MIPOESIAS The Blues Issue Edited by Terry Lucas
Contributors Kim Addonizio Gary Lilley Tara Betts Grace Cavalieri Charles Wilkinson Jim Boring Christina Lovin Arthur Ginsberg Dianne Borsenik Howard Camner Rena Rossner Jim Benton Jenn Monroe Bianca Stewart Lisa Cihlar Maria Koors Chantel Heister Michele Poulos
MIPOESIAS Photos by Jennifer Koe Edited by Terry Lucas
Published by Didi Menendez GOSS183 www.mipoesias.com
Kim Addonizio Train Song This train goes from Hangover Junction to I’m So Tired City. This train is chasing Prozac with flat champagne. This train carries everything you have done to escape the memory of me and is destined to crash into the train that carries all I have done to escape the memory of you or so I’d like to think, and this train carries the pain I caused you but you will board it again gladly so I’d also like to think. This train is the first train; though shalt have no other trains before it. This train just wants to lie down on the tracks. This train carries the chickens home. This train carries the fragments I have shored against my ruin: Boxcars! Boxcars! Boxcars! Boxcars! This train sounds a lot like my harmonica. This train sounds like my mouth on you. On this train we are making love in the bathroom, passing through the valley of grapes. This train is passing near my hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska at 12:05 am as I write this line. Having writ, the moving finger rolls over in bed, missing its thumb. This train carries the thumbs, always in the same direction, the one where the rails never meet.
Kim Addonizio’s latest books are Lucifer at the Starlite, a finalist for the Poets Prize and the Northern CA Book Award; and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton. Her novel-in-verse, Jimmy & Rita, was recently reissued by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Kalima Press published her Selected Poems in Arabic. Addonizio’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and the essay. Her collection Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. Other books include two novels from Simon & Schuster, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. Addonizio offers private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online, and often incorporates her love of blues harmonica into her readings. www.kimaddonizio.com.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Gary Lilley Sermon of the Dreadnaught The guitar: I take communion daily in this shack of a church with a moaner’s bench rubbed smooth by repentant backsliders. I listen to the seventh note, graced by God, it is my battle-axe, a joyful noise no more modern than that old-time religion cooking on the woodstove in my grandmother’s kitchens. Holy ghosted, I have been washed in the blackwater cypress swamp that flows inside my guitar. A solid top, and I play it righteous as any stingy brim disciple that ever has played a small town bus-stop, and I got a missing canine tooth from the right side of my mouth and now my gospel is cobalt blue. I remember the purity of the old guys, Lucky Strike smokers and homebrew drinkers with open tunings, sanctified
imperfections, scarred and battered harmonies. They have introduced me to the hollering saints who hold late night prayer service in my guitar. I believe in the palm oil that anoints the guitar. I believe in life as sure as I believe in death. I confess the ancestor spirits and their love accompanies me. The bloodline has dressed me in that glorious suit that we only wear when we are our true selves. In the ascending heat there is a train of guitar moments, boxcars of dualities in the everyday choices that we make. I have been delivered, blessed by this guitar that brought me home from forty years in the urban American deserts, back to the piney woods of Carolina, this old rugged guitar, my cross to bear, this everlasting church of the mule driving sharecroppers.
Gary Copeland Lilley earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. He is a Cave Canem fellow, and his publications include the poetry collections The Subsequent Blues from Four Way Books, Alpha Zulu from Ausable Press, and High Water Everywhere (forthcoming from Willow Books spring 2013). He lives in Belvidere, North Carolina. MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Tara Betts Wichita Lineman after Cassandra Wilson
When Cassandra opens a cover of Glen Campbell, the eyes I see are dimpled. His arms arc gently under a T of shoulders. Slight parentheses same as his sinewed stance. Why is his body familiar like decades stacked and popped in one touch, broken in the back of my throat when our lips spoke to each other once so briefly? I know I need him more than want him. I insist that lyric reminisces. Some memory taps pulse into me like I saw him come home once. Like I knew the iron flattening his shirt, like I knew sweat gathered in our kitchen, a hollow trapped in at the small of his back, the yoke of him still familiar with a day’s sweat as if he had always known where I stood, how I held up a doorway with my lean, the tilt of head bent listening to rain tap its staccato long past midnight while it slicks my skin with summer cooling so swiftly. My Wichita Lineman still on the line. There will be no dusk in our kitchen, no narrow hum tickling his spine, no clasped limbs in a locket of paired bodies. He is a blues I know, a song caught in the dusk that I avoid singing. Yet I hum sometimes faintly, conjuring a steady stutter of circuits.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Tara Betts Circuit Breaker Ever felt your next husband touch you, then the voltage shorts out, runs cool? You ever felt the next man touch you, all volts and sparks that run so so cool? Been months since your skin felt his palm, But each cell remembers the outline, a balm. Been months since your body felt that palm, But the skin remembers that pair, their balm. Could be gilded prayers made those hands to touch you and call you back from the dead. Yes, some shiny prayers grew those hands that touched you back to life, never dead. He was circuit breaker that popped her fuse, flipped all the right switches. He could choose. He was a circuit breaker and popped her fuse. An interruption of sparks he lit and would lose.
