Daniel Lusk On Poetry
I came early to love writing poetry because I found that in writing poetry nothing I had felt, observed, recalled, dreamed or imagined (no matter how joyful or bad) was either worthless or wasted. And it offered any of these as connections by which one might “tag” the experience of readers.
My instincts for poetry were born of reading first the King James Bible and after that a rich inheritance of poets like Wordsworth, Roethke, Oliver, and Wendell Berry, who loved Nature. As a boy, I thought my love for such language and preoccupations suggested a life as a preacher. But by the time I graduated from college, having served a number of rural churches in Iowa and South Dakota, I had discovered the great variety of human beliefs and superstitions about our common origins and place in the natural world. I no longer held the tenets of the religion of my youth to be sacred and had turned instead to singing and writing poetry. It was not the European post-World War II existentialists or the bucolic poetry of Kenneth Rexroth or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” that prompted me to leave the church. But they showed me the way out.
Here’s the beginning of a poem by Francis Ponge, “The Delights of the Door,” that suggests what I had begun to discover instead:
Kings don’t touch doors. They don’t know this joy: to push before us one of one of those huge panels we know so well, then to turn back in order to replace it— holding a door in our arms.
Here was a way of praying that did not have a human at the center of it, as the recipient of the favor being asked.
When I left the church, having tried to be a preacher, and having failed at it (my sermons were never longer than five minutes, and in Bible study I argued against literal readings of scripture). In one interim assignment to a pair of cowboy churches in western South Dakota, I found myself happiest and my parishioners most responsive when I was drafted as an extra hand for branding, moving cattle in the Badlands, painting the steeple and scuffing the hardpan at the bottom of a new grave in the churchyard.) Yet my early poems were something like prayer.
I wanted to speak to the great Invisible, to express the gnawing doubts and hopes and yearnings I felt about life and love and sorrow.
In his book The Spell of the Sensuous philosopher and magician David Abrams suggests that, when he went looking for shamans in Bali, over and over again he found them living outside the community, at the edge of wilderness. It was, he learned, because their role in the community was to live at the margins, and to remind people who came to them with problems, that their problems were almost always because their lives had fallen out of balance.
Abrams maintains that “the medicine person’s primary allegiance…is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which the community is embedded…” I would say this description fits some of our best poets as well. And while I don’t think a poet need be any sort of medicine person, it does seem to me an appropriate role for a poet to work in the manner of Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver to maintain the awareness of humans that our communities depend on the wild, non-human world that surrounds and sustains us.
The poet Robert Bly has suggested that this role is dangerous because it tends to separate the poet from the community. I would argue that, like the shamans David Abrams encountered, the human community needs poets who remind us that our place in the natural order is not a privileged one, that such humility is essential.
It seems to me that earth and nature must be the basis—the fundament—of all moral and social values, and of any viable religion, philosophies or economies of human kind. There is a sort of Kantian logic in this: a culture or people may not stake its future on principles or policies that will ultimately destroy it. And a poetry of selfabsorption is the moral equivalent of the principle held by many, including many of our leaders, that “this world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.”
Writing my own poetry is intrinsically ironic, for it employs a tool (writing) which is conceptual to affect images and sensory/visceral/emotional impact on a reader. In other words using a linear device to suggest images and sounds and rhythms that exist only when experienced again, as it were second-hand, in the mind of the beholder.
Such poetry strains against the literal, for even as an image in a poem conjures up visual or other sensory and visceral responses in a given reader (and of course different for each), it signals to that reader’s subconscious in ways that call forth unconscious and primal and dream-life responses, responses that defy rationality and literal experience. Because the words mean little until they are strung together, and because the reader/listener must create from experiencing them the images intended (or something like what was intended) by the poet—this is more “magic” than “message”—more conjuring than communicating.
Aside from the irony of using nouns and verbs and adjectives to suggest pictures to a reader, this poetry of image also has the effect of reaffirming the innate connection between our human perceptions and the sensible world of animals and plants around and outside us—their non-human perceptions and languages.
Children know instinctively that poems are magical. They also know that the natural world experiences us in the same way we instinctively experience it—that nature is not a science project but life to be shared. And they know that words and phrases have power.
Here are some poems written during my workshops long ago by second graders, children who had not yet been influenced about what poetry might be or do:
Peacock’s secret: to keep the family together by calling out in deep voices. Angela C.
Nov. Friday. dark of the sea deep. Feeling something in him I know. Rocks broken and shells broken Glowing in the dark I heard the world coming up I saw it too. I like seeing it in mind. Mandy H.
I saw the trees singing and. Swaying and. The ground lifting up and. I saw lights and. Saw the tree whistling music. Kurt H.
Music
The church. it is coming from the church. and it is flying like the wind. Raymond L.
I would not cast myself in the role of poet as physician to the injured or heart-sore the way I once did. Today the urge toward poetry for me is the same as at the beginning, but my yearning is no longer to explain myself or to declare my affections, but to somehow try to connect the human spirit with the invisible and non-human in the natural world that surrounds and sustains the communities of us humans.
My poems are still prayers, but there is no request for a new bicycle or a bigger house or victory in war or someone to love me (not that it wouldn’t be a good thing).
Book available at Kelsey Books (Utah) https://kelsaybooks.com/collections/all/daniel-lusk
Jordan Smith
Jordan Smith is the author of eight full-length books of poems, most recently Little Black Train, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Prize and Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, as well as several chapbooks, including Cold Night, Long Dog from Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations, he is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.
The Black Canvas Jacket
That her father always pulled on
When he walked the trail
Into the vly behind the house
She’d grown up in, then
Scrambled down the wooded bluff
Toward the creek, clutching the maple
Saplings and catching his fall
Until he reached the old road, barely
Anything of the two ruts left
As it followed the Dwaas Kill past Some posted land no one’d farmed In years and entered the marsh
Where he’d walk, heel-and-toe
As the footpath dwindled to tussocks
And along the plank catwalk to sit with binoculars In an abandoned duck blind, watching For any hawk and the redwings that dogFought it away from their nests, their sharp Black bodies and cries, as they dived, The flame-orange blazons
On their shoulders like an RAF
Insignia on a Spitfire, until even the big Redtails soared off with a sort of shrug
Toward the higher ground
He’d just descended, and he’d smoke
A pipe of dry Latakia tobacco
To keep the mosquitos off And sip from the flask of scotch
He carried in one inside pocket
(In the other, a notebook and stub
Pencil) work gloves jammed beside His baseball cap in the game
Pouch of the black canvas jacket
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That she saw was missing from the hook Although the binoculars Were still on the shelf, and she thought They had agreed the descent Was too steep for him and the footing At the ford untrustworthy For a man in his seventies, even With the hobnail logger’s boots He’d saved from his time With the CCC in Bandelier, When he was almost charged With desertion for wandering Up Frijoles Canyon, climbing The cliff face with his sketchbook To copy the designs on the shards Of pottery on a house floor, Spirals he could not stare at long Enough for how they moved His mind towards the ragged Canyon rims and circling Birds, too far to see if they were Raptors or scavengers, and at this Distance, he thought, it hardly Mattered, he hardly mattered, Only the decorations on the splinters Of clay, one of which he kept In the pocket of his black Canvas jacket, the jet streak Of jagged lightning
Not even a bit worn from all the times His thumb had traced it, A talisman against whatever fear Might take him at last, And when she saw it on the butcherBlock table near the back door And that he’d left his journal There and even the flask, she knew How little he had ever asked Of her, and that this was the one Favor she would have to grant And she sat down to wait For him not to come home.
