Image (Copyright © 2009 Tammy Ho)
Winners of the 2009 Numinous Magazine Poetry Prize:
1st Prize – Tina Simpson’s “From Here”
2nd Prize - Mary Belardi Erickson’s “As A Leaf”
3rd Prize – Annie Finch’s “Goddess”
plus New Work by:
Archive for the ‘Issue 4’ Category
Issue 4
In Issue 4, Winners of the Numinous Magazine Poetry Prize, announcements on October 31, 2009 at 8:00 amTina Simpson
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:59 amA Dreamscape
At a pinnacle, crown in space–
in a closed room,
of only mirrors.
We admired the reflections all around.
Watched them split and roll,
split and roll themselves
again and again.
There were many mornings looming,
and even-tides breaking
by guiltless, divine aggression.
Still there was Grace, and Mending.
Frequencies lilting–
One billion tiny pulses weaving light.
An instant entrancement off swirling zephyrs–
Jade to violet, to cerulean, to gold.
Like many kaleidoscopes bleeding,
churning and seething
with sweet scent of dew,
and demise.
At a pinnacle, crown in space–
in a closed room,
of only mirrors.
We admired the reflections all around.
Watched them split and roll,
split and roll themselves
again and again.
Save the words to tell us
because we already knew,
These–
Our Silent Mind Skies Eternally Streaming
along to a cadence felt identical
in our veins.
We knew–
This was making Love,
and sinking.
Surrendering,
and rising.
This was war,
and acceptance.
Laughter,
and mourning.
This was arrival,
and departure.
A Wildflower’s efflux,
and death.
And when we awoke,
we were flooded with warm refulgence–
A new learned endearment
toward these fragile bodies,
trying to contain.
From Here
I saw it writhing. I saw torches and kings.
I saw it learn beside itself,
I saw it beside its own dank pit of polished reason–
to never become another apathetic groove in a modern thimble.
You speak of the storm assailing you, always
how the remorseless squealing steals inward
through breaks in the squalid coop,
where you stay, where you curl–
one inverted feather on your back,
twitching codes between the skies.
I watched you blend into your Want– like blood of black tar.
I watched the Want as it crept over your peripherals,
dimming your heart and window senses.
I watched the shadow spill forth a mephitic companion
to all your days.
Then mania–
stirred by some sacred bond to your compass,
and giant stethoscope placed to every rip of the earth.
My Dangerous Angel, my Sempiternal Love–
I never made such a promise,
claiming righteous filter to the Wind
and I have been long unreasoned by a twin flame–
by a single finger gliding down my vertebrae
stopping to press the hollows
stopping for time, untold.
and the slides of ever-running iridescence,
and the gorgeous cavalcade
soaring eons behind the glint– the glint
the single violent split
reflected always in our eyes now, a yellow blaze.
Were our entire lives to be just as subtle
as a scintilla dwelling in the intersection of All Remembrance,
accepting the simple, but golden ‘hellos’
from older, now brighter friends?
and can we–
can we leave our doors open throughout this night,
fear not the loss of these senses,
and fly off with the collapse of poles?
Says a red fidget rising through all quiet things
nothing chased will fill you, nothing cupped will ring.
*1st Prize Winner of the 2009 Numinous Magazine Poetry Prize
Jupiter
Jupiter is visible tonight.
People are busy walking, counting minutes,
crunching minds,
while a vagrant in the park
with a golden-painted face
and feathers in her hair
climbs the bronze wing of Minerva
crosses her ankles, then curtsies slowly
keeping her eyes fixed
on the white-blue gem in the sky.
She elegantly, knowingly extends
her arms above her head
like two hollow reeds–
the white-blue pours through them
and welcomes her to becoming.
The four Gallieans
make Love at two and ten.
Love Me Better by Silence
All of these things, and covetous Lovers
they leave my hands ashen,
and starved.
Do not pour your name into me.
Love me better by Silence,
with me.
Do not go roaming in my ruins,
with intent on tracing me there–
that tiny coal city deserted and charred
where I once wickedly blazed.
Do not go searching for the thing blackest in me,
so you can face it toward the sun
or hold it tight to your chest as if it were yours to have.
It will hiss,
and scatter to the wind
leaving your hands ashen,
and starved.
Tina Simpson: For as long as I can remember I have let fragments of my mother’s telephone conversations or snippets from someone’s lost shopping list waltz around my mind until they became golden, secret codes for the magic that this world possesses. I spent almost the entire summer after my twenty-first birthday in the seemingly enchanted St. Francis Woods behind my mother’s house releasing words to the wind and listening for their echo to return, revealing new meanings and richer realms of existence. I began working them into poems and short prose pieces, sometimes filling an entire notebook in just one week. By the end of that summer I craved the inspiration of the city and enrolled at Columbia College Chicago where I currently major in Creative Non-fiction, and minor in Poetry. I am fascinated by human consciousness, energy work, and cosmology. Through the process of writing I am able to explore my spirituality in connection with nature, and an aching passion for the unknown.
