BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
LITERATURE+ART
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BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE LITERATURE+ART Botticelli Magazine is an online literary and art journal produced and edited by students at Columbus College of Art & Design
CONTENTS Feeling Project Grid: DYLAN KASSON ........................................................................................ 6 Four Poems: LAUREN SHANNON MCKELLY ................................................................................ 7 Her father is the Venus de Milo ............................................................................................... 7 A Discordant Back Contests at Midnight .............................................................................. 7 20,000 Leagues under the Stars .............................................................................................. 8 Head Haunts .............................................................................................................................. 8 Untitled: KAITY HORD .................................................................................................................... 9 Five “After” Poems: JOE BENEVENTO ....................................................................................... 10 After I Almost Died In Infancy................................................................................................ 10 After I Drove To See Sylvia in Nebraska ............................................................................... 11 After Forgetting the Peanut Butter Sandwich, Bartlett Pear, Carrots .............................. 12 After My Fiancée Was Too Busy To Attend the Italian Club’s Spring Festa .................... 13 After Knocking Tommy Cook on His Ass Twice in One Game .......................................... 14 Untitled: KAITY HORD .................................................................................................................. 15 The Sound: BETH STACKHOUSE .................................................................................................. 16 Untitled: KAITY HORD .................................................................................................................. 17 Interview with a Flower: ALEJANDRO BELLIZZI ......................................................................... 18 Alone With Spiders .................................................................................................................. 18 Celestial Afterbirth .................................................................................................................. 21 The Loneliest Spaceman........................................................................................................ 22 Interview with a Flower........................................................................................................... 22 Staring Contest ........................................................................................................................ 22 Bonjour. Fuck me..................................................................................................................... 23 Boring Car Rides with my Mother ......................................................................................... 23
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What Trees Fight For ................................................................................................................ 24 Bradbury and the Speck of Dust........................................................................................... 25 Conscription ............................................................................................................................ 25 Moments Before Death .......................................................................................................... 26 Demon Versus Poet ................................................................................................................ 27 Mime Versus Mime .................................................................................................................. 28 Untitled: KAITY HORD .................................................................................................................. 29 Three Poems: KAITY HORD ......................................................................................................... 30 The Shock of Grief ................................................................................................................... 30 Star Craving and Stark Raving .............................................................................................. 31 The Stolen Sleeping Man ....................................................................................................... 32 Washing: SIERA CANTER............................................................................................................. 33 Rain Dream: JAMES BRANDON O’SHEA .................................................................................. 34 In Another Life: TOMMY HOLMES .............................................................................................. 35 Untitled: KAITY HORD .................................................................................................................. 37 A text message poem with English translation: JUST KIBBE ................................................... 38 An Interview with JOE BENEVENTO .......................................................................................... 39 Coda: JOHN AYLWARD ............................................................................................................. 40 Low of Solipsism: JOHN AYLWARD............................................................................................ 40 Solitude: JOHN AYLWARD ......................................................................................................... 40 Untitled: KAITY HORD .................................................................................................................. 40
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Feeling Project Grid: Dylan Kasson BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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Four Poems BY LAUREN SHANNON MCKELLY
Her father is the Venus de Milo One day her parents turned into statues. Eyes replaced with glossy marble and their parched lips so still one wonders whether they ever moved at all, frozen in blank stare. Mother did not survive the Middle Age, as cancer hacked at her liver and bones. Father saw through the scourge but lost his arms. He could not hold the daughters anymore. So they took his battered form and put it in a museum. The girls got a lifetime membership card to visit once a month, and revere the artifacts from childhood. Sisters stand behind a crushed-velvet rope, while father watches them grow from afar.
A Discordant Back Contests at Midnight Two centurion shoulders grimly guard, their blades jutting out ready to defend, while vertebra become the foot soldiers, as deftly they descend the frontspine. The ribs encage the pulsing cavalry, steadily pounding out its drum of war. Militia flanking on a battlefield, suddenly appear from her about face. The surface unsettlingly pristine, pale plains wait to be lashed with a sharp tongue. When she turned away it was a challenge, does he launch the catapults or retreat. He stares at her back cautious to engage, nothing can stop the fight about to rage.
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20,000 Leagues under the Stars He is gracefully drowning in midnight, swallowed under by the shadowed riptides. Darkness pushes against his eardrums tight, and the world becomes a hushed silent lie. Cold laps and churns upon thick, slick skin as he blinks rapidly against sea salt tears. Burning lungs gasp for that elusive air, but only the opal blue rushes in. Any cry catches sorely in his throat as breath plumes soundlessly from gaping mouth. It is in vain because no one can hear him 20,000 leagues under the stars. He stops trying to break through the surface, resigned, floating on in the navy din.
