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Introduction
By the time you read this, the 2014 issue of Mandala Journal has been launched from the nest out into the springtime world. We’ve called it Issue X. Let X be natural disasters, bent consonants, activism, all kinds of history - geological, alternative, personal - all in excess of any single theme we could think of. Let X be excess. This is a compact companion to Issue X. We like the accessibility of our online format, but we like the materiality of offline, too, so we’ve selected five of our favorite poems from the issue and put them on paper here for you to hold in your hands. We hope these poems stay with you as they have stayed with us.
Mandala Journal is a literary and visual arts journal published each spring by the University of Georgia’s Institute for African American Studies.
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Sugar, Sugar Nathalie Handal My mother told me she had me early. She has no idea what day it was, only that she heard roosters crowing, then she parted her legs and waited. That’s how god visited us in Batey Monte de Coca, where language is removed from our gut for safety. Understand, echoes grow echoes. Maybe that’s why my father left. Everyone’s leaving for the city—the peso is what they need most. The horses we ride are quieter now that the consonants are bent. Now love is but one heart on every side of the earth—but that doesn’t help sell sugar.
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Taper Joseph Harms With curtainstrip tied Bel her besom loose along her neck, from sink to clonus washed within her shed, without her eldritch bailiwick a taper hind each leaf. Her leech, the last, arrived and left, said for the last, from basket took a boiled egg, her last: deponents gone like Proctor left to god the heter’clite to cavitate the bore uncavitated: simple ontogen. On Main forenoon amorts the drugstore paced with tickets. Others howdied Bel inside the Bakery and spoke beneath their hands as coteries in school had. Mrs. Reed had left a spaceheater, a note: One Month.
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excerpt from Twenty
Questions forYour Mother
Mahtem Shifferaw
When did you bleed for the first time? She will say – it was when I was holding the green skin of guava fruit, and its lilac meat. The juice squirted out so quickly I thought it was mine to take. What did you notice then? The sky had a solitary eye on top of the mountain, where the horizon line curved itself into the redundant nature of tall trees; it was only noon, and yet a fat tear was approaching fast. Tell me about the time you fell in love. I was mad. The harsh whiffs of desert winds and the striking hands of older brothers made the same sound,
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like a wave of the Red Sea was cut from its drooling origin and shoved into the unassuming whiteness of salt dunes. But words filled my mouth, and the taste was new, milky. What happened to your hair? It was the same color of my shadow; its texture harrowing at night. When Mother was jailed, it felt her absence, her sharp tone and gentle eyes. It fell in mouthfuls at a time; it was Autumn and even leaves were falling then. What of your sisters? I planted a seed for each of them, wished they could come earlier. I knew them before they were born. My cheeks bruise so their hair won’t fall.
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(Spill-O’s Recession) Colin Dodds After a long prosperity, he was shocked to find himself threadbare and in play, bandied about by taxis, ricocheting off the street-faces of women, and judged by the mouth-breathing cashiers. Spill-O’s images found their way to the 99-cent stores. He raged against the heavens and looked the fool to the air-conditioned cars. Before, he could forgive, could afford to forgive, could afford so many things that he could no longer afford. Spill-O applied for bankruptcy, just to explain what was happening. But even his creditors had forgotten him. 6
Rising Song, Elegy I. Tacey Atsitty
Shádí, immersed in canyon, it was so wet that spring, this summer. We gripped our Easter sacks: this was a time of knowing.You knew when I was about to—rain, see how it eats the mouths of our paper sacks, how it drowns hollow tree sounds we’d make when leaving each other in the early dark. II. In a photo of us, you were purple, and I stood in a flower: desert bloom. Your eyes cradled me. Now, I feel only your bloom. My cheeks say you must’ve meant vine and petal to me. III. A whistle tore out of my throat— IV. Give into you, falling: in breath, we begin to waft. It’s about to rain at the curve of mine. I feel all wrought when I see stars we never sang through: so many girls in scatter— 7