Martin Burke
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:58 amThe April Navigations
April. April’s silence. A mile away the river turns.
Will the bell ring and the sailor return?
Will the harbours be safe or full of flotsam?
Who can say? Time and history await the fated moment
As birds circle above the boats but to what, to what intent?
Who might answer the cry of the gull?
Who might answer the cry of these times?
Alpha Christ –you are the bright star our longing turns towards
Yet we must also wait the fated ringing of the bell.
April. April and silence. The earth is fallow but not yet ripe.
I strike the gong of the sea and watch the water shudder.
Ships turn on the tide.
Gulls swivel and swerve but the harbours are unsafe.
There is no passage guaranteed a destination
And on the sea they travel by the old negations.
What now might we say?
What are the offerings we might bring to healing altars?
What are the words to guide us safely home?
The nets are cast in hopelessness and hope
So what song shall be sung?
Sing the dirge of the sea or the lamentation of the heart
As it turns with the tide that is turning.
O may the tide bring all sailors home and make all harbours safe
For we turn with the tides yet do not know
The flow from the undertow
Will there be faith in this time?
Will the bell ring to wholesome ends?
And will there be singing of the Gloria?
Alpha Christ –you have woven this harsh fate.
History comes with claims and needs and we are meshed
Between the singing and the wailing of this time.
Yet if not into your open hands,
If not into your healing glance
If not to these things to what can we turn as the tide turns
And calls all sailors home?
O we are those sailors in unstable ships
Of which the keel is long since broken
As are the shanties we sing to your name
While flames flare the rigging of the mind
Will the bell ring and the sailor return?–many ask.
Will there be that hope for which all long?
Will there be the healing and the grace?
Alpha Christ, only you can say,
Only you can bind the wounds of intemperate speech
And make our mouths whole.
The bell rings and the sailors wail
Though we no longer know the language of the sea.
We no longer know which wind to trust or which to turn away from.
Alpha Christ – if the boats return to wholesome harbours
Will there be singing and pennants flapping in the wind
Or will the cold silence of the world cover all again?
The river turns and so I turn to where it turns
Having no option but to go where voyagers go
Having no map beyond the maps of longing and desire.
Time and history sing the desolation of the world,
Time and history –allies and enemies,
Alpha Christ – this is the harsh fate you weave.
It is April and there is silence in the world
Yet on all things no healing balm
While the child that was born in December cries and cries.
What language do we speak that confuses our hearts?
What language might help us face the turning?
What pennants flap in the winds of this time?
Time and history . Time and all the desolations of this time
And history writing the script of our lives.
O who would claim to be the one escaping from the flow?
Alpha Christ, all turn with the tide but to what do we turn
When silence conspires with time and history?
Yet you remain our bright star of hope.
We kneel at broken altars.
We sing the psalms of desolation.
We pray –if that is what these words can be called.
The buoy-bell at the harbour mouth is ringing,
There is a thick and swirling mist upon the water,
Guidance seems withheld -we are an abandoned generation;
The undertow is faster than the tide that turns,
The undertow brings a weird music to the world.
And many, many sing it.
Yet to escape such flows and tides,
To walk in the clear light of a given morning in April
And sings the psalms of Gloria
Yes, this is the wish that the heart longs for
And this is the altar it kneels before saying
Alpha Christ you are out bright star of hope.
Songs across the waters of night
As the flames flare the rigging of the ships
O I would sing –I would sing as if healing came into the world
And all was granted ease from sorrow and pain,
Or granted at least a harbour to rest in
While the buoy-bell rings the approaching storm.
April. April and silence
I strike the gong of the sea and watch the water shudder.
The tuning fork of the world has been struck
And this is a harsh history.
Son of man, if you do not weave a gentle fate
Then what will our fate be?
I strike the gong and watch the water shudder.
I strike the gong of the sea.
Martin Burke: I have published nine books of poetry in Ireland, UK, USA, & Algeria. My plays have been performed in Belgium and the USA. My new book, due next month from the Utter Press, Ireland, is Exiles & Redemptions.
Aristotle Sinclair
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:57 amDual Realization of Illusion’s Many Findings
My dream awoke me.
I in a dark room.
Standing, I wrapped my arms
around contours of the room’s
sole emotion.
On the black-blurred length
of the curtain’s frail physique, a
shape.
The shape was an unknown dimension.
Similar to a story told while wearing
a hood, though humidity required
further explanation.
The open mouth of heat
warned of the warmth made worse,
as my hood became more intense,
wrapping its strings into a glorified
X.
I awoke from awakening.
On my bed, a puddle of an outline,
a body’s curled outline.
Darkness dissipated.
On the frail physique of the curtain’s
now clarity, a shape:
distance had drawn a shadow, relaxing,
leaning a soothing semblance
of prior position of secondary
rest.
Misplaced
Away, her breath whispered,
hands of my ears
grasped at nothing, whisper
broke into collective inexistence.