Head Haunts A thought that aches deep in my bone, It paces across my brain, Haunting my skull instead of a home. It drags on my scalp like a fine-toothed comb, Plowing through so it becomes ingrain, A thought that aches deep in my bone. It causes such a racket in my humble dome, Under the cumbersome racket I strain, Haunting my skull instead of a home. Its fists pound against my temple tomb, Attempting to escape in vain, A thought that aches deep in my bone. It desires to break out and roam, The idea becomes my existence’s bane, Haunting my skull instead of a home. And so I try to get it out in this poem, Before it drives this being insane. A thought that aches deep in my bone, Haunting my skull instead of a home.
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Untitled: Kaity Hord BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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Five “After” Poems BY JOE BENEVENTO
After I Almost Died In Infancy from diarrhea they couldn’t quell at home, so bad they had to send me back to Brooklyn, as my mother hadn’t switched doctors or hospitals yet since the recent move to Richmond Hill, but not before Father Toohey rushed over from St. Teresa’s to baptize me over our kitchen sink, so my soul could go straight to heaven instead of languishing in limbo, if I didn’t get back to Queens. My godmother, Kitty Lofaso, later recounted how she’d port Brooklyn water back to my mother, in case some curse in Queens faucets was causing the formula Mom carefully mixed for me to unsettle my stomach so. Still later, though, I discovered the real reason I almost didn’t make it. I, fifth of seven children born to Mary and Joseph Benevento, came out the biggest: 10 pounds, 5 ounces, and so hungry my mother was certain the formula could not be enough, so a week or so in she already was feeding me baby cereal, which we know now you should never do so soon, just as we know mother’s milk is far healthier in every way than some cooked-up formula, but it was 1955 and Mom didn’t know any better, and, apparently, I managed to figure out a way to avoid heaven for a while.
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After I Drove To See Sylvia in Nebraska where she and her folks were visiting her brother José, choosing to spend the Christmas holidays in freezing Fremont, instead of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, where Sylvia had been staying since the Ramos family split Queens fifteen years before. Already having failed, by age 31, at three marriages, Sylvia waited into early January to find me still trying to fail my first, as I fled too busy Carmen, risking the snowy road, the can’t go home again injunction that might encompass being unable to rekindle all that unrequited fire, so many winters passing. Sylvia Ramos was unchanged, the same mixture of beguiling beauty tempered by modesty unmolested by the hands of time or men. So we could still pretend there was only friendship between us, that my Cuban wife back in Kirksville was glad I was getting to revisit the Ramoses, that my now full fluency in Spanish could bring us no closer than the space between seats in the front of my mistrusty old Pinto, as I drove Sylvia Ramos to the Omaha airport, her two year old sleeping in the back, the rest of the Ramoses in José’s van, so Sylvia could soft talk away all the years, convince me how right I was to keep believing in her, how nice I was so ready to remain the faithful knight to her maddening Dulcinea.
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After Forgetting the Peanut Butter Sandwich, Bartlett Pear, Carrots Turning my Toyota to return right home, where I’d left my lunch on the kitchen counter for the third time this month, I deflect my frustration for the minutes, gas, selfrespect lost, listening to Bocelli “live” from Central Park. The January Missouri morning offering only grey, the heater humming its persistent need to undercut the blind Italian’s beautiful tenor, until, back in my woodland neighborhood, I find my Camry attacked by some mid-sized brown and white mutt out to impress its owner, himself headed for work. Three times I lose seconds stopping to avoid banging the life out of the clueless canine. What else will go wrong? I wonder as I get away without murder, a minute later entering my own driveway, where, immune to my schedule a Bald Eagle flies overhead, the first one I’ve ever seen up close in all my years, wide-wing-spanning away from me in an instant enough to be certain this precise moment matters: Wednesday, January 18th, 2012, 7:37 am and some seconds spent in sudden surprise of yellow talons and beak, blackish-brown back and breast, bold white head over silver sedan, not me shivering the demise of some unfortunate dog or already twenty minutes dismal at my desk, paper bag resting to my right.
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After My Fiancée Was Too Busy To Attend the Italian Club’s Spring Festa I was close to content, close to deciding Carmen could not keep choosing her homework over me without consequences. I was set to sing “La Mattinata” a famous Italian love song my professor, Joe Italiano (yes, really) had commissioned me to learn. His vision: I’d enter the crowded room, guitar in hands, flanked by two co singing, co-eds in airy dresses, to start the party. I had no illusions about either blonde; instead, I would be scanning the room for Christine Frangiapane, my classmate for all three Italian classes we’d taken at NYU, a paisana with a beau she also would not be bringing in from Brooklyn, hers a Mafia wannabe stewing in Bensonhurst about her bookishness, mine all too wrapped up in her Biology major in Bay Ridge. Maybe it was time for Christine and me to let our lips speak the words our mutually dark eyes had imagined more than once when we teamed up for flirty dialogue assignments we co-authored and performed, maybe, Carmen-less, I would dance instead with Christine, who I noticed, in an orange-red, disco-y dress she might have maneuvered to tempt Travolta, just five seconds before I saw my fiancée, who had six-sensed trouble, showing up in time to assure Christine Frangiapane would never teach me what she knew, my intended securing me in an embrace lasting all through that April evening’s sure seduction away from Romantic might-have-beens, towards a marriage that was destined to fail.
