After the Pause Volume 3, Issue 3 Fall 2016
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Now you get to read about those people who made this thing by writing something. Sudeep Adhikari is a Structural-Engineer whose poetry has been featured in various online literary Journals/Magazines. Carl Boon is a member of the Department of American Culture and Literature at Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir, Turkey. Yuan Changming, 9-time Pushcart nominee and author of 7 chapbooks (including Wordscaping [2016]), published monographs on translation before moving out of China. Eric Cline is a poet, cashier, and Yellow Chair Review staff writer from Dumfries, Virginia. Christopher Eskilson is one who eats his breakfast gazing at the morning glories. Faye is a student of (the) biology/art and/of/in art/biology." Peter Grandbois is an associate professor of creative writing at Denison University in Ohio. Liz Hogan is a poet and musician who lives and writes in New Orleans. Jackson Holbert is originally from eastern Washington and now lives in Waltham, Massachusetts. Timothy Kercher is a wanderer who is trying to cultivate roots in Dolores, Colorado. Kim Peter Kovac (@kimpeterkovac) writes poems, prose poems, flash fiction, haibun, haiku, found poetry, and hybrid pieces which have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online in journals from the US, UK, Australia, India, and Dubai. www.kimpeterkovac.tumblr.com Sophie E. Moss is a trick of the mind. Gayle Newby, a long time resident of the South, currently lives and works in Utah. Michael Prihoda is one of those people, by which he means he is a person, give or take. Martin Stannard is English and teaches and eats and sleeps and so on and so forth in China. Harry Underdown, a former wunderkind, is currently a persona non grata but has hopes of becoming a cause celebre. Originally from Ann Arbor, MI, Anthony Zick currently resides in Bowling Green, OH, where he is finishing his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. Matt Alexander is a scientist in Philadelphia. Travis is from Australia but lives in Buenos Aires; he writes fiction from an invisible city in-between. John Hanson writes in Melbourne, his poems and stories have appeared in the Eunoia Review, Bop Dead City, and other places. Megan Merchant is open to receiving presents and monetary donations. Miles Varana is doing just fine, thank you very much. David Felix is an English visual poet who lives in Denmark and whose writing takes on a variety of forms, in collage, in three dimensions, in galleries, festivals, publications, performances and video. My name is Fishspit and I spend my days spinning rockabilly 45's on my little record player with my 19 year old, deaf, demented cat Pip.
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Allen Forrest's expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and postImpressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas. http://allenforrest.fineartamerica.com/ Mike Good is from Pittsburgh, PA, holds an M.F.A. from Hollins University, and co-founded the After Happy Hour Review and Hour After Happy Hour Writing Workshop. Jhaki M.S. Landgrebe hoards words and working surfaces. Olivier Schopfer is a Swiss guy living in Geneva who likes to capture the moment in haiku and photography. Bianca Tschaikner is an Austrian illustrator currently living in Granada, Spain.
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…cut, paste…
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Liz Hogan
Sunrise
the freeway the dove the crow but mostly the dove and— was that the ship’s horn before my last breath? a mean motorist lights up the air —and there again the crow.
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Timothy Kercher
Probability The probability of not hitting a deer with our car is near the probability of my wife carrying twins. Add to this the probability of not seeing a shooting star on a day where I will see a gathering empty-handed hunters and wonder why they didn't drive this way at 4:00 am—I’m praying to not see a deer when I see four coagulating in the roadside darkness as I make a wish for them to stay where they are, and I end up seeing as many shooting stars this morning as I do deer, the stars streaking through the atmosphere like deer across a road—on each one, I wish to safely transport my pregnant wife and two little girls to the airport on a day when the hunters have descended upon our small town, their orange vests and hats matching the cheese melting over their gas-station nachos like the darkness melting over deer, and I'm wondering who will be our third child, even though what we once thought would be our third disappeared into the swamp that was forming her two surviving sisters, and I know that children are supposed to leave a story behind written in bones that shouldn't be like the deer bones I saw on the trail or the still-fur covered bones of the three carcasses I saw as I returned from the airport, but bones are like stars that people the skies, all the lost children, all the lost parents who lose their children, and with each plummeting star, a flash like a deer’s eyes caught in headlights, I make a wish that we won't have to wonder where the bones went or bury them because a child, even if a parent never meets her, is something a man or a woman will pass by thousands of times on the roads of mind—and I wonder about the probability of hunters going home without a deer, about the probability of my wife going home empty handed from this pregnancy, about the twelve in one chance of having twins again after having twins before, and the sky is full of shooting stars as numerous as the roadside deer that we haven’t hit yet, so anything is possible.