Her back
became abstract, a wall of fissures
and holes, allowing stone to resemble
bones of an acclimated body
though distance has outlined with
blur and re-identification.
Unknown of the Elemental Excellence
Earth was an empty room
required nothingness
to survive and inhale
tones of ontological
consciousness. She lived
and loved the absence
of fully-clothed language.
Her naked tongue spoke
only truths of invented
purpose and necessary
thread count. I entered
her earth, here in a room of
desolate landscapes. As
I spoke into her slightly listening,
my tongue approached slowly
as to not alarm the perfect being
with inability to posit propaganda.
Intellect of the Blindfolded
The poet stated
he understood genius
as the corporeal manifestation
found when lifting
the bodiless body
of a stillborn stone
bludgeoned by bountiful
remarks of wind’s scolding
cold.
However
as the poet gently
repositioned the dead stone’s
altered body,
the silhouetted shadow
of the ebony-curled, white
striped stone
spoke a language
unseen by the closed eyes
of the genius without
hope.
Aristotle Sinclair’s website: http://aristotlesinclair.blogspot.com/
Taylor Graham
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:56 amYour Secret,
how you survived that overnighter,
wandering as if mindless
off trails into untracked dust.
Maybe you were following a pillar
of cloud to the horizon;
thinking this is where Jesus spent
forty days and nights of temptation,
the devil flexing his craft.
What voices does the wind take?
A searcher knows fatigue,
dehydration, hyperthermia, big words
for letting go. For visions.
What grace in a mirage’s cup of water?
Was it a sign from heaven,
the raven flying overhead, dipping
its wings then banking, turning so the sun
struck just so – a raven blinding
angel-white? Is that what made you
change your course? Or at night
as you tried to pray yourself to sleep,
maybe the stars sent coded messages.
We found you. For years I’ve
replayed the story in my mind. But
I could never say what saved you.
Alyssa, A Paradigm
Who steals a childhood?
June’s a fly-away blue wind.
What do elm-trees know?
A girl – no, three girls,
mother and daughters at play.
Behind his fences,
hedges over-green the walls,
shadows trick and tease.
If at dark you listen soft
as nighthawk, can you
hear the untaught laughter fly?
Above the tent-top
so many constellations.
A backyard slumber
party – how many years can
a ghost story last?
Will he let the sweet
alyssum’s tiny white blooms
show bright in the sun?
Flowers answer to their names
when a spring breeze comes to call.
Three golden finches
caged, singing inhuman words –
who will set them free?
Wind Today
End of August, almost fall,
the eucalyptus is wild
with it, blue oaks scattering
leaf-confetti. And now
overhead, a shadow of the wind –
two, three buzzards
casting their dark circles.
Underneath, wind
or wing strikes the dead
branch of an oak –
talons, eye of hawk.
Look higher.
Her mate far over-sailing
buzzards. This is how
the heart hunts
for a living
in this lift of wind.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in California. Her poems have appeared in American Literary Review, International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review. Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press) was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.
Paul Vreeland
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:55 amLot’s Wife I
Pound, pound, pound, our fists upon your door, “It’s not fair.” Pound, pound, pound
Not fair.
Are you not home? Where else would you be? Do you lie there in the backroom with blinking eyes staring at the ceiling fearful of the storm you know will arrive presaged by the thunder drums, prison of dark skies Do you cower behind the blue shutters and fear-locked door Lights turned off, every appliance unplugged, the canary cage covered You make a forced entry into an imitation of night and wonder why your prayers for light are not answered. You close the door hoping that company will arrive to save you.
And we do, We come, stand on the other side hearts unbalanced, the scales suddenly askew with the weight of unshed tears while a river flows between us carrying the stench of incontinence and recent history
If I would be, could be, who you think I am the lesser sister long dead, her undisciplined desires once unbecoming, cover-hidden She beckons and would be your beacon, signal of hope Come, she says. Enough of the tarrying (How that word is gone too, like Gomorrah )
What you hear are echoes, voices like starlight that have taken a thousand years to reach us from places no longer there, across a matter of faith
Come, she says. Cross over, don’t look back The leash of your life so light now, the tension slight, that of a minnow yearning the incomprehensible bait.
You could let your breath ease, fail You could let the silver clasp fall clatter to the floor awaken the others to your terminal silence
Pound, pound, pound, our fists upon your door, “It’s not fair.” Pound, pound, pound
Not fair.
No rocket-science limbo a hundred-thousand pages swallow our petitions ten-million angry words You rest, your grimmace a blinking red light “You don’t understand” blink, blink. “You don’t understand.” blink, “Yet. . .”
So why are those who do, so veiled? Are they sworn not to reveal the secret mantra? the sacred password? Is the membership so damned exclusive?
Come now, she says, don’t look back. Come and be reunited with lovers who would hold you Here the ties that bind are flaccid now, the colourful balloons appear to ascend while the heavy shell of your world gravity-pulled, sinks into their hands.