Another Old Movie
There was always a wireless playing a few rooms down the hall (It’s been years since the years when you lived in places like this), Opera or jazz or baseball.
A thin door. A lock that opens with a shake. It’s too easy. You’re already inside where you shouldn’t be, Checking if your horn is in the closet, your hornrims on the table,
The round oak table with a paisley cloth, Where tubes glow on the Philco, the turntable spins, the stylus bumps against the label, Bix or Bessie or Benny, Rose or Rudy or Red.
In the next room, on the nightstand, a movie magazine, a syringe. No one is ever as alone as you expect them to be. Years ago, and if you’ve thought of her at all
It was as the starlet in the film’s next-to-last scene, the one Just before you walk away clean, humming a song, some standard That hasn’t been written yet, though you’re sure you’ve heard it before.
Leonard Cohen in Heaven Nurses a Second Espresso and Finds
Neither the darkness of his late songs that welcomed darkness, Nor the famous whiteness of his room on Hydra, Promise of love’s erasure.
Only the familiar taste of a double expresso each morning, and another, Black black coffee, bone-white cup, As if there was anything to wake from.
The coffee is as good as he might have hoped, had he hoped at all. And the two buskers, sisters, on R. St. Catherine, sing a song about R. St. Catherine He takes as sign of god’s unpredictable kindness.
Had he thought of god as an object of hope, even then He would not have expected the pleasure of a table in an empty café, Through the window, the winter light of Montreal,
Or to reencounter love as he knew it, as he knew The entrance to the Metro, late at night, and no telling Who will be on the car.
And the next day, nothing to do with the morning but sip coffee and write As he had once when there was no one at all to listen to the song He had not thought would be a song until it was.
Charlie Brice
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His sixth full-length poetry collection is Miracles That Keep Me Going (WordTech Editions, 2023). His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere.
Louise
Louise was the smartest person I knew at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Her face, wrinkled already, belonged on a fortyyear-old, her body that of a spinster in a Tennessee Williams play, hair coarse as steel wool, her complexion moribund, corpselike.
There had to be someone who wouldn’t find love in this life, someone who only washed one cup, one plate, after dinner, someone who reached across the lonely sheets in the morning to find no one there.
We shared a love of Thomas Hardy and Allen Ginsberg.
She visited me in my tiny room on 10th street. We talked about Casterbridge, Tess, and the obscurity of Jude. We drank cheap Ratskeller wine, and toasted those best minds that Allen lost along the way. Louise lay on my bed, her hands behind her head, and gave me the look. She wanted
something I could not give her. The thought of sex with her was repulsive to me, a total turn-off. I wished I could have achieved an erection while thinking about her soul. Her soul was exquisite, the most sparkling jewel.
Descartes could doubt the existence of everything but his mind—psyché in Greek—also soul. I failed to doubt my body. She hung on in English class for a month, then hopped into her beige Mustang and drove out of my life.
Forty years later, out of the blue, an email from her in my inbox. Louise: wife, mother, grandmother— she loads dish after dish into her dishwasher, and in the morning, loving hands help her make the bed.
Walking Memory
I loved watching her tushie wiggle on our walks down Maple Avenue, loved how she’d stop a few feet before the intersection, look at me with those deep brown pools, wondering whether we would cross the street or round the corner.
When we crossed, she heeled, kept close as I’d taught her, so she wouldn’t wander into traffic. Sometimes, on midnight walks, she flushed a deer.
They’d stand almost nose to nose, dog and deer, astonished at the presence of the other. Usually the deer jumped first, her bounding tail visible in the moonlight. Mugsi, unfrozen, would yank her leash, forget about me, and yelp like a drunken banshee. Once home she lay on her back and I’d pet her tummy, our pace of life slowed by the peace my hand found there. I’d watch her pink tongue lick her lips in rhythmic contentment—comfort for us both.
When the time came, she met the Vet at the front door, tail wagging. She always loved visitors. And when the injection began her pink tongue shot out through her lips. “That happens,” the Vet said. “It’s okay.”
I know that others have suffered, have lost like I have. Matthew Arnold mourned, “That loving heart, that patient soul.” Browning lost her “loving friend,” her “gentle fellow-creature.” Updike lamented that, “surrounded by love that would have upheld her, nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.” I looked to their words for consolation—there was none.
I can no longer pet my dog. I’m tired of all that “crossed the rainbow” crap.
Mugsi’s ashes are in a black box on my dining room table. I’m unable to move the box, but I have tried to pet it. It was like petting a box with my dog’s ashes in it. I found her leash. It was like trying to take a memory for a walk.
The Title
At this age fifty years seems a friction spark— here/gone—a nothing nova. Three friends have tolerated me all my life— have laughed and cried and sighed with me—
Carried me along in a caravan of care. I’m a lucky man.
Still, everyone seems to know more about everything than I do about anything. Certainty creeps into every crevice of my life, leaves me gasping for a little wonder, some mystery.
In my backyard wonder grows alongside day lilies, ferns, and Monk’s Head, swoops into my yard with bluejays, song sparrows, chickadees, crawls up my feeder poles with chipmunks.
Years ago my neighbors let their backyard go— fervent Christian missionaries. I thought they were growing a jungle whose natives they hoped to save from their heathen ways.
Fervent, fanatic, fascist—all those F words fit them— the F-word fit them as well.
Wonder wanders with me on walks down Maple Avenue. Hawthorns wave to me in summer and in winter give naked witness to my hobbled self. How do they know I’m there among them?
What I was led to expect: a guardian angel, a benevolent god, a profession peopled by sincerity, not egos, a government that put truth and justice before all else.
Then again, I suppose the title of anyone’s life story that ends in the twenty first century is “Disillusionment.”
Richard W. Halperin. Photo credit: Bertrand A.
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections since 2010) and Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert (eighteen shorter collections since 2014). In autumn 2024, Salmon will bring out a Selected & New Volume, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon most of these. The seventeenth and eighteenth Lapwing, The Painted Word and Three Red Hats, appeared in July 2024.
Of Fathers and Sons
Watching shadows move. Giving each other a wave.
Fathers and sons. The best book – Turgenev’s –has been written. This poem is Of.
Prepositions are rather new. Many languages don’t have them. The wallpaper of the guesthouse where I am staying is white roses on a black background. Black roses on a white background would be the same. Beauty is beauty.
My father is my father. I am his son,
I write poems. He played golf. That’s all.
My Spenser Teacher
He died many years ago but there he was last night in a dream. Not he, but, let’s say, his personality. A vibration. A rainbow. When he read Spenser to us,
his calm voice, amusement somewhere in it, made each line shocking, and of course in Spenser each line is shocking. He knew you can’t teach Spenser, you present him. Niagara Falls.
About the Gentle Knight pricking on the plaine, he said ‘He has no name. The whole arc was to be his learning his name at the end of all those Books which Spenser never got to. His name is George.’
That impossible jewelled fragment. Newspapers describe every horror without touching the why, the waste, the hate, the illusions, the stubborn hope. The sheer glamour of being alive. Spenser is straight reportage.
The Other Side of the Valley
She was on the other side of the valley. Or – depending on the dream –on the other side of the chasm.
And yet there was no distance. In the tonality of experience, there was no distance. The phrase comes from
Henry James. That middle-aged man who was so concerned about having put on weight, has something to tell us.