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Timothy Kercher
Self-Portrait While Driving The sky purple like a bludgeoned face, my brain spilt into what I am now and the ghost I will bury. The twilight’s deer wait upon the road’s shoulder that I will soon speed by— I call out to anyone who will listen, but the living haunt my words— the steering wheel, the front bumper, the not bright enough lights. Out from the shadows the sky rages like grass fire and I see a hitchhiker's silhouette— I don’t understand where he’s going, lost to me like Enkidu to Gilgamesh, but I am not here for this— my quest, not to lengthen my life but to decide just what to do on any one particular day.
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John Hanson
Convenience You’re listening, you’re really, really listening to me when I say it’s kafka and you say it isn’t real, when you say you’re a distraction and there’s still that phantasmagoria the clouds made for me, that stumbling flirty impotent guitar riff whispering onwards gasping for air though we both want it to stop and the white hairs of seas that malt and spread and i’m thinking of a rainbow cardigan and a palm on my stomach, a dint in a chest a cardboard sign with black text a forest’s silver-blue pool the motion of a face made from moody colour and mushrooms, what’s it been now four months? why should life insist on a cheek sleeping on a breast?
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Carl Boon
Milton in Wyoming I belong here. Demons sprayed with serpents’ bile rise against these hills, emerge from this soil. I hear them all winter as I laugh at Montaigne and Cervantes. I am witness finally to the true, ferocious sky, where six clouds form St. Matthew’s sword, lit putrid orange as I fall to sleep. But mostly it’s the wolves that frighten me. The pines howl with them, the black sheens of rock glow in their sound. My hands shake at dawn as I lean into the stream to wash. I believe there are no poems in this land. No pen can touch the unseen furies that wait to strike. The western sea feeds them; it is a mad correspondence
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we face here, madder than men imagine.
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Carl Boon
Poe in Richmond, 1849 Daisy brings the duck out, and there’s bourbon, hand-sewn napkins stitched with Jackson’s silhouette. Down East Clay Drive girls in gowns the color of flamingos lick caramel apples. It’s October and everybody has a claim to the nation. California, the price of tobacco, what should happen to Henry Box Brown. The poet twirls his hair with his thumb. There are stories in his fingernails, a story in the scratch on his throat— and death inside his eyes. As he pours bourbon into his coffee, brass music from the Johnston Tavern strikes up: the trombones tell a story, too. He listens. Something’s happening to the blood inside his skull. The train to Philadelphia leaves at dawn, and Baltimore calls to him, the sunlit avenues near the bay, the women who promise terrible, beautiful nights as the liners cross the horizon.
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There will be hours to write, hours to be well again.
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Faye Goodwin
Bitter Diana It’s chilly. I invoke an ancestry of early morning prose genuflect the muses, the suburbans, the Greeks, the great medicated laureates of my sex and honor them with candles, lipstick, howling vows to never love again; Never marry, never wake up too hot in an obligate soup of devotion and jewelry. High and Windy in my skirts and teacups I’ll write pages of shit Immune to adoration wholly sheathed in my opalescent self, alone on a train, in a cafe until one day I settle down paint a cream nursery and, sweating a little, I’ll bud and bloom like so much stunning algae.
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Faye Goodwin
Elizabeth’s Dream The kettle didn’t whistle this morning But shrieked like a parakeet, yellow and cold And somehow the wind shivered through my hedges Of coreopsis and ragweed and thyme Without sounding the xylophone stumble of the old tin chimes. And sure enough, your shoelace announced you, Slapping loose on the hardwood front hall, all rhythmic And the clocks slowed to syrup Right after nine Like they do every time When you pay your respects to your long-tidy bedroom Raise up the hairs on my arms, and slosh the milk in the pail as you pass With small feet, and familiar Return to the graveyard and leave me a husk over breakfast to wait for your coming again.
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Faye Goodwin
Exhumation I imagine you’re dead somewhere in Tuscon or Yemen. The jackrabbit length of you baking on terracotta, nameless They open your skin and find locusts, sand, teeth, martyrdom, spleen Find no artifact of me. They call your mother. She becomes a nun and never speaks again, so none of your college friends or the girl you loved in Dallas or the fat man and tiny man you drank with in Prague or the airport bartenders, your dog know you’re gone. I imagine your stupid notebook gathering dust in a motel closet (Barcelona, Beirut, Brisbane) as you’re buried in clay silence by cowboys and waiters, and disappear like always like ruins at last.