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After Knocking Tommy Cook on His Ass Twice in One Game by bashing into him at home plate, each time dislodging the hardball from his soft mitt and scoring the run, I laughed rounding first when I saw my third hit go through the right fielder’s legs, almost assuring another play at the plate. I just didn’t like Tommy Cook, one of a core group of white guys who gave me grief for running with “the spooks and spics,” instead of my brother blancos, but in our neighborhood you couldn’t start a fist fight every time someone said something you didn’t favor, plus Cook was always careful not to cross any imaginary lines that might get some actual Puerto Ricans or black dudes after him, so mostly I had to let it slide, but in Pony League baseball nobody would say anything but, “Way to go” if I wanted to run the catcher over instead of sliding. It wasn’t like I weighed any more or was built any better than Tommy, just that I didn’t care if I got hurt too when I slammed into him, so long as he went down, and, by the third diamond round trip he knew that too well, so as the ball came to him in plenty of time for a tag, he let it go by instead, and got out of my way, the only smart thing that punk ever did.
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Untitled: Kaity Hord BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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The Sound BY BETH STACKHOUSE
Of the autumn oak leaves As the wind blows through them Of the white-capped waves Crashing on the jagged rocks Of the blowing wind as it Rushes past my ears Exhilarates me
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Untitled: Kaity Hord BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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Interview with a Flower BY ALEJANDRO BELLIZZI
Alone With Spiders Every night, before falling asleep, I perform a dramatic monologue to the fuzzy patterns of color that I can barely see in the darkness. And, excited, I force my eyes open for extended periods until the shadows and shapes transform into nightmarish figures. But it’s not the shapes that keep me awake while I fall asleep, but the deteriorating stories that take place in my mind. I have several dinner conversations with people who often times remind me themselves that I can’t eat food while in my bed, and that’s its rude to invite them to dinner and not even be there, and then to not even speak to them, and instead just imagine that I’m talking to them while I fall asleep. I love to be alone when alone, But I hate to have another accompany my solitude When I see them, I feel compelled to tell them How it pains me to be alone The manic juggle of absolutes There is truth in the pattern of my being There is truth in me, but I, Being a part of the pattern Cannot identify this truth I declare the birds to be heavenly spies. One tries to speak a truth As if it will become separate from themselves To liberate itself from the pattern to judge the whole Rather than chase an inconceivable whole We must expand upon its fragments Deconstruction undermines the medium By which we discuss deconstruction. Logic that Undermines itself in order to find a truth That it says cannot be found. There is a Dionysian skeleton in me. Beyond our impressions of connection and separation And generalizations and rules, we must consider All information existing to itself. The word, and all words, are trying to escape themselves In their attempts to become real, Rather than be symbols, abstractly strung to reality, The words become their own reality, and we must accommodate this reality by describing it with additional words, and so on.
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I love to be alone. I’m alone on a bed in my brother’s old room. Tomorrow is thanksgiving. Most people get together with family. I am with my mother, everyone else is far away. A rectangular gash in the wall above my pillow. I meticulously sealed the open air-vent with paper And double sided tape. I saw webs in it and I Fear spiders while asleep. Hello feeling of being alone. I am remembering old days. Forgotten people who I can’t seem to let go I feel alone, yet I love it, even now. I love to suffer in my own mind, like a sauna, or a a deserted island. I love to force the sensation into simple words So small on the page in front of me I am small enough to fit on paper Or so the writer assumes I feel as light as a dream, I am as light As a leaf on the ground, I am blown Away and again I say, now that I am Writing, this moment is its own eternity Someday I will find a girl, my biology tells me And I’ll share this with her, if I can I realize I feel unreal, eyes that look inward This is a moleskin sketchbook. Someday I’ll grow old And die. Reality is itself, stars exists. So do other worlds. Someday I’ll reread this and be amazed at how much I knew. Hello, Wrinkle on the page If you were my world, I’d bend You a bit further, or all the way And make a wormhole My pen is beyond reckoning. Sorry –My pain is beyond reckoning, I do not understand it. It’s as if being has left me incomplete, as if I long for death. At least I don’t Have Huntington’s disease. There better be a heaven.