A Personal Poem
During a period of recurrent unemployment, and with a young son to support, my mother would stand on Fifth Avenue near Fifty-first Street in front of a big Art Deco statue of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders. ‘That’s how I feel,’ she would say. In this, she was not an Irish woman or an American woman, she was a desperate woman. She was pretty, which sometimes helped and sometimes didn’t. One plus one is not two, it is one plus one. A desperate woman is not a desperate man. A statue is not a man, it is a statue. A son is not a helper, although sometimes he is, he is a job. He is a burden, hers, in a society set up for those who can keep going.
A desperate society. Looking at the statue helped her arrange her head before going home to talk to a child. It helped, because she related to art. Art offered her solidarity. For my father, too, who was a desperate man. Brahms symphonies helped him arrange his head before telephoning – once a week from a thousand miles away – his son who, he knew, would tell him, too enthusiastically, that things were fine. Does fibbing make worlds roll off shoulders? It does, for a few seconds. Is it as good art in that regard? I am an artist. The answer is: yes.
Photograph courtesy https://pixabay.com/photos/sunset-tree-silhouette-dusk-lonely-3156176/
Finbar Lennon
Finbar Lennon is a retired surgeon. He lives in Collon, County Louth in Ireland. He is the author of three collections of Poetry published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast (2021/2022). He is a member of the Bealtaine writing group and has had poems published online in Live Encounters, Planet Earth Poetry and on Viewless Wings. Some of his early poems including ‘teenage poems’ appear in his late wife’s memoir “The Heavens are all Blue” that he co-authored and was published by Hachette Ireland in 2020.
Her Trove
List of names dates and assignations safe in compact coloured handbag sitting on her lap for comfort resting by her feet for notice waiting to be clicked and opened scent of poetry wafts through air sounds of dizzy lines to share lace and gloves a statement too trappings of diplomacy and poise man behind dares stretch his legs his foot mistook for hand on bag an innocent mistake in springtime.
Some words for Tom
The men I pass make no remarks only one had caught me napping in mind as night sky seeks out land my evening goals already planned now set aside for one who spoke of flint and stone and alabaster hoped for like reply - nay my answer filled with doubt and make believe not fazed by limit of my reach he gave me grace to find out more for next we trod on well worn path that occasion sadly passed us by
last we spoke of illness taking hold and how our lives are not our own how words of jargon take control bend our will down country roads for trek of miles past empty signs no destination or arrival times reassured him no one in control find listener with a word to say heed doctor who is sound and clear submit yet keep your counsel near promised I would stay in touch but knew from memory lapse I failed to honour that
arrived too late to wish him well had gone unbeknownst to friend helpless moments of dismay and loss my compass had deserted me no answers on the bricks and mortar pipes were set obliquely in a row between the railings and the lawn still not sure what role they played he wondered each last time we met not happy had not solved the plot but stayed upright solid to the end no wilt in will to fit the bill and live each day God granted him.
An old acquaintance
The managers are men sit at tables, on bar stools dark suits with open necks long gazes over laptops women at work on shop floor breakfast customers gone I waited – she was not there no need to ask – I knew –just as I knew when she was, unseen yet her presence felt has been a while since we met no one stays long in the place am sure she has forgotten me I was a regular for years always asked about family mother, siblings back in India dependent on her for support funny how small talk is enough to bond with a stranger her name was Monina.
Photograph by Mark Ulyseas.
©Mark Ulyseas
DeWitt Clinton. Photo credit: Meg Crosby.
DeWitt Clinton taught English, Creative Writing, and World of Ideas courses for over 30 years at the University of Wisconsin— Whitewater. Recent book collections include At the End of the War (Kelsay Books, 2018), By A Lake Near A Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters (Is A Rose Press, 2020), and Hello There (Word Poetry, 2021) which was awarded the 2022 Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His poems and essays have appeared in a variety of national and international journals. He is a student of Iyengar Yoga and offers a gentle yoga class to seniors in the Milwaukee Public Library System.
On Death & Dying
“I find it extremely hard to talk about people I loved who have died.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
Absolutely, and who wouldn’t as we wouldn’t want to talk about them like that if we hadn’t loved them, but just exactly how do we talk about them now, so long gone, and none of us knows where in the heck they are, but those who prayed a lot know they’re upstairs, of course, but the place seems a bit iffy now, and I try not to get into those unpleasantries about don’t I know where, and of course I know where, but so many don’t want to know what I know about where, as where is the problem, isn’t it, and it’s got nothing, nothing to do with love, and how do we even know how to grasp something like love as most of us just haven’t even ever passed through love long enough, or as some say, deep enough to even begin the conversation and who really wants to, now that they’re gone, and isn’t everybody on their way to leaving us alone, without them, so maybe all we can do is stick around, perhaps like Ursula wanted her friend to stick around just so they could catch up, talk a bit, sip tea, and think about the nicest ways to send pleas for blurbs, reviews, whole reviews of terrible manuscripts, sometimes arriving in even boxes, and who, who really wants to tackle all that when you’re trying your best, as they say, to write something down yourself, as if that might let us know we’re still here, mumbling on, if that’s what it is, or not to be so mean, carrying on as if this is what we’ll always do, if that’s what we’ve been doing for so very long, despite few even caring a hoot about who’s just thought of a sentence,
which probably isn’t that glorious anyway, and besides, who has the time, anymore, to read a line, a sentence that doesn’t really make all that sense, but that’s just talk, isn’t it, yet that’s probably what keeps us above ground, for those who are thinking that someday, somewhere, they will be carefully planted with others, but here’s the thing, so many of our dear ones, and yes, that’s a nice way of putting it, isn’t it, so many we’ve loved have already died, and aside from some bogus holding hands and closing our eyes from the flickering candles, well, nobody’s going to talk back, right, they’re gone, and the longer we’re here, the chances are we’re going to forget most of our loved ones, or if you like, most of our acquaintances we’ve had a conversation with, and that’s probably what’s the hardest as so few are left to have a conversation with as most of our high school chums are disappearing so fast we start to wonder why in the world were we here in the first place, but of course, that gets complicated and absolutely no one knows, and probably you as well, knows what to do with something like that, so I do have a few crackers and a bit of moldy cheese, and I’ve got a nice cold Sav Blanc, so please don’t forget to come by, and come by soon as we could figure out who we could even remember after all these years almost as if we never ever knew them, for we can’t even remember what we said, when we said something so important or so we thought so.
C’est la Vie
Just the other day we were talking about regrets and of course you’ve had them, right? as who in their right mind doesn’t have some regret(s) about how that went so long ago or wishing whatever it was that was important hadn’t worked out that way, not that way, as that way wasn’t your way, and so many of us are now in some clusterfuck and don’t even know how to get out of such a mess, but what if we didn’t have regrets about what we did so long ago, what if we don’t look back wondering why we did something that way or another way, as so many have forgotten the exit for this entirely erasable fiasco that all of us make over and over, so relax a bit, get out your French famous slogans phrase book, and savor what just might help to lift you out of such a funk so go ahead, but first, you need to just say it, say c’est la vie, not that you can even pronounce it well enough in a French grammar class, but that’s not important, unless you insist that pronunciation is everything, and if you can’t get this one right, well, it’s worse than any of you can even imagine, the end of the world as so many know is coming and none of us, not even you has prepared an emergency grab bag just in case you do flub up the ever so popular phrase that usually can get so many of us out of our funk, and again, who hasn’t been in a funk, ever, really, no one no one is going to believe that, so get over that as it makes for such a happy go lucky
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song even if the song sounds French and you still haven’t learned even how to order soup in French, but no worries, just hum that tune, and all your worries, all your c-f’s might just not be so gob smacking important, a little like whatever it is you’re in, you’re not really in it, you just think you’re in it, so let’s review everything you’ve ever done that ends up in your head as regret(s), and haven’t you figured it out yet that all that was just you thinking you were doing the right thing, when the right thing wasn’t even right, or wrong, in fact, it wasn’t even in the mix, as they used to say so cleverly, perhaps what you wanted was just up there in your head plotting and scheming away when those weren’t the options at all, even though you thought they were so “optional,” but just something you thought you should do, and now you wonder why you did that and wish you hadn’t so let’s join in the chorus, once again, without a care with no regrets, yes, c’est la vie.