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Travis Englefield
Two Authors and a Shotgun There are two authors in the world. In their world, there are two authors. In everybody else’s world, there are more than two authors. But because everybody else’s world includes the two authors and in their worlds, there are two authors, in everybody else’s world there are two authors. The two authors can reasonably be referred to as the protagonist and the antagonist of the world, although which is the protagonist and which is the antagonist changes depending on which author is describing the world. The two authors don’t know each other very well, though they’ve met at least five or six times. This is because each time they meet, they argue, and their arguments take the form of fictions. Neither character in these fictions is consistent from one argument to the next and so each author is forced to depend on hearsay to learn about the other. Each is surprised to learn that the other is more intelligent and interesting than they had been willing to admit. Each then decides that the only way to properly get vengeance is to make the other a character in their fiction. In this way, each author becomes the other author, each protagonist the antagonist, until there is no author and no protagonist. Neither wants to admit they have become their enemy because each is adamant that he or she is more photogenic than the other. The last time they meet, they argue, just like always. In the back of each author’s mind is the other author, a fiction of their own creation, laughing at them. This fiction is probably laughing at both authors, because the fiction was created by both equally and so knows more than either. After the argument, which was at either a bar or at a party, depending on which version you’re reading, each author spends between three and five days wandering the city in despair, trying to figure out how to get the other author, which both still considered a fiction, out of their head. The revelation – that the the author that was in their head, that they considered a fiction, was actually the author they thought they were – the revelation makes front page news. If you see either of the authors now, today, it’s still front page news. It’s still happening. The nightmare always starts again and the only thing you can say, the only words your lips can form, is a question. Whose world am I in? you ask. Or, maybe: which way do I go?
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Less likely, but still possible: what’s the next line? Or, if you remember reading this: where is the shotgun? Is it too late? Nobody says it but you know just looking at their eyes it’s true and you start crying because you know they’re never going to believe you.
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Gayle Newby
On the Passage of HB 1523, Mississippi, 2016 Had it been 1962, they would have driven pick-up trucks with gun racks and Roll with Ross signs, prominently displayed. But in this scaled down age, their rides were minivans, toyotas, here and there a ford or two. Down from the hopscotched northeast hills, through the rich mined delta blues, past the swamp pocked trace, where the Chickasaw once held sway, they drove their fiery steeds, stopping now and again for a Big Mac and fries. On they drove to that domed city in the fertile loess hills. Into the governor's mansion, a day rich with concertos, reenactments and fiery jeremiads, At last purged of righteous intent, with handshakes and hugs they embarked once more on their righteous journey. With a wink and a nod, they proudly enjoined, We’ll show them we’re not just whistling Dixie!
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Martin Stannard
Asserted in Concordance with Unconfirmed Facts A force for good1 Two acres of ground I am not2 God3 As if a doubt4
Carousel1 for our pleasures A hand of sand2 Time for a rest3 Any part of us
Inactivity5 the main cause Special cases of vanity6 The skin of mules7 Associative pain and treats8
Once of a lifeless4 Ocean hair5 and health By way the sky6 Breathing at7 the Sun
We would punish fear9 All tears10 pressed out Of a cat's pace11 And teacher made ice12
Three hands of fate8 Reason9 to be here10 Diary of a saint11 Pushed beyond one's fence
Make allowance for her Brain took a blow The twenty sexual favours A horde13 and more
It broke the medium12 Bus service for citizens Arrow in the night13 To fall for duplicity
Vocabulary ached into life Fish forget their names14 Total absence of purity15 Perfume16 taken as evidence17
Ennui born of familiarity Concordance14 to the Scriptures15 Elsewhere her fortune fell Mirror16 taken to bed
Last week my menses Sweet tide and alcohol18 Only need to bend19 My hand and glove
What I meant17 was Apologize for our absence Rain18 arose a smile Express only a pause19
Front and strange limbs Pulled apart20 by trains21 Wasted to exact revenge Or slowly the pallbearer22
It's not so difficult Form for a fashion Plate of burned papers20 Elicit all the information21
A crust and edge Shingle clouded morning voice Forgot to stay touching23
We blew eggs away Fearful of being bored22 Suggestions to take23 flight
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Dog in the area
Marking open doors closed
Sound of messenger24 arriving Envelope filled for givens Tar paper wrap solids Easy to excuse25 solitude
Curlew24 but maybe not Answer on a placard Thinking of a leotard Angrier than silent leads
Inappropriate to be said Leaves26 cannot be emotions27 Refer only to oneself Devoid of any reverence28
We had a tune Marina you were Ken's25 Told into a muffle Nobody cares26 who cares27
