NINE MILE MAGAZINE Publisher: Nine Mile Art Corp. Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels Cover Art: A portion of "Detached Online" by Carlos Franco-Ruiz. The painting is oil on canvas 36 by 28 inches. Used by permission of the artist. More of his work is published in this issue. Nine Mile Magazine is a publication of Nine Mile Art Corp. This publication would not have been possible without the generous support of the Central New York Community Foundation. We are very grateful to them. ISBN-10: 0-9976147-0-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-9976147-0-1 Poetry and artwork copyright of their respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may be reproduced in full or in part without prior written permission from its owner.
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Contents DAVID WEISS Hardening Up Late Unreadiness Equinox
9 10 12 13
ANDREA SCARPINO Excerpts from Once Upon Wing Lake
17
JOSEPH BUEHLER Dora and Jenny's Mittens
23
PETER HUMPHREYS June, July Axes
25 26
QURAYSH ALI LANSANA basement blur: wisconsin
29
JENNY HUBBARD Why I Am Queen of the Second Guessers Cleaning Out Her Closet Partum The ceiling of ocean, the floor of the sky
32 33 34 35
JASMINE V. BAILEY Agamemnon Garden Equity
39 40 42
CARLOS FRANCO-RUIZ Detached Online Rubbish1 Waiting Online
46 48 50
WALT SHEPPERD In Case You Were Wondering Addiction, Withdrawal, and Cure
54 56
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MATTHEW GRAHAM And Then
60
CYRUS CASSELLS Lazaretto Lovers Borrowing The Language of Cicadas Jasmine
63 66 69
JORDAN SMITH The Ecstatic Moment With A Shot Of Maple Whiskey
71 72
DEBORAH DIEMONT Mineral Blue Shotgun House Now Hiring, Moonlighters Wanted
75 77 78
ONA GRITZ The Flipside to the Sixties The Spider Tattoo Rebecca Pregnant
81 83 85
DANIEL SIMPSON Listening to New York Radio in the Middle of the Night My Pants Are Drenched With Rain Platonic Sex
88 90 92
A POETRY SHEAF: YOUNG AUTHORS OF CENTRAL NEW YORK
97
BRIANNA MAI Society is a Construct Silence Mice When You Quiet Your Mind, What Does Your Soul Say
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104 106 107 108
JOZY BUTLER A Girl Without Numbers or Hands
111 112
CHRISTOPHER COSTELLO Meaning Revelation
114 115
EMMA VALLELUNGA Brooklyn Baby Girl It For My Anti-Valentine Smile Jars Ish
117 119 121 123 125
THOMAS PETITT #1 #2
128 129
ANNI CLARK "It had only ever been" Stained Glass Hands Fingertips
131 132 134
BOB HERZ Review of Andrea Scarpino's What The Willow said As It Fell
136
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About Nine Mile Magazine Nine Mile Magazine is an magazine of literature and art, which has been digitally published each Spring and Fall since 2013. With this issue we will begin a print version of the magazine in addition to the digital version. The magazine was founded in 2013 by Bob Herz and Whitney Daniels. Ms. Daniels is now art editor emeritus. We remain grateful to her for our design and look, and for her unfailing good taste in artwork. Stephen Kuusisto, the well-known poet and memorist, joined as co-editor and co-publisher in 2015, bringing new skills and outlook to the effort. Our purpose is to publish the best writing and artwork available to us, emphasiszing Central New York artists but not excluding others. Our views are broad and eclectic, and we’re excited to be able to provide publication and appreciation to a range of creative types. We hope you enjoy this and all our prior issues, which are available online. The Editors Bob Herz & Stephen Kuusisto.
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About Talk About Poetry Talk About Poetry is the Nine Mile Magazine podcast venture, offering discussions by working poets about poems that interest, annoy, excite, or otherwise engage us. All podcasts are available on Soundcloud and iTunes. The Talk About Poetry blog provides an extended discussion of the poems and an opportunity for listener feedback. The addresses are: Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bobherz iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ talk-about-poetry/id972411979?mt=2 Wordpress blog: https:// talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com Podcasts to date include: Robert Bly’s “Old Boards” • Brigit Kelley’s “Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone” • Phil Memmer’s “How Many Shapes Must A God Take” and “Psalm” • Georgia Popoff’s “The Agnostic Acknowledges the Food Chain” & “Name Inconsequential” • Stephen Kuusisto’s “Sand” and “They Say” • Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Voetex Sutra” (2 parts) • Discusson of Georgia Popoff’s book Psalter • Discussion of Jasmine Bailey’s book Alexandria • Discussion of Marvin Bell’s poems, and an interview, with a specific focus on his Dead Man poems (3 parts) • Readings by Ken Weisner, Jasmine Bailey, Georgia Popoff, Andrea Scarpino, Sam Pereira, Marvin Bell, Christopher Citro, and Jeffrey Harrison.
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Submission Policy We want to see your best work! Submit via email to: info@ninemile.org. • Poetry: submit 4 - 6 poems in Word, text, or pdf format. • Artwork: submit 3 - 5 small jpg files. Include your name and contact information along with a brief paragraph about yourself (background, education, achievements, etc), a statement of aesthetic intent for these poems or artwork, and a photo of yourself, and a link to your website (if available). We will respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us, reconnect to make sure we received your submission. Note that at least for now we do not accept essays, reviews, video / motion based art, or Q&A's without invitation.
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David Weiss HARDENING UP Yesterday sun branded your back Today wind is roaring like the sea Yesterday there was plenty of time Today you can't even feel your toes A buck lifts its head ready to bolt Yesterday you’d stop to talk Today snow careens sideways and you’re not looking up Later the wood you split will be going up the stove pipe We are the birds that stay is how she put it though going wouldn't change a thing Your letter said as much One then two shots far down the hill and the buck is gone You can survive getting lost or lonely if you don't lose your head You can even survive the touch that melted your heart
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LATE The moon’s a mole tunneling through the sky so cold you can see its breath You can hear creaking in the trees which crack without breaking You’re out looking for a dog that’s missing It’s 2 am and you’ve been calling Now you’re just walking stopping listening Long ago you found the dog you were searching for its front paw clenched in a trap Part-collie it made a sound so soft you didn’t hear it until you were beside her Now each tiny snap makes you listen harder At the bee hives you go close and make out the sound of ten thousand wings vibrating like a choir in a cathedral Really what do you know about anything You’d like to go back in where the fire’s warming Page 10 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
the walls but a dog is out there where it’s unforgiving and who knows what else
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UNREADINESS A wagon train of clouds is trekking east In the fields no rows are left for the fox to move through unseen Blackberry shoots scratch at the window to get in The cold rain stings You can remember a thing only so long Blue sky breaks through and pleases the eye The water is cold the trough scuzzy but the cows don’t mind it They’re in it for the duration which is not all that long Nothing welcoming in the air ground hard underfoot You like it outside where knuckles ache and there’s always another thing to get done On the inside something’s missing The dog barks he’s going blind Nor can the small plane up in the clouds see a thing So much to get ready to get ready for If you close your eyes you can see her face turning back half-hidden by hair And still you don’t know how to find the tulip tree once its leaves have blown away
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EQUINOX Like that carousels of snow geese out of the north boomeranging in midair black blurry wingtips dizzying to us earthbound ones who’d crawled out from under the International Harvester dragging the starter motor whose brushes were too shot to start anything We stood coldtoed and runny-nosed beneath that feathered machine turning like Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels and which turned which we couldn’t tell They banked dark against white cloud white against blue sky and the starter too worn to work pulling our arms down as rooted to the spot we wheeled with the gyroing geese that rose and fell off to weave through each other like line dancers or circus jugglers spontaneous and intricate unorchestrated and interlocked With our eyes we took our best shot and rode the revolving kaleidoscope into a whooping
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larger life where feeling sight flung us until we couldn’t hold it up much longer and lugged the iron thing like a passel of geese to the bed of the pickup then on to Monroe Tractor to order a rebuilt the sound of the honking still geysering behind us as though nothing mattered more than the pure urgency of that commotion which set us straight till our own motion carried us to care more for that kingdom of small concerns we were headed toward Our hands warmed in the cab and fiery windblown minds turned to incandescent and neon light where by then a small hand would seize hold of a forefinger and tug it toward some other miracle saying Daddy! look! look! look!
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ABOUT DAVID WEISS David Weiss is the author of a recent book of poems, GNOMON, two previous collections of poems, The Fourth Part of the World and The Pail of Steam, and a novel, The Mensch, which was published by Mid-List Press as a winner in their first novel contest. He has also published numerous essays on poetry. Weiss teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the editor of Seneca Review, a literary and art journal published by Hobart & William Smith colleges.
ABOUT THE POEMS There is a wonderful photograph of Federico Garcia Lorca sitting in a bi-plane (it’s a studio prop) with Luis Bunuel behind him. Lorca has his hands on the wheel and a look of great glee on his face as he looks toward the camera. I saw this on a postcard in Lorca’s summer house, a museum now on the edge of Granada. There were other postcards in the rack. In many, Lorca has the same look of delight, of gusto (to use a Spanish word), of high spirits. I think often of his notion of duende, that spirit of blood, earthiness, and death, of the deepest strata where the human and nature commune. But the glee that fills Lorca in those pictures is another aspect of duende. The poems of mine that Nine Mile has accepted, that appear under the sign of hard necessity and the
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hard necessities, could not exist without the vitality Lorca was so evidently imbued with. I think that where the two come together, vitality and necessity, are in idiom and image. Idiom is the animal body of language; image is the animal body itself. And the animating, inhabiting self, it struck me, while in Granada, is essentially a Flamencan dance of desire and mortality, which I saw a young boy doing in a circle of young and old women who were clapping out the beat.
