edges of thin
pants that do nothing sub-zero
to stand between blade and skin.
It’s all a blur—sound, sight,
sense—except for this: one dry
leaf cartwheeling over drifts, and one
wheel chair making slow but steady
progress across the wide street.
This wind passes through that body
too, gathers to powder
us both into a million snow-bright particles
dispersed with no particular care,
to release what, if anything, remains:
puff that joins the hurricane.

Wendy Vardaman, Madison, WI, has a Ph.D. in English from University of Pennsylvania. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Riffing on Strings, Letters to the World, Poet Lore, Poemeleon, qarrtsiluni, Main Street Rag, Nerve Cowboy, damselfly,Free Verse, Wisconsin People &Ideas, Women’s Review of Books, Rain Taxi Review, and Portland Review. When not writing, she home schools two of her three children and works at the children’s theater, Young Shakespeare Players.

Janice Vernon

breathtaking

breathtaking
        that in my dreaming was my waking
that in my body was a center,
        a hole
in which lay the whole
        not mine but all connecting to all
and through this place
        near heart and ribs
an opening
        where before sat fear
guarded on either side
        by yes and no
and with one look at these
        and one deep breath
they were let go
        allowing light
and lightness long hidden
        and
breathtaking.

Janice Vernon, at home now in East Tennessee, USA, near the Great Smokey Mountains. Work life included teaching and practicing law, and now happily back to a learning mode….relative to the likes of gardening, Yoga, and the use of language to describe the indescribable. No terminal degrees yet!

Daniel Zimmerman

entertaining angels

you never know until later.
no strut, no swagger, no wings.
just something odd about the conversation,
a gyroscope that never wavers.

fireflies in daylight, faintly aglow
when clouds obscure the sun.
their lingo only slightly out of date
or minting tomorrow’s slang

often in the same sentence. we fail to see them
as stylistic imperfections, our idiolects
deafening us, as if only others have accents.
these strangers don’t quite sound

from around here. we make
allowances, but don’t introduce them
to friends. they talk the shirt off your back
& walk away naked.

Anne Higgins

Outside Santa Fe , New Mexico

Sanctuario de Chimayo,
Your brown arms surround me.
I kneel at the bowl wide bath deep hole
in the earth floor,
in the deepest recess of your house.
Powder fine dirt sifts through my fingers.
Brown woman of the Mexican desert,
breath warm and musty,
maker of tamales with Guadalupe,
invite me in to gather the brown flour.

Anne Higgins teaches English and Theology at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg Maryland . She is a member of the Daughters of Charity, and is a graduate of Saint Joseph College , Emmitsburg, the Johns Hopkins University , and the Washington Theological Union. She has had about seventy poems published, in YANKEE, COMMONWEAL, SPIRITUALITY AND HEALTH, The Melic Review, and a variety of small magazines. Her book of poetry, AT THE YEAR’S ELBOW, was published by the Mellen Poetry Press in 2000, and republished by Wipf and Stock in 2006. Her second book of poetry, SCATTERED SHOWERS IN A CLEAR SKY, was published by Plain View Press in 2007. A chapbook, Pick It Up and Read, will be published by Finishing Line Press in the Fall of 2008.