Come, she says, don’t look back There where hollow statues of the once proud stand like obelisks hewn from the white stone, stalactites strong on the hillside sculpted from halite accretions the tear-salts of other lost souls,
Come, she says, do not let them frame your likeness, empty hearted, another miscalculated marker of vanity randomly grave-yarded. Come, give it up.
Pound, pound, pound, our fists upon your door, “It’s not fair.” Pound, pound, pound
Not fair.
Lot’s Wife II
Winston Burleigh bought Lot 's wife, who would have thought.
Transformed, born again she was just another block of salt they carried from the Farmers Coop and dropped in the back of his half-ton just another lick he staked in the south pasture down by that scraggy remnant of an orchard down where Dennison's Creek is just about dried up now.
He hung her for his small herd, thirty-seven holsteins that came for the shade and loved her, gave her another chance until the deer came not for the apples, they loved her more kissed her to oblivion.
Sapiencia
Rising, dreams in Spanish fall away, remnants, in the wake of my ship headed now for a day filled with prayers for the departed, for those souls that crowd around taking in the rarified strata of air.
Imparting a certain divine-intoxicated madness, they would turn my thoughts, the stronger ones, my heart, not for me to see, or know, in the daylight, day-job conventional sense, but in that sentiment of knowing, rooted deeper down, where more than bone is buried where truth trickles and meanders with intention, flows, cell-to-cell, the ever, slow morphing of biological structures, sure as time’s pendule, building out of the decay, molecule by molecule the Kingdom of God from the ground up the slow, creeping dawn-like emergence of stately networks of skeletal art holding aloft incomprehensible visions peopled first, by those unaware, then occasional recognition, certain as the daylight of the day-job convention, the pulse-signals in my veins, certain as my arrival.
The Fall
The boy opened his eyes as he lay on the meadow hill stared up at the blue sky feeling the pain in his back didn’t know yet whether he could move.
He saw the sky for what it was—a canvas of grandeur so very far away knew that he was under it, awake for the first time no longer in the garden of his dreams, the kind of awake that never goes away
He turned his head slightly, looked up into the branches of the tree —an apple tree, but there were no apples, it being budding spring.
It came to him now, the remembrance of his climb of summer last, the effort of his untrained hand, the jamming of the rusty saw in the deepening score he made in the green wood, until he gave up. No reason for the work, only his quitting.
Beside him lay the broken saw-wounded branch that carried him down today.
No apple, no snake, his fall is not that story, only an innocent justice. And besides, the woman who would tempt him was waiting years away in a future where he would carry the living pain, with him constant like the ever-nudging assertion of his first regret.
Paul Vreeland’s works have appeared in CV2, Grain, The Caribbean Writer, Orison, The Baháí World, and The Toronto Quarterly. A world traveler and freelance editor, he writes from a home-base in Prince Edward Island .
Leonard Kress
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:55 amMirrors
When we were slaves in Egypt, the Pharaoh outlawed sex,
even between husbands and wives, our men forbidden
to sleep at home. What did we daughters of Israel do?
We went down to the banks of the Nile and drew buckets
of water filled with tiny fish. We cooked some of them,
sold some of them to buy food and wine for our husbands
and wandered out to them in the grueling fields and when
they were full and drunk, together we gazed into the
mirrors we brought with us. The wives would say, “I am more
beautiful than you.” And husbands, gazing by our side
would say, “No, I am more beautiful than you.” We did
this, as the sages say, in the midst of hard labor,
in order to accustom ourselves to desire.
Gone Fishin’
Chuang Tzu & Hui Tzu went out for a stroll one warm day.
When they reached a bridge over the River Hao, Chuang Tzu
leaned over the rail and said, “Look how those minnows dart
to and fro, back and forth—what pleasure it must give them.”
Hui Tzu replied, “You are not a fish, how do you know
what gives them pleasure?” “And you are not I,” said Chuang Tzu,
“How do you know that I do not know what gives pleasure
to fish?” “If because I am not you and therefore I
cannot know whether or not you know, then equally
because you are not a fish, you cannot know what gives
them pleasure. So my argument still holds,” said Hui Tzu.
Chuang Tzu said, “Let’s go back where we started. When you asked
how I knew what gives fish pleasure, you already knew.”
Leonard Kress: My most recent poetry book is The Orpheus Complex, published by Main Street Rag. I teach creative writing, philosophy, and religion at Owens College in Ohio.
Rebecca Gayle Howell
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:54 amPsalm #1
What if I did the thing
they say we are to do:
think of myself, first.
Think of myself, first
as a piece of glass, blown
in my own hands.
My mouth to my orifice
to my fire.
What thin light would come?
What oracle? What purpose,
except to hold straight
some daffodils in their cut
spring, their cold water
of rapid bloom.
I don’t know who I am.
I no longer believe
I can know anyone.
A bell with a cotton tongue.
A string tied around a finger.
And you.
Blessed be thy name.
Horrible fish,
what is it?
Psalm #2
You are the origin.