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I remember when I was a coward. Each moment of cowardice stays in me A thousand stones in my kidney for later Or not, I feel unreal. I feel unreal. I didn’t talk to a girl in the eighth grade And on a dare, I’d vomit from the memory Unlike kidney stones, I can’t pee her out. Two friends trapped in a poem. Behold: the incredible journey. He built a city around the open vent, a whole city. To keep out the spiders, who, upon breaking Free of the original paper barricade by way of gem encrusted ram, were dumbfounded by the metropolis, and its slums. Its crevices and alleys, forgotten rooms and open stone windows, the archways and stairs, and somewhere around in a room, two friends. How are you, my dearest friend? I feel as careless as clouds against the azure sky. The what sky? I don’t know, I cannot recall such words— Why are you talking like that? Oh ye gods, I do believe we’re trapped In a poem of all things, not a city, but a poem To trick us! Mere spiders caught In a foreign kind of web. What kind what kind! –One of words, I believe, just look: Now I’m just the letter “A” –I “C”. And spider A and Spider C, shaped In the letters of their names, teetered Out the open door, careful not to trip On the jagged brick road, below a moon, Above the twilight of a dead city
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Celestial Afterbirth The moon is a peaking head of the great newborn as it tears through the celestial seal, the fertile canal of stars. Every day it grows larger, to me at least, and it slowly turns. Its nose and eyes peak on the horizon because I know that soon they must. The arms will poke through. The astral mother will idle like a giraffe in a safari. Who knows if the cresting infant will live? If the arms of the sky will find him? We here do not know, but we will not let the child die. Mother told us to prepare years ago, and we’ve been sewing ever since. The trees have been cut and behind our town, the gifts of the newborn’s bedroom wait. A crib past the clouds and a mobile with bells the size of mansions. The shelf just behind, painted red a thousand years gone for a life time by all the world’s artists with books, with words too large to be seen at all. The writers have yet to fill the highest shelf, but they’ve worked as long as any. I gave myself to the sewing of a lake-sized diaper, and it became that way as well. And it was an endless winter where snow became warm and cottony. Sometimes a needle stung me, and they became like bees for my new world And the cloud-like cloth draped BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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high from scaffolding, so I couldn’t always see the crib, or the shelf, not even the mobile’s bells, and never the moon
The Loneliest Spaceman I’ve said this before, but we can’t help repeating seasons. And trees have paper leaves, and they burn away from the orange like rockets aimed senselessly to the earth And as they collide their trunks split apart in a burst, immovable “Behold, explorers!”, as I remove the cracking fish bowl, “We’ve landed on a chocolate world.”
Interview with a Flower It seems today that a good poem is more of a ghost that poets used to wrap like mummies with flowers and descriptions and the month of autumn But now the good poet never ever cares for a flower’s color Tell me flower, what is it exactly, that you do?
Staring Contest The moon’s been out all morning and now a staring contest with the sun behind them a bell from a brick church and so I feel like painting how blue the sky is, how determined the moon squints to look at day light I’m relieved to keep it all to myself, to have none to share it with. Unless you are wind or old bells far away, do not speak to me. BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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Bonjour. Fuck me. I thought the clouds were on the window in the car and I tried to wipe them off The car began to drive off and the rumbling of the engine nudged me down a creek to sleep I didn’t want to leave La Chatelaine, not even the parking lot and in the sunny tree outside with sprouts of wind growing between its leaves I searched for the culminating image of hormones and quiche and that girl on the register who’s voice cracked when she welcomed “bonjour” and so she laughed.
Boring Car Rides with my Mother I mistake the ashen pines for the spines of a mummified lizard. I pretend that trees are crustaceans beneath the deepest layer of air, thick with rain and broad leaves. Seaweed of the sky. I pretend the highest clouds can float to space. Their white dust would bulge and boil dark blue. Maybe the sky’s escaped prisoner would vanish, or continue to drift as a fated balloon or an alien craft, punctured by the meteoric refrain. I pretend the powerlines are like caravans of ancient nomads: tall and strange creatures tied by their wires, shoveling deeper still. BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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–Were they once taller? do their bottoms feed the magma? I pretend them, with copies behind and ahead: are they your brothers? are those frozen copies your past selves? With just one rootless cane how can you dare to walk? You can only replicate a moment in time, a few feet forward With just a second to stiffly toss the rope ahead like climbers, refusing to abandon a friend. Grab hold of the cable, brother –We’ll see the road’s end soon.
What Trees Fight For I see how thin the horizon is. Just a thin trail of trees in the farthest distance imaginable, like a brave vanguard of earth fending off the falling sky That horizon is truly a cosmic field of battle where life’s last stronghold deters the inevitable This world will be a graveyard. It will be like a sheet of white noise and overtime in the white noise, the scattered memories of the past will recall themselves In the quiet world of the future, there lies a ghost of consciousness where there is nothing, there is everything The world as an empty room for the mind to expand
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Bradbury and the Speck of Dust Astronaut dust particle You may have been a spaceship But I imagined you had been Launched from your craft Lost and now hoping for a wind To send you home, into orbit Around something not the sun You’re small to me, but I can see You’re thin as web when caught In light, and I wave goodbye
Conscription Hong likely never cared, at least not for his fridge, now resting upon another dusty square in my bedroom attic. I use his fancy umbrella in the rain. It expands like a peacock’s plume –to think Hong affords such things. I mistook his dehumidifier… for a postmodern water-cooler. I placed it atop the mini-fridge while asking his memory: was Ohio air humid? Have I mistaken your humanity for a constant smile. The air was less humid in soul. I knew you most as a closed door, a laughing phone conversation in the room’s white shell. His memory is the ghost in the empty fridge, once behind the door. Hong likely never cared, so his ghost doesn’t linger like a kind spirit, drooping over, protecting us like his umbrella in the rain. And I stop myself in the road to laugh: I’ve mistaken South Korea for heaven.