Tara Betts is the author of Arc and Hue. Tara is a Ph.D. candidate at Binghamton University and a Cave Canem fellow. Tara’s work has appeared most recently in RHINO, Court Green, Bellevue Literary Review, Saul Williams’ CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (MTV Books, 2012), VILLANELLES (Everyman Publishing, 2012) and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (The University of Akron Press, 2012). She is co-editor of with Afaa M. Weaver of Bop, Strut, and Dance.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Grace Cavalieri Old Lady Sings the Blues The doctor, so young. Why young men, day after day? It is not the rejection that saddens her but their actions, hot pennies against the soft cement of her heart. Hospital The safety of loneliness reaches her. Healed with Steel they call it, cut from here to there. She blushes with its conclusion, so private a wound. I want to go back to my first kiss, she thought, just empty gestures after that. Talk She feels nice outside but mad inside, like a kind of snow hidden in her center, surrounded by bitter chocolate. She won’t talk. She won’t tell of the crippled dog within, because it’s hers, they can’t take it away. She looks out from her one big blue eye. Tray She turns in her sleep. If you believe in me, God whispers, I’ll believe in you. “Weave a cloth around the heart, and pull it tight,” Angels cry. “The body self eliminates, come with us.” Waves of fantasy leave the shores, one after one, brilliantly made failures. Now breakfast. MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Old Lady Sings the Blues
Grace Cavalieri
Lover He holds out his hand to give her a key but she does not reach far enough. He has to lift beyond himself. This makes him angry. Now, no key, no hand, only empty air, or does she know the truth— that there never was a key. Shoes People lose children, husbands, but still have their shoes. Where are they? Once she saw crops turn to dust in the fields. Once she saw a biker fold his map ready for the next leg. She thinks Judas was a good man if he killed Jesus so he could rise again.
Grace Cavalieri is presently trying to get her play ANNA NICOLE: BLONDE GLORY on stage after the 2011 hurricane closed it down on opening night in NYC. Grace is also writing poems about her past, THE HOT DOG FACTORY is a sample, for a book of poetry Memoirs. She has also finally gotten her rescue cat to eat wet cat food instead of dry food for his kidneys. The latter project took more creative energy than making Art.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Charles Wilkinson For Ever, As If what keeps you going,
spun straight from
old long player?
the wheel of black
candour recorded fresh from the heart,
though vinyl
every note open
attracts the dust
& shining on
what’s compact
that spotless sleeve;
lacks the long truth
the beat always
of lyric persuasion -
believed, & true
that nothing is ever a final blue: as if the
from the body
music’s playing,
you style us a
seamless its soul, & forever
way of singing,
that felt chord’s
never locked
hurt is sound solace, as if
in the groove - its
there was no hiss
every move’s
between the tracks for you
felt fluency
A collection of Charles Wilkinson’s poems appeared from Iron Press many years ago, and his pamphlet Ag & Au is forthcoming from Flarestack. Recent work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Salzburg, The SHOp, Prick of the Spindle, The Conium Review, San Pedro River Review, Shearsman, Tears in the Fence, The Warwick Review, and other journals. He lives in Powys, Wales.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Jim Boring Horace Silver at the Piano Down the lonely afternoon, the dark and sunny day, alone in smoky silence, Horace bends low over his hands. Whisky circles widen, merge, glisten wet on the upright lid. A long ash shudders in anticipation. Close on the yellow keys, head cocked, listening, he is not playing, he is conjuring note by solitary note, into trembling air. This is how it is done, alone in an empty bar, in dusty light, in a quiet place.