The obstacle.
The fist I have held
caught in my throat,
the hand that pulls
the knotted rope
lengths from my mouth.
White bird from out behind
my teeth. Wing’s rush.
Oh, me.
Your house, these hips,
this trash palace.
Do you smell it?
Mother’s milk, left out.
Does it make your tongue
curl against your palate?
Do you never want to eat.
This is the home you have made
for me. For you. For me.
This is the body
I am not inside.
Doors. I stand again
before you, twin self.
The earth is cold.
I am impatient with entry.
I want what I want.
Put your tongue to me.
Psalm #28
The problem I have is that you’ve made this world for your pleasure, not ours—
so much pleasure, so much burning (desire), so many
dragon flies blue as ball jars, sonic waves with wings, so many ball jars,
so much evening light filtered through their skins, so much hunger (preserved)
(protected from) made, so many stomachs competing for their place: here is a world
like a marble in a palm, a glass milky-way, whirling with micro-
cosmic stars in every egg, a dervish in every face, if I tried to take it in I would break—
so the problem I have is this creature I call me
can only be a part of it, another thumping thing, one more
craving mouth wet with taste, my beating self just another Salome (dragon fly) (solar
flare) (snake), my beating self just another dancing thing, hazard-thing, god of fire, god of grace.
Ruth
I didn’t love him
I told her I did
I told her I would take his favor
into my small hand, mouth
I told her I wanted her
to bathe me, perfume me
for him I told her I did
When I clave unto her,
I clave unto her
Where ever you go I will go
where you will not
Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer and documentary photographer. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Hatchet Buddha (Larkspur Press) and was the photographer for Arwen Donahue’s This is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak (University Press of Kentucky); her work has also been collected in the anthologies Plundering Appalachia and The Artist as Activist. Currently, she is a faculty member for the BFA in creative writing at Morehead State University.
G David Schwartz
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:53 amEarly Figs Make Windows Clean
Early figs make windows clean
And though I don’t know just what that means
You can place them
In and out of dreams
G David Schwartz is the former president of Seedhouse, the online interfaith committee. Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue. Currently a volunteer at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, Schwartz continues to write. His new book, Midrash and Working Out Of The Book is now in stores or can be ordered.
Jane Williams
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:52 amFirst Kiss
That first kiss ruined us for the rest,
all the willing near drownings in tongues -
how we long for that life giving breath.
The frantic heart seeks sweet arrest,
shaping each lover into The One.
That first kiss ruined us for the rest.
Each new romance a nostalgic quest;
flights of the faithful into the sun.
How we long for that life giving breath,
for more than good natured second bests.
A chance reunion brings us undone -
that first kiss ruined us for the rest.
It is not enough – the word made flesh.
Love, a trick of the light of the moon.
How we long for that life giving breath.
The soul’s dark night invoking what’s left;
a skin of prayer across memory’s drum.
That first kiss ruined us for the rest,
how we long for its life giving breath.
Jane Williams is an Australian poet living in Tasmania. She is the author of three collections of poems and one of short stories.
www.janewilliams.wordpress.com
Catherine Zickgraf
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:51 amMercy
God cups me in his blue hand.
Over the marble atmosphere, I swing,
hair trailing like comet fire
or strands of kite bows.
Trillions have existed,
sorting through trash,
but my neighbors and I
landscape our palaces.
He’s patient as I wander.
He values my thoughts.
I ponder the Lord,
and He responds.
Suppose God tipped His mighty palm,
prying apart my fetal curl
and I landed
among God’s subsistent children.
I’d get what I deserve.
A thousand generations have
suffered and struggled
from the evil of life.
But among the masses are pilgrims of
humble faith who proclaim
they’re locked
into God’s blue hand, too.
Matilda
We prayed before lunch for Matilda.
She is two, and her Daddy just died.
My boys were waiting, kicking feet at their table,
Joshy in his kitty chair, and Joey in his doggie chair.
We were about to eat our fish fillets and carrot sticks—
my brown-haired boys with bowed heads.
I remember Pat Robertson on TV
sometime before Matilda and Joey were born.
“It is absurd this film gets so much acclaim
when it has no objective cinematic value.
It’s just more proof,” he said at the camera,
“that the media worships these gays.”
In bed one night—Tom on his side beside me
sleeping hard from working like a machine,
his muscled arms pinned the pillow over his head.
I found among the TV channels a broad, cold sky,
eyes discovering steely eyes, and
cattle driven up through the mountains.
The character went home and contained well his feelings—
a father of two, a new job and a wife.
I imagined his longing from my TV-lit bed
and I pressed closer against my lover’s curve.
We were legit, though.
Married the requisite newly-wed years before
conceiving our white and male and beautiful children—
their Daddy rich, their Ma good lookin’.
But in the movie, love destroyed.
A family dissolved, and children afraid.
In the end his lover was murdered by a mob,
one un-impressed by the media’s “gay worship.”
Oh, Pat, Oh, Pat: on TV in sheep’s clothing.