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Moments Before Death There is something invisible in my hands to all but me invisible. You cannot see it and so I hate you. There is something, the size of a rock and it rolls onto my open palm as I fall asleep The pages wilt with my eyes. I hold a dream in my hands without color or feeling, not a word to keep it here in this world I tell you nothing, not at first. I don’t have an interest in this place anymore I’ve been speaking to the fist-sized dream right now in my hands, we’ve been whispering and it tells me of an unapologetic trail away, a rude gesture to those who don’t see him, a door he says. There is a door far away in me. Without a color or a form Not even a word. Keep your colored shapes and your sensations, let your feeling slip with your mind down the rips and holes of your empty pocket I can say anything now, you know. Like a wizard, I extinguish all judgment Across from me, something you’ve just said travels in the air, but the harsh wind of my indifference blows it far away. About the door, I ask my invisible dream. Show me a way, show me the diaphanous path ah yes the frames have begun to vanish at the bottom, corners of smoke where a face once was, now a series of letters, I’m described in another page, sometime ago, sometime in an off white universe. BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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I am something invisible in your hands, I told the invisible dream
Demon Versus Poet I stood next to a girl holding a note book, and I felt this more than I saw it, just as I was falling asleep. She wrote poetry in her notebook, as we looked onward into the horrifying, dark pit in front of us. Your poetry is just as horrible, I imagined telling her. And it truly was. Her poetry was no good. The fruit of her passion was rotten, and it seemed beyond the power of her will to correct this. How she must suffer, I thought. How miserable must she feel, to know how useless and untalented she is. Does she have friends? Do they feel obligated to cringe in acceptance at the sight and sound of her poetry? To think, the sting of her thoughts cannot even contain themselves! To think, she will continue to live this way. How awful does the morning feel to her, and every moment into the day like a constant reawakening to the truth, that she has no hope of putting something genuine or beautiful on the white page. But wait, I thought, perhaps it’s difficult, but I could set her free from the prison of her existence. She’s not paying a bit of attention, and with her so close to this cliff, it’s as if God brought us both here, it’s certainly a sign. Like I said, I felt it more than I could see it, with it being so dark and all, and the dirt almost a maroon red. I could feel the prolonged impact in the hallow pit of my chest, probably a dozen times before she landed, and the vibrations took all that much longer to leave me. There we go, I thought to myself, it’s finally over. Before leaving I saw her notebook on the ground, just barely holding to the edge. Perhaps I could flip through it, maybe—but even the slightest chance that some arrangement of words on those final pages would have made her life worth living completely disgusted me. Perhaps I’d feel remorse, but what’s done is done, I decided. After savoring the thought for a moment, I kicked the notebook down the hole, and for as long as light could afford, I watched it fall. It fell like a wildly flapping bird as it chased after its owner. Stupid bird, I thought, and then I never returned to that place.
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Mime Versus Mime And now child speaks to his toy: a doll with one eye gone, one limb falling from the loose grip of his gently rising finger. With two eyes and a smile, won’t you speak–with just a moment past, it says hello. And with help, behold the bending of his knees. But how alive is alive enough? The child imagines himself into the nearest mimic in a panic, who is there, so familiar with a walk and voice and no mind hiding in the fluff, but the doll turns by the hand to his neck to say: “you are the ghost in my shell.”
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Untitled: Kaity Hord BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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Three Poems BY KAITY HORD
The Shock of Grief Expectant, charged silence the moment leading up to the birth of it all. Or death rather. Is there a difference? Swiftly shifting sized eyes searching for a last gasp of what used to be, what we want back. Stripped by the furry greasy flight of fate. Churning, tripping tongues attempt to navigate deep barren bowls of thought that cannot possibly come out right. But who cares. Our heads are heavy, and so are our glasses with their watered liquor that sloshes when brought to our mouths and catches the heady air so sickly intertwined with slow moving bugs and exhaled breaths. They dance, sleepily in front of our dry faces, but they are nothing more than a swinging talisman to stare at while their sloppy wings move through dry spaces, Bewitching, hypnotizing us. Slow moments have passed, and now there are none
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Star Craving and Stark Raving These things keep happening, this life is on a loop. The rain is coming and our sky never feels light anymore. It doesn’t even sparkle at night, I swear. You think these things would be human need, think that we would crave them more than we do. We are owed them, aren’t we? It’s our right. But no, everything is flat. Carbonation and sheen, just an ill-defined memory… And a memory I now question, was it ever even there? It seems silly that I saw those things, didn’t notice the raw meat and worms creeping in. And now we are here, in this home made of our brittle unhappiness. Always replaying it, just to make sure we’ve screwed it up enough. You remember Narcissus? Of course you do. He died fixated and in love with his angelic reflection. Our fate is an eerie and obvious carbon copy. This obsession with our ugliness and power to swell scars on one another will slowly fill us up with water. And again, like always, I am awake. The first slice of morning comes sharp in unison with the ache in the pit of my sad stomach, and you look as though you’ve never had more peace. It feels mystical and like some deep archetypal hurt, it’s infuriating. I always make plans in these moments; sumptuous, unreal, sublime plans. I will become different somehow, as though by decision I can control who I am. I will put on that velvet dress and go into it all blazing, strong… carefree. I will frighten you with my ability to snap back to the creature I once was, while you swim scared beside me. And that’s when the sky bubbles again.