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Andrea Scarpino ONCE UPON WING LAKE (Excerpts) “Once upon a time Mother Rose From The Sea” Once upon a time Mother rose from the sea, kelp-tangled, salt-streaked, cleaved open her hands like shells. Little birds, she sang, Come to me. And we did, perched on her shoulders, back, opened our beaks to drink. In our throats, a salty sting, thrashing waves. And she held us there, net of the tides thrown over our wings, net of her blue eyes. Come to me. And we beat ourselves against her shoreline. * ”We Were Children Once, Remember” We were children once, remember? We knotted twine, hid bread in our pockets, sifted gold nuggets through metal sieves. We slipped down the stairs on our stomachs, wrote notes with lemon juice on paper we stained with Mother’s tea. We gathered candles and long matches, tracked beasts, drew maps of secret caves. Our hearts beat too loudly for us
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to sleep. We lived in a place called Wing Lake and there were many birds: mallard ducks, mute swans, geese, robins filling the apple trees, blue heron that reigned on one leg. Blue in my feathers, blue in your eyes. Spring, we caught minnows by the bucket, tadpoles that died before they grew legs. We watched the sky for the swans’ return, worn feathers, travel-thin necks. They told us the secret of flight, wind gathered in shoulder blades, how turtles snap from below, how quickly a father turns. We went to the woods, built a hideout from cattails and fallen branches, swept the dirt floor, cooked pots of stew, made weapons from stone to battle bandits. At night, so many stars, milky line of the galaxy, so many lightning bugs we caught in jars. Fall came with its apples and rotting leaves, blue of the sky turned steel, glint of an axe and the blood it finds. The lake like breaking glass
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as it turned itself to ice. We bent our backs of sinew and lace, preened our feathers, read stories of Arctic adventurers, planned our own escape: what clothing we’d need, how many strong men, ice picks, deer to keep us from starving. We packed soup, instant oatmeal, tuna fish, sardines. We must be ready, always, to run— I was snow covering our tracks, you were wind sweeping away our scent. I was the core we cut in lake ice. You the hook of our dropped line. * “We were children once. Light shone in the trees.” We were children once. Light shone in the trees. Rocks breathed, watched over us. The mute swans nested, a jumble of twigs and lake grass we watched for weeks. And then, two cygnets appeared. A third, the weakest,
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lay on its side in mud. Its open beak, fluttering breath. We dripped water from our fingertips, fed it what worms we could find, covered it with felt, drew it a picture of the lake. It died one morning before we arrived. Mother Swan had to think of her other babies, Mother said. The other two grew strong, waited each afternoon for bread. Summer grew humid, sticky with thunderstorms, sirens. Cattails rattled a warning song. Every disaster has its scent— One evening, the father turned, grabbed a cygnet by his thin neck and held him below the water, small beating wings against his wide chest. We threw rocks, screamed, you found a long stick and waved it over your head. When the father let go, the cygnet bled from his neck, red open wound we could see from shore. He hid in the lagoon.
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For days, we looked for him, brought him his own bread, begged Mother to call a vet. Mother Nature isn’t kind, she said. Feathers covered in blood. And so we learned what hurt parents hold, learned only one of us could survive.
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ABOUT ANDREA SCARPINO Andrea Scarpino is the author of the poetry collections What The Willow Said As It Fell (Red Hen Press, 2016), Once, Then (Red Hen Press, 2014) and the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press). She received a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, and an MFA from The Ohio State University. She currently serves as Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
ABOUT THE POEMS These three poems are excerpts from my current work-in-progress, a book-length poem that weaves together myth and fairy tale in an exploration of the ways we think about and frame childhood experiences, the myths we tell about childhood, and the role of parents in shaping their children’s lives. We review Ms. Scarpino's What The Willow Said As It Fell in this issue. You can hear Andrea Scarpino reading on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ bobherz/andrea-scarpino-reading-what-the-willowsaid-as-it-fell and on iTunes: https:// itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/andrea-scarpinoreading-what/id972411979?i=366408926&mt=2
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Joseph Buehler DORA AND JENNY'S MITTENS The speed of sound surpasses the speed of light as multitudes watch in horrified wonder and amazement just before the magic cart turns over upon itself, spilling its heart shaped contents all over the black-spotted wolf-dog who shudders imperceptibly as the magic cart then smashes violently to the ground, rolling in an awkward position upon its own axis! These fitful sightings should go unnoticed! Dora and Jenny’s mittens fit too tightly on their cold tiny hands.
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ABOUT JOSEPH BUEHLER Joseph Buehler is retired and lives with his wife Patricia in Georgia between the cities of Atlanta and Athens. He has published short stories in The Kansas Magazine and the Canadian Forum long ago and poetry since December 2011 in such journals as Bumble Jacket Miscellany, Common Ground Review, Theodate, The Write Room, Two Cities Review (New York and Boston), The Tower Journal, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Indiana Voice Journal, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Unbroken and elsewhere. ABOUT THE POEMS "Dora And Jenny's Mittens" was written some years ago and re-written about a year ago. In the first version I didn't even mention Dora or Jenny. I guess I was trying to be mysterious. In the second version I mentioned them at the end. They had nothing to do with the rest of the poem; that gave it a disjointed appearance and a surprise ending. I don't consider it the best poem I have ever written, but I guess it's not the worst either.
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Peter Humphreys JUNE, JULY Surely you have made somethingEverything is worth the keepSome of many are nights with only Holst The Planets I drink and hear The Magician The Bringer of Jollity Some of these minutes 41.32 Feel as they were meant
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AXES I miss the sound, of all you who carried Sudden- dark trilogy of everything I’ve seen from him Al, as he calls him self, he only calls himself And he cries and asks for a soda cries and asked to finish my cigarette It was wet with my lips, I imagined him tasting my saliva running it in and out through his teeth As soon as I left I knew, I would see him floating in that alley bank-
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along with his brother alone in his booth
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ABOUT PETER HUMPHREYS Peter Humphreys currently resides in Syracuse, New York. He is presently attending SUNY Oswego, studying finance and investing at the undergraduate level. His poems have appeared in the Spring issue of Ghost City Press.
ABOUT THE POEMS For myself, these two included poems differ in great amounts in terms of aesthetic and material. “June, July” was to communicate my deep love for the The Planets, Op. 32, an orchestral piece by the composer Gustav Holst. It is a dynamic work-- one that is endearing and substantial. “Axes,” a piece soley written to reflect my experiences in cityscapes. A manifestation of encounters and cognitive content. A nod to the statement of Holst that, “In the real world, the ending is not happy at all.”
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Quraysh Ali Lansana basement blur: wisconsin in a basement with whiskey zeppelin II & cheeseheads drunk on hail mary. could start mess but outnumbered. this is not the underground hug i long for. very far away and not. milwaukee not norman. they are not the same. i was safe there. 2015 not 1985. kindred demographics in beer flannel & guitar music. white boy infatuation with black pain. another melaninless room. outside those purple walls, oklahoma history. inside we made our own. six years in a drunken cellar without cracker syntax. a brotherhood. mostly love down here. hate across street. klan on campus. a red-eyed reagan ache. here it’s packers & obama too long in charge. they okay with jay-z. sport green & gold not crimson & cream though just as fevered. fortune on the legs of black men they call nigga when game is done.
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ABOUT QURAYSH ALI LANSANA Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, three children's books, editor of eight anthologies, and coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2011, where he was also Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing until 2014. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a 2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. His most recent books include The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop w/Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall (Haymarket Books, 2015) and The Walmart Republic w/ Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, September 2014). Page 30 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
Forthcoming titles include A Simple Gift (Penny Candy Books, 2016) and Clara Luper: The Woman Who Rallies the Children w/Julie Dill (Oklahoma Hall of Fame Press, 2017).
ABOUT THE POEMS "basement blur: wisconsin" is one in a series of poems which attempt to recollect a defining, yet exceedingly hazy five year period of undergraduate learning at and/or near the University of Oklahoma. Life in the purple basement, as it was known, was a non-stop experiment in socialism, music, art and intoxication. Almost every time I'm in a basement or garden apartment I think of those purple walls, and for this poem the trigger was a Milwaukee bar.
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Jenny Hubbard WHY I AM QUEEN OF THE SECOND-GUESSERS Because my first crush was Danny Bonaduce. Because our first house was ugly as he was: a one-story brick ranch. Because my younger sister, who slept with my parents for two years, got a bedroom all to herself. Because my mom fooled us with Kool-Aid concocted with only ¼ of the sugar. Because in fifth grade, I wore a calico bonnet to school. Because the lamps in our living room held only 40-watt bulbs. Because I was proud of my used clarinet. Because I watched Love Boat, The Lawrence Welk Show, spent babysitting bucks on Add-a-Beads. Because I didn’t take calculus. Because at seventeen, I loved a smart black boy after being dumped by a dumb white boy, and the world didn’t build us a castle or elect us to homecoming court. Because life is a chain-link fence of crosswire choices, and I was never anyone’s princess
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CLEANING OUT HER CLOSET When a man-made substance, frail as a butterfly wing, outlives a person as fat as my mother, natural laws grow transparent. Science can’t master the sinister properties of Kleenex. In every one of her pockets, jackets, corduroys, extra-large bathrobes (My God, did she never wash clothes?), safety-pinned to linings, skirts, dresses, a tissue. Crusted with lipstick, torn, shredded, worn thinner with tears. Shrouds for mints, clasps, an unfamiliar cufflink, a pink parking ticket. I could stand here, dust spinning, and tell you they’re gifts from elves I used to see in my mind when I couldn’t find some small thing. I could say that angels had shed bits of fluff as they lifted her. But that my mother stepped out of the house with Kleenex stuffed up her sleeves cuts to the core of my being just like her. Fretting nightly, daily, and so ill-prepared for it: loss, that faceless white answer, echo of paper and air.
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PARTUM My desk fasts by the window with its one drawer and its dust. Its fallen pencils. Its broken leg. Across the hall, in that room, over the crib, butterflies suspended. The pillow small and pale as a petal. Where, in the silent disorder of things, can I place you? Powdery milk in the pantry. Waterless words. All the days, all the nights, I will write it another way: mother and pen fastening the bluest of bows to the lamppost.
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THE CEILING OF OCEAN, THE FLOOR OF THE SKY A mother walks the sand with her dot of a boy. She, heavy as the day, her back in its black bathing suit, stuffed clouds lowering themselves on the sea. Along the gray shore, trails of seaweed like hair of drowned girls. Years ago, a girl sidled off from the family picnic strung out at the base of the dune. A big family. She shared a room with dull sisters. She walked far, out of the summer. The mother fears the ocean, the way it harvests life into its roiling and throws back the unloved. The boy, about five, laughs at the white caps (hats!), at his mother’s fat legs. Back home, she only wears pants. The girl chose a shell, her own, bleached white as a lie. It fit in her palm, a story she opened: a ship set to sail, a lighthouse daughter Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 35
in a gown of foam, the tide playing tag with her ankles. The boy scoops up a shell, bleached white, asks why, why they come here, what is it she sees way out there on that skinny, dark line?
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ABOUT JENNY HUBBARD What you will want to know about me at this point is this: I am an award-winning young-adult novelist currently under contract with Penguin Random House. My two books, Paper Covers Rock and And We Stay, which both feature protagonists who write poetry, have earned top honors from the American Library Association, and my poems and stories have appeared over the years in many journals and little magazines, including the Southern Poetry Anthology, Crab Orchard Review, Tar River Poetry, Two Hawks Quarterly, The Rambler, and Hunger Mountain. A former English teacher, I currently volunteer as a literacy tutor in my hometown of Salisbury, NC.