Jim Boring’s poetry has appeared in many journals, anthologies and online venues. His booklength poem, “Condo,” (Lit Pot Press), examines aging and loss in a South Florida retirement community. He is co-author of The Horse Adjutant: A Boy’s Life in the Holocaust (Shooster Publishing), and author of Scraps, a novel in manuscript, about police corruption in Chicago.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Christina Lovin The Seventh Year 1964, for ’Trane
And in the seventh year,
away. And he dreamed a bird
God spoke through his servant
that piped a song so sad,
John, the prodigal come
so lost, it haunted him
home from the land of junk,
in his exile. And so he
and brown horses named
arose and cleaned himself,
Harry. Tired of being
traveling through the heat
boy, tired of being stuck
waves to his Father’s house
in that mud of black tar,
to which all paths lead,
and shit, where tusks of pigs
but no road is an easy one,
dug the wallows he shared
o where there is peace and
and his hunger grew great
all are one in His grace,
but only empty husks
to be unworthy servant,
sustained him. And he longed
to sing all songs to God,
for the land of his fathers’
to have all tears wiped away,
fathers’ fathers, and dreamed
remade by that mercy—
of his bed and the sheets
robed in elegance, elated—
of sound washing over
and in the seventh year
the courtyard from some miles
to exalt that supreme love.
Christina Lovin is the author of What We Burned for Warmth and Little Fires. A two-time Pushcart nominee and multi-award winner, her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Southern Women Writers named Lovin 2007 Emerging Poet. Having served as Writer-in-Residence at Devil’s Tower National Monument and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Central Oregon, in 2010, she served as inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Connemara, the NC home of the late poet Carl Sandburg. Lovin has been a resident fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, Orcas Island Artsmith Residency at Kangaroo House, and Footpaths House to Creativity in the Azores. Her work has been supported with grants from Elizabeth George Foundation, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Kentucky Arts Council. She resides with four dogs in a rural central Kentucky, where she is currently a lecturer at Eastern Kentucky University. MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Arthur Ginsberg Glen Moore’s Bass No frets on this three hundred year old bass, no map to show his fingers the way: catgut cords stretched taut from scroll to foot vibrate the varnished chambers, excavate our buried rhythms from the pelvic floor upward: tremolo of a lark, a bullfrog's croak, a mother's croon. He's nimble as a tightrope walker across her strings, or heavy as a lineman pulling wire, showing off his wide-hipped woman for Mingus, Gomez and Hayden. Married to the grain of her wood, he makes love, teasing out the blues like taffy, with the horsehair bow drawn across her neck, his head bent back as she blows sweet scat to the wind, pulls him into her body until they sing as one.
Arthur Ginsberg is a poet and neurologist from Seattle. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Pacific University in Oregon where he studied with Marvin Bell, Dorianne Laux, and David St. John. His book, The Anatomist, is scheduled for publication by David Roberts Books, this summer.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Dianne Borsenik Blues Shaker crossed the Mississippi River prayin' for a breeze crossed that big old Mississippi prayin' for a breeze heat chokin' air like kudzu vines drippin' from the trees heat smotherin' like kudzu vines givin' me a squeeze slowin' through The Crossroads thinkin' I should have a beer slowin' down through Clarksdale's Crossroads thirstin' for a beer who is this like he owns the street a Jack-eyed devil leers strolls up to me with interest sez whatchu doin' here? now I'm not dumb, and my first thought's no way I'm gonna bite sure I know the price you pay in crossroads at midnight but dusk is some good hours away and mornin' sun is bright so I sez brother I'm all ears can you make it right? his chuckle is an evil rasp he turns his head to spit I have the answer to your prayers it's gonna cost a bit I see the Blues have possessed you
like to have 'em quit? I have the answer to your prayers but it's gonna cost a bit wipin' sweat I hide my eyes sink deep into the ruse afraid he'll see the twinkle there catch on that I'll refuse and I sez man you got it right it's true I have the Blues where do I sign, what do I do to shake these mighty Blues? you can see he's thinks he's won another soul for hell he spits again and curls his lip fingers his lapel well missy all you gotta do is swear your soul to sell I'll paint your Blues a shade o' red as bright as flamin' Hell well now I laugh right in his face pretty as you please I rake my hair and laugh at him pretty as you please those Jack eyes narrow into slits he knows me for a tease and I sez brother take a hikeyou won't get me on my knees