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The Stolen Sleeping Man When at first turn of her gentle bone, a small and shining droplet came its way from his vision,
and the feel of her humble soft fur created in him a small bloom of what it was like to maybe be that man. Someone he had always seen, that man, made of broad and sturdy bone. Someone who only truth came to bloom from each move he made, a subtle drop of net to take in the mist of her sun filled breath and leaden fur. A deep and fathomless citrus vision. But she had made a cunning incision in the softness of his side, the weakest part of a man. Parts she found, muffled and stuffed with fur, She took out pieces of his brittle bone. Each a treasure, each kept precious in droplet sized caskets marked with triple sized flowers in bloom. They shared a bright and liquid room, he thought, a single and one hearted vision. But every night, she removed one piece, placed it in its droplet home and swept up in her mild snow, that man who trusted her unswerving, was eaten away to merely a bone, while she grew grand, wearing all his given fur. She perfumed the air around her, with boldness and myrrh. Her sweetness burning his sunken eyes, radiant and stupid in bloom. But the burning turned bright and he began to feel his phantom bone mumble and hiss in every night’s sleep thick vision. He felt himself weak-limbed and feeble, a lamb. He struggled in his sad skin, rolling, searching his psyche for each stolen droplet. His insides sprung wise and grew new webs, each fresh fiber to drop red liquor and strength upon the next, sprouting gold-laced fur and curling back into the spirited man that first felt that creamy bloom of her now cold and walled up brilliant perversion. He was shrewd and quick in his growing of bone and stripped her of his crystalline droplets, she swiftly melted, leaving a bloom stricken river in her dead fur wake, her prisoner the true vision now, a man strong, come back from his first bone.
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Washing BY SIERA CANTER
Water drips unevenly from my face. Or perhaps it’s my face that is uneven Just like the unevenly matched eyes. One far weaker, the more frail sister to the other who is already crippled in her own way. They are nice eyes. Pretty even though the pupils are distorted like a child has cut them raggedly from construction paper, and sight has already started to fail them. Blue. Like the ocean with the sky merrily reflecting and dancing upon its glassy calm surface. It’s a fake surface. The real one is covered with scars That criss and cross like lattice work across a hair-thin sclera damaged over time. The eyes are blue and coated with silicone. Sight will disappear eventually. It will fade, and the images will become like the photographs in my grandmothers’ albums. Blown out, white washed, and blurred. I will not know what shade of brown my hair is as it turns gray. I will not know what the tattoos look like as they move from black to light blue. I will not know the face I look at now that is dripping with water as I inspect it. Eyelashes filled with watery diamonds as I inspect it. I can wash and wash and wash this face and never be rid of the imperfections, never be rid of the flawed eyes.
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Rain Dream BY JAMES BRANDON O’SHEA
Through the double door and on to the lacquered floor – Paint-splattered, use-worn. Dark steps before the switch are all inward sounding, Thumping four times before the lights flicker on. Breathing in smooth linseed, and sharp turpentine: The scent of rendered skin. Among the drab, the thoughtless colors. Above them all, your portrait hovers, Waiting, earthy hued, in the easel’s holds. Trace from dark brown eyes to curls, resting full in matching shades, Cupped in your collar bones, exposed And falling to the canvas corners – Receding to imagination, To expectation. —– Two weeks pass, returning daily to see the progress, You moved as the tide of my dreams. And because you painted yourself so well, Your closed lips would part to smile. Years gone, I wake and choke, My gut wells up, heart to throat. We met and you were taken – He a better man, a smile of his own.