You are a false prophet, a ravenous wolf.
But it’s not about you at all,
A little girl has lost her Daddy.
Don’t tell me he deserved to die
because he played gay in a movie.
As for my little family, gathered at lunch,
we pray to our God of love
that He will be an oak tree of a Father
to Matlida, this small, and fatherless child.
The Legend of Sudden Sanctification
John Newton was a people-thief
and was on his way by ocean
to sell his loot as slaves.
This was his profession.
He was proud of his ship,
it was sturdy and strong.
One day the rains came,
and the winds blew
and beat upon that ship.
Captain John, ill at the wheel,
the ship’s belly filling with water,
prayed to his Maker
to spare him his life.
And in return, the story goes,
our hero promised to
reverse his course,
return to the coast,
dust off his hostages,
and deposit them home.
But that’s not what happened.
The conscience of a man
is dull and slow.
And conversion is not known
for resolving that swiftly.
Most days I fall short
of my own standards.
Even those who don’t believe in my standards
know what they are
and demand them of me.
And here I am, I disappoint.
But the reality of the plan
is gradual change—
from liar to teller of truth,
from gossip to trustworthy friend.
Or, as the case sometimes is,
from professional kidnapper to jobless liberator.
There is a long life in between conversion and perfection.
And on this earth, I will disappoint.
But, Victim of my failure, I will love you with my heart
though with my actions I will fail.
Thirty-two years after his Godly pact,
John realized his thievery was wrong.
And by then the retired captain had nothing to lose.
“Amazing Grace,” often a silly jingle
sung by felons on TV,
was our hero’s handiwork.
The act of mercy our captain recorded wasn’t his ocean life-sparing.
It was the incredible patience his God had shown
throughout John’s lifetime
of failure and
human-ness.
Catherine Zickgraf is indebted to myspace for helping her find her long-lost son whom she placed for adoption two decades ago—thus you can find her blog there: myspace.com/czickgraf
Her poetry has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and in BirdsEye Review. She also has work forthcoming in GUD Magazine and decomP.
Jeff Klooger
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:50 amAve Maria At The Crossing
After the painting by Giovanni Segantini
These mountains cupped their hands
to catch a pool of golden light, and show
how round the world is, how still
and true to the wishes of the weary travellers,
the family drawn together in this simple vessel
beneath crossed staves, to mark
the rite of each day’s passage.
The lake is empty, but the boat
is full, its living cargo jostling the rower,
who leans on his oars to stay awake
as the day dies quietly, forgiving
all our imperfections.
The sheep bend low to drink
their own reflections. The mother
rocks her child on her knee, the two of them
resting against each other, cheek to cheek,
and the lamb peeking over the bow,
searching for dreamt-of pastures to frolic in.
The sky is a dome, the lake is a bowl
and the whole world floats between
in the setting sun. At the end of the day
all things revert
to what they truly are and mean.
Ripples ring the boat
like time encircling its source,
its holy centre, hope and solace,
our origin and end,
the still and silent moment of our passing.
Wonders
When I was a seeker and needed a desert
to wander in, I found what I needed
in empty suburban streets at midnight, under stars,
under streetlights that buzzed like enormous
alien insects, songs of electricity
and loneliness, of desperation. No solace there,
just the hollow clatter of shoes on concrete,
playground swings and slides to show how
I had become too large and ungainly
for the pleasures of childhood.
What I sought was an answer
and an escape: both the same. Life cried out
for something more, my body
cried out, my brain whirred
and slipped and spun without traction.
Life was about going nowhere
and never arriving; but all that internal motion,
every muscle straining in the rush
of thought and desire, plummeting
head-long into the imaginary future –
something just had to break, I wanted
something to break, to shatter
the frozen world, the creaking ice-flow
of day upon day. The desert is what I needed,
what I wanted, the unrelieved absence
of life’s distractions, like the absence
of hope, of comforting lies. I turned my face
to confront head on what lay behind
textbook solutions and kindly platitudes,
a truth as stark and chilling
as the thought of freedom.
What did I find? What do prophets find
in the desert? Their God, their mission,
a world of illusions all their own, truth being
but a variety of illusion. I found
a degree of expansiveness I had not reckoned on,
a oneness of the simple and the sublime,
a unity and kinship between my pitiful self
and the cold and glorious blackness
of the night sky. It filled me up
for a time, and let me live; and even now
I sometimes return to it, remembering with envy
the untrained virtuosity of youth,
forgetting the pain, the bottomless ache
that forced me into that desert, that made me
so desperate for answers, so hungry for wonders.
What Is
Impossible! From the first
peremptory explosion we have gambled
against entropy’s impossible odds
and won, and keep on winning, staking all
on every spin, and heaping fortune
upon fortune, miracle on miracle.
How miserable! To be so lucky
and so undeserving makes no sense.
It’s true we die. You and I
certainly will. And if you listen right
it’s possible to hear the whole world moaning
as if one collective agony gripped it
in a barbed-wire fist.