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Dianne Borsenik
Blues Shaker
cuz yeah it's true I have the Blues why'd ja think I'm here? ja think it was this goddamn heat ja think it was the beer? I came to trace 'em to the Source Delta Blues flow clear I couldn't wait to slake my thirst have done it now I'm here oh yeah it's true I have the Blues I also have the Soul I have the Motown and the Jazz I have the Rock and Roll I don't need your kind of help and I don't need control I'm wild and free and twenty-one and you won't take my soul
Crossroads scriptures baptized me and music turned me Blue there's no way you can fake the Soul and Rock will keep it true I'll stay Jazzed up until I die so beat it man you're through cuz I've been passioned at the Crossroads don't wanna shake THESE Blues
Dianne Borsenik, former flowerchild and current redhead, is active in the Cleveland, Ohio poetry scene. Her work has appeared in, among others, Rosebud, Slipstream, and Lilliput Review; two recent chapbooks are Fortune Cookie (Kattywompus, 2012) and Blue Graffiti (Crisis Chronicles, 2011). In 2011, she founded NightBallet Press, publishing poets from New York to California. She's married to James, and has two dogsons, Bodhisattva and Michael-Angelo. You can find her at www.pw.org/content/dianne_borsenik_0.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Howard Camner Pigeye Smith Mississippi blues man Pigeye Smith of the washboard circuit commutes with spirits and swings at ghosts With his one gold tooth and his final fling with the 10th Street whore all decked out in her faux fox fur, her ivory cross, her alligator boots, her sealskin slacks, and her chinchilla muff a walking graveyard she is a walking graveyard in the busted mind of Mississippi blues man Pigeye Smith of the washboard circuit who communes with spirits and swings at ghosts
Howard Camner is the author of 16 poetry books and the autobiography Turbulence at 67 Inches. He was named "Poet of the Year" in New Times Newspaper's "Best of Miami" readers poll edition in 2007. His works are housed in prominent literary archives worldwide. He is currently preparing a book of his collected poetry for publication later this year.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Rena Rossner Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine My blues are turquoise tiles on mosques and synagogue archways glass evil-eye beads on hand-of-Fatimah hamsas tzitzit fringes died in snail-blood blue as Mediterranean coves and Eilat stone women with headscarves the color of peacocks holy shrine, mausoleum blue swimming pool barely-there-bikini sky with no-rain-in-sight eyes-of-a-prophet camel tassel beaded earring painted building blue sitar sounding on a lonely night harmonica in the desert leather-bound prayerbook abandoned on the Tel-Aviv beach
Rena Rossner is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at The Johns Hopkins University. She also holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin and McGill University. She has written extensively for The Jerusalem Report and The Jerusalem Post. Her poetry and short fiction has been published or is forthcoming from Poetica Magazine, Ascent Aspirations, The 22 Magazine, Fade Poetry Journal, Exterminating Angel Press and Full of Crow, among others. Her first novel is out on submission.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Jim Benton 12 Blues in 3-Line Time pure Santa Fe
cerulean
sky burning autumn
aquamarine cornflower periwinkle
eyes
in a flip-top box of 64
bought store stiff
impossible
Levis washed and worn
national geographic lagoons coral
soft by time
seas and that grotto
baby blanket border crochet
backyard swimming pools
Grandmother’s unfailing welcome before
from the air
her fingers forgot
before the clouds
cable knit cardigan
Mary’s Christmas bathrobe
catching every flake and crumb wooly
seersucker flannel polyester blend
history with pockets
cotton custom hand-me-down
oxford cloth button down
my grandmother’s crystal
starched dry-cleaner cardboard
brilliant cut eyes reset aglisten
cool
in the faces of my children
good little soldiers in wolf dens
silent sunlight
boyhood nostalgia
trembling after stained glass
uniformly outgrown
still after all
Jim Benton is a retired public school teacher from Fort Worth, Texas, whose poetry students have won college scholarships, read their work at area museums and civic events, and received statewide awards for their poetry. In retirement, he is enjoying more focus on writing poetry himself than on teaching others to do so, but he still volunteers at local high schools. Those who teach also can. MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Jenn Monroe JR’s Blues At our first blues fest a palm reader told me I would never win the lottery—that any fortune would be my own to make. Naïve, I had worn a sundress, no sunscreen. We stopped by her tent only for the shade. Five dollars later her insights burned hotter than my shoulders on rough motel sheets. She also saw three great loves, and like a slap across my back I understood—she did not see you.