ABOUT THE POEMS My aesthetic honors the quiet moment and the unspoken life found within it. “Partum,” “Cleaning Out Her Closet,” and “The floor of the ocean, the ceiling of sky” speak to loss and the ways that we absorb it and reshape it into some kind of narrative, usually with ourselves at the center. As a fiction writer, I am often more Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 37
intrigued by the side story rather than the main event, as these three poems illustrate. “Why I am Queen of the Second-Guessers,� unlike the other three poems, is pure autobiography, a rare concoction of poem for me, now that I spend most of my hours concentrating on fiction. In this one, I have tried to craft it so that the details in first two stanzas and most of the third, all literal, set up the metaphor in the last few lines. I also wanted to move gradually from humorous to serious. So I guess you could say that this one is an exercise in balance, pacing, and progression.
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Jasmine V. Bailey AGAMEMNON Did you contrive to turn a snake into a staff, a bitter speech into a poem or a foreign word for a kind of love that we don’t have, simple as the music of a broken reed, alien as the grown child you long ago forsook? How blame her for daring to arrive, upend your fragile life, ask you this once to look at a birthmark on her neck? Who sends our unwritten letters when we’re dead? Do the daughters who should scorn us, reject us back now they’ve grown up, instead tell strangers something gentle we once said, that in our folly we aimed to walk erect, even when careless as the gods, meant well?
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GARDEN In the glass shards and clam shells you found, the deep, heavy root that felt like a treasure chest against the spade, or the wilted box of an old woman’s dog vulnerable to desecration, a piece of doll shoe or Styrofoam with most of the word McNugget still legible, the yard teemed with evidence of regret. The attic was politic by comparison, dividing along a neat if artificial line between the orderly and decaying; there had been time to think before stashing pictures bursting from a wicker lunchbox, a half-hearted plan to return to the silver dress from 1966, the marionette never given to a child, booster seat melted and frozen over and over. In the ground you found what is forgotten naturally, as you might expect more things are forgotten, blotted by the inwardcasting sheen of living in oneself. In fact, much more is forgotten on purpose, with the ceremony of a burial or the sacrament of casting down, stomping, covering with stone: Page 40 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
the comedy of getting the better of the past. As you sift the soil for radishes you think it is a miracle more people aren’t killed and hidden beneath the grass. The weight of each fragment is out of proportion to its size, pressurized with intent the ground accepted. The dirt is studded with decipherable pieces of the harm that was meant, misery where it fell.
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EQUITY I know we will have it, a house that belongs to us by contract, bought with capital, recognized by courts. What is it we’ve been doing in all these apartments owned by tall men with teams of women doing their screaming for them? The dream must have been on hold, but sometimes I failed to remember that was so. I know we shall have some earth surveyed, rendered mathematic, owned the way I have owned sandwiches and shoes: without dispute. Ours to do with. To set a couch on the porch or to stud with iridescent balls on columns. To landscape with drought-resistant succulents and wild thyme. To come out with a golf club and scream Get the fuck off my lawn, to die in or away from. How much will we believe that it is ours? The vast, timeless hawthorn one of us will climb after an argument over money and our daughter dance with the branches of calling them prince this, prince that. The spot that is always a little damp below the floodplain good for digging worms, Page 42 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
the border where we bury animal after animal and erect pagan remembrances of stones and walnut shells. Day after day you hand me coffee and it is no accident that your fingers look like tributaries of the Amazon or the branches coming off of a wild cherry. The fact of pattern is proof of all patterns. I let it serve as evidence of something as impossible as separating coffee back to water and grounds. Take my hand like the Orinoco and promise that soon we will build our next lie.
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ABOUT JASMINE V. BAILEY Jasmine V. Bailey’s poetry collection, Alexandria, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2014 and won the Central New York Book Award for poetry. Her chapbook, Sleep and What Precedes It, won the 2009 Longleaf Press Chapbook Prize. She was the 2010 O’Connor Fellow in creative writing at Colgate University and her work has recently appeared in the minnesota review, Quarterly West, and 12 Women: an anthology of poems, published by Carnegie Mellon.
ABOUT THE POEMS “Garden” is a look backward and forward— forward to an imagined day when I have to clear my parents’ home of more than thirty years of living in, backward to the days when, as a child growing up in that yard, I dug for fossils and other buried treasures. We lived less than a mile from a McDonalds, and its detritus always littered that yard whose plants were wild enough that gardens didn’t have enough sun to grow well, but where many animals were laid to rest. The darker musings about burying murder victims come from everything from Rear Window to Berryman’s Page 44 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
Dream Song 29: “Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up./ No one is ever missing.” “Equity” also locates in the home and land. Many in my generation have delayed some rites of adulthood that at our age our parents had long since achieved. We struggle with the desire for a house, family, and the like despite knowing they are symbolic, ephemeral, and complicated: they suggest certainties they cannot guarantee and carry worries as well as reliefs. Like marriage, the ownership of property is a false guarantee against change, and it is human nature to want it anyway. "Agamemnon” is inspired by Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In the story, Agamemnon returns from Troy and is murdered by his wife who has never forgiven him for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. This act of comeuppance is avenged by their other daughter, Elektra, who convinces her brother to kill her. Morality is unnuanced and totally personal in these plays, and one person’s right is never reconciled with another’s. Peace is purchased with promises. In the poem I am also considering how often parents who should expect the kind of rejection Elektra deals to Clytemnestra (or she to Agamemnon) get just the opposite: forgiveness by those they wronged when they were vulnerable. That kindness can stand as a person’s independent act makes it to some degree more powerful than kindness born of reciprocity.
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Carlos Franco-Ruiz DETACHED ONLINE
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RUBBISH1
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WAITING ONLINE
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ABOUT CARLOS FRANCO-RUIZ
Carlos Franco-Ruiz (째1987, Managua, Nicaragua) is an artist who mainly works with painting. In 1988, as the civil war was winding down his parents immigrated to Miami, FL. Carlos was raised in Miami, in the neighborhood of Little Havana. At the age of 14, he was accepted into the Commercial Art Magnet Program at South Miami Senior High School in 2002. After graduating, he would continue to pursue art as a career and completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Miami in 2011. In 2013, he moved to Uruguay and continues to follow his passion for painting where he recently had a solo exhibition "Fractured Moments" at Roggia Galerie to showcase his latest body of work. Currently lives and works in Sauce, Uruguay.
ABOUT THE WORK By taking daily life as subject matter, he explores the lost spaces of our surrounding. His paintings reference recognizable landscapes transmuted into a color field through the abstractions of hues. The Page 52 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
result is a deconstruction of an environment ignored. By exploring the concept of landscape in this fashion, his images become a moment of extraction and addition, created through the layering of varnish as the painting progresses. His works explore to challenge conceived notion that everyday existence is mundane.
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Walt Shepperd IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING I was watching my story you know the one about the guy who lost his job for getting the boss's secretary pregnant and the boss got indicted for income tax fraud and it got to the point where the guy's wife who was supposed to have died in an airplane crash came back after ten years in a South American jungle and they interrupted it for a news bulletin saying everybody got scared and set off all their nuclear bombs at once and there was a terrible noise and the screen went blank but my story came back on and the guy's wife turned out to be the secretary's mother from another marriage and the commercial came on and I started thinking—it's gotten awful lonely—but I guess the end of the world
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could have been worse. I mean they could have cancelled my story.
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ADDICTION, WITHDRAWAL, AND CURE They came to my door two of them said a friend of a friend said I might want to connect to be connected said they were the connection could hook me up right then and said being I was a friend of a friend they would hook me up for free. The two at my door said try it everybody likes it try it this once for free and if I didn't like it I would be under no obligation but if I did I could stay connected by just paying every month and I'd never even have to see those two at my door ever again I'd stay connected unless I missed a payment In which case the two said sternly the withdrawal Page 56 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
would be vicious. I missed a payment once and read three books in a week to tranquilize myself from the withdrawal of being disconnected and when I finally knew I couldn't make it through another night I called and said I had the money and I'd never miss another payment so they sent the truck to reconnect my cable television.
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ABOUT WALT SHEPPERD Walt Shepperd is author of Poems for Lorca (Nine Mile Books, 2012), Conjuring a CounterCulture, Essays on the Sixties (Paradise: Dust Books, (1973), and I Dreamt I took a Two Week Vacation in an Audrey Hepburn Movie (Pulpartforms Unltd (1975), a chapbook of poems. With Stewart Brisby, on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he edited and published Born into a Felony, the first national anthology of contemporary American prison writing. He is founding editor and publisher of Nickel Review, founding editor of the Syracuse Gazette, and was Senior Editor for 35 years at the Syracuse New Times. Shepperd's work has also been published in the Berkley Barb, Newsday, the Post-Standard, Scholastic Teacher and Home Furnishings Daily. Mr Shepperd is Executive Producer for the Media Unit and threetime winner of the New York Press Association Writer of the Year Award and a recipient of the Syracuse Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award. A recipient of the New York Civil Liberties Kharas Award, Shepperd received a Golden Apple Award Page 58 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
from the New York Teacher's Association for educational reporting and an Impartial Citizen Award for reporting on race relations.
ABOUT THE POEMS In pursuit of aesthetics, poetry—as I found teaching the form in junior high school English— takes on a quick stereotype as the genre to celebrate beauty. In the same classroom, however, poetry emerged as a comfortable home for irony and absurdity. The most valuable lesson came from a comparative study of poetry and humor: if you have to explain a joke, it isn't funny. If you have to explain a poem, it doesn't work. After reading a poem you should either laugh, cry or lose your train of thought. Anyway, most of my poems are notes for short stories I didn't have time to write.
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Matthew Graham AND THEN “As a machine gunner, you pulled the trigger —there would be targets.” My friend Andy Doyle was a nineteen year old door gunner On a Huey Cobra Gunship named Bad Karma Patrolling the skies over the Mekong Delta Rocking to The Doors blasting through the cockpit speakers. This the end my beautiful friend. All the children are insane. One door opens and many doors shut forever, So long ago Along with the endless missions: Ash and Trash, Med Evacs into hot LZs, And Andy’s favorite—Search and Destroy. Break on through to the other side. And then, April 7th, 1970 And here they come, A line of Cobras arching low over the shimmering paddies, The early morning sun behind them, Bad Karma in the lead. And there’s Andy, door open, his 7.62 mm M60 Wide open and firing a solid stream of death Into the distant and rapidly diminishing tree line. And Andy screaming along with the Lizard King: Page 60 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
Baby you can light my fire, Baby you can light my fire. Time itself opening and closing Such a long time ago.
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ABOUT MATTHEW GRAHAM Matthew Graham is the author of three books of poetry, New World Architecture (Galileo Press, 1985), 1946 (Galileo Press, 1991) and A World Without End (River City Publishing, 2007), and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Indiana Arts Commission, Pushcart, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern Indiana. ABOUT THE POEMS “And Then� will be part of my new book entitled The Geography of Home. I hope the poem makes some of us remember the nightly news of long ago, the apocalyptic music of the Doors, and for every one of us to realize just how young and unready the combatants of that war were, and how unprepared they were to face what came next. I think too the poem connects the violence of our present culture with the violence of the culture of our past. My 20 year old students still listen to the Doors.
