OCHO#6
Zachary Blessing
what I want as rough as mill stamped sand as the waves in lake superior - huge and gray and alive. I want. - unbroken deep deep in the red round sandstone
Contributors Lorna Dee Cervantes Lyn Lifshin David Raphael Israel Diego Quiros Michael E. Carlton Reyes Cardenas John Korn Zacahary Blessing Michael Parker Dan Coffey Grace Cavalieri Erica Fabri Adam Fieled Jess Menendez COVER GIRL IS JACK ALBERTO
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Shelling the Pecans for A.A. I knew what a woman’s hand could do: shred the husk into threads, weave lips together at the seam. Rock to hard body, empire to thrust into knave—the native touch tocando música up the spine of the violin, some song of silk and gut. I knew race was a matter of degree, that inch in the face, that notice of dismissal. How to work all day at a posture, at a stance, at attention paying attention to none but the awl. I put my hole into you, this notch between the breasts, this discovery and treason. Hembra a macho. Fixed. O defined in the still shell of history, a destiny written in the charts and lost. Lost in the unnoticed memories of you, a flicker of change, some small scrimp of light. Tu luz. Ahí allá—a la ala and the scoop. Your aguila eyes sweeping up the dawn’s desire. This night. I remember shelling the pecans. Nothing but a bucket. No ride exceptional. Nothing but a dream to entertain us. I dreamed this moment— all the sweet meats in a risen weight going higher to the rim. The price and the pricing. I could eat what I missed or messed. Outside, the birds bending to it on a summer day. The great age of my grandmother’s banded hand weighing me down. The paper of tutelage blasting me away at that age. Now, I still remember how to shuck, how to fetch it, how to step it. Stepping up to you, I ask. The point enters the ventricle without shattering the meat. How a woman on a good day can rip out the heart whole.
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Lyn Lifshin
CHAMPLAIN, BRANBURY, THE LAKES AT NIGHT always women in the dark on porches talking as if in blackness their secrets would be safe. Cigarettes glowed like Indian paintbrush. Water slapped the deck. Night flowers full of things with wings, something you almost feel like the fingers of a boy moving, as if by accident, under sheer nylon and felt in the dark movie house as the chase gets louder, there and not there, something miscarried that maybe never was. The mothers whispered about a knife, blood. Then, they were laughing the way you sail out of a dark movie theater into wild light as if no thing that happened happened
Reyes Cardenas
Running Away, Running Away I kiss the sound of your shadow because that’s all I have left. Somebody please pull this rearview mirror
Michael Parker
A Difference Between Us You sip war like a glass of red syrah, so blasé, swirling the wine in circles inspecting it for residue while noting it is palatable to a creamy pinot noir.
out of my head and the reflection of the city I am leaving behind. No, not that homeless beggar,
Don't tell me again how its taste lingers on your tongue, how it's one of those finicky spirits once you acquire a piquancy you are infatuated, till death do you part.
let him fend for himself. No, not that dead prostitute, it’s too late for her. Not the mangy dog sniffing in the alley, man discards them by the millions like toilet paper down the drain.
Consider I told you: I lost my soldier-son from a bullet to the head, execution style in front of a mosque.
Somebody please pull this rearview mirror out of my head, I don’t want to see what I’m leaving behind in my heart.
David Raphael Israel
Arnold Speaks Forgive me if I said you are a babe it was a rather vapid way to speak I’m trying really trying to behave alas my discipline was rather weak my good Teutonic blood I aim to marshal my every utterance shall be P.C. my bonhomie has been a bit inertial and yet no racial slur was that from me I said the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans are passionate by nature through the mingling of African with Spanish traits? Mohicans’ finale stands before you blithely tingling I am the man who accidentally uttered taboo remarks no dog would dare have muttered
Grace Cavalieri
The Spirit of the Law: The Letter of the Law When the flood came, my husband went crabbing While I climbed uphill over the ice to find the sun
Consider, I told you: I lifted my dead two-year old son out of Qanan's carnage just like I lifted him up to the face of heaven in gratitude for his birth. Consider, I told you: My mother walked out of Tyre's rubble, covered in soot, and strayed the streets like a specter, not knowing herself. And consider, I told you: I am walking the long road of refugees overflowing into the war-scarred hills where the words of Mohammad whistle on the wind and everyone translates: there is refuge ahead. My wife walks with me, cradling an arm maimed by shrapnel, as does my daughter, who clings to my sweat-stained shirt, in the light of the sun, the moon, and the forsaken day. You may never place your feet on the same roads lined with red and violet anemones and oak trees as old as the prophets. You may never walk a mile with anyone except yourself and find you are nothing, an empty conch; and too blind to see your face on the face of any one else's pain.