Jenn Monroe is the author of Something More Like Love (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and a recent Pushcart Prize nominee. She is executive producer of Extract(s): Daily Dose of Lit, editor of Eastern Point Press, and a member of the creative writing faculty at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Bianca Stewart The Only Poem I Ever Wrote About Helen The last time Helen washed my hair, I wept. I was getting over an illness and Helen had come to check on me. Earlier that week she brought sunflowers. I felt like something the ocean had coughed up along with bones, shells and the rusted parts of ships. Helen assured me I was still beautiful, a photograph accidentally handled while wet. Quietly she unbuttoned my nightgown. In the afternoon light that bounced off walls and rifled through my belongings, I stood naked before a girl whose laughter was an aviary. I must have smelled ancient, like time itself, but Helen kissed my forehead, the bridge of my nose, my lips, my shoulders. She kissed me without judgment, without disgust. I closed my eyes. When I opened them she was lifting her dress over her head, breasts falling like drunken mountains. Behind a shower curtain was the smell of violets, the taste of salt.
Goings-On Zoë floats around the house wearing sunlight, sleep and a slip. Behind her ears, the potential for a thunderstorm. A drunken Leonard Cohen insists on repeating himself until the banana bread rises. Walls complain about shadows, how even the thin ones itch. Gnats hover over a bowl of rotting plums, small as marbles. Box fans send words flying off jaundiced newspapers. I cannot stop coughing up red string. Zoë believes my heart is unraveling again.
Bianca Stewart lives and writes in Virginia. She listens to Tom Waits every day and eats entirely too much candy. Her work has been published in literary journals such as Versal and Gargoyle.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Lisa Cihlar Rental Cabin Up North Even the refrigerator is painted Dresden blue. The blue blanket on the bed is flocked with cat fur. My husband gets a piece in his eye and grouses about my choice of reservation here by Lake Superior. In the 5 a.m. dazzling dawn I take coffee to the porch and watch an old woman in a flowered dress hang sheets and blankets on the clothes-line outside the big house on the hill. She is backlit in early gold light. The blankets are washed-out squares of sky from this picnic table perspective. Three cats curl around her legs. She pays them no attention. Above my head, from the soffit, wasps drop by ones and twos to fly away to the day’s wasp business. Somewhere a camp fire is smudging. Smoke smells and lake smells and sand smells wisp in the shoreline haze. In the cabin next door a radio comes on playing cake in the rain. I hear a shower start, and a fog horn far away. My husband shouts a word in his sleep. I am not sure what he is saying. Could be a wasp dilemma.
Lisa J. Cihlar's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, Green Mountains Review, The ProsePoem Project, In Posse Review, and Blackbird. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Insomniac’s House (Dancing Girl Press, 2011) and This is How She Fails (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2012). She lives in rural southern Wisconsin.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Maria Koors Melancholy, Again We are all gathered to the same place. All our lots are turning in the urn, and sooner or later they will be shaken out, and put us on a boat for an exile that never ends. —Horace, Odes, Book II
Ah, master of unholy rites, Melancholy: how your grey scale plays its keys to the final note of black from the shock of a wake to the shock of waking up. You’re in the winter rain dripping like an infection, drops in an I.V. bag, cars left to rust in the woods, an empty poor box, an overcrowded prison cell. You are the warden and the ward. Your architecture is everywhere: from factories to factory farms, from meth labs to mortuaries to strip malls, strip clubs, strip mines, crosses by the highway and crosses scheming into dollar signs. Your sentences begin with the imperative of Don’t your vocabulary is in definitions of desolate, desecrate and deserve. Your greeting is we regret to inform you and in lieu of flowers. Your signature is a suicide note. Can you see through the eyes of a branch scar, a black eye and eye of a hurricane? Do you see your daughter, Dysthymia through a keyhole in the city of Dis?