But is this suffering a truth
to be believed in or endured,
sworn by or sworn at? I don’t know
and when I think I do, I’m wrong.
I only know that waiting at a station
after sudden rain, the sun just happens
to touch my cheek, and the moss
shines emerald green on red,
red brick, and I forget what doom
this madness runs to.
Laughing Buddha
Great sage, enlightened one
or just a fat and jolly monk,
my laughing Buddha smiles at me
from his bookshelf home,
sack slung over his back, begging bowl
proffered hopefully, or in wise, resigned
acceptance of the limits to this world’s generosity.
Respect for the religious life ebbs and flows
like the seasons, but his mood is permanent,
a year-long mirth nudging his huge, bare
belly into a quivering dance.
Everything and anything can start those waves
rocking on his ocean of flesh. What is not
funny, after all? Sorrow, pain, suffering, death
− all illusion! Only a fool
would not laugh!
If his enormous body
should complain of its burdens, he ignores it,
knowing any body will deceive you
if you let it. In truth, he is as light
as the tune he hums as he walks
from mountain to valley, from this village
to the next. His way is endless, and
endlessly joyous. Wherever he goes
crowds of children trail behind him
and mothers rub his quivering belly for luck.
The World
A tower opens onto a view
presenting itself to the viewer
like a table laden with fruit.
Imaginary fruit! Delicious!
Imagine what you could do or make
with a scene like this.
Possibilities
flower into consciousness
perfume your inner life
with their profligacy.
Looking out
I am reminded of that statue of the Buddha
tall as a mountain, with hollow eyes.
Staring up at its great hulking mass
you miss the wonder others claim to see.
The trick is to climb the steps
behind the statue and peer out
through the Buddha’s own eyes.
Then breath catches in your throat
your skull cap comes loose
and the chill breeze of the sublime
washes through you.
Look! See what the Buddha sees!
The world stretched before him
like an offering.
Jeff Klooger’s poetry has been published in Australian and international online and print journals. Recently his work has appeared in The Liberal, Harvest, dotdotdash, Words-Myth and Pure Francis. His other interests are music and philosophy. His book on the ideas of the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis was published in 2009.
Julia Guez
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:49 amInfinitive
Let us faith to frame the day
as
wood and silver
frame
an
oil, or a gelatin, or a lithograph
calling out a certain color, a certain texture or shine
only
faith to frame brokenness, the flawed and the fleeting
as
washers and bolts and struts and caulk
frame
a disaster
calling out a certain beauty, a certain resilience, a certain gratitude.
Somehow
the wabi-sabi world never falls completely apart,
even though we have all been brought close to the edge by certain sorrows,
fearing, at points, we would weep and weep and never stop
weeping. Somehow
we end up
faithing
more and more and more,
faithing and reading The Psalms in desperation,
faithing and saying please or help or thank you,
faithing and praying
the little we do is enough to frame and hold
the engine together,
the window, the mind, the porch, the ocean, the toilet,
the wing, the bank and the song
holding everything together
tight
with rope and gum and rubberbands, spit, prayer, putty and love.
After five years of service with Teach For America, Julia Guez is now pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts at Columbia University. At work on a collection of poetry called Wabi-Sabi, Guez has received a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and a Naomi Shihab Nye Fellowship to attend The Round Top Poetry Festival in Round Top, Texas. She is now living and writing full-time in New York City. New verse is soon to appear in The New Vilna and The Basilica Review.
Bobbi Lurie
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:48 amdaylight
perceive it everywhere
all comes out of it
all is made of it
through the mind: light
through the heart: love
existence is its own definition
Pythagoras: numbers 3
- God
- Logos
- Beginning: creation
belief in duality holds ego together
becoming a complete human being
an organ through which
universe can experience itself fully
complete human being
the way the universe experiences itself
completely
make the eye
completely
transparent
give the world
an experience of
dimensionality
variety
colorflavor
the whole universe is behind you and you are
like a window through which it sees
not to free ourselves
from suffering
but become the window
through which it sees
Henry Rasof
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:46 amInside Abraham’s Tent
A visitacion had not occurred
For some time
And now he sat on one side
Of the long row of beat-up wood tables
Piled high every which way with books
In a language he did not understand
He tried to explain
That at one time blood sacrifice
Was the rule
And asked why
If blood were the essence of the life force
He was being asked now to pour it on the earth
And suck on the dry dead meat
Then
Came a marvelous shimmering
In the language he did not understand
Translated into the language he did
So that his brain was bifurcated,
All thought dispelled, an odd quietude
As he was being asked to stretch
The part of his mind that understood
To that part which did not
Although the languages were not the same
A visitacion had not occurred for a very long time
So that now, with the darkness taking shape outside
And overhead the clear penetrating ethereal white light
Of the moon before the harvest,
All before him began to dissolve into the simple
Glow
Of the letters assembled on the page
In such a way as to evoke in him a lost forgotten music
So powerful he wanted to shout, cry, escape
Into and through the roof
Ascend from a base built of years of solitude
Transfixed in waiting for the too good to be true
To come true once and finally and for all
His sexual power too stirred
So that overall the effect blocked even his
Compulsion to question everything, just
Whew was all he could say after it was all over
Shaking hands, I wanted to go through the roof,
Not because I was mad, all mixed up . . .