No Worries, Call Soon
It’s not complicated, really, is it, or is it? remembering all the stuff you’ve ever done, seen or wish you hadn’t seen or done, but just the other day, out of nowhere, I couldn’t remember which room I wanted to walk into, or even if I wanted to, so there I was, forgetting about just about everything, ever, and then, and this really is a head scratcher, as if I really had any hair, but I do, really, though I do enjoy (quite a bit, even) someone else rubbing her genii’s shaved head, oh for crying out loud, now you’re crying and why now, what in the world just happened, yes there were two of us, but now, at best we can only find one plus another nine tenths for somebody here doesn’t know, and please excuse my French, squat, and yes, we know by now you could be a bit lost, and why shouldn’t you be, yes, and are you always hoping the days ahead will be clear as a cow bell, or even better, the deep gong of calling Buddhists to pray, and, you know this, don’t you, you do know the clarity and richness of those bells in your head, well, dear, they’re going to be a problem soon, not now of course, but soon you’ll be wetting your fingertips to turn even
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more pages, looking, forever, it seems or the word tonality as now that is sinking into you, even though the tonality is a little fainter every other day or so, though hearing anything these days is not necessarily the most pleasing, is it, but I can’t really talk about that as I’m actually not here as I left days or weeks ago, I think, now on a Queen Mary bound for Lisbon of all places, and just now you’re remembering where you thought you were just now for it’s only been a second or two, but please don’t forget to ring me up as I wouldn’t want to miss out on anything without you.
Photograph by Mark Ulyseas.
©Mark Ulyseas
Micheal J Leach
Michael Leach is a poet, reviewer and academic who lives in Bendigo on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Michael’s poetry is featured or forthcoming in journals such as Cordite Poetry Review, exhibitions such as the Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, anthologies such as The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 (NewSouth Publishing), and his four books: Chronicity (MPU), Natural Philosophies (RWP), Rural Ecologies (ICOE Press), and Chords in the Soundscapes (Ginninderra Press). Michael’s poems have won or been otherwise recognised in the UniSA Mental Health and Wellbeing Poetry Competition, Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, Minds Shine Bright Confidence Writing Competition, Woollahra Digital Literary Award, Hush Foundation Kindness in Health Writing Prize, and Liquid Amber Press Poetry Prize: Poetry of Change.
Central Victorian Haiku
i. before the fog lifts— a calf between cows
ii. landlocked lake— seagulls
iii. mid-July I climb to the peak of my gas bill
Lisa C Taylor
Lisa C. Taylor is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Interrogation of Morning (Arlen House/Syracuse University Press, 2022) and two collections of short fiction, most recently Impossibly Small Spaces (Arlen House/Syracuse University Press). Her first novel, The Shape of What Remains will be published by Between the Lines Publishing in February 2025. Lisa is the codirector of the Mesa Verde Writers Conference www.mesaverdewritersconference.org and she teaches online for writers.com. Lisa’s honors include the Hugo House New Writers Fiction Award, Pushcart nominations in poetry and fiction, and numerous best-of-thenet nominations. She is a fiction editor for Wordpeace.co an online journal with a theme of social justice. www.lisactaylor.com
A Biography of Fabric and Hair
“Do you really collect world globes?” I ask him on our second phone call after our virtual meeting on the dating site.
“Yup. Smallest one is the size of a bead. I have a marble one, an egg-sized one on a wooden pedestal, and a few the size of that Italian cheese you find in specialty grocery stores,” he says.
“Mozzarella? How many do you have?”
“Hmmm. I’d guess about thirty. But that’s not the weirdest thing I collect.”
“Oh yeah? What?” I pet Carmel who has taken over the edge of the chair.
“I collect lint. The stuff you find in the lint-trap in the dryer. I go to laundromats and get it there. I have this big ball. When I was on vacation in Maine, someone had a yarn bomb event, knitting a tube that stretched all the way to the beach. I’m trying to think of something like that I can do with the lint.”
“Why?” Carmel’s purr makes the chair vibrate.
“Why does anyone do anything? I guess it’s interesting to me. Lint is like a shadow story. Who has flannel sheets or wears fleece? Fleece is a great lint producer. I have magenta and yellow from fleece jackets. Some of my lint has dog or cat hairs mixed in. I think about what kind of pet someone who goes to the laundromat might have. Do you collect anything?”
“Not really. Postcards for a while. I live in a condo and don’t have a lot of space. But your collections are interesting.”
“Interesting? Does that mean we should meet or is that just a nice way of saying goodbye?” His voice is low and gravelly. I find it sexy in a warm-up band kind of way.
“I wouldn’t do that. I’d like to meet. I have a boring life. I go to work. I go home. Sometimes I watch a movie. On Sundays I visit my mother. My Dad died last year so she’s alone. She makes me dinner and I help organize her stuff.”
“What’s your job?”
“Benefit analyst. I interview people applying for state benefits and determine their eligibility. Been there twelve years. You?”
“Therapist—mental health, not a physical therapist. I wouldn’t know how to do that at all. I specialize in PTSD and eating disorders,” he says.
“Interesting. In a hospital or clinic?” Carmel is digging her claws into the upholstery so I throw her off.
“No. Private practice. Started two years ago. I have a shelf in my office for my globes. Clients ask about them. Kind of a metaphor that they can learn to control their own world,” he says.
I think about some anorexic looking at the collection and somehow seeing control over her disappearing body. Bet he doesn’t tell her about the lint. Who wants to see a therapist with huge balls of lint in his house? Lint bombing. I’m sure that’s going to be the next big thing. Calls after meeting someone on a dating site are like a window cracked open in your car on a cold day. It’s freezing but the car smells like old dog so you’re trying to air it out. Unfortunately, when you close the window, it still smells like old dog.
“Still there?” he asks.
“Yeah. Thinking about the lint.”
“I know. My last girlfriend couldn’t get past it even though I keep it in the study. It’s not like it’s by the bed or anything,” he says.
“How much do you have?”
“That’s hard. I mean some of it is in balls and some of it is flat. A lot. I have a lot of lint. I’m really going to do something with it. It’s kind of a biography in fabric and hair,” he says.
I’m feeling a little queasy at this point. This guy may be psycho even though he’s a therapist. I open another screen to Google him and there he is, all whiskery and earnest-eyed, fucking Ph.D. in psychology. Why do male therapists always have beards? He was clean-shaven in his profile picture. His specialties are listed: PTSD, eating disorders, couples and family therapy. Heal thyself, George-the-therapist. Oh, by the way, I’m sure he tells them he has sheets and balls of lint in his house as a metaphor for life. I’m betting that wouldn’t do much for his business. I Google myself. Oh, Internet Oracle, tell me who I am besides Veronica Redmond, MBA. Nothing much except my stint with the Sierra Club and a charity 5K that raised money for children with Muscular Dystrophy. My Instagram has mostly pictures of my cat and flower garden. See, George. I’m the normal one.