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Maria Koors Acedia accidie State that inhibits pleasure and prompts the rejection of life; one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Aquinas associates it with turning one's back on things, through depression or self-hatred, and nicely defines it as a torpor of spirit which prevents one from getting down to anything good (Summa Theologiae, IIa 35.1). —The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
I know it as an avian thing: with wings large as a turkey vulture’s and when it flaps, air drafts up as smoke folding into the brain’s grey convolutions. It glares, head cocked to the side with a loon’s scarlet eyes, with plumage missing its primary feathers dark and rank as drain grime. When it lands on my palm its pointed tongue and beak peck at nerves like grass seed. Its talons claw like a sapsucker at a sugar maple, ravening my skin to bits snatching up whatever good is left in me. When I try to chase it away it screeches: You must go nowhere You must do nothing You must not live your life
Maria Koors lives and writes in Birmingham, Alabama.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Chantel Heister Outside Pressure The walls creak under the heaviness of outside pressure. They won’t stop ticking. I want them to, but they won’t, and can’t, because that’s just what they do. The sunlight stops at the windows and leaks down the sides of the house. I can see it glowing through the cracks in the walls. Sometimes, when the wind blows, specks will sneak in through the cracks and illuminate my room, in tiny spurts. Every time it happens I think of Decasia. On better days I cup my hands and try to catch the glowing sparks like lightening bugs without form. When I’m successful, I slowly walk around the room with fingers barely parted and observe the dustcovered furniture of my past, present and predetermined future. The sparks always burn out, though, leaving my hands just as empty as they were when he held them and said my name.
Chantel Heister is a Portland, Oregon-based writer, editor and make-up artist. Her work has appeared in TUSK magazine, Make-Up Artist magazine, and The Literary Review of Colorado Mesa University, among others. She likes to spend her time marveling at the world's idiosyncrasies and creating in consequence.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Michele Poulos Rilke’s Eighth Letter i. Creped by touch, dog-eared & stained, yellowed in the flimsy light, the words of this letter may both hold you in place & carry you from all that is to all that might be. They say relax in suffering & exhale. Liddy, your one bright comet, your child, her last fatigued breath spent, as depleted soil might feed a crop, and another, and on until the constellation of sorrow that follows, fathomless, surprising the ways it opens out year after year.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Michele Poulos ii. The way it is always: 1996 in my hometown on the coast of Connecticut, the silvered & damp cold burrowing its head beneath every lining. I’m at a bar with Charles, elbowing the after-work crowd, buzzed with forgetting, crushed peanut shells beneath our feet, the thread of the horizon shimmering beyond a red neon sign. What were our hopes that night he tickled my palm with a halved nut below the table? Each day they diminish, those spectral currents, dissolved in the woods now as ghostly as his car,
or that following night, its slide across black ice, its nose accordioned on the oak’s splintered bone, the vast quiet holding in its arms the one sound—Led Zeppelin, “Ramble On,” playing through the car’s mangled dash, insisting on its own arrival in that abiding stillness.
iii. You ask if I’m forgetting, or want to, if, among the blurred city lights, what opens isn’t so much acres of night, but a small grace placed in every room, as your hand moves in orbit over each page, the way you circle the house, stars filling the empty windows.
Michele Poulos’s A Disturbance in the Air won the 2012 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2012, The Southern Review, Smartish Pace, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. IV: Louisiana, Crab Orchard Review, The Hollins Critic, Copper Nickel, Sycamore Review, Waccamaw, and other journals. Her essays and book reviews have been published in Blackbird and Stone Canoe.
MiPOesias ~ The Blues Issue ~ Edited by Terry Lucas ~ February 2013 www.mipoesias.com
Edited by
Terry Lucas is a poet, essayist, and reviewer. He was the winner of the 2012 Littoral Press Poetry Prize and, among other honors, his poems have garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. Terry has recent or forthcoming work in Best New Poets 2012, Great River Review, New Millenium Writings, MiPO, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, and The Citron Review. His chapbook, Altar Call, available in the compilation anthology, Diesel, was a winner in the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival chapbook contest. Terry grew up in New Mexico and resides in northern California. He is Associate Editor for Trio House Press, and blogs at www.thewideningspell.blogspot.com.