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Contributors
David Rigsbee – guest editorial
Alan Walowitz
Angela Patten
Anna Yin
Anne McDonald
Art Ó Súilleabháin
Arthur Broomfield
Carmen-Frances Banciu
Claudia Gary
Dimitris P. Kraniotis
Hedy Habra
Jane Frank
Jim Burke
John Philip Drury
Jordan Smith
Laura Johanna Braverman
LaWanda Walters
Louise Wakeling
M L Williams
Mari Maxwell
María Castro Domínguez
Michael Simms
Nathanael O’Reilly
Olivia Longe
Phil Lynch
Rachael Stanley
Serena Augusto-Cox
Silje Ree
Tim Dwyer
Tim Tomlinson
Book review of David Rigsbee’s
Watchman in a Knife Factory
by Dr Arthur Broomfield
Volume Five
November - December 2023
David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems, was just published by Black Lawrence Press.
David Rigsbee
Friends of
“Our One True Philosopher Poet”
(from a forthcoming memoir: Three Teachers: Kizer, Brodsky, and Rorty)
“There are vast lacunae in my education,” Carolyn Kizer once remarked in an interview. From such a vivid and imposing woman, the admission can come across as a bit of false modesty. Surely there are such lacunae in everyone’s education, but it was nonetheless certainly true in her case. Yet this person did know things I wanted to learn. She was a noted poet at the time I met her, and she would prove a gifted teacher. She became my first of three mentors, and her influence on me as I tried to rise artistically and intellectually through my twenties was profound and personal, lasting until her death in 2014. There were the principles to acquire and there was the example to meditate on. Not all of this experience was exemplary and warm, but she helped me to awaken and format my brain from its provincial moorings and enlarge the scope of my interests in poetry. Hence this memoir.
When she landed in North Carolina in 1970, Carolyn had bought a two-story, white frame house on the main street in Chapel Hill, not only next to the retired radio host but several doors down from the mansion housing the UNC System president William Friday, and immediately set about reworking it with built-in bookcases, a new kitchen, a sunroom for larger gatherings and a place to put the baby grand Steinway, a gift from old flame, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. She also had the driveway enlarged to accommodate what she expected would be a steady flow of visiting writers, students and assorted hangers-on. Carolyn noted that she had always been “house lucky,” and the Franklin Street house did house did nothing to dispel her architectural fortune. It was a welcoming place, although it always seemed in some way under construction.
When you walked in the first thing you saw was a foyer table fitted with books. The last thing you remembered of the house was its library and paintings. On the upstairs landing, one was greeted with a little painting by e.e. cummings. The foyer led straight to the living room. There were antique chairs, a marble coffee table groaning with books, mostly poetry and art monographs. These were stacked a dozen or so at a time, some sideways so that the entire table was covered. You could always find the latest publications right there before you. This included literary magazines, a discovery for me: The Hudson Review, Kayak, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The New England Review, The Paris Review. When the drinks came, as they always did in the afternoon, you had to set yours down in the little canyons carefully, like landing a helicopter in a ravine. In fact, every flat surface in the living room and sunroom was overrun with two sort of books, in the former, it was predominately poetry; in the latter, oversized art books of her favorites: the Renaissance usuals—Cimabue, Giotto, et al., followed by Impressionists and Modernists, both European and American art for the young mind’s genuflection. There was also much Asian art: Japanese and Chinese drawings in particular. Her tabletops presented little in the way of English stalwarts like Constable or Turner (Blake was excepted), and her American painters were western-heavy, from Tobey to Diebenkorn.
Off to the side was Carolyn’s study, a niche of a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with poetry: the contemporary collections in alphabetical order, older books by period. You could be forgiven for missing the white writer’s desk. It was tiny, especially considering the expanse of the owner. Sitting on it was a portable electric typewriter, and next to it was a stack of correspondence. As with nearly all poets of her generation, she composed in notebooks first and didn’t take to the typewriter until the poem was mostly finished. Her script was always legible, nearly calligraphic, and it never gave off a whiff of haste. I quickly learned her pen strokes mirrored her taste for classical Chinese calligraphy. Around the house one encountered screens, filled with beautiful slashes and the hint of serene meaning. While the study was small, it felt like the symbolic heart of the house. Often I would slip into this study to browse. It was there that I first encountered names of international poets in translation that I would know well a year or two hence: Amichai, Paz, Parra, Ritsos, Montale, Bonnefoy, et al., as well as English poets: Hughes, Middleton, Larkin, Pitter, and Wain.