“So, should we meet?” he asks.
I imagine George rolling up some lint that he keeps by his computer.
“I guess. Public place,” I say.
I’m thinking an arena or a mall but George suggests Deena’s Pizzeria. I should have known that a lint and globe collector wouldn’t be reading Yelp to find a five-star restaurant.
“Sure, okay.”
When I sign out, I’m giddy to have Saturday night plans since I’ve exhausted all the Netflix and Amazon options and even my mother is out playing cards on Saturday nights. He looks kind of normal and there aren’t any Healthgrades that say anyone committed suicide after therapy with him.
I’ll wait to tell him the rules. No need to overwhelm a man who collects lint. It’s not too much to ask that he take off his shoes and socks indoors and wash his feet. He probably won’t care about the silverware I carry with me, public dishwashers being a breeding ground for germs. I’m discreet. The last date I had was two years ago. We broke up because he didn’t understand the need for latex gloves when I touched his body even though I explained that it wasn’t a lot different from wearing a condom. I’m sure I can help George overcome his habit of collecting the detritus of other people’s lives. Our own is disgusting enough. In his photo, he has warm eyes and I sense he’ll be kind.
Fred Johnston
Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951. Working as a journalist for some years, he was a poetry reviewer with Books Ireland and The Irish Times, among other publications: he also reviewed for The Sunday Times and Poetry Ireland Review. His work, both prose and poetry, has appeared in The New Statesman, The Guardian, Stand, The Spectator, Iron, Orbis, The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Sewanee Review, Southwards, The Moth, The Stinging Fly. Founder of CUIRT international literature festival (Galway,) his most recent poetry collection is ‘Rogue States’ (Salmon Poetry, 2019.) He is also a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Galway in the West of Ireland.
A Commoner’s Lamentation
It’s another rotten day some fool calls summer With foul rain and wet leaves and a streetful of idiots And invisible things flapping and snapping And dogs making fools of themselves expecting Me to tog up and walk them in that glorious downpour
I can sense the lack of heat and sunlight doing The sorts of things great grief might do Worming from the deep inside the rotten planks of me Until it’s easy to shout Sink! Sink! rotting barque! I promise not to swim! And mean it, sweet for drowning.
If by any chance a sliver, like a wound, of sun Applies itself corrosive and ridiculous Before it’s time to turn the lights on, what mockery! Too late for promises, I sink stern-first into TV’s dream And think If this is death, I can handle it. Bring it on.
No Man’s Land
It’s drear damp
Even the trees want out
You can do only so much with our council estate Before something unnameable boards up doors and windows
And the route-march
To the shopping-centre
Takes on the weight of an assault across open ground And nobody’s safe. Still a few yappy young continue to hug
The park benches
Like offerings for mythic birds
Or some sun-starved sun, or some Lottery win, waiting there On the peeling benches above the dropped needles and beer cans
In the jaded mind’s eye
You can conjure up
A gangly sack of hormones showing off by crushing a can In his hand, the best he can manage in the way of foreplay
The fidgety girls
Hanging out, bottle-tanned
Wary and wanting in equal breaths; over everything, this Descending fog out of a sky the colour of a bin lid, full of promise.
Happy
I’m staring into Niagara, six years old in a yachtsman’s cap One wrong move and I’m down the slope and under Horseshoe Falls The noise is absolute, white spray even at this height, and cameras Held out like offerings over the low railings; Eisenhower Was in The White House, everyone had a black-and-white TV
Sputnik whistled in the disputed heavens, Elvis played Canada. Niagara roared, a hand on my back steadied my infant gyroscopeI would not fall, not easily or by accident. My mother’s hair was Held in by a headscarf, it was sunbright hair and swallowed light like A mirror. She must have been young, girly young, and maybe happy.
Anna Yin
Anna Yin was born in China and immigrated to Canada in 1999. She was Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-17) and Ontario representative for the League of Canadian Poets (2013-16). She has authored six poetry collections and three books of translations including Mirrors and Windows (Guernica Editions 2021). Anna won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTYs, two scholarships from USA and grants from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. Her poems/ translations have appeared at Queen’s Quarterly, ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, Literary Review of Canada, Danver Quarterly, Epoch Quarterly. She read on Parliament Hill, at Austin International Poetry Festival, Edmonton Poetry Festival and universities in China, Canada and USA etc. She teaches Poetry Alive and started her own small press: Sureway Press for translating, editing and publishing or other cultural exchange services. Her new poetry collection: Truth in Slant will be published by Frontenac House in 2025.
For Katherine L. Gordon
I shall come to meet you in autumn, in the garden you have tended with care, listening to your Cosmic Chorus with awe.
My summer pockets are full of forget-me-nots cherished by you, each petal is a new flashcard questioning war and peace each flower is an old sad song, mourning this fractured Earth. On my daily walks, I ponder the muse in your mind and wonder how your awareness turns bittersweet.
I imagine the door I will knock at is what I knew, for our ancestors have shared the same journey not alone—— seeing wild geese come and go, dreaming of stars shooting and falling.
I will come to meet you in autumn, before the first frost and nightfall. When leaves turn red and wing to earth we will catch their inner light and flame to let the Cosmic Chorus rise once more.
Notes:
Awareness is Katherine L. Gordon and James Deahl’s forthcoming book Cosmic Chorus & Forget-me-nots are poems by Ms. Gordon.
The Beauty of Friendship
Here in my back yard in Mississauga, Canada, a young tree is loaded with green apples, summer sky drifting with white clouds…
I look through photos from Kariya, Japan: The Ferris Wheel, the Floral Garden, “The Mando” parade and cherry blossoms In red, white and pink, then the nine-meter-high Maple Leaf in Mississauga Park there lit up in changing colors at night.
In my hands are gifts from friends I have newly met in our city’s Asian twin: handmade book marks, tiny folded fans, beautiful Japanese calligraphies with landscapes, floral fabric and stylish volumes of 俳句 (haiku)… My heart is full of gratitude.
I remember Stephanie, former president of MFA shared her exciting oriental experiences in Kariya when we ran into each other at the Living Arts Center for Mississauga’s next 50 years. It was she who warmly connected me with Yumiko Naito, a gracious representative from KIFA who made my new eastward cultural exchange possible.
What did I bring to Kariya, our twin city? Arts from local artists about our city’s scenery, maple syrups and chocolates, green tea, books of Canadian poetry and my sincere heart with a learning mind.
I recall Joy Kogawa’s poem “Where There’s a Wall”, I remember the hundred cherry trees from Kariya donated to our city for peace and friendship… I am convinced that art and cultural exchanges are bridges for truth, friendship and harmony… And now, as I survey the photos and writings between our twin cities, I perceive we have all reaped a rich harvest of gifts.
Notes:
KIFA as Kiraya International friendship association (Japan)
MFA as Mississauga Friendship Association (Canada)
Edward Caruso
Edward Caruso has been published by A Voz Limpia, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, ‘La Bottega della Poesia’ (La Repubblica, Italy), Burrow, Communion, Kalliope X, Mediterranean Poetry, Meniscus, Melbourne Poets Union, n-Scribe, Right Now, StylusLit, TEXT, Unusual Work and Well-Known Corners: Poetry on the Move. His second collection of poems, Blue Milonga was published by Hybrid Publishers in 2019. In August of that year, he featured on 3CR’s Spoken Word program. In 2024 he co-judged the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.