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O C H O Ohs
A Face in the Park The face on the park bench has gathered a crowd. It is smooth and thin and likes soda, a folded can sits by a newspaper. Flies and insects typical of summer feasts and garbage buzz around the crowd. The face is not bothered by them. The face belongs to a young man with a tenor’s expression, with the skin of autumn skies. Eyes fixed on the clouds with the deep look of glaciers. Arms clasped together, mimic the faithful stance in paintings of the crucifixion. The improvised stage looses a little perimeter when a trail of ants exits the mouth on the face. I think of his mother and then of mine. Someone uses a cell phone, others murmur like insects. No one touches god’s garbage.
Silence gives way to round little vowels that ooze from your lips like sweet ripened fruit at the touch of my hand. A slow string of ohs owned by ghosts filling the air with the heaviness of petrified music long after spoken. Voice pearls. The laws of everything fail in lovemaking. My ears can see your face by the tone of your ohs. My eyes can taste the burning flesh by the position of your legs, and my hand can hear the rapid beating of your heart as it slides down your chest..
DIEGO QUIROS Christ Under Water I dreamt of you last night. It was not our usual dream exploring taboos in the company of rose petals and mirrors. It was a civilized dream. We greeted each other like old friends and walked away. Its been years since I’ve seen you. Off the coast of Key Largo there is a sunken Christ dressed in barnacles and shells arms raised towards the sun. I can never tell if the sunrays are coming from the father above the waters or out of the son’s hands and up to the heavens. His decomposing eyes weep in green and salt and the voice that raises the dead is slow and choppy like the murmur of the tide. He stands on grass that moves to the song of the angel’s trumpet, and small fish swim about their drowned idol like thoughts turning to miracles of different colors. Its been years since I’ve seen you. This is how I imagine me the day I do.
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Lorna Dee Cervantes
Lyn Lifshin
Groovy Mortimer y Su Lepista Nuda It was a black beans summer night, the squash was kid long in the grass and you could smell the tamale pie in the avenues coming from the curtained backs of the bodegas. Lucky Cienfuegos was on the ancient phonograph, black nylon no longer slick, the tar-voiced maestro still snappin' his hat on the wrist, stiff kinky creases in the cuff, double turned and out of fashion. But in his prime, never: cha cha ritmos of rhymes between the bolero eyes, Caye Coco all the way to the heavenway of poetry, Mayan waves chucking bonito in the aqua spray. In a heyday of rites and rituals, this shred left on the trunk of cultura like candlesnuff clumps on a stump, the indigenous xlaria hypoxylon, common and otherworldly as a woman named Kosumi, Miwok for She Who Fishes For Salmon With A Spear who goes into the forest padlocked in pine and searches the Aspen floor for the populus tremula, the aspen flower for fears – to stop the fear and trembling of an age. This black bean soup. This herbal blossom. "How to Speak, And How to Listen." The blue foot, pink cap lepista nuda sunning herself among the needle beds – purple fleshed in the vulva, a hundred fires in the stem. And somewhere sweet Seymour turns in his dream of beaches and pies, spies the black pitcher of night dawning into sap, the well-fed soul stalling on the stove, a single salmon stunned in the wake and scooped up by hand en un camino antiguo,
MIDDLEBURY POEM Milky summer nights, the men stay waiting, First National Corner where the traffic light used to be, wait as they have all June evenings of their lives. Lilac moss and lily of the valley sprout in the cooling air as Miss Damon, never later for thirty years, hurries to unlock the library, still hoping for a sudden man to spring tall from the locked dark of mysterious card catalogues to come brightening her long dusty shelves. And halfway to dark boys with vacation bicycles whistle flat stones over the bridge, longing for secret places where rocks are blossoming girls with damp thighs. Then nine o’clock falls thick on lonely books and all the unclaimed fingers and as men move home through bluemetal light, the Congregational Church bells ringing as always four minutes late, the first hayload of summer rumbles through town and all the people shut their eyes dreaming a wish
un camino real. And Mortimer grooves, his lucky capitalist nickel heaving up the tunes on a lonely juke box on a flaxen fleshy night; the groovy night, a wood blewit blue cap erect, edible and delicious.