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In Another Life BY TOMMY HOLMES
“…The accident is believed to be the most serious in the history of nuclear power, worse even than that at the Three-Mile Island power station in the United States in 1979, when there was some release of radioactivity but nobody was injured. The report, from the official news agency, Tass, said there had been casualties but gave no details of numbers. It said aid was being sent to the injured…” –26 April 1986 –1988 A pair of lights danced on the rough, abandoned terrain. Like two children playing with no regrets, no worries. Symmetrical balls of energy moved quietly through the approaching night splitting the howling wind in two. With purpose, they made a path of their own up the rugged slope. They had been there before. The sun had completed its descent behind hills, far across the horizon line. The shadow of night began to overwhelm the lights. The car continued to curve up a desolate hill, swerving violently with every path it created. But these weren’t new paths created, rather old ones that had been attempted to be forgotten. The car came to a piercing halt as it reached the hills summit. A silhouette of a lonely, coarse tree rested on the hill. Less than a kilometer away, a desolate, uncanny cityscape shrieks for attention. The subtle cries of the car disappeared along with the luminance. The rusty door, of what seemed to have once been a white car, slowly cracked open as a dark figure stumbled out into the cold world. The liquid in his bottle sloshed back and forth, imitating the man staggering towards the tree. With a swift kick a triangulated golden sign, housing four black marks, was uprooted and sent in the air a few feet. As he approached the tree, a flashback played in his head. Blanket, basket.. The man jerked his neck and screamed ,disturbing the quiet night. He fought every ounce in his body to hold back a tear. He hadn’t let one go since he last saw her. He tossed back another swig from his bottle. No expression was made on his face as the liquid crashed routinely down his throat. The large tree casted a familiar yet uncomfortable look upon Petro as he was deep in contemplation. He looked towards the tree and saw himself with Nat. They laughed, ate, drank and flirted around on a scenic day. He remembered smearing the barbecue, from the glazed lamb he grilled, on her face. She was quick to fire back at him. They shared the honey spiced vodka while watching the neighborhood children playing in the park and field below. Not a single care was given. What a perfect day. Days that he held onto more tightly than his bottle. He was sure of what he had to do. His attention gazed towards the sky as he professed, voice cracking. “Nataliya, soon we will be together again. You won’t have to wait any longer.” The hemp, nylon, twine, among other fibers were tied tightly around the trees strongest branch. The radiation hadn’t done its job quick enough so Petro decided to take matters into his own hands. He looked out towards the city that once was his home, now unlivable. The city that had produced his lover, now deceased.
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The loop was set around his neck, he was almost there. He made one last look towards that city. That Home. Chernobyl. A light arose from behind a large building, sparking a faint glimmer in the night. With it came a crackle. A firework. Petro, shocked, almost fell off the rock he stood on. “What the fuck? Nat you better not be behind this, my decisions been made.” A feeling came upon him that he had not felt in a year and 10 months. Submitting to it, he loosened the rope and stepped down. The perplexity of the situation finally started to kick in as Petro shifted his thoughts towards it. The city was supposed to be lifeless. The explosion. The radiation. Everyone was evacuated. It was barricaded and fenced up. Something didn’t fit. He looked back up towards the dark sky. “You and your signs…Okay, you got me this time.” With another pull from his bottle, he began his descent down the dirt covered hill. The lifeless ambiance surrounded him as he began to make his approach. The ferris wheel carts moved a few centimeters back and forth making a faint noise as if to replicate the noise of laughter that once consumed the area. It had been just two years ago when Petro and Nat watched children ride on it, from atop “their” hill. From a few hundred meters away an eerie feeling came upon him. The barricades, blockades, barbed wire fences. Debris from the accident was scattered on the outskirts of the city. Abandoned cars and broken street lamps populated the area. As he approached the fence he became intimidated by the immenseness of the layers blocking off the city. He advanced down along the border of the barrier looking for a possible defect. The moon began to shine down on him, as if to lead him towards what he was looking for. Twenty minutes into the search, Petro stumbled upon a tear in the fence. Subsequently the concrete wall directly behind the fence was chiseled down to fit the form of a body. He stood there for a second, bewildered in the situation that he found himself in. What the hell was going on. Why would anyone want to go in the decaying city. He crawled through the brief tunnel and found himself in the city that once raised him. How twenty six years pass by in the blink of an eye. Ruins of buildings remained where he once remembered proud ones standing. He started his exploration of the city and with the first turn a nostalgic feel overwhelmed him as he converged on the path he used to take to the academy. A foreshadow of his journey as he delved deeper into the heart of Chernobyl. Memories of happier times surrounded him, attempting to crush his spirit. He’d been through worse. Petro advanced further through the labyrinth of empty streets. Forsaken cars and forgotten salvage littered the debris filled streets of the city. At every corner he searched, looking for the source of the light that had caused the change in his plans that night. “Where in the hell could that have came from” he spoke aloud. In the distance he recognized the seven story apartment that had housed him and his family just years ago. With no clue of where to start looking, Petro shifted his path towards the rotting apartment. While turning at an intersection, a strong savage smell began to enter his system. He began to cough roughly as the nasty smell hit him like a punch in the stomach. One of the worst stenches he’s had the pleasure of smelling. He thought, even worse than the red deer corpse he and Ivan had to pick up back when they worked for the city. He attempted to stray away from the smell by cutting through what used to be the town grocery. After passing the carts and rounding the corner, the source of the smell stared him in the face. He couldn’t remember the last time he has ran so fast. He tried to erase the image from his head but it continued to pry itself back in. “How the fuck did that happen?” he panted to himself. His mind was running as fast as he was. How