Notes: 1. "A force for good is only a good thing if it doesn’t use too much force and if it really is good." Paddy Crake, An Investigation Of Recent Thoughts, Parse, London, 2012. 1. Carousel is the second musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics). The story revolves around carousel barker Billy Bigelow, whose romance with millworker Julie Jordan comes at the price of both their jobs. He attempts a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child; after it goes wrong, he is given a chance to make things right. The show includes the well-known songs "If I Loved You", "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" and "You'll Never Walk Alone". 2. The assertion of not being God may be taken with a pinch of salt. 2. Do not forget the sands of time. 3. The existence of God may be taken with potatoes and vegetables, like so much meat. 3. cf. Malcolm Shirt: "It's time for a rest, by God's grace", to Peggy Malover in Sherry at 8. 4. "Doubt as a force for good" cf. Milton's Journals (see also anything by Kanye West) 4. "Once of a lifeless form we were, an army born of sleeping girls, bereft of passion and torn from arms, as once our boys were ripped from sight." (Anonymous) 5. An inactive scribe might just as well be dead. 5. "The hair of the ocean is the most marvellous of hairs." Jeremy Twill, from Organs to Grind (1998) 6. Vanity Fair: at one and the same time neither a favourite novel nor a magazine to be enjoyed. 6. There seems to be a word missing here. Or is there? 7. The uses to which mule skin can be put are too many to enumerate here, but some examples are gloves, masks, handbags, book covers, knee protectors, decorative coverings for furniture (coffee tables, dumb waiters etc), uniforms for dumb waiters, condoms (old school style), hats for boys, and the lining of vanity cases. 7. Breathing at the Sun is okay. Breathing on the Sun is not okay. Breathing because of the Sun is poetic. 8. The connection between pain and pleasure hardly needs footnoting. 8. The Three Hands of Fate in ancient Han culture do not, according to the scholars, wear gloves. 9. "Do not punish fear; cherish it." Bibby Carew, from The Eleven Commandments, Bibby'sBooks, Sacramento, 2002. 9. Reason, the capacity for consciously making sense of things, sits in the corner wearing a pink kimono. 10. Sorrow. Elation. Awe. Pleasure. 10. Please let us have your current correspondence address.
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11. It is always important to allow your cat to set his own pace, and to be patient if his pace is slower than you had hoped for. 11. "The days pass and here I am always in the same worldly abyss." (from The Diary of St. Gemma Galgani, 1878-1903) 12. It was a science lesson in Winter. Not for the first time did we not learn much. 12. The Psychic Medium Team can advise you on any issue you have. They offer relaxed and calm readings with experienced spiritual readers who are non-judgmental and there to advise you 24 hours a day. Call on 0904 007 0213 - it's only 46p per minute. 13. The invincible Mongolian hordes, under the leadership and tutelary power of Chingis Khan, overran most of the Asian and Eurasian land, and in their heyday, the Mongols never met an army they could not beat. 13. The arrow in the night, the wound carried throughout the day. 14. "Our names define and limit us. I will never forgive my parents for naming me Judith." Bingo Kramer, from My Life in the Bush Behind Our House (Autopsy Publications, Tilehurst, 1984) 14. "On every first weekend of the month the Concord town elders held a dance. It was very popular with the youth because of the free lemonade. I never went, dance not being my thing. But Thoreau went every time." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Memoirs. 15. So how come a material's level of purity can only be stated as being more or less pure than some other material? 15. "The work being cleared out of the way by the Workers, Mrs. Livingston read from the Bible out in the open, with the girls sitting on the ground with feet tucked under them. Over-head the birds sang sweetly, their voices heard even above those of the girls when all joined in the singing that followed the reading of the Scriptures." Janet Aldridge, from The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas, Henry Altemus Company, Philadelphia, 1913 16. cf. Antoine Watteau's Jupiter and Antiope. 16. "We are but mirror images of ourselves, and this leads to love and loathing." Pamela Ponting, from Twenty Easy Dinner Recipes (Famish, Paris, 2000) 17. "Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact." George Eliot, from Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879 17. Let's think about what this all means, shall we? (Allow one hour.) 18. It's now four months since the last drink. Since the last. Since the. Since. Four. 18. "Rain arose a smile, the bow of pleasure; how many times have we engaged upon the meadow grass?" Alberta Stereo, from Spring and Its Games (Isi Isi Is, Reykjavik, 1991) 19. The trees bend in the wind, to the Lord bend thy knee. 19. "Let us pause a moment and consider where we are and, before we pause, let's wait a while and think about how we came to be here. Some of us took a train, others only woke up and discovered somehow their place had been decided for them. What discoveries they had unwittingly passed by! And then some have been dragged here by people who know what's good for them. It never ceases to confound our organizers how no matter how many signs one puts up anarchy reigns." Constantine Pope, from Some Thoughts Provoked by Gazing Too Long at a Tree (The Chic Organization, New York, 2013) 20. "Apart we can be stronger. That will confound them." The Doo-Wops, Baby Let's Go! 20. One cannot condone the burning of books papers. 21. " Let us linger a moment and think about where we are and, before we linger, let's pause a while and consider how we came to be here. Some of us took a train, others only woke up and discovered somehow their place had been decided for them. What discoveries they had unwittingly passed by! And then some have been dragged here by people who know what's good for them. It never ceases to confound our organizers how no matter how many signs one puts up apathy reigns." Constantine Pope, from Some Thoughts Provoked by Gazing Too Long at a Girl (The Chic Organization, New York, 2013) 21. The Information Age: " ‌.. the very notion of our actions, our endeavors and especially our mistakes, being perfectly archived is somewhat terrifying to say the least‌." (Someone, somewhere, sometime; you can Google it.)