The shimmering blindingness of the light
Permeated into his centres, circulating,
Becoming the meat, bleeding now,
Explained, power drawn
From the words in the language not understood,
Revitalized, coming down, once
Starved, now only hungry. . . .
Henry Rasof has degrees in music, creative writing, and Jewish studies; teaches an online graduate creative nonfiction course at the University of Denver; has published in print and audio magazines and anthologies, including Bachy, BaoBab, Beyond Baroque, Bits, Black Box, Gallimaufry, Kansas Quarterly, Partisan Review, and Text-Sound Texts; has a web site, www.medievalhebrewpoetry.org; and does Jewish creative-writing activities with first- through fourth-graders.
Robert Gresak
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:45 amEarths Travail
The very soul of our earth
groans in agony
at mans never ending perfidy.
A living, breathing entity is she.
This is truly a great truth,
a revelatory reality.
Only the enlightened soul can know
of her vast distress
at mans ceaseless mess
of life, his perpetual desecration
of her body without cause,
reviling and mocking her Cosmic laws.
Robert Gresak: I have been involved in spiritual endeavors since the young age of 17 and started writing poetry and articles of a spiritual nature way back in the 1970’s.
Mary Belardi Erickson
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:44 amWhaling Song
Life swallowing you like the whale did Jonah.
when you jump a train heading in a hurting direction.
So you resting in a silver culvert,
its ribs like whale bones.
After hot questions cool steel a comfort
the trickling flow soothing your bare feet
while you bind a loose sole.
Beneath the clanging traffic,
you watching pointed tail feathers,
a swallow tending its nest
of hungry chirps filling this metal tunnel.
You wondering which way
to right,
as a bird instinctually flies.
Mary Belardi Erickson was born in Passaic, New Jersey but experienced a rural upbringing in southern Minnesota. She has a BA from Augsburg College, Minneapolis and a MA from Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, and post-masters studies in literature and writing at Purdue University, W. Lafayette, Indiana. She has taught in post-secondary institutions. Her son, Joe, is a computer technology specialist. She enjoys country living with her husband, Jon, in west central Minnesota. Her poetry has been published both online and in print, recently in Flutter, Numinous, The Aurorean, Oak Bend Review, Bolts of Silk, Avocet, Perspectives, forthcoming in Mindflights, Waterways, as well as others.
Christy Collins
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:43 amJourney beautiful into everything you want but can not have and love even with out seeing. The things you have faith in from books and lives other than your own – write me letters from there, those places of your dreams (and mine_) and we will grow old together knowing we saw together all we ever wanted to see – alive, our hearts beating deep in our bodies and all of us where we longed to go –gentle, soft and safe. Tiny and insignificant, without disturbing the dust with out sandals, treading softer than any traveller before us and more beautiful, purer than everything we’ve ever seen in real life – because the distractions fall away and you allow yourself the beauty of pure reality untainted by this that we distract ourselves with you are always deep inside this and it lives in you so write me postcards from there when you are most deeply yourself and most completely alive – alone with the most important of your works. God sees this and it is good. He cries out your beautiful name – be mine always he calls to his creatures as they dance in his creation. As they learn to join his co-creators, artists of all the beautiful colours of all the beautiful forms he says: go forth be fruitful, I have called you to this, you are mine.
Liz Afton
In Issue 4 on October 31, 2009 at 7:40 amGive Us This Day
To celebrate the hearth, its funny hot igloo
swelled as a mother tummy, her still-
warm french awaiting paper swaddles.
To praise punk baker angels wafting yeast
& fire, to be blessed by white prints,
to worship: O sun-filled honey, O molten light.
To dip into tall gems, jars that glint,
to dribble flower syrup, sticky bee goo,
that sweetness I can’t fully swallow.
To see the bees patiently feeding
wax boxes in their wheezing hive
out under the bakery sign that reads:
THE HUNGRY GHOST.
To know her kind: communion holy,
austere as Buddhist dhamma,
more frightening than a campfire story.
To summon her, to watch her rise,
swift as dough, pale as a cloud of flour,
moving her mouth so desperately
to fill only with more air. To witness
her witchcraft unsating my plate,
to know utensils can’t help her,
that no careful cooking can get her fed.
To hold her gaze, to meditate, to pray,
to turn away at last with lovingkindess,
to walk in peace with my bag of bread.
Liz Afton is an MSW student at Hunter College School of Social Work. She received her BA from Smith College, where she was one of two poets selected to represent at the Five College Student Poetryfest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Brink, r.kv.r.y,, and Shampoo. A native New Yorker, she lives in Brooklyn with two kittens.