did that happen? He was way too bloody to die of radiation. It looked like he died from a gun. Something he saw in a movie years ago. 6 blocks down the road, Petro began to slow BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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down to a stop. Catch his breath. As his panting began to die down he heard the faint sound of voices. Like spectral whispers they began to haunt up his spine. The light in the sky, he thought. This has to be it. The sign that diverted him that night. He owed it to himself. To her. Petro kept in the dark, following the voices slowly, readily. The clamor amplified with every block he passed. He lodged his head carefully in the corner of a corroded building’s first floor window. Two boys, couldn’t have been old enough to graduate from the old academy, sat in chairs, constricted from the legs up. Petro, many meters away, remained crouching in silence, confused, and uneasy. Behind the boys, a steel door began to rumble and open sharply. A mysterious and luminous brilliance shined through the opening as five sullen, harsh looking men proceeded through towards the boys…
Untitled: Kaity Hord
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A text message poem with English translation BY JUST KIBBE
don’t believe everything you read I am not a crook quoted for idiocy what you see is what you get 3D dinosaur hugs and muscled angels on your pillow *** DBEYR IANAC Q4I WYSIWYG 3D DH & TANK AOYP
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An Interview with Joe Benevento BOTTICELLI: Talk about your process… Joe Benevento: The “After” poems are a kind of departure for me, writing a whole group of poems with the same form, and one of my own invention at that. Usually I write free verse poetry, with the occasional sonnet or other form poem just for a kind of variety and reminder of what free verse is freeing itself from. But for some reason I started by writing a few poems with “After” in their titles and which felt right to do in five, five line verses with a one line coda or kicker and after the first few “Afters” felt good to me, I decided to explore how many more I could write well in that same form. I’ve got about 60 of them written so far, and I think as many as fifty of them might be publishable- have had about twenty-six taken by literary journals so far. I ‘m not sure if I’ll try for a full length collection of “After” poems, a chapbook sized collection or whether I should use the very best of the “After” poems in my next full length manuscript, but I’ve certainly enjoyed exploring my biography for key “After” moments that might make good narrative poems. BOTTICELLI: How do you decide if an idea will be a story, poem or essay? Joe Benevento: Since a lot of my poetry is narrative, it’s all the more a good question as to whether I’ll go for poem, story or memoir-like essay when I have a story to tell. Of course, a few times I’ve written both stories and poems about the same event or moment in my life. I think I decide to try fiction when I am seeing the story as only able to be told through multiple scenes, when I envision dialogue as a key element in making the best result. As to what form or genre I feel “most fluent” in, I’d start by answering that I’ve never felt extremely fluent in any; I’m always groping, like most writers, to get the best thing said. Poetry comes most readily to me- fiction is a lot more work, though I value each of them equally. I’m a little less interested in memoir or essay, though I occasionally find something that needs to be written in essay form. BOTTICELLI: Who are your influences? Joe Benevento: When I was a teen I loved Poe and though I admire him for very different reasons now, I still really am influenced by him in everything from his poetry to his detective fiction (I’m presently trying my hand at some literary mystery fiction and Poe’s three Dupin stories really are a firm basis for practically everything that came after in that genre). In poetry Walt Whitman is definitely a big influence and to a lesser extent Pablo Neruda, and the comic timing of people like Frank O’Hara and Nicanor Parra have left a permanent impression. In fiction I also love Hawthorne, and many Latin American writers, but especially Garcia Marquez and Borges. I get to teach a Poe-Borges graduate seminar this coming semester that I’m very excited about. BOTTICELLI: Is there any hobby or activity that feeds into or informs your writing in some way? Joe Benevento: I love singing and have passed that love onto my children, so I guess vocal music is a big part of who I am and that does come out in both my writing of poetry (I used to write a lot of songs) and in many of my characters in fiction being interested in song and singers. I also am very interested in ethnicity, both my own Italian-American roots, but also about anybody’s ethnic make-up and whether it matters to them or not. Lots of my fiction and even my poetry, since it is most often autobiographical, will reference that interest.
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BOTTICELLI: Since you also write reviews, are you noticing any trends in recent collections? Joe Benevento: It’s true I write reviews, but only of poetry books by poets who have been published at least once in the journal I’m poetry editor for, Green Hills Literary Lantern, poets whose work I admire and can honestly say good things about. For this reason, one can tell more about my own taste in contemporary poetry than overall trends by looking at the books I’ve reviewed. I prefer poets who are accessible, who care more about saying what they care about in the most lucid way possible, who care more about that than they do seeming clever or jaded or whatever else a lot of contemporary poets seem to want to convince me they are. As a poetry editor I see a disturbing trend of poets who are too influenced by the classroom and by their time with each other and with writing professors and not enough with life’s core issues and the role of the poet in speaking to those. And I say this, of course, as someone who teaches writing myself. But I still prefer poetry that is less academic than it is for the world- a poetry that isn’t anti-intellectual but maybe anti-pseudointellectuals. But I may just be getting crabbier in my advancing towards old age. But the type of poetry I choose to publish in GHLL knows no age- I receive it from both young and old poets and those in-between. And it’s my little way of supporting those who care most about communicating something because they just have to and because they’re genuinely curious to know what someone else might thing about what they have to say.
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Coda: John Aylward
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Low of Solipsism: John Aylward
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Solitude: John Aylward
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Untitled: Kaity Hord BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE
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