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Dan Coffey
Diego Quiros
In Praise of Rain Rain fills the bruises of earth, flows from the facade of structures into dust covered streets. Dust assembles on graves under the bed, inside the bible until a crosswind, an opening re-assembles it elsewhere. Air in my lungs, in my heart like the voice of the poor like the void of humankind. Nothing a little love can’t cure. Your house burns down and all you thought was you is now scattered ashes. Ashes, wet from the fire hose nozzle. Kids in the neighborhood watch in amazement. Here’s what happens when you die: A bottle is thrown from a passing car. It shatters and spills its remaining contents on the asphalt. A small portion of the contents are absorbed into the ground. The rest is absorbed by the atmosphere. They will eventually rain elsewhere. Fragments from the broken bottle are hit by sunrays. Glass angles break the sun down into lights of different colors. Kids in the neighborhood watch with amazement. Somewhere in the world the sky turns to cinder.
On a Subconscious Level Go down to the basement – take this flashlight – and fetch the penis. That’s what I said to him almost two years ago. Suppose the batteries must’ve all petered out.
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John Korn Lyn Lifshin
this poem fell off the stool I want to tell you that there’s change in the wind and that maybe the birds can feel it. Like if you were sitting in your car during the day eating a fast-food sandwich or smoking a cigarette and watching the tiny hood ornament about 5 feet in front of your vision and say a big blue bird swooped down and perched on it, probably attracted to the bread of your sandwich or the white color of the cigarette paper, and when you stared at its little bird eyes, all black and seemingly filled with wisdom,
NEW HAMPSHIRE wild cat in the wood pile, deer you can’t see. I drift with the poem you sent into an underground river where
you feel a chill of excitement,
Indians eat fish so old
because just then the wind blows some paper bags across the parking lot and maybe some leaves drift through the air, and maybe then a flock of those birds kind of sputter out one by one and gather themselves like something big and secret is starting to happen, but it’s not, they are just doing what birds have always done and the wind is doing what it does, and the change is not in the wind, no, not at all. it’s all chemicals in your brain really in fact, youre not even in a parking lot are you? you're not even in your body.
they have no eyes. If I shut my eyes I hear the water that flows under
you're in a jar, floating in some liquid,
the columbine. When I touch
hooked up to wires and machines you’re a piece of a brain blown out that’s been preserved and doctors in white coats surround you
the chair I hear bluebirds that
and check off little boxes on paper with blue ink.
were wild in its leaves when there
little white doctors with little faces on big round heads and none of them know a good joke do they, no they have very dry senses of humor. don’t bother telling them the one about the monkey with penis fingers and the half Japanese waitress because you don’t have a mouth and they wouldn’t get it anyway.
were red flowers in its branches
OCHO
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Fishwife
Erica Fabri
There’s a pregnant woman at the pool. I’m watching her get dressed. Her skin is rock white. She’s shaped like soft wood. She has horse’s thighs and work boots for arms, carries her belly in one of them, more solid than bone. A knot of black dreadlocks rest on her neck. Two fingers pull a brass pin and ropes of hair fall loose to her waist. She raises a hand to kiss her throat with her palm, it leaves a print. When she moves, I think she is the most beautiful thing in Brooklyn. I smile and say hello. Shy, that she might know how I watch her, ashamed, that she might see how plain my body is. She steps into a papery sundress, the one she always wears, ties a leather cord around her hip. Her sandals are flat as leaves. Her nose-ring is a silver fishhook. I look away, and when I’m home, I curl my fingers into rubber bands, and sob into the toilet bowl.