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22. "The woeful sun, slowly fading behind the clouds of an ever brewing storm, so nearly impossible, yet slowly the pallbearer …." etc. etc. Pauline Larkin, from Sorrow and Extinction (Witty Books, Brighton, 1999) 22. Bored? Bored?! How the Hell can you be BORED?!! 23. "His oft repeated experience of body sensation converting to dream image marks Coleridge’s dream theory with a sharp ‘psychosomatic’ awareness, an adjective he coins to describe the delicate permeability existing between the body’s sensations and the mind’s emotions and images. Coleridge also develops the term ‘double touch’ to name this ability of the body to feel itself, to tell by means of the organ of the skin what is ME and NOT ME." Kathryn Kimball, from Coleridge’s Dream Theory and the Dual Imagination, (Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 16, Winter 2000) 23. Theft is theft, plagiarism is plagiarism, borrowing is borrowing, plagiarism is plagiarism. 24. Should this be "message" rather than "messenger", do you think? 24. By the same token, on another day this might easily have been "curfew." 25. It is easy to make excuses but no so easy to make good excuses. "I cannot come to your party because I will be cutting my toenails at that time" is an excuse; "I cannot come to the party because I don't like your poems" is a good excuse. 25. cf. Kenneth Koch, The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (Random House, 1979) 26. "It will be good when the leaves on the trees return." Cubby Woods, A Year in the Forest (Abracazoom Eco-Chapbooks Series XV, Volume IV, Epping, 2002) 26. It's true. 27. Emotions, as the Ancient Greeks knew, can get you into all kinds of bother. 27. Add question mark: Who cares? 28. Devoid of any reverence, nobody cares who cares.
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Matt Alexander
An Arresting Discovery Picture a cell, the self-contained unit of life. It lies in a row of similar cells, all functioning together to meet the needs of a larger organism, call it “Sand Hill Correctional Facility.” The cell produces proteins to carry out its daily tasks, call these a tiny cot, a toilet, Jerry White (a misnomer, but that is neither here nor there). These proteins turn over with regularity, albeit with specific time constants, ranging anywhere from five years to life. The exact amino acids that constitute the proteins, and therefore the ultimate structure and function of said, are determined by the genes, the DNA, call it the Pennsylvania State Legislature or a theory of broken windows. Our particular organism, like all that came before it or are yet to come, is a product of evolution by natural selection, call it politics as usual if you are amenable to clichés. Therefore, our organism is highly tuned to survive and thrive in the environmental niche in which it evolved. Under certain circumstances some organisms evolve what are called “dead end”' strategies, of which hermaphroditism is a common example. Our organism, “Sand Hill Correctional Facility,” has been so cornered and will continue on in this vein--protein production, turnover, cellular replication ad infinitum--until it is out-competed or denied of resources. So long as the organism is supplied with energy, call it public support or continued misinformation, to develop and reproduce, and the integrity of its DNA maintained, it will continue to carry out its life cycle as long as possible. Some have thrown up their hands in exasperation at this turn of affairs, reasoning that there is little to be done. However, we now have an opportunity to intervene. Let us not take the integrity of “Sand Hill Correctional Facility’s” DNA as a given. Scientific progress has enabled us to enact highly specific changes to the genome-down to the level of a mere single base-pair--of living organisms in an unprecedented manner. I'm speaking of course about the emerging CRISPRcas9 system, recently isolated from bacteria, call it betraying a sense of humanity or civil disobedience or reparations or taking a new angle on things. Some have questioned the ethics of this sort of “playing God,” of intervening in the underlying order of life. Who are we to meddle with nature’s creations in such a fundamental way? To what do we owe such hubris? For sure, the
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conversation is fraught with cries of scientific overreach, fear of change, questions of slippery slopes, etc. And yet I believe that just because a novel technology opens up heretofore untrodden avenues of human inquiry and intervention, that is no reason to discount it altogether. Indeed, just because we have previously witnessed the perils of prematurely attempting flight with wax wings does not mean we should never take to the skies again. Nay, we need only move forward with prudence, possibly with something like the preemptive development of a heat-resistant protective coating. Fortunately, as we speak scientists are working to just that end. We are living in a time of radical change, but let us not fear this change; rather, let us embrace it. Still, we need to proceed with caution. I am not denying that. One misstep could lead to catastrophic mutations resulting in free-living proteins, viruses. None of us wants to unleash untold numbers of toilets or tiny cots and have them floating around pell-mell, let alone something like a boundlessly replicating Jerry White. Let us proceed warily, but with a modest reserve of skeptical hope.