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Cyrus Cassells LAZARETTO This prepossessing word, whose genesis is Lazarus’ fabled upending of the tomb, limns both the behemoth of a brick hospital, shipshape for the moribund, and a severe, anchored boat, teeming with the sick; conjures the ragged, animal panting of the world itself beyond featureless walls; means a grey-souled station for infected seafarers: also, lazar house, pest house, and in its most musical form, lazaretto. * In Trieste one sultry July I stayed on “Old Lazaretto,” a long port street that the adept poet Umberto Saba revered. Ambling the adjacent harbor, I faced an open stretch of sea, tranquil, stately beyond belief, a blue, allaying mirror, but I never encountered a local Virgil willing to impart
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the origins of the old lazaretto, a soul able to usher me to the actual site, where Death prevailed, tireless as a forest partisan— * At final count, eleven funeral parlors refused his beloved’s body, so harried Raphael was impelled to hurry it into earth on his own; granted, that was at the onset of the winnowing AIDS years— remember?— when no physician could discern the source of the ambushing disease. It wasn’t just disgust, all-out disavowal that made the wary shunt the stricken men with garish lesions: fear is the quickest contagion— * And in those lazaretto years, I recall: the tame and mannerly failed us, yes, timidity and etiquette, that Romulus and Remus, were wholly decimated, so that we were cast adrift, bereft of any steadying map or outright destination, though, to be solicitous, Page 64 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
we were spurred to ask: What are you feeling? How are you today? Then the answer might come from a sallow, downcast “disco Apollo,” or even your dearest friend, a dancer/choreographer barely thirty, reliant suddenly on an ominous cane because his once expressive legs were collapsing: Oh, you know, I’m dying— * Hear me, when myriad, no longer able men foundered, and my bustling “City by the Bay,” the city that thrilled us, became a lazaretto, I was a first-time lover, a questing seeker in the first months of outbreak, of mystery and runaway mourning— I speak for the shattered, the aggrieved but still-alive, the voluminous missing, when I say once more: Fear is the quickest contagion— I can’t believe I survived. Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 65
LOVERS BORROWING THE LANGUAGE OF CICADAS “Nothing in the cry of the cicadas suggests They are about to die.” –Basho
That ladder-to-the-moon solstice when you first shadowed me, fearless and unerring as a pearl fisher, through my sea-lit hotel’s innocuous corridors, down to the inlet, and I understood it was no coincidence, that you wanted me (I would never have imagined you a lover of men), I told myself to memorize all the sanguine lights of the lustrous dancehall, the canopy of deluxe stars, and even now, decades later, I can summon them at will: balm of the emboldening evening air, glory-bound clouds, blanched further by the immoderate moon— No hallowing rhyme or reason why almost every July day we followed an unfailing route,
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past the frail but cordial puppet seller, through the sun-roughened park, to a barrage of voluble cicadas— bristling and wild as mayhem but truer than that— as if their unbridled strains were nimbly revealed, sim sala bim, as our own maverick vocabulary— In Hersonnisos, when we flourished, minus any shared language, no scaffold of expressive Greek or English, only hasty drawings on a pad and pressing gestures of desire— I swear I didn’t know you had a kept-quiet wife, a luckless child on the way (a stillborn son), so when I consider, inter alia, your coppery beard, your wine-soaked tongue and Adam’s apple, my young man’s body in getaway olive groves and coves, once skittish and bronzed by Crete’s compelling sun, once lanky and elegant as a kouros, I want to strike out those Aladdin’s carpet escapades
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like glaring errors, because a lie is a lie in any language, even the cicadas’—
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JASMINE These are the days of jasmine in Rome— when headlong, emboldened April has dissolved, and the joyous braiding of sun and rain brings this sweet, steady broadcast; when I step from the suppertime train, that’s what greets me: Roman hedges and walkways, graffiti-laden precincts graced with pallid fireworks, so even the most tumbledown niches seem breeze-swept, festive now with fragrance— Jasmine—the elating moment’s shibboleth, the cool, enrapturing night’s cavalry— Even crone-glorious Daria, my terrace-loving neighbor, confides: When Galliano came back from the front, his right hand was bandaged, but in his uninjured one, ah, poet, he held a fistful of jasmine he’d picked along the path to my door. How could I not become his wife?
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ABOUT CYRUS CASSELLS Cyrus Cassells is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, and The Crossed-Out Swastika, which was a finalist for the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2012. His sixth book, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, is forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. He is a professor of English at Texas State University. ABOUT THE POEMS My impulse as a poet is to move to beauty and music as anodyne—as a healing approach to things that are challenging, even horrific. I don't know if it's a balancing act or a need to ameliorate, but the goal is memorable language, emotional richness, spiritual heft, and a linguistic beauty that is not ornamental.
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Jordan Smith THE ECSTATIC MOMENT —after the ecstasy, the laundry Jack Kornfield It comes and it goes, and still no one’s done the dishes. No wonder the hermit poems are filled with rice and smoke from the tea stove. No wonder the most commonplace furnishings are offered as examples, As if what we cannot do without should be no impediment.
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WITH A SHOT OF MAPLE WHISKEY — for Bill Ackerbauer A good night for a reel on flute, Pays du Haut or Mattawa, wood fire, Leaves just past peak, and I am left with all I’ve left undone, As if it mattered, as if anyone remembered the notes I forgot Last time through, just to get the phrasing right, just to get that lift Of the geese rising from the marsh, of whiskey on the tongue, Taste of leaf smoke in all that sweetness,
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ABOUT JORDAN SMITH Jordan Smith is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, and The Light in the Film, The Names of Things Are Leaving, and For Appearances, all from the University of Tampa Press. The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, he lives in upstate New York, plays fiddle and flute, and teaches at Union College. ABOUT THE POEMS These poems are shorter than I usually write and with longer lines, which means, I think, that I finally figured out how to learn from poets I’ve long admired (Tomas Transtromer, Robert Bly, Thomas McGrath) to be quiet, wait for something that wants saying, say it straight out, and then shut up. “With a Shot of Maple Whiskey” is one of a pair of poems about the mixed pleasures of whiskey and music (this one’s flute, the other is fiddle) and the states of mind these create. “The
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Ecstatic Moment” occurred to me (not the moment itself, just the poem) while reading Peter Coyote’s The Rainman’s Third Cure and thinking about the zen proverb that’s the title of Jack Kornfield’s book. Of course the Chinese hermit poets (as translated by Red Pine, whom I’d just had the pleasure to meet) got in there as well.
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Deborah Diemont MINERAL BLUE Back in the 1970’s, Oscar hopefuls had a yellow glow to their film stock. Now the color of Oscar is mineral blue. —Zadie Smith She’s black-eyed-Susan-splashed, loose thread, bellbottoms. She’s a maiden name, a dandelion fire that spread inside a pinewood picture frame. She’s ochre-colored kitchen tiles, thin yellow squares—American— on white bread from a silver bin. She’s Butterick—quick-scissored smiles to pumpkin heads for Halloween. She’s DIY but more condensed, one dial, two channels rarely seen. She’s what I couldn’t tell but sensed. ... I’m dawn-hued rooms, a breath of air for someone with a steady hand who builds me tall, who’s shifting sand to set the ocean on my chair; I fix the ripple and the edge. I’m water that won’t seem to spill
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or wipe the plain despite the surge. I’m blown glass on the windowsill. I’ve kept my name-change and my form with nouveaux corsets bathed in blue, where seagull and snipe are the norm and every bit is globe but true.
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SHOTGUN HOUSE On your old street, debris swirled over cars, and sunlight entered through the iron bars to scrape an almost naked window frame. What paint remains is neutral: same, same, same by contract. Then, a hot breakfast for two meant coffee. You could lunch on it, still do, with chicory, and menthol cigarettes. The basin mirror showed men placing bets. The landlord said you hadn’t cut the grass. He must have stepped over the broken glass to show you how the plot required some tending. You study his perspective, shading, blending what lines you’ve found impossible to hold. Just make the structure yours now that it’s sold.
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NOW HIRING, MOONLIGHTERS WANTED Robbie’s charming ladies and their lady friends and women on first dates with texting men whose eyes say, Dope, you’ve lost your chance, and whom it costs too little to win back: a look, a shoulder squeeze, a smile. Girls drink his careful stubble and dark eyes. They glance at the tattoo he had re-inked, the harp, reminder he will always play with Stef, who writes electric lullabies. Robbie’s reciting, slow, from memory: cob salad and Italian wedding soup, a primavera sampled on his break, an oaky Malbec to complement the steak. Good choice, the angel-food, it’s light, so light, why not this once? Robbie, driving home, confronts the sign, floodlit beside a plastic Christmas crèche, the cratered lot, its trailers hauled by U. He’d wear a polo like he hasn’t worn since school, fill in blank forms and check each gauge. Fluorescent light would wire his hair to gray that candlelight forgives or wipes away. Rob, at 4 AM, kissing Marley and Sinèad: When he wakes, he’ll play monster, he’ll play house, while Stef gets a long shower around noon. Page 78 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
He slides his arm so they’re both holding To Be Named. He can’t afford to moonlight, not so soon.
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ABOUT DEBORAH DIEMONT Deborah Diemont lives in Syracuse, New York, where she has tutored grammar and writing at Syracuse University. She has two books of poetry available from Dos Madres Press: Wanderer and Diverting Angels. ABOUT THE POEMS I wanted to be a fiction writer and like to write narrative poems, even narrative sonnets. I wanted to be a painter and a musician and like poems that are musical and imagistic—also poems that travel, or unravel, to end in a different place from where they begin. Mostly, I work in form because my free verse lines tend to slacken; meter helps with control. Also, fresh rhymes continue to appeal to readers and listeners—from Shakespeare to popular music and rap. The poems here come out of memories of childhood, travel, and life in different cities in the North and South. Now Hiring, Moonlighters Wanted gets its title from a sign in the U-Haul parking lot on Teall Avenue. It’s for the staff at various eateries in Syracuse whose grace and hustle knocks me out; I think Syracuse waiters and waitresses are the hottest in the country.
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Ona Gritz THE FLIPSIDE TO THE SIXTIES For years I didn't know my mother had a son living with a first husband on another coast. It was like that then. A boy on the next block wasn't told his parents were really his grandparents. A girl I sometimes played with didn't know about her twin who died at birth. I'm sure that, like me, that neighbor boy knew without knowing he knew, and that girl felt lonely even if she couldn't name who it was she missed so much. Everything comes out in the wash, my mom used to say. (We hung ours outside. My mother's cone shaped bras, my flowered underpants, my dad's V-neck tees that smelled sweet with tobacco fresh out of the machine.) I like to think she tried to sound playful, whispering, who you are will be our own little secret to the lanky boy, her first born, on that long distance line. These days, my brother drops the words my wife into every sentence. It makes me feel like an acquaintance.