Conversations with my grandmother, La Villetta Cemetery, Parma, and beyond
1
From quadrangle to quadrangle, to walk these corridors, not only for great uncles and aunts, great grandfathers and grandmothers, but those others who’ve passed through.
Your picture, my need to reminisce: Parma with its soft colours, veiled skies, riverbeds lined by oaks and elms; Bologna on my return, hidden canals and streets, graffiti-covered pillars aglow as my night bus rumbles across uneven street paving.
2
On some nights I dream of ropes dangling from skies, just out of reach.
I try to fix them down.
continued overleaf...
3
In your town, landscapes that could pass for paintings, hazy skies.
Allegations of gypsies who presumably filch fifth-storey apartments, who climb towards windows barely open. Here in Bologna, close to where Biagi was gunned down, an addict shoots up behind a parked car. A graffito on via Pratello:
‘Chi ha qualcosa da dire si mette avanti e taccia’. [1] There’s a parallel in this directive among crimes against the State and others in the frailties of our being.
Let me search for you here.
4
You once spoke of keys and the doors they’d open, an omen of the love in store, but the only chances are those that come once and suddenly vanish.
5
Each time I leave Bologna to visit you: the weather that accompanies departure; those left behind, their farewells; the elderly man with ragged hair floating in the rain while his grandson holds a black umbrella, at waist height; rains that fall in mid-Summer; the beauty of photographing wet streets that reflect a church entrance before a liturgy. Add the renaissance windows with their white pillars and faded red curtains; divining rods used in search of Felsina’s ores; the climb to San Luca and folly of snows reported over Milan; poppies sprouting between cracks of cobbled stone and concrete; mosquitoes hitting the parks in the dreaming of the day where lovers treat wooden benches as matrimonial tables laden with presents, our hillsides hidden from the Montagnola Gardens.
continued overleaf...
The history lesson of the ex-partisan I met in piazza San Martino, Bologna, extolling freedom, but reflecting that our understanding of it has been shaped within, rather than outside, liberty. Someone of your day who’d slept in hiding without knowing if he’d be apprehended by fascists and executed.
Think of this city, of the Reformation that took seed beyond these borders. Think of the civic responsibility that begins with the self, id and ego, with the almost sixty years that have elapsed since the war-time Resistance, the psyche now one’s property rather than the confessional’s, a secular public’s ethics subverted by free markets.
The day I was told all this the skies were a deep blue, dearer than ever because such days lie beyond the observations of a war survivor who brought the above views to me, observations I have to share with you because for too long we’ve had no dialogue.
7
The heat of day, ghost-town figures and shadows creeping across streets. Piazza Maggiore, preparations for August fifteen, acrobats counter-balancing on a wire by a ship with white sails and actors in see-through cotton dresses balancing on metal props with wheels. I search lines from Attilio Bertolucci’s ‘Parma’, his longing to rebuild the war-ravaged city. There are intimations of a voice calling out, a need for your presence, beyond the quadrangle where this piece began; beyond the cathedral next to me, drizzle outside a bookshop I enter for a line or two of Vita Nuova as a backdrop to the pealing bells.
8
Light fading across balconies and rooftops, this place engages, with its windows and towers, porticos and student quarters, wooden beams and pillars. Through it all the graffito: ‘La libertà ha i nostri occhi’. [2]
It’s inevitable – we’re distant but close. There’s a need to complete this inscription, and it’ll never be exact.
There’ll never be the same view of the one building, whether it’s a window covered in vines that will flower, or a ledge seen for the first time for its floral patterns. Our innocence is a well of tears and rainwater that purifies everything we tell each other. It’s in that view along via Farini as it curves away from via Santo Stefano. That sight is my voice and it’s my well. Follow it, like the paths of your ducal park or the shadows of your borghi, and you’ll catch me.
Life goes on unimpeded, and when I return it’s like seeing everything for the first time. That picture is my Felsina.
Note:
[1] ‘Whoever has something to say step forward and shut your mouth.’ [2] ‘Liberty has our eyes.’
Photograph by Mark Ulyseas.
©Mark Ulyseas
Stephen House
Stephen House has won awards and nominations as a poet, playwright, and actor. He’s been commissioned often, with 20 plays produced, many published by Australian Plays Transform. He’s received international literature residencies from The Australia Council for the Arts to Canada and Ireland, and an Asialink residency to India. He’s had two chapbooks published by ICOE Press Australia: ‘real and unreal’ poetry and ‘The Ajoona Guest House’ monologue. His poetry is published often. He’s performed his acclaimed monologues, ‘Appalling Behaviour’, ‘Almost Face to Face’ and ‘The Ajoona Guest House’ widely. His play, ‘Johnny Chico’ ran in Spain for 4 years.
he and she
he and she like to go on excursions along the coast / they both enjoy photography and nature / we’ve seen them several times on a path we take by the sea / she likes to stop and talk about whales they have photographed and birds and the weather / he prefers to nod and say hi and quickly keep going / if she has stopped to chat to us he waits up the track a little way looking back to her and checking his phone and making a clicking noise with his tongue that is loud enough for us to hear / we don’t encourage her conversations due to his tongue clicks but we respond to the topics she raises related to their walks / he likes to bring sandwiches and a thermos of tea for lunch while she prefers to go to the pub in the nearby town and have a counter meal and a few beers and talk to other people having lunch / we worked that out by watching and discussion and feel our take on their lunch is fairly accurate / he likes to avoid the cafes in the town pre and post their coastal walk but she likes to have a long black coffee in a café / i know that as she shared the information with me and extended on it when she discovered i like long blacks too and that we often go to a café before our hike / we haven’t seen he and she that many times but we know a lot about them because we are observant and enjoy working out the stories of other human beings / we believe that he and she get on well together and enjoy the seaside walks they share just as we do / but we both agree they are quite different in personality and taste / each time we see he and she we discover more about them / the other day after our walk we had lunch at the pub / she was in there / he wasn’t / she spoke to us as she was leaving / told us they were about to go for a walk / when she left i looked out the pub door and down the road / he was standing on the corner smiling as he watched her walking towards him / he wasn’t phone-checking or tongue-clicking / when she reached him they hugged and then walked towards the coastal track / together //
Carolyn Jabs
Carolyn Jabs has written poetry off and on ever since she figured out how to hold a pencil. She published her first poem in Seventeen magazine when she was in college, but she put poetry aside to become a professional writer. Her essays and articles have appeared in dozens of publications including the New York Times, Newsweek, Working Mother, Self, Redbook and Family PC. She is also the author of The Heirloom Gardener, one of the first books about heirloom vegetables, and co-author of Cooperative Wisdom, Bringing People Together When Things Fall Apart, an award-winning book about an innovative approach to conflict resolution. After retiring from commercial writing, Carolyn pivoted back to poetry and was fortunate enough to be included in a workshop managed by Perie Longo, a former poet laureate of Santa Barbara. In the past few years, Carolyn’s poetry has been published by Quartet, Brushfire, San Pedro Review, California Quarterly, Evening Street Review, Anacapa Review and other journals. Carolyn and her husband live in Santa Barbara where she practices Tai Chi and serves on the Board of the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara.
Irritant
I’m told oysters make pearls to neutralize a dangerous intrusion. How do they recognize risk? What triggers the cocktail that becomes mother-of-pearl? Does it take concentration to transform irritation into something shimmering, iridescent, transcendent?