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Yuan Changming
Loose Thought Like a tiny fish Swimming along a summer streamlet Elusive To the nimblest human hand Even after rushing into a pond or lake It can never be caught Within the largest net Of language
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control, shift, option control, option, shift option, control, shift option, shift, control shift, option, control shift, control, option
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Allen Forrest
Second Thoughts
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Allen Forrest
Street Life
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Bianca Tschaikner
Hotel Niayesh
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Bianca Tschaikner
Look South
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Bianca Tschaikner
One in a Billion
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Bianca Tschaikner
The Jungle
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Bianca Tschaikner
The Sea
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David Felix
Poles Apart
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David Felix
In the Field
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Fishspit
i’m made of meat
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Mike Good
LINE
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Mike Good
Poem
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Mike Good
Points of View
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Olivier Schopfer
Urban Geometry 1
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Olivier Schopfer
Urban Geometry 4
command command command command command
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Megan Merchant
Salt Ring “Pour a little salt and we were never here.” — Bon Iver
I show up at his door. He knows little about how to embrace me—if it is wrong to hold and for how long, unsure what happens after time has been between bodies that once kissed crevices of dark. What permission the past holds. He touches my cheek, says I never regretted you. Please, don’t make me do that now. Invites me in. Pours whiskey, neat. The long hardening of amber. I find a letter on his desk between stacks of hardcover books. My letter. He folded it into a paper airplane, drew rows of passengers in pencil. They are speechless, grim-lipped. I say there should be flames, so he knows I am there as something to be extinguished. The wings are still intact, he says. And that is too much hope. There is mercy in the amount of light that slats between us. There is mercy in our quiet. I say, I loved you. He nods, pulls me close and there is a litany of bees thrumming my spine. My skin-a season of subtle grey and violets. His arms-still the shape of waiting. I tried. I learned that Dahlias grow best in dirt that is tart, mixed with finely ground bones. What else, he asks.
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I look at his bed, the untucked sheets. That has nothing to do with us, he says. A salt ring around the window, the tapestry of an ocean exhaling. Then play for me. He places the curved body of a guitar between my legs. Strums.
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Sophie E. Moss
Josef as Other Part 1 There is something strange inside J—nerves bursting like corroded pipes in absence of lineage, gut lined with loss or shame or contagion I scrub holy from the sink each morning. At sixteen he puts his tongue inside a woman whose mouth tastes of merlot says he loves her because she looks like his mother before the vanishing—beautiful, all plump little tits and pinstripe, an empty sort of stare the kind that says pour it in—fill it up woman,
all woman.
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Christopher Eskilson
Lafe1
Like a man He says nothing. Eyes round, Mouths fall Sucking Like a piece of paper. It hadn’t happened then, The bed and her face. He came and did it. The pink lady, The warm smelling Smell, the life running up In the dark, In the sucking, Sucking on down the— It does not make so much noise now. Run at her, Looking up the path. And now she’s getting ready She means through it— Smells of cooling flesh, An illusion of a coordinated whole. See hearing coil toward him, Hold him His shadow walks around like it is asleep, dripping onto the floor
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Found poem. Source text: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
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Jackson Holbert
The Clearing We’re cutting a clearing a few hills over and the chainsaw tensioner breaks so we string together half a mile of orange extension cord for the electric. The third tree in eats up its chain so I go back again and grab the axe. Around nightfall we pull together the last slash pile and burn one pile after another, gas to wood, match to gas until the whole clearing looks like cantaloupe split across asphalt. We sack up where the woods start again and wake every thirty minutes to bank the fires.
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In the morning we douse what’s left with dirt and head for the house. On our way, I find some .270 shells scattered across the trail and hold one up to the wind. For a moment, the whole hill is singing.