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My wife and I saw that movie. I'm taking my wife out to dinner tonight. He was nine, I remind myself, watching my son play outside, collecting leaves, digging holes, while we talk on the phone. Nine and forbidden the word mom.
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THE SPIDER TATTOO I'm staring at the tattoo of a spider on the murderer's neck, at the cross-hatched lines that form the top edge of a web, which disappears into the orange collar of his prison suit. I imagine it probably continues, spreading across his broad shoulders over that place where a pair of hands might have pushed him on a playground swing. When I was little, my sister would take me to the park before supper, lift me onto the rubber seat and let me fly. I loved that motion, the rhythmic squeak, the way she'd chatter behind me about the boys down the block. But then she'd make me go so high I thought I'd catapult off that flimsy strap. Stop, I'd call but she'd laugh and pull me back so that I'd soar even more, the swing tilting, and me holding on so tight the chains dug a web of red marks on my palms. Finally, I'd cry and she'd slow me down and hug me, my wet face pressed into her smoky hair. Walking home,
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we'd hold hands and that mix of joy and fear would move inside me until it changed into a secret between us. 'Love does funny things,' I think now and let myself wonder if maybe he loved her too, this man in the overheated courtroom with the spider on his neck. The way love can push and pull and push too far, it's possible, I suppose, that he loved her too.
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REBECCA PREGNANT (Genesis 25: 19-25) The tight wet sack my twin boys share is a battlefield. One aims a forming foot at his small curled brother. That one retaliates, using an elbow sharp as a gnawed chicken bone. Be grateful for the gift of sons, says Isaac. And I am. But, sometimes, half sleeping, I envision daughters. They lay quietly, head to head, touching palms. Awake, I drink a ladle-full of milk and it fuels this fight. What's the point, I ask, if they wish to cancel one another out? Our God is nonchalant. Already, He's decided which of my two children I'm to love.
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ABOUT ONA GRITZ Ona Gritz's first full-length poetry collection, Geode, was a finalist for the 2013 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Seneca Review, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and many other journals and anthologies. Ona's chapbook of poems, Left Standing, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2005. Her novella-length memoir, On the Whole: a story of mothering and disability is available as an ebook from Shebooks, an imprint of short ebooks for women. Ona is a columnist for Literary Mama and, along with her husband Daniel Simpson, poetry editor for Referential Magazine.
ABOUT THE POEMS When I first wrote "The Flipside to the Sixties," before I'd found its title, I believed I was simply sharing my experience of the hurt and confusion that comes from living in a family rife with secrets, and noting how prevalent the experience turned out to be in the years of my childhood. But as I spent more time with the piece, it came to me that, though I grew up in a burgeoning era of freedom and self-expression, my parents and others of their Page 86 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
generation had already based their personas on the values of homogeny and perfection from the previous decade. It was an impossible standard, and they hid the places they faltered by telling secrets and lies. We, their children, were given that legacy to reconcile, thus the underbelly of the polished 1950's became the flipside to the let-it-allhang-out 1960's. As a poet, I have always found flipsides fascinating. "Rebecca, Pregnant" is part of a series of poems that questions the harshness in stories from the Torah. I want to believe in a deity who is loving and wise, and yet the God of the Hebrew Bible has a dark side that so often punishes and places people in impossible situations. The persona poems in this series are my attempt to grapple with this aspect of God by spending a moment in the skin of the various characters who are directly affected by his testing and his cruelty. "The Spider Tattoo" came from a prompt I was given by the inimitable Peter Murphy to "drop a spider into a poem about forgiveness." I was at the time, and am now, in the midst of writing a book about my sister who was murdered, along with her husband and infant son, by trusted friends. While I am not in a place of forgiveness for the homicides, I was willing to explore in the poem the likelihood that the perpetrators' feelings for their victims were complex and layered and that love might be part of what is on the flipside to hate and its most vicious acts. Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 87
Daniel Simpson LISTENING TO NEW YORK RADIO IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT There, in Insomniac City where the dial can easily hold five languages beyond English and stations bleed into each other, Emily Dickinson—satisfied she could no longer see to see— spoke through a piano while a Spanish man, half crying, half singing, declared he too would die if the one he most desired did not give him her undying love. Between Emily and the Spanish man, a sitar spoke harmoniously about rock-steady faith, while picking its way along a path of dissonant doubt. Commercial life finally put to bed, Lennon woke up from a good dream, his imagination intact. He sang with the sitar, calling the chutney and raita left over from last night's dinner to put on spiritual livery. They in turn inspired the beans in my cabinet to take on a holy presence,
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and the cabinets themselves, dazed at first, recalled the distant spirits of trees. And when the whole house became tuned like this to the radio, my father kindly caught a coach from that other kingdom to sit in my living room, if only for a moment, and casually talk with me of ordinary life.
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MY PANTS ARE DRENCHED WITH RAIN My pants are drenched with rain, which came sideways and up my legs as I walked home from the bus. Once, Jenny filled my hand with hers as we walked in the drizzle. Her hands were wide and quiet— hands that could listen, quiet like a priest at confession. My father's hands were busy, not soft and uncaloused like mine. I touched all the caskets before I chose a pine box that was smooth and lean— no nicks or splinters like the rocking boat he hammered together for me in the cellar. I picked a pine box and the sun poured down. But now, my pants are drenched with rain. May there be no time this weekend— no time and not too much sun. May there be no more train whistles saying you must go somewhere, and none of the usual loneliness. I have other pants, dry pants, that would match the red shirt with the swan, the one I have on. I am rich; my ears are full of talk. Page 90 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
Once, my arms were full of someone half my age. Her shirt was filling up with water and yet she breathed air in and out. She did this repeatedly and without effort. Everything she did amazed me. Pretty soon, I will be dry. Will the memory of my father fade the way rain evaporates? My mind is full of words. I have not run out of things to say. I make emphatic statements about the future and the present: "Jesus shall reign" and "the rain it raineth every day." How many years of rain make dust of a wooden coffin? One week after my father was buried, it was raining, and I was touching myself, thinking of Debbie, who wrote on our prom picture that she would never forget the night we had. Jenny just called to say it is raining in Seattle now, too. My mind is full of rain, and my heart of dust and longing.
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PLATONIC SEX "What a depressing idea of love, to make it a relation between two people, whose monotony must be vanquished as required by adding extra people." — Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia So this is intercourse— you asking me with your eyes to say yes, I'm game, I'm up for this lifelong tapestry of ideas, and I asking you by touch to pick up yesterday's thread when you said I just learned from Yeats how crosses and roses work together, then you asking me by phone what I meant about the difference between passion and romance, the middle path and mediocrity, and we asking each other, sitting in your cold car past midnight, living and dead stars crossing and rising over the whirling earth, to say perhaps, to say that, if yes,
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we would seek the others, we would place ourselves in the path of meteors.
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ABOUT DANIEL SIMPSON Daniel Simpson’s collection of poems, School for the Blind, was published by Poets Wear Prada in October, 2014. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Passager, The Atlanta Review, The Louisville Review and Margie, among others. Cinquo Puntos Press published his essay “Line Breaks the Way I See Them” and four of his poems in Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, now in its second printing. The recipient of a Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he serves, along with his wife, Ona Gritz, as Poetry Editor for Referential Magazine, an online literary journal. His blog, Inside the Invisible, can be found at www.insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com.
ABOUT THE POEMS One night, when I was staying just outside Manhattan, “the city that never sleeps,” I found myself wide-awake. I turned the radio on with the hope that it might help me fall back to sleep. No such luck. Instead, I found a dial as animated and Page 94 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
crowded as a rush-hour subway. Stations playing radically different genres bled into each other, firing my imagination and giving me the start of "Listening to New York Radio." I can’t quite explain how or why the poem made the turn to pull chutney, raita, beans, cabinets and trees into the mix, but that’s when I knew the poem had a mind of its own. (I once heard Marie Howe say that, most of the time, writing a poem can feel like riding a horse. “That’s great,” she said, “but it’s when it feels like the horse is riding you that you know you’ve really got something going on.”) On a subconscious level, I may have thought of this mix of things as being like an amazing soup, and that’s how I got to the food, but I’ll never know for sure. Marvin Bell talks about “writing into the unknown.” I’ve written my share of narrative, fairly autobiographical poems, which can seem to be at odds with this idea, since a known story can have a tendency to drive the poem toward a pre-determined end. I always hoped, however, I could write myself to some new insight into the situation and the people involved in it. Wanting to push myself closer to lyrical without entirely giving up narrative, I found myself drawn to trying out what Natalie Goldberg calls “writing practice,” a kind of free-writing. I didn’t expect this to lead me directly to writing a poem, although, once in a while, it did; I only hoped it might loosen my control, perhaps help me write
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even more deeply into the unknown. “My Pants Are Drenched with Rain” came directly out of freewriting. I probably jettisoned about half of the original and shaped what was left, but almost everything in the poem came from that original impulse. “Platonic Sex” has its roots in one of the headiest periods of my life. I had left a traditional marriage and life in the corporate world to enroll as a graduate student in English. I was eager for fresh and challenging ideas, and my heart felt open to deep, human connection wherever I could find it. I took several classes in Yeats, Joyce, and other Irish writers with Vicki Mahaffey, whose open heart and mind I truly admired. In one of those classes, we read A Thousand Plateaus as an ancillary text. The passage from it that serves as epigraph to this poem scared and enthralled me with its possibilities. I was excited by those possibilities, as I was by Yeats’ use of images to embody large ideas. While reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I became obsessed with the concept of the middle path, which Daedalus warned Icarus to follow for his own safety. When, I wondered, did the middle road become mediocrity? I had many more questions than answers, but an answer “Platonic Sex” seemed to have well ahead of me was that I needed my deepest relationships to be driven by conversation.
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A POETRY SHEAF: YOUNG AUTHORS OF CENTRAL NEW YORK
Clockwise from left, Kat Skafidas, Brianna Mai Schwartz, Georgia Popoff, Thomas Pettitt, Jenna Lacey, Jozy Butler, Anni Clark, Chris Costello. Emma Vallelunga was cut out by camera angle. She is shown below.