I wonder if the process is painful. depletes energies needed elsewhere. Maybe pearl formation is simply a by-product of everyday housekeeping. Does the oyster feel it has fulfilled or been distracted from its destiny?
Most of all, I want to know if the oyster takes pride in its pearl, forgets the intruder, finds unanticipated pleasure in the loveliness of her defense without quite remembering why it is there.
Puzzled
It began as an amusement, a way to pass the time on evenings when the sun sets long before self-respecting adults go to bed.
When the border clicked into place, we realized the pieces came in only two shapes. What seemed so simple— an autumn day in Central Park-became chaotic:
fallen leaves everywhere, people distinguished by nothing more than the shape of a hat, the color of a coat. In the welter of detail, we could not recognize the critical piece connecting the tree’s trunk with the branch suspended above it, the arm that linked a mother with her child.
Day after day, we struggled to find the big picture until, one afternoon, it found us. The last pieces knew where they belonged. Everything felt inevitable, as if it had been determined from the very beginning.
Pivot Point
Out of our hands, it could go either way. Tomorrow’s test determines whether we resume lives whose goodness we didn’t appreciate or veer into the thicket of procedures, surgery, disagreeable treatments that may not matter. Today, with effort, I can still imagine happily ever after, close my eyes, make a wish, touch a talisman for luck. Right this minute, entangled on the bed, covered only by late afternoon sun, we hold each other’s hands, refuse to let go.
Marcella Remund
Marcella Remund is originally from Omaha, NE, transplanted to South Dakota in the U.S. Her work has appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, Jabberwock, Poetry Ireland Review, Pasque Petals, Banyan Review, Live Encounters, Sheila-Na-Gig, Quartet, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of poetry books The Sea is My Ugly Twin and The Book of Crooked Prayer, both from Finishing Line Press, and the forthcoming books Hysterian and Stroke, Stroke also from Finishing Line Press. Find more information at www.marcellaremund.com.
Maiden Voyage
Had I been there on that April night, third class, of course, and traveling as I must with father or fiancé, I like to think I would have wandered off alone, tucked myself at last into a leather chair in the library, reading The Goddess of Reason. After four days, my stomach would have settled, and I would have found comfort in the rocking and solitude below, those upstairs women in gowns and furs, tipping champagne, or swishing up and back on their first-class promenade. I like to think that far from the upper decks it would still have been peaceful, that the bump and scrape of that iceberg would have seemed just rough water and engine noise to my young mind. And once I knew, would I have scrambled in a panic for a lifeboat, or would my lifeboat have been the quiet below, the leather chair, the book, a cup of tea, and the sudden cold water, that blanket of sea?
Olympus Ablaze
Few remember the younger sister of Zeus, Photia. She was mother Rhea’s favorite, of course, the way she could light up the mountain. Dad Chronos wasn’t a fan—all that ashes to ashes business could undo even his perfect timing. Like her siblings, she had a temper. Each time the boys tied her to a stovepipe, each time they
put a mop in her hands or tried to crawl in bed with her as horny teen gods were always doing, she’d torch the place. You don’t see her name in history books
because like so many rebellious women, she’s locked in Hades’ underworld, out of sight in a dank, fireproof room where the only thing she has to burn is herself.
Cigarette
for the women of the Magdalene Laundries
Behind the garden shed, in weedy brush near the locked gate, Maureen and Sister Clare share a fag Sister squirreled away cleaning Father Gerald’s private rooms. Maureen came to Peacock Lane at 15, sent by her da to hide the shame of her rape, to keep her uncle’s name clean as hospital sheets. Clare—born Colleen, betrothed to Christ at 17—blows a neat blue smoke halo. The girls pick tobacco from their teeth, laugh quiet as they can. Clare fans away smoke with her scapular.
The rain starts. Maureen whispers, want to dance? She hums “Broken Wings,” the two lock arms, chance a few close circles. No talk of family, the future or past in this temporary truce where nothing good can last.
Only more ironed aprons, embroidered christening gowns, hothouse days, dreamless nights, nowhere to go but down.
Carolyn Chilton Casas
Carolyn Chilton Casas is a Reiki master and teacher who often explores ways of healing in the articles she writes for energy and wellness magazines in several countries. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. She lives on the central coast of California where she enjoys nature, hiking, and beach volleyball. More of Carolyn’s work can be found on Facebook or Instagram and in her second collection of poetry Under the Same Sky.
My Temple of the Green Hills
When I’m searching for trust in the transience of everything, it comforts me to walk the green living hills in meditation, listen to the creek chanting mantras to the rhythm of spring.
I shut my eyes for a few paces climbing upward, ears open wide to a choir of hawks and sparrows, hymn of rainwater flowing down fissures carved into the forgiving earth. Concerns pass through my mind like rosary beads slipping through fingers.
Come summer, the creek will grow silent, the luscious green turn tawny and brown. What choice do we have but to hold what we love close for the time it is with us, then open our hands to let what we have cared for take wing?
© Carolyn Chilton Casas
Saying Yes to Vipassana
I can say yes to this opening to reveal my true self, letting responsibilities, worries and the ego’s dross fall to the edge of awareness.
Saying yes to fasting from speaking, denying that rush to fill sacred silence with a tumble of words.
I say yes to acceptance and to the rays of affection reflected in each person’s smile, even in their downcast eyes.
Yes, to the cumbersome zafu beneath me, the exasperating desire for ease.
And yes, to this body, this breath, muscles already strengthening as I climb the steep slope toward home.
Whispertree
When we arrived, I listened for the whispering trees–
oaks, madrones, and firs–although they remained silent, silent like we were asked to be. That night, the creek waters ran through my dreams, bidding me welcome, pleased to be a part of these days for contemplation, this potential reset for the rest of my life. The woodpecker and the warblers say it’s safe, safe to be my essential self. They urge me to release my desire to be remarkable, to let go of all that gloss.
Atef Abdel-aziz
Atef Abdel-aziz is an Egyptian poet and critic who published 12 poetry collections in addition to a critical book. His poems have been translated into several languages including English, French, Spanish, Kurdish and Persian. Furthermore, he participated in many international conferences and festivals in Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Kurdistan and others and has received many local and international honors and awards.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda. Salwa Gouda is an Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic at the English Language and Literature Department at Ain-Shams University. She holds a PhD in English literature and criticism. She received her education at Ain-Shams University and California State University in San Bernardino. Furthermore, she has published several academic books, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, and others. She has also contributed to the translation of “The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers,” which includes poets, philosophers, historians, and men of letters, under the supervision of UNESCO. Also, her translated poetry anthology, entitled Dogs Pass Through My Fingers, was published recently through Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Additionally, her literary translations have been published in various international magazines.
In Praise of Cruelty
I killed the goddess of love I killed the playful deity who ruined my life And the lives of others.
I met her after midnight
She was wandering as usual on the riverbank In her crimson dress
She looked beautiful, gazing absentmindedly Toward the water
Her long hair was adorned with two touches
Of moonlight
I lingered for a moment, contemplating her oppressive presence
And the more her splendor increased in my eyes
The more resolute I became in luring her to her fate.
“Good evening, my lady.”
She turned to me with dark eyes, I imagined they were looking but not… seeing.
I said, “I am a sad man, A sad man who left a full bottle Of aged wine at home
And there is no one to share it with him.”
The woman smiled with her lips pressed together
Then said, “It’s alright, It’s alright as long as you return me here
Before the night is over.”
I prepared a poisoned drink for her
While she was lost in thought, gazing at a replica Of a Picasso painting
Which I had purchased one day At an auction.
Time slipped away:
Each time my friend reached for a glass
I handed her another
Until she lay sprawled on my couch like a forest
Of burning violets, And slipped into death.
...
A shiver ran through me
So I carried her light body to where she wanted And cast it into the depths of the water.
The city now lies upside down as if a storm
Had swept through:
People are confused
Searching for a goddess under whose steps
The grass would turn green
And the basil would sigh
The poets have come to a standstill
Their pens have dried up in their drawers
And the pages have folded
They wander the streets, searching For cruelty
Yes, cruelty!
The very thing they have long reveled in within her cursed Paradise
Trying to find the lost meanings
As for the lovers
They turned away from their beloved after their hearts dried And became devoid of chaos
Instead, they began to bask in a bliss of calm And boredom.
I killed the goddess of love And now I have nothing left to do I spend my entire day indulging in my bliss like everyone else, Until my legs grow weary And at night I lie on my couch, with a poisoned drink Beside me Yet, I find no one to carry my body To the water.
Emad Ghazali
Emad Ghazali (1962) is an Egyptian poet who published nine poetry collections. His poems were issued in most literary periodicals in Egypt and in some Arab countries. He is a member of the Writers’ Union in Egypt and a member of the Poetry Committee of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Culture.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda. Salwa Gouda is an Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic at the English Language and Literature Department at Ain-Shams University. She holds a PhD in English literature and criticism. She received her education at Ain-Shams University and California State University in San Bernardino. Furthermore, she has published several academic books, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, and others. She has also contributed to the translation of “The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers,” which includes poets, philosophers, historians, and men of letters, under the supervision of UNESCO. Also, her translated poetry anthology, entitled Dogs Pass Through My Fingers, was published recently through Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Additionally, her literary translations have been published in various international magazines.
The Seagull
Oh, what a stubborn seagull I am!
I dreamed one day
To fly farther
To scream louder
To make the hunter despair of me, gnawing on his nails
To peck at his filthy eyes with the sight of blood
To teach him wisdom.
Oh, what a wise seagull I am!
I understood one day
That accompanying the earthlings is a threshold
To losing the horizon
That believing them in their claims of ancient chivalry
(When one of them managed to ascend the peaks
And another flew with wax wings
At noon
And a third curled the flat Earth
In his fist)
A mere trap
For ascending the slopes.
Oh, what a peculiar seagull I am!
I lament my solitude in the cold
Suffering for those
Who set traps for me
Suspended in the sky
They direct their angry beaks at me
And envy my solitude
With fiery rays.
overleaf...
Oh, what a fortunate seagull I am!
One night, I soared – my body glowing –
Above the city rooftops
And its people asked me
To grant them the kingdom of heaven
So I could rule over them
Delighted
I paid them the treasures I had hoarded of fluff I built my throne
From the gentle air and dewdrops I reigned over them for twenty years
Filled
With laughter, intoxication, and noise
While I watched them unable to hold onto What they already had.
Oh, what a seagull I am!
One day, the thought struck me
To break free from destiny I soared further away I called out louder
I wore a sniper’s bullet as a charm
Around my neck
And amused myself with the tales of those who keep their heads Bowed As I mockingly drifted through the city’s air
And my inner voice whispered that my scheme Is clever
And that we both slipped away
Towards our destinies.
Photograph courtesy https://pixabay.com/photos/seagull-ocean-bird-gull-natur-974789/
Hind Zituni
Hind Zituni is a Syrian-born poet and novelist currently living in the United States. She specializes in teaching English to non-native speakers and regularly writes literary articles for various newspapers and magazines worldwide. Zituni has published four novels and five poetry collections. She received the Short Story Award in 2020 and the Naji Naaman Award in 2024. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she has also translated two books into English: a collaborative poetry collection and a selection of short stories.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda. Salwa Gouda is an Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic at the English Language and Literature Department at Ain-Shams University. She holds a PhD in English literature and criticism. She received her education at Ain-Shams University and California State University in San Bernardino. Furthermore, she has published several academic books, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, and others. She has also contributed to the translation of “The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers,” which includes poets, philosophers, historians, and men of letters, under the supervision of UNESCO. Also, her translated poetry anthology, entitled Dogs Pass Through My Fingers, was published recently through Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Additionally, her literary translations have been published in various international magazines.
The first words
Are a cry for help that hints at the unknown
The unknown: perhaps it lies in those inscriptions
At the nape of the neck
Or beneath the neck of a black raven
The unknown is like a folded paper
That dances in the air
Before settling on a stranger’s palm
Are our suppressed desires like blood
Flowing from the heart’s core
To fill the depths of longing?
Or are they shadows of bodies
Entwined with other shadows
Simply because the light guided them
To the depths of love
When the moan of darkness fell.
Why does this world repeatedly fall
Into the depths of bitterness
And hide its intentions in the palm of darkness?
Why do all the suns commit suicide
Only to throw themselves into the arms of the rainbow
As if this time
Hunts the fates of the wretched with a malicious glance
And buries the butterflies of joy under the bleeding soil
(Shiva) still
Douses us with cans of colored sorrow
Hurling us with the thorns of fire
It is the hell that blazes in the present
And kills the joy of the seasons
My city
Has turned into the head of Medusa
Every time the beast of the forests violates her
A snake gasps grows in her head
Every time she looks at its beloved
He turns to stone!
Mahmoud Khairallah
Mahmoud Khairallah (1971) is an Egyptian poet and journalist. He works as deputy editor-in-chief of the Egyptian Radio and Television Weekly magazine. He has also published six poetry collections, and one of them was translated into French.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda. Salwa Gouda is an Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic at the English Language and Literature Department at Ain-Shams University. She holds a PhD in English literature and criticism. She received her education at Ain-Shams University and California State University in San Bernardino. Furthermore, she has published several academic books, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, and others. She has also contributed to the translation of “The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers,” which includes poets, philosophers, historians, and men of letters, under the supervision of UNESCO. Also, her translated poetry anthology, entitled Dogs Pass Through My Fingers, was published recently through Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Additionally, her literary translations have been published in various international magazines.
Come, let’s buy a graveyard
Come, let’s buy a wide graveyard
To bury our defeats in
The revolutions we left hanging
On the walls with the dead
Which nostalgia has dried up for the fruits
The kisses we longed for
But never tasted
The forests we dreamed of
But never visited.
Come, let’s buy a graveyard
To bury the precious houses
That we never rented
The fast trains we never boarded
The ships on which we never crossed any ocean
And the luxurious rooms we will never inhabit
And the balconies
Especially those we’ve never seen
The incredibly spacious balconies
Because of its long stay in front of the sea
Let’s buy a graveyard
For the children we never had
And we will never reach out to save them
For the smiles that left marks on our faces
And have not returned to us with warmth and love
Even to this day
For the planes that have always flown across our skies
- Perhaps their roar even stirred us from sleep -
The planes we have never been able
- Not once -
To cross with it
To distant and happy countries.
Let’s buy a very large graveyard
That might hold all we’ve lost along the way
A graveyard that doesn’t stretch out to the edges of cities
Like a perpetual wave of goodbye
Let’s buy
A resting place for our immense sorrows
That can hold all the precious opportunities
That slipped through our fingers
And that we will never be able to reclaim
A resting place for sorrows
That fits all the professions we never pursued
And the unions where we had
No history of struggle.
Photograph by Mark Ulyseas.
©Mark Ulyseas
‘Tools of the Trade’
Cover Artwork
by Irish Artist Emma Barone