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Sudeep Adhikari
The Lost Art of Making Galaxies From Zero2 Temporary interludes. Memory crashes on you and you start again like a new island, with new greens, some liquid blue, a small rag of ether and some dusted diamonds for the sand. The shadows of relations and relativities, linger. Reverse engineering of absolutes and permanence, to make home from the incessant flux of vortices, changes and ephemeral ghosts. In the box , a man lives in pieces, quantums and discontinuities and outside: a gestalt, a mosaic or a painting a Janus, with the faces of gutter and God. Truth is an untruth. Permanence is a fabrication there is no finding the meaning of life, because it was never lost, and because it was never there. Androids play the language-game, lost in the maze of Turing-Tests. I have nothing to say, I have nothing to do but I keep saying it in a john Cage way, and I keep running their marathons. Freedom. It is no more than enjoying the game, when you realize its emptiness but keep making the shapes of water-bubbles and fireflies.
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First appeared online in Tuck Magazine
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Sudeep Adhikari
Deconstructing the Science of Soul I come to a standstill, when I speak. Word is not the world a matrix of veil, virus, venom; represents but misses the entropy of this immediate now there is no calculus of the "Present", no algorithms of Truths. Reality happens in the whole with its turbulent terror, vortices and silty-shiny paintings of sand-dunes, carving hundreds of silver-coins from a single moon. Only a limited fraction of the whole, I am talking about when I make philosophies and religions out of it It's like playing dart-game in a bar you are drunk, and you always miss the point. You abstract, and extract a meager figment from the swirling plasm of becoming that flares like the solar-wind the map is not the territory, low-key definitions of Instagramed Van Goghs. Ideas and words, precipitate to a static low like the calcinated bones of pre-historic raptors, as dead as Seattle's Grunge and Zarathustra's God. My ego, a quarter of the half, of the shadow of the shadow of my shadow lingers in words, decapitated and robbed when the plastic soul
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eludes the grammar of Newtons, Euclids and Aristotles and remains, a sacred deconstruction forever.
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Peter Grandbois
Had I Loved Better I used to think the world was inexhaustible, that lovers would always kiss with fingers, that dreams would never be tied into little bundles and packed away in grottos at the end of a long river. I was so sure I wouldn’t live at the edge of things, the dust covered and dirty sheeted edge where copper dawns and curling dusks hide the light knifing low across tendons and stillness grows inside us the same way darkness grows outside. Then I look at you, my son, sprawled upon the bed as if it were another shore, as if it were possible to lie in another dream where hope doesn’t scar like an old wound, and I think so what if there’s no second world as long as I can keep you free of the diluted light of this one.
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Miles Verana
And It Was All Terrible, In the End Kaia grows up writing. She goes from writing about her parents to writing about breakups to writing about feminism to writing about the people who ride public buses to writing about divorce. After that she writes nothing, because she’s dead. It doesn’t matter how. Kaia grows up wealthy, but she doesn’t stay that way, because her father dies when she’s sixteen. It doesn’t matter how, except that his considerable medical expenses bankrupt the family. Her father is a botanist from Ontario. He loves old movies and sushi and botany and Kaia’s mother, who’s a botanist from South Carolina. Kaia’s mother loves swimming and old movies and her three ex-husbands. After Kaia’s father dies and bankrupts the family, she and her mother move from Seattle, Washington, to Webber, South Carolina, where they live with her grandmother, who is very old. Kaia learns to call her Grandmom. Kaia has the sort of rambling charisma that knocks people on their asses, but she sometimes doubts the strength of her own words. She doesn’t get her period until she’s fourteen. Don’t worry, don’t worry, it’ll come eventually, says her father. And then you’ll really be complaining, says her mother. It’s right around this time that Kaia starts writing. Grandmom hates Jesus. You don’t really hate Jesus, do you? Asks Kaia. You just mean you don’t believe he was really the son of God, right? No, replies Grandmom, I hate him. The world was much better off under the Pagans. Grandmom goes to yoga three times a week and smokes cigarettes the rest of the time. She says she wishes she’d been born an Inuit. The Inuits know how to live, she says. Their shamans still sit in the smoky darkness of igloos, telling tales of the Anirniit. Grandmom explains that the Anirniit is the spirit of a thing; an animal, a mountain, a fetish. Now there, she tells Kaia, is something for your stories. Kaia’s mother tells Kaia not to listen to Grandmom. Kaia ignores her. She rarely speaks to her mother. Kaia’s mother tells her that silence is fine by her, she’d rather have silence then talk to an ungrateful little brat, anyway. In the years following Kaia’s death, her mother regrets this estrangement. She sits up late at night with books she doesn’t read, wondering about all the