By Bob Herz 1. We are proud to present poems by these six young Central New York authors. They are members of the Young Authors Academy at the YMCA Downtown Writers Center. All are taught by our colleague, the extraordinary poet, editor, teacher, and essayist, Georgia Popoff. The poets are: Brianna Mai - 17; Joey Butler - 14; Christopher Costello - 16; Emma Vallelunga - 16; Thomas Pettit - 17; Anni Clark - 16. I should get something out of the way up front here in this introductory essay. I say "young authors," as a way of explaining them, and that's unfair. As if one Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 97
should expect less, forgive more, make allowances. They're young, right? After all... But that's the wrong frame of mind in which to approach these poets. Their work speaks for itself: It is wide-ranging in its interests, specific in its concerns, adventuresome in its choices of forms, always interesting, uniformly good. Lest that sound like a hectoring of the gentle reader, let me make a confession, one which readers may share, however silently: For I am abashed to admit that it was a surprise to me, on first hearing the poems read, how powerful they were, how good, how much of themselves and their lives the poets put Emma Vallelunga into the poems. How much of value was there. I kept thinking, It can't be, but of course, it was. One of the nice ways to be defeated by reality. 2. I should not have been surprised, of course: poetry, the oldest and most original art—there has always been poetry, and poems—favors no individual, group, place, or time. That may be one of the great reasons for its strength and its longevity. There is only one Shakespeare or Milton for us, but clearly there have been many Shakespeares and Miltons over the ages in other cultures and places and times. As for age, once again, the muse of poetry is indiscriminate: Rimbaud began writing poetry in Page 98 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
grammar school, with his most productive period coming just as he turned 17, and ending when he reached 21, when he stopped writing altogether. Alexander Pope wrote poetry by age 12 that would appear in his later collections and anthologies, Percy Shelley wrote in his teens, and his wife Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at age 19, finishing it by age 20. Dylan Thomas wrote poems throughout high school, filling The Notebooks with extraordinary pieces, often first drafts of the major work that would appear in his 20’s. It is likely that most poets Georgia Popoff whose names we know today started early. So that’s my confession: a lacuna in my vision. A discrimination, a bias. I somehow thought in my unexamined way that college was where good poetry began. But the pieces I first heard from these six were the equal of things I had seen as an undergraduate and in many cases of work I saw at the Iowa Writers Workshop. It was a surprise, a pleasant one. Like all working poets, I worry about the future of poetry, as well as about its present. Honestly, I worry less now, thinking that the future will produce good work by very good poets who are committed to the craft and who find the possibilities for content personal and inexhaustible because it is a way of seeing and dealingwith the world as it is. Wonderful. Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 99
3. I mentioned that I heard their poems before I ever read them. That's because we recorded some of these poets reading their work. We had to try twice. The first time was alas, a bust: The heating system in the old room we used at the YMCA for the recordings produced a low hum that was inaudible to us during the recording, but was destructively audible in the later playback. We were able to clean up and produce a reading by two of the poems at our Talk About Poetry podcast, Emma Vallelunga and Christopher Costello (the reading is at SoundCloud: https:// soundcloud.com/bobherz/young-authors). The other readings were unfortunately a loss. We have since tried again, and believe that this time we will be more fortunate. More news about that another time. If it turns out the way we hope, we will be able to broaden the audience, the reach, and the effect of the podcasts. It is potentially a very exciting development. 4. So what about this place where they work and develop? The Young Authors Academy is an extraordinary program in Syracuse, NY. It works with teens in grades 6 - 12, offering classes and sessions with known and experienced writers who teach the fundamentals of writing poems and stories, and try to help the writers push to the next levels of development. Page 100 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
Anni Clark, one of the young authors in this feature section, said that being part of the the Academy “gives me the opportunity to have friends who are interested in the same things that I am. And this is not to mention how much the classes have helped to improve my writing abilities. Recently, I entered a story that I'd written in class into an international short story contest, sponsored by the New York Times bestselling author John Green, and the story is now published in an anthology. I don't think I could have done that without the help and guidance I've received from YAA.� The exercises are broad-ranging and challenging. One of these exercises is called "prompts," which are subject matters or exercises often generated by the young authors themselves, who take turns to provide the prompts for the group. The poets as well as their teacher write to the prompt. Georgia Popoff told me that by following the prompts she finds that she is often able to generate new work along with the young authors, leading to a poem in response to the instant prompt and eventually a whole body of new work: The teacher is being led by the students. One of these prompts, from Jozy Butler, was to write a last Will and Testament. For her response, Georgia Popoff wrote to her students about what they and the teaching meant to her: Last Will and Testament (as it stands today) To my brightest lights, my brilliant young poets, Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 101
I leave whisper phones to deliver the majesty of your own words directly into your own ears. I offer the jasmine perfume of the Santa Cruz mountains and July’s insistent stargazer lilies as inspiration, the hum of wood bees searching for weakness in the rafters, and the sway of mature maples new with leaf in May. I gift you with all of the language that has held me captive and astounded, frustrated, and empowered throughout this life. To you, the next generation infected with this necessary and crucial craft, I offer every thesaurus, dictionary, and repository of words to heal and hound, reveal and belie the evidence of folly and foible, wonder and confusion. I place the power of the pen in your nimble hands to blare and blaze, to confront and console, to ring as Quasimoto’s bells of love and longing, outrage and remorse, laughter and sorrows, the truths that we, as poets, behold as self-evident and are compelled to grace to the unseen and unknown among those with whom and away from we walk. I give you all I love, all I believe, and all I hope to learn for you will be the ones to continue Page 102 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
this ancient and immediate art. You are the stars the sun, the pulse of all that is true and urgent. Keep each other whole and ready to face the world. Shine each other’s armor and fuel each other’s lamps. It is you I trust and who keep me breathing. "Keep each other whole and ready to face the world": It is the right wish of any teacher for any poet, the wish for community. It is the single most important and most ignored and denied thing in any author’s writing life. Writing is a solitary act. Publishing is easy, sharing is hard Important to remember that it is a virtue, and often salvific. 5. I talked above of the power of these poems, but it might be as well to focus a moment on their strangeness. Consider Brianna Mai’s “Hope is losing control,” or Jozy Butler’s “A girl with no shadow / Or better yet, a pink one…” Every poem in this group has something sudden or strange in it, a surprise. I love that. And I love it that the poems are in control throughout, the lines holding their own with seriousness of their mission. Other examples? Almost too many to count: Think of the end of Emma Vallelunga's “For My AntiValentine”: the items I would buy you on this gray-skied Valentine's Day Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 103
would be a pair of scissors, a package of breath-mints and an extra large sweater. Or Thomas Pettit’s #1: "We have a cat? Since when have we had a cat?' "Since Christmas!" says my sister, throwing her hands into the air. "And you named it Gollum? What's wrong with snow ball?" "He's gray. Duh." "Oh, of course," I think, "That's the only logical name then." Or his Sam shivered. It wasn't the cold. It was the new dance craze. Or the way Christopher Costello opens his poem about death and discovery with, I stare past the sightless sheep. Or again, Anni Clark’s “Sometimes you’re not given the privilege of suffering appropriately.” There are so many other things to praise in these poems: their fierceness, their insistence that their own voices are real, that the space they create is genuine, their loyalty to their own visions and forms, their belief that the work at hand is real and important, and nothing to hesitate or be timorous about. I should add that I find the thinking in these pieces to be adept, complete to the subject matter at hand. Page 104 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
Lovely, all of it! But enough, because I could go on for pages... Read these poems. Enjoy them. There are extraordinary virtues here, and wonderful writing. It is a privilege to publish this work by these poets, and exciting to think about where they will go and how they will develop.
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Brianna Mai SOCIETY IS A CONSTRUCT Society Is A Construct It's a wall around who I am. It's Racism, Cliques, a Popularity Contest A form fitting box with nowhere to go. Conform They Say. Become one of us. One of them. A white picket fence, a well paying job, The American Dream. Be One of Us. A skinny blonde girl, or a tall brunette Popular, Athletic, Loved But usually in a group so never truly thinking for themselves. But what if you don't fit that description? Me, I am different. Different and in other words strange. I am Asian with black hair and dark eyes, Not athletic, Not known to myself, let alone by anyone else. But loved. Purely without hate or envy. Not conforming to anyone's will but simply standing. Alone with a camera Thoughts overflowing With ideas that hold no real meaning. My passion isn't the "American Dream" Page 106 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
So, I don't really know where I'll end up. With a white picket fence..? I don't really know.. With a well paying job...? I really hope so. But in the end, I don't know where you'll find me. I'll be doing something I love And not conforming to the ideas That society expects me to perform. So I'll be here, still doing me Until the end of me, comes to be. So this is me. Who are you?
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SILENCE Your lips are moving but I hear no sound. It’s like my eyes are shut and I’m lost. Not found. I want you to talk to me but please use your hands I see what you want but don’t understand I’m deaf not dumb so don’t twiddle your thumbs make the effort, come talk all it takes is to walk Over to me, over to us we’re the miscellaneous bunch not just one, not even two fill a whole country that’s just as much. What it takes is to sign and not just to say not a laugh or a line but a sign, that you know who I am and that’s simply sublime.
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MICE Bombs are falling Hope is losing control. Hearing screams are growing louder, Louder, LOUDER with every boom. Bodies are collapsing running around in circles like giant mice in a maze twisting, twirling, toppling over met with dead ends, the cycle repeats E v e r y t h i n g . i s . g o n e.
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WHEN YOU QUIET YOUR MIND, WHAT DOES YOUR SOUL SAY When I quiet my mind, my soul refuses to reply. My soul enjoys the music I play in my mind. My own compositions, new songs that I just heard spotify or on the radio. the quiet of my mind is uneasy. my soul hates the silence. When I quiet my mind, my soul says nothing Yet it hums with anticipation. and passion. It swirls with colours, more colours than known To the world. Feeding my mind with ideas For projects and film, they dive from The highest diving board into the pool of my Thoughts and start to sink. Growing into Deeper ideas and feelings. When I quiet my mind, my soul says nothing It cries at me. An ongoing battle with life. Those rough days when staying in bed is the best Thought I have, the days when I’m too tired to Write, they days when my music means the most To me, myself and to who I am. When I quiet my mind, my soul starts to Laugh. It is proud of the struggles it has Overcame and the ideas that flow Out into my mind. amazing ideas
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That will lead to brilliant projects And hard work. It smiles at all The dark days and the sun hidden behind the clouds. When I quiet my mind, my soul says "Smile through your pain. It'll all be better in the end"
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ABOUT BRIANNA SCHWARTZ Brianna Schwartz is a 17-year old homeschooled student. She has written, performed, and recorded original music and is currently working on three new songs. She is a self proclaimed bookworm and is a poet. In Spring 2015, Brianna studied a rigorous program in math, literature, and music for a semester in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she sat for and passed the General Certificate for Secondary Education exams. The GCSE exams are the "compulsory school-leavers' examinations by the government of the United Kingdom". Brianna enjoys communicating through her music, American Sign Language, and her writing. She would like to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and pursue a career in the entertainment industry, with a focus on film.
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Jozy Butler A GIRL A girl with no shadow, Or better yet a pink one. Forgotten in the sky, she neighbors The stars, she sing for the moon. A life form. A BOY. A boy that lives at the bottom of the sea. His only friends being the seahorses That come by every once in a while. He was in flames. The same water that put him out, Drowned everything he loved. I assume this is how "Things work� The galaxy in reach of only HER hands But ever so slightly alluding the Palm of her hand. How does she obtain happiness? When happiness is just a twinkle In a black hole, a rose petal At the bottom of the ocean. Happiness is just someone’s Bait to lure us into to a lie. But we found out being happy is many Things, perfection not being one of them, So why don't you stay while?