The Corpse Dream For three days now, she has not been able to erase her dream: She is locked in a basement. Dead bodies are laid out on rows of folding tables. Her great aunt Kuku is back from the grave to count the crumbled souls. Kuku carries a red candle, stops at each cold figure and pins a yellow ticket to their shirt. The ticket says: PASSPORT TO HELL. In the morning, she wakes her American boyfriend and says to him: I need you to hear what I saw, so that I can forget it. Her nickname for him is Boobs. She whispers: Boobs, there were corpses. He sticks his thumbs inside his ears, refuses to hear a word of it. That night, she tries again: Boobs, I need you to hear what I saw. Boobs, there were corpses. He covers her mouth with a sock. The corpse dream follows her like a swarm of bees. In the dark, she can hear Kuku counting in Chinese. At the bus stop, she sees a yellow ticket nailed to a wall. She wears her hair in a soft French crop, on the third night, she lays it on their pillow like a quiet blackbird and she begs him: Please listen. Boobs, there were corpses…
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Michael E. Carlton
SEEKING THE MISTRAL My dreams were different than yours, Mother. I had need to feed flocks of wild pigeons in the middle of St. Marks Square. To stand piously silent within Van Gogh’s barren last bedroom, where errant Mistral winds might cast my aching soul into that same artist’s wild, spent spirit. I desired to receive a trophy of warm ears, still bloody after being sliced from a dying bull, felled in centre ring, somewhere in Spain’s Costa del Sol. You and I never spoke of my dreams. Just yours, as you chose my wedding gown of snow-white French lace, with seed pearls on sleeves and bodice. Along with the husband of your choice. You gave me your dreams by day, Mother. But, I still brave the Mistral, and attend every day’s bird covey. Only the blood comes now from my broken heart, shed nightly beneath that husband you chose for me.
RAILROAD TRACKS LEADING NOWHERE Deep, uneven scars crossed her swollen, saffron belly, cross-hatched in crazy patterns, like railroad tracks forever leading nowhere. Those flawed wounds could be traced to years of marital hell, and husband’s infidelities from day of their marriage. Jagged notches formed in flesh, following her annual homages to local hospital rooms, in lieu of holidays. Needless surgery chastened errant mate, her major slices loosely stitched. replaced verbal complaint. After forty-eight years, and equal sum of not quite healed internal scars, there was no divorce: threatened or promised, during a lfetime of hostile togetherness, apart. She died on yet one more, being the last, sterile table, joyfully ready to celebrate the forty-ninth incision. No friends, no relatives, no one, not even non-mourning husband, attended the funeral to grieve, with little need to explain. It took him two weeks, less one day, for the widower to find a younger woman to share his bed, she with flat stomach, and no visible scars.
OCHO
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Erica Fabri
The Wanting Poem The doctor said it was necessary that I die. He pulled all my teeth and showed my mother how to strangle me. When her hands closed around my neck I told myself relax. don’t fight it. go slack. just let it come. it will be dark and warm.
But my ribs were knocking, their rattle a code, clunking: NO. I WANT MORE. My heart bumped against the bowed bones: NOT YET, heart said, DON’T WANT TO GO. [“People who have difficulty falling asleep usually have difficulty in dying, too.”] It came like a gag, the jerk a retch makes, the twitch of a fit—a potato sack where the breath should be—then overcast, then eclipse, then new moon black. I woke up in a bed with my mother, my father and my brother. my mother said: couldn’t do it after all. my father said: darn good thing, too. turns out doctor was wrong. you can live . my brother said: wipe your lip, sister, the holes in your mouth are bleeding.
creep
Adam Fieled
i’m inclined to play creep w/ a bagel off-white dough gets kneaded black-shirted blue-jeaned green-horns indented floors absorb sponge-light looks for line-riches, coffee-crucial cafés leg strokes render you from his palm in paisley like an Oregon farmer
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ploughs couldn’t be more shared as you leave me, hardly, knock-kneed
Erica Fabri Marilyn and the Spelling Bee It was an early round. The judge presented it to her: Fish. Like a pride knife it stabbed at her. It cut this: SPELL IT NORMA.
David Raphael Israel
To continue To continue in English press one to continue in Spanish press three to continue in Sanskrit press none to continue in Elvis Presley to continue in Spanish press three para continuar en español la prensa tres to continue in Elvis Presley to continue in ichor press space para continuar en español la prensa tres auf Deutsch fortfahren Presse fünf to continue in ichor press space to continue in Eros press rump auf Deutsch fortfahren Presse fünf if you would like to place a call please hang up to continue in Eros press rump if ya wanna vernacularize yo slang up
She knew she knew this one. As she dug her two beautiful bucked teeth into her too beautiful bottom lip
if you would like to place a call please hang up if you wish to be silent why not just try it? if ya wanna vernacularize yo slang up if you seek to be enlightened please be quiet if you wish to be silent why not just try it? to continue in banter select fun if you seek to be enlightened please be quiet to continue in English press one
and started to say: eff— two droplets of nearly black blood ran down her clefted chin. Just then: Agatha. Agatha, breastless, wanted to win. Agatha said: Blood isn’t allowed in a Spelling Bee. Sit down Miss Baker. Agatha pressed the bridge of her glasses into her forehead, hard, like bone.
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OCHO