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things that might have been said. Go back to sleep, says her husband, laying next to her in bed. Turn off that damn light. In Norway after college, Kaia meets William. He wears thick glasses and a goatee and speaks in good English about basketball. His favorite player is Allen Iverson. Kaia never forgets the way his hoarse voice sounds in the darkness away from the fire on the night they meet. She writes about it in the only poetry collection she ever manages to get published. Less than three years after they meet, Kaia and William are married. Their wedding is in Norway. It is very beautiful and moving. Less than two years after that, they are divorced. It doesn’t matter how, except that Kaia is devastated. She flies to China, alone, and never returns. Every day after school, Kaia takes the bus to the hospital where her father is dying. They watch baseball games together. He lays in his adjustable bed, she sits in a chair next to it. What’s wrong, Kai? He asks one afternoon. Don’t you like the Mariners any more? I just feel like I’m too old for sports, says Kaia. I mean, they’re okay sometimes. But I like to use my brain, Dad. Her dad smiles. Our little writer, he says. Mom will be off work soon, let’s see what she wants to do. Maybe a Woody Allen movie. You still like those, right, Kai? Yes, Dad, I still like those. After Kaia dies, her mother and several other American families take part in a successful class-action lawsuit against a Chinese company. The lawsuit returns Kaia’s family to its former wealth. Kaia’s mother retires and moves back to Seattle and buys a house, which she fills with a new husband and volumes of unread books. One morning, Grandmom calls Kaia up to her room. Grandmom’s room overlooks the sea. The windows are open, and the curtains billow gently, like sails on a ship that can move only through generations. The air is full of menthol and sea salt. Come, murmurs Grandmom. Look, see what I have for you here. The pearls are from the sea. They are much older than Grandmom.
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Harold Underdown
Lost: My Front If found, please return my front. Recognizable by a durable obliviousness and a well-worn smile. Mistakenly taken by lover when she moved out. Could be found on any street corner or park bench, nursing its wounds. Without it there to retain them, vital organs are in constant danger of spilling out. With so many nerve endings exposed, every forward movement causes excruitiating pain. Also, my back is getting awful lonely without it. Modest cash reward offered for information leading to its return.
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Kim Peter Kovac
Howling After3 In the roaring winter dusk, the ghostly clothes of jazz, as heavy as the moon, dance under the battered bridge
listening to the terror of wartime (crazy time, animal soup of time). Heartless horrors, waking
nightmares illuminated in supernatural darkness by the flashing alchemy of the trembling cosmos.
Scholars of war find the ash of poetry on mountaintops in caves, a hopeful little bit
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Found poem; remixed from Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl”
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of hallucination.
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Anthony Zick
Prayer After Wasting an Hour by Driving to Chick-Fil-A In a split-second move while exiting Costco, I veer to the right instead of the left setting the course for Chick-Fil-A, home of the original chicken sandwich, which when mentioned to my little sister bugs out her eyes and points them to the nearest store, no matter the miles or state boundary lines; and really everybody’s been there once I’m told so why not drive fifteen minutes out of the way in the name of the necessity of lunch, even though my plan for the day was to visit the counseling center’s walk-in hours and fill out paperwork before meeting with a counselor to discuss certain issues that remain nameless for the simple fact that their elusiveness is legendary in my personal mythology, so much so that to say I have a problem is to say I have another two years until it becomes visible enough to really understand what it might be; but at least I got my glasses bent back into shape and a cheap half-tank of gas at Costco, and the chicken sandwich isn’t bad, and now I can say that I’ve been there to my little sister – she’ll be happy about that, and I’ll be happy about the way I, no doubt assisted by the meds, can say okay, alright, thanks God, where to next?
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Eric Cline
Waiting;Metro;Skyline (
cells of cars in circles (circles; mauve str et che s behind them;) planes take off slow, one hangs like an orna ment;the sky is tattooed with a streak of hot magenta pink flame rising diagonal {like eyelids} across the bluemauvelavender cytoplasm of reagan national;airport— )
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Editor’s Note #? Copy, copy, copy.
About After the Pause is an online literary journal based in Indianapolis, IN, featuring poetry, flash fiction, and artwork, published quarterly. We also publish a yearly print anthology whose proceeds go to charity. We look to feature the best creative arts from new, emerging, and veteran creators. Find us here: afterthepause.com or @afterthepause
Purpose We believe art is a product of life experiences, from the joyful to the heartbreaking to the absolutely mundane. Life throws pauses at us. Art follows the pause. We want to share the best art we can find and bring hope through those artworks.
Cover Art “progress report” by Jhaki M.S. Landgrebe
Departure Until next time, ctr/alt/del.
Copyright 2016 All rights of the material within belong to the authors.
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