Off to the side was Carolyn’s study, a niche of a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with poetry: the contemporary collections in alphabetical order, older books by period. You could be forgiven for missing the white writer’s desk. It was tiny, especially considering the expanse of the owner. Sitting on it was a portable electric typewriter, and next to it was a stack of correspondence.
Many guest poets ensued in person, and unannounced surprises were frequent. As a result we had a backstage pass to many of the poetry worthies of the time. Her friend Robert Creeley was especially welcome. Carolyn sang the virtues of Creeley’s poems and read them to us in class, pausing and pointing out their miniature virtues. At the time, they were chiefly collected in For Love and Words, copies of which were always available at The Intimate Bookstore, which was the place for poets looking for poets to follow. It was there that I found the Creeley’s Scribner books, along with other smallpress publications that bore his name. I didn’t then understand the significance of the emerging small press movement (why would you publish a collection with a press nobody had heard of, when you could have Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s publisher?) For Creeley, it looked to be a collaboration and acknowledgment of bookmaking as an art, as well as a matter of local loyalty—and poets of the Black Mountain/Beat persuasion were loyal to each other and supportive in material, as well as intangible ways.
One one occasion, the legendary Robert Creeley had scheduled a reading at Duke, and we were to pick him up from a house in Durham where there was an afternoon party in his honor. When we arrived, there was no Creeley. The guests stood around on the grass of a clapboard house on Broad Street in Durham, smoking and drinking wine. Carolyn looked about, then walked out to the sidewalk and asked startled passersby, “Anybody seen a long-haired, one-eyed poet dressed in black? He’s needed for work!” As if stepping from behind a curtain, Creeley appeared, smiling, having spent an hour walking around the neighborhood and visiting a bakery.
Creeley was not a great reader of his own poems, however. As we were driving over to Durham, Carolyn had said that his quiet, small-parceled delivery was the result of years of pot-smoking, and indeed Creeley himself spoke of his consumption in his letters to her. When about to leave the gathering to deliver Creeley to the reading room, he turned to the hangers-on (me included), and asked, “Shall we turn on before the reading?”
Carolyn, who avoided weed for the most part, even though it was plentiful, often parodied Creeley’s recitation style, exaggerating the discontinuities and disjunctions that were the hallmark of his smart, Fabergé poems. She did this not to make light of her friend, whose poems also pointed to a concern with stuttering, with the initiating procedures of saying in general, but to suggest what happens when the voice mimics the vocal score embodied in the form.
Carolyn Kizer at home in Lahore (photo courtesy Marian Janssen). https://themarkaz.org/author/marianjanssen/.
She had little interest in the lights of the Beat Movement or the Black Mountain poets as such, although she praised Snyder and Levertov, as well as Creeley, and paid respect to Olson, but she also held to discriminations. She thought Creeley brilliant and promoted his poems all her life, but she chalked up his support for the Beats, including the second-rate, to loyalty.
He was indeed turned on at a reading at Duke with a Harpo-thatched Gregory Corso, who read a short story (or was it a narrative poem?) about a suicide by bicycle. As the speaker in the poem neared the tree with which he intended to collide, Corso became more and more worked up. No one would have been surprised if he had actually passed out. Carolyn turned to me and uttered, “Ugh!” Creeley followed with a few poems and then a short story. I noticed that my 8th grade English teacher, a proper, 60-plus gray-bunned woman with a shoulder tic, sat a few rows ahead of us. Creeley’s story slowly surfed into an endless description of a facial activity we came to realize as a blowjob. Carolyn had only one comment, “I don’t think that was the best choice.” As we exited, along with the rest of the sullen crowd, I spied the dapper and proper novelist Reynolds Price standing with his arms crossed. “How did you like that?” I asked. His eyes widened. “I should have made a citizen’s arrest!”
Lapses in conventional taste aside, Creeley was at this best when talking about poems. Carolyn deferred to him and liked to pitch him questions when students were present at the Franklin Street house. I can’t say that I always understood his replies. His recursively cadenced sentences sounded programmatic and abstract, laced with a jargon with which I was not familiar, and yet I understood that they were grounded in the alt-Pound school of poetics, the paideuma, by way of Olson, Duncan, and Zukofsky, and so I turned to these doyens, where, like many of my fellow poets, I found at last a lexicon and an approach to poems that didn’t creak with the academic idiom with which we had been brought up—and from which so many of our peers had been turned off, many permanently.