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WITHOUT NUMBERS OR HANDS What is a clock? Is it a lie of demise? I guess a better question would be How should we spend our time. It all ends anyway. Why wake up to a burning sunrise With hot herbs in one hand and A lover in the other when everything Can disappear without proof of Existence? I do know one thing; If you had no air to breathe I'd give you my last breath, i'd give you a Lung, i'd give you both of them. I'd give you my last heart beat so you Could love before your time ends. I think i answered all my “why's" The end of a time line is just a fraction Of the space before it. The sunset we watch could only dream To be as bright as our souls. Our DETERMINATION. So what is a clock, Without numbers or hands? A shackle for progress.
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Jozy Butler is a 14-year old 9th grader who is homeschooled currently living in Syracuse, NY. A poet, songwriter, and visual artist, she has lived in many locations throughout the U.S. Her twin sister Connie is also a student of the Young Authors Academy. Together they make art and are creating mangas for the YA reader.
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Christopher Costello MEANING The meaning of life cannot be discovered unless it wishes. It has an inhuman power. It has its own freedom. It has control. The meaning of life cannot be summed up in a note, passed back and forth between two gossiping friends. The meaning of life cannot be found by crunching numbers or scrawling notes in the pages of old books. The meaning of life can be found only by living.
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REVELATION I stare past the sightless sheep. The ones with enough naivety to Think repeating honeyed prayers Will somehow make all this okay. I remain silent, because I know better than to plead With someone who's stopped listening. Dad squeezes my hand, Warming the bitter words; “She's with God now.� It seems like a bad time to bring up That I don't believe in fairy tales any longer. Outside, the sun is black and unforgiving And I gaze into its blinding challenge Like I'm seeing the truth for the first time.
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Christopher Costello is a 16 year old sophomore at Westhill High School. He is a writer who concentrates on speculative/science fiction and poetry.
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Emma Vallelunga BROOKLYN BABY GIRL (A GOLDEN SHOVEL) She waits on the side of the curb. She's never been taught manners, always talking with the people on the streets to ease their weak souls without angels, sometimes she would pick up lost change, counting the numbers of cents in her dainty hands, the amounts too small to buy a pack of gum, stars were always her night-lights in darkness making her dreams more enjoyable than most and a free breakfast awaited her at a friendly diner, wishing she could give a bite to the street-men, ongoing they lingered in her mind, always trying to aid them. She loves passing by the street-men who play music, caressing their guitars with grace. She's tried to learn the feelings of rhythm, dancing to beats she didn't recognize but still with the fear of the way they, the strangers, stared at her and waited for the falling so they could take her from her home, apart from her street-men, breakfast and stars, but waiting until the days she could live without worry for everyone's safety and someday her Superman will arrive, giving her the rescue of her life, to take her to a place where she could pick how to explore, how to be, where her
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psyche would flourish beyond comprehension, up the sides of mountains, into the depth of valleys, across the vast beaches, history could be rewritten through all the scars on her arms. NOTE: Lines from “Waiting for Superman� by Daughtry
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IT I had yet to give it a name. Not a finger could be placed its origin. The feeling, the need to pick up a pencil and let the words spill onto the paper like blackened sludge. I had hoped it would pass, that it was just a phase, an illusion, a memory. But it stayed. It set up shop in my brain, kindled a fire so large my head remained constantly ablaze. It liked to cook enormous meals, of pies and cakes and cookies, food so unhealthy, my brain jumped with glee and then plunged into a sugar-induced coma. It liked to sleep for long periods of time, snoring like a wild grizzly bear, leaving me awake at ungodly hours of the night. Most of all it liked to make me its servant. Whatever it had to say, I wrote it down, taking its orders. Change this word! Rewrite that! Throw that away! Add this! On and on and on it went. I had yet to discover that I held inside myself the power to control this wild beast who took refuge in my mind Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 121
so many years ago. Soon after, it kept its roaring fires to a soft warmth. It began to cook less frequently but more fulfilling dishes of pleasure. Its sleeping patterns calmed the restlessness of nightmares. Suddenly it took my orders, and only intervened when I needed it most, giving advice. And in writing this poem, I have realized what it was. It was the birth of an imaginary child, the process of maturity slowly setting in as it grew up to become my ever-lasting partner in all things creativity. I was forever its mother. And since then I am forever a writer.
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FOR MY ANTI-VALENTINE Every time you become annoyed with me I love to smile at your discomfort. If there was a day you didn't look like you crawled out of bed it must be the day the world was ending. When I see you approach my direction I only feel glad because you're walking past me. Invisible. Thankfully. If I had a penny for every time you flipped your long hair, or your mouth reeked of bubblegum, or your clothes outlined your entire figure, if I had that many pennies the items I would buy you on this gray-skied Valentine's Day would be
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a pair of scissors, a package of breath-mints and an extra large sweater.
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SMILE JARS (A GOLDEN SHOVEL) Had they never told me my intensions were unclear, hold me close, whisper that my collection allured bees to honey I would take those words and squish them together but I can't capture all memories, store them like butterflies awaiting my ignorance, no matter how much bread is eaten by happy mouths, inside my heart I yearn for the little pieces of moments in my jars so that I may savor and taste ingredients that cabinets have hidden so tightly and of no regret did they have for my jars when they crushed them by will. Because if wonderfulness is less than I then sadness is a burden, you bid away my dreams of the beautiful jars of smiles firmly placed upon my broken boards 'till the wind steals their lids yet I have a habit of leaving and returning and don't recall the directions from which my smile jars cascaded into hell. Yet when I try to reform them my idle hands slip through their amber colored bodies ones that I so very adored but the hounds were hungry. Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 125
I knew they would like the meal I had prepared but I like to amaze their minds, become so incomplete. So when travelers come from afar and ask me where to take refuge none will say I am a bad hostess who can drain your emotions, nor tell anyone about my orange jars when they give off such an odor yet I can't help but grin as the mayhem comes, continuously they dine and their smiles shall never leave my jars again
NOTE: Lines from “My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell� by Gwendolyn Brooks
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ISH When I was a small child I found a rock in my Mother's garden But it did not seem like it was a rock to my small child brain It was warm-ish, smooth-ish, brown-ish, hard-ish, heavy-ish And I did not know what name to give my new discovery So I named it Ish, and Ish and I went everywhere together I would play with Ish after primary school in our backyard Rolling it down our dirty yellow plastic slide over and over I brought Ish to the dinner table and Mother would get mad So I hid it under my chair so she wouldn't see Ish beside me And I did this continuously to complete my childhood fantasies Until one day that I decided to pretend Ish was a big rubber ball Mother sat by the kitchen window smoking a stubby cigarette I picked up Ish and began to ready my footing for a big kick But before I could lift my right foot I dropped Ish on my left foot
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Ish fell on all five of my small child toes and then I screamed Mother dropped her cigarette and rushed to my rescue As she held a bag of peas to my toes I screamed for Ish But Mother said I could not play with Ish anymore I told her I did not understand through tears but she threw him away I had never bothered to go through that trash to find Ish out of fear Yet as time passed, as my face grew older, my mind wiser Ish was only a rock and I was only a man with abnormal toes And every now and again, I began to stop, to think of Ish Because when I was a small child I found a rock It seemed like a normal rock to anyone but a small boy It is cold-ish, rough-ish, black-ish, soft-ish, light-ish Lost and Forgetten Ish.
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Emma Vallelunga is sixteen years old and a junior at Cicero-North Syracuse High School in Syracuse, NY. Along with participating in the Young Author's Academy for three years, she is active in her school's music program as a clarinetist and a woodwind section leader in her school's marching band. As a poet she specializes in her love of persona poems in order to keep her roots of flash fiction alive. Her current plans for college include majoring in Multimedia Journalism or Communications. She is actively working on publishing her own chapbook in the near future.
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Thomas Pettit #1 "You know that Gollum is hiding under your bed," my sister says calmly. I peer up over my computer screen to see her staring at me from the love seat she's sitting in. "You mean the guy from Star Trek?" I ask, unamused to the nth degree. My sister rolls her eyes, sighing. "Okay, first of all, Gollum is from Lord of the Rings. Second of all, Gollum is our cat." "We have a cat? Since when have we had a cat?' "Since Christmas!" says my sister, throwing her hands into the air. "And you named it Gollum? What's wrong with snow ball?" "He's gray. Duh." "Oh, of course," I think, "That's the only logical name then."
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#2 Sam shivered. It wasn't the cold. It was the new dance craze. At last, dances that required stealth, grace, and big butts had been abandoned for something that literally only required a body that could be gyrated. And it was a very versatile dance, great for all types of music. You could get turnt on the dance floor to Skrilliz by vivaciously shaking your body, arms flailing, and legs wobbling like you're on an attraction at Disney World. Or you could take it slow to Lana Del Ray, gingerly swaying your body side to side, your head thrown back, hair veiling your face. Yes, Sam liked to dance. He liked to shiver.
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Thomas Pettit is a senior at Corcoran High School and has been writing since he was about five. He absolutely loves to write and will be majoring in Writing at Ithaca College in the fall. Thomas first joined the Young Authors Academy when he was thirteen and, four years later, still loves workshopping his writing with other writers his age at the Downtown Writers Center. Besides writing, Thomas enjoys reading, acting, and volunteers regularly at his local library. Thomas primarily focuses in Fantasy Fiction and hopes to expand to other forms of writing in college.
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Anni Clark It had only ever been a comfortable house, built like all the rest to hide every life that passed within its walls. It was made to conceal. It only ever had a lawn choked with green to fool you into life, and a roof slanted to slide off ugly truths. It looked soft about the edges, with stone worn smooth outside from life. The windows were slowly being blocked by branches and leaves, bright green to fool you into life. There was a chimney that always seemed to be blowing smoke, its way of expelling things from the house. It was full of words that shouldn’t be there. They had been meaning to have it cleaned. The inside wallpaper was stained with words like malignant, and terminal, and chemicals green, to fool you into life. They were scrawled in the shaky script of an echo, something that never should be tainting the warm green walls inside, begging for air. The garden, once filled with endless color and life, turns green with weeds as it goes untended.
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STAINED GLASS HANDS Sometimes being a tortured artist isn’t like they say it will be. You don’t always get the nice problems, the comfortable, the culturally endearing. Sometimes you’re not given the privilege of suffering appropriately. When they say to write, they don’t warn you that soon your fingertips will all run dry. They never say that the world will build up in your soul or that you will, one day, explode. But I have. Example one: When I have nowhere else to go I often sit on ledges and press every molecule of myself against the wall. I say it reminds me that I’m still real, but really, I’m just afraid of being seen so I spread my body so small I may float. The next day, when I tell my therapist I sometimes wish I were a blade of grass, she asks what happens when it gets cut down. I have no answer. Example two: The stillness of a morning is breathing in a glass case full of stars. It seems as though the universe shifts and sighs with my body. There is no sound but my heart whispering to my breath. They talk about god, about the tiny vessels he has done wrong. They talk about me. When they see I am awake, they are quiet, but their soft tones still linger on my tongue and thaw my frozen eyes. This is how I know I am alive.
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Example three: I forgot my voice, and all I can taste anymore is howling. I am silent, ten years and a hundred thirty seven bars past all I can do is count the eggshells that hold me up and wonder if god hears howls from those with hands burnt from catching too many fireflies. I am still waiting for my voice, my tongue still silent, but now I fear if I open myself, I will never stop pouring. Four: Rivers drain at the mouth into mine, I am so full of this world I can barely speak. When rivers have all died dry and no rain remains, it is my pores that bring life. I hope you like it, it’s all I have. When the rivers have all gone and my mouth is all that remains, it is truer, then, to call this love. Five: I live in the space between breaths, that moment when nothing moves but the stars in your eyes. My fingers are grasping for the sky that I may reach solace, but I fear this soil is all that keeps my veins fertile. I am that moment, when goosebumps blossom and life is finally, finally reached.
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FINGERTIPS They are from dark coffee and darker walls. From broken glass broken lungs and cigarette smoke. They are from rosary beads and third graders condemned. They are from nights when skies fall and children hide from their breath. They are from chili powder in paper cut and midnight trips to hell. You say that skin is not made from where they've been but how then does it remember. They are from barren womb and shaking legs. They are shaking legs. They are a shadow frightened of themself they are dust craving sky saying: here. I am here. I am here. I am poems found wanting, and poured tea left alone, growing colder every day. I am grit and raw chewed fingertips trying to heal. I am healing. I am vital. Despite every reason to be gone, I am still.
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Anni Clark is a 16-year old junior at West Genesee High School. They are heavily involved in the music department and are the chief editor of their school's literary magazine. After high school, they hope to pursue higher education and a career in international relations and advocacy.
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Review: What The Willow said As It Fell by Andrea Scarpino by Bob Herz Shouldn’t the world pause for at least an instant or two when a poet finds his or her voice and its perfect theme? If so, it should pause at Andrea Scarpino’s new book, What The Willow Said As It Fell (Red Hen Press, 2016). This such a beautiful, stunning book, that it seems inadequate to merely describe it, to say that it is a single long poem, a meditation on chronic pain and love and nature and words and the impossibility of ever really understanding what ails us and of explaining it to anyone else—inadequate because that’s not where the poetry is. Andrea Scarpino is Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and author of Once, Then (Red Hen Press, 2014) and the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press). By the time this review is posted you may also hear her reading at our Talk About Poetry podcasts pages, which also contain a prior reading in Syracuse. Links at Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/bobherz) and iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-aboutpoetry/id972411979?mt=2). The poetry in this new collection is in the technique, the energy, in the craft of the making, and in the joy visible throughout this book, from the opening to the closing poem. Between the two we get a vision of what it means to be human in the visible world when every moment is a matter of intention, of choice to live
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and to find peace against a visible opponent without a name, a disease without a diagnosis. Here’s what I mean: here’s how the poem opens: Before the day : sunrise over the lake, seagull clatter, crow, sound of glasses stacked, restacked, metal slid into place. Cacophony of blossoming : forsythia, lilac, cherry’s pink-tipped sway. And here is how it ends: Love My body in pain. Waiting. And then I left it. Turned myself to tree. And between those two places a life moves, beautiful, breathing, remembering, thinking about pain and love, questioning Job-like, why is this affliction brought unto me, frustrated that medical technology with all its knowledge and pills and techniques cannot find its cause only its effects, but the voice still offering love and still coping or trying to cope and finding beauty in the world around, a beauty become more valuable perhaps because of the affliction. Look at those final lines, and ask the attentive reader’s
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questions: What tree? We don’t know, we’re not told. It’s a special tree, and it is also any tree—it is the tree that is not this body in constant, chronic pain, the tree that does not feel this pain anymore. But it is not death, and it is not even the wish for death, which has been discussed and dealt with and dispatched in the course of the book. No, the identification with the tree is the hardening into life, the reduction of self to the that part of us that has identical DNA with the tree: to be alive, to feel, to survive but not as victim, rather as this new thing. And between the opening view of the trees before dawn and the metamorphosis into a tree at the end we experience with this poet everything: love, medical reports, a Bart Simpson moment with an entire page filled with the same short phrase, stunning descriptions of a beautiful world, and the questioning, always questioning, always the seeking for wholeness, sanctification. There is no explanation for the pain, only ongoing visits to the doctor. Only discussions, descriptions. She thinks about how we are related to the trees: Humans share 50% of our DNA with trees ribbons of living tissue epidermis cuticle cortex vascular cambium heartwood root hairs mother cells leaves that breathe male and female hormones : ash changes sex different branches The same substances work on the human nervous Page 140 - Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2016
system trees can be put to sleep chloroform and ether telegraph system initiates defenses under duress : jasmonic acid ethylene Trees may not feel pity and pain?— This meditation brings a fable, a memory of the hope and excitement of birth, of “a baby born / with damaged lungs” who is put through the ash and cured for awhile, until the borers come. She asks—any of us would ask—what does it mean, to be afflicted this way, with an affliction that can be felt but not named, that has a result but not a diagnosis. Is pain a judgment? Pain (n). (classical Latin) : punishment, penalty, suffering or loss inflicted for a crime, offence; thought to be endured by souls in hell; mental distress or suffering; annoying or tiresome person or thing— As in : pain-dimmed pain-drawn pain-chastened pain-shot pain-wrung— And the meditation, the self-examination goes on:
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never missed a checkup, never had a family history of disease, did everything she was supposed to do. How is she supposed to react? “Pain changes us,” she says, “and everything we touch.” This is her Job moment, of trying to understand why this has been visited on her. And what of the willow tree? One hundred years beside the lake. Girls played in its long-armed cape, braided branches like hair, mothers turned its switches into pain. Mallard ducks, Mute Swans, geese built nests with matted leaves. Night of the hurricane, my child body asleep. Sideways rain, lightning : one long, loud crack and the willow split in two, one half in the lake, one half through the roof, broken windows, plaster knocked from the walls. What the willow said as it fell : Take this body. Make it whole. And I woke with a crown of leaf and limb, bark-thickened skin, sap down my arms—
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salicin : aspirin— What is remembered in the body is well remembered— Mother’s voice through my room’s darkness : part crying out, part inhaled breath— She imagines or reports the doctors and others asking, but what does it feel like, this pain? It is like an ache, heat, lightning, heaviness, swelling, or a hundred other metaphors? No, she says, “Pain feels / / like nothing except pain.” There is no metaphor for pain, a point made by another poet 50 years ago, Randall Jarrell in “90 North”: I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness-that the darkness flung me— Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain. In her frustration of trying to explain that pain is NOT a metaphor, she writes a full page of “pain begets pain.” Later she asks, “what if feeling better doesn’t include a cure?” Depressing, maybe, as subject-matter, but lifted consistently up by the artistry of it, the technique, the voice: the way that blues perfectly sung transcends Nine Mile Magazine Vol 3 No. 2 - Page 143
the sadness of subject matter, the way Robert Johnson or Joni Mitchell tell us terrible things that make us feel better. If the poetry’s in the pity, it is also in the hope. And all this loss of faith in cure is followed by an extraordinary moment of transcendence and love: To love bare limbs, thin arms reaching. To love new leaves in bloom. To love their death, layering of brown, orange, too-late green. To love toppling, growth rings exposed. To taste sweet pull of sap, bark’s thickening. Mouth filled with golden light. To want to call my own— I want to quote so much of this poem, to praise the way the lines cohere and hold to their facts, so that each page is an object, a made thing, not a metaphor for something else. Her nature descriptions are terrific. She says, In the red pine grove, air heavy, sap-sweet, red dust
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through mottled branches, air in my lungs reddening. All day, building. Until one long, loud crack : lightning. And the sky opened. And there : a deer entirely white except a stain of pink inside each ear. Like fog, hovering. The book is offered as a description and explanation of this unknown pain, a questioning 0f it and not a justification, a learning to live with this unknown malady that is also a part of the poet’s life. There is no wallowing in the pain, but there is enormous restraint. At the conclusion she finds the irreducible, the life that links us to all other life. And in finding it, she finds transcendence, and takes us with her. An extraordinary book.
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About Nine Mile Press Nine Mile Press is the book publishing arm of Nine Mile Magazine (Ninemile.org) which also publishes the Nine Mile Talk About Poetry blog and Soundcloud and iTunes podcasts. The catalogue includes the former W.D. Hoffstadt & Sons catalogue. Current catalogue includes: Bad Angels, Sam Pereira (2015). Of this poet Peter Everwine has written, “He’s an original.” Pereira’s work has been priased by Noman Dubie, David St. John, and Peter Campion. Poems for Lorca, Walt Sheppperd (2012). The poems continue Mr. Shepperd’s lifelong effort to truly see and record the life around him. Lorca is his daughter, and the poems constitute an invaluable generational gift from father to daughter, and from friend, colleague, and community member to all of us. Some Time in the Winter, Michael Burkard (2014). A reprint of the famed original 1978 chapbook with an extended essay by Mr. Burkard on the origins of the poem and his thoughts about it. Prior publications include the following, all out of print: The Airplane Burial Ground, James Crenner (1976). Of this book Marvin Bell wrote: “... the poet turns the pain of loss into the presence of art.” Mr. Crenner was cofounder and co-editor of The Seneca Review. Villains, William Burtis (1978). Mr. Burtis writes with an honest and real sense of real life lived through that shines through every poem here.
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Dinosaurs, Herbert Scott (1978; chapbook). Mr. Scott writes this long poem from the ground up, with the precisionist’s ear and the surgeon’s knife. Screen Gems, John Bowie (1978). A posthumous book by a brilliant and extraordinary poet, with memorial essays and poems about Mr. Bowie by David St. John, Bob Herz, Larry Levis, Bill Burtis and Debora Greger. Some Time In The Winter, Michael Burkard (1978; chapbook). A marvelous long poem, reflective and inward. The Passionate City, Barbara Moore (1979). Phillip Booth wrote, “Barbara Moore’s poems are serious business; they spare nothing… in sharing with us their knowledge that we, too, are ‘made / Of grief and disparity and food and love.’” The Olive Grove, David St. John (1980) These poems give us the brilliance one expects from David St. John:. They are elegant, witty, comprehensive, praising. The Year is Approaching Snow, James Cervantes (1981). A great collection by this well-known and highly regarded poet, essayist, critic, magazine editor, publisher, anthology architect. The Love & Death Boy, Roger Weingarten (1981). The work includes poems by Mr. Weingarten and pictures of sculpture by Dina Yellen.
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