Carolyn was no friend of abstract or of programmatic ways of approaching poetry, but she was respectful of the Pound tradition which was, at the least, practical. Part of this was her lifelong equal preference for Asian-facing, west coast aesthetics, as a balance to European east coast ones. She longed to escape the smudge of Spokane, but embracing traditional Western ideals of beauty was not enough. She was drawn as easily to the classicism of Po Chu-I as to the 17th century poets, many of whose poems she had committed to memory. She had little interest in the lights of the Beat Movement or the Black Mountain poets as such, although she praised Snyder and Levertov, as well as Creeley, and paid respect to Olson, but she also held to discriminations. She thought Creeley brilliant and promoted his poems all her life, but she chalked up his support for the Beats, including the second-rate, to loyalty.
She once remarked, on hearing that Ginsberg had been coronated as “King of Prague” that there were “at least a hundred” American poets more talented. She felt the same way about Whalen, McLure, Corso, Spicer, Lamantia, et al. She spoke well of Duncan, not for his poems with their sometimes antiquated diction, but for his benign influence on behalf of the core of poetry, and she approved of his passion for mythology. Her reverence for Snyder included her recommendation of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, as offering some of the best examples of anti-establishment verse (which is to say they didn’t fly on the wings of rhetoric). They were about hard work among hard workers and discovering what the land had to offer, away from institutions and offices. He was an authentically environmental poet before the Zeitgeist arrived, bringing with it young poets eager to supersede the tradition that created self-conscious nature poets whose work could be traced to Emerson, Thoreau and finally Woodsworth and the English Romantics. She was devoted to poets from across the spectrum, but when it came to schools, she was non-aligned.
James Dickey, in nearby South Carolina, was perhaps the most conspicuous southern poet during Carolyn’s years at UNC, and he was among the visitors. When his status— and finances—suddenly cantilevered by the disturbingly depraved hillbilly thriller Deliverance, starring Burt Reynolds, a blockbuster movie in which Dickey played a bit part, he was regularly on the phone to update her on his triumphs. Which she would then dish to us, along with commentary. “Jim Dickey called me last night. He was drunk, naturally, and kept saying, ‘I’ve just made a million dollars! A million dollars!’ Then Maxine took the phone away from him and begin apologizing. I’m fond of Maxine, but she puts up with a lot. I know I wouldn’t.”
Dickey had put a lot of face time with Carolyn when she worked at the NEA in Washington. He would show up with his son, Christopher, according to Carolyn’s daughter Jill, and the two teens would disappear into the basement for soulful conversation, while the parentals discussed the state of poetry overhead. Although she didn’t take to his poems glorifying war and was quick to interject that his bombing run poems were “pure imagination,” she nonetheless thought highly of his early work. She read his popular “Cherrylog Road” to us and listed his virtues: his point of view, attention to detail, his clean-but-charged language, his evident passion. David Wagoner was later to say that Dickey was smart enough to compensate for his deficiencies of voice: “If you don’t have your own voice you’re going to have to conceal the fact. Dickey had no ear but arranged poems to take the fact into account.”
She once remarked, on hearing that Ginsberg had been coronated as “King of Prague” that there were “at least a hundred” American poets more talented. She felt the same way about Whalen, McLure, Corso, Spicer, Lamantia, et al. She spoke well of Duncan, not for his poems with their sometimes antiquated diction, but for his benign influence on behalf of the core of poetry, and she approved of his passion for mythology.
His guitar-picking and posturing didn’t make much headway with her, but as for his poems, she considered him among the best male poets of his generation, by whom she meant Wright, Hugo, Bly (she rarely failed to mention his “smelly” pancho), John Haines, and Merwin. Years later, when Steven Ford Brown’s and my Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry came out, I told her that Steven and I had asked each other to name his pick for the best poet among the twenty eight included in the book, and we both replied “Dickey” over the phone at the same time. Carolyn concurred that his standing was high, pointing out that there was a lot of competition in the anthology, including the likes of Ransom, Justice, and Warren. Of Robert Bly, with whom he was often mentioned in the same sentence, despite their somewhat disaligned politics, Carolyn said that, like Bly, the true Dickey had been eclipsed by his commercial book success.
In Bly’s case, it was the publication of Iron John, his best-seller redefining masculinity in an age of rising feminism. Bly called for a “rewilding” of men to find more positive (and acceptable ) images of masculinity, but in Carolyn’s eyes it was just “Silly rich Boy Scouts whooping and jumping over fires in their jock straps. You don’t make better men by taking them out into the woods.”
Meanwhile, Dickey became a frequent caller, and she overlooked miles of her own reservations to focus on the value of his natural poetic sense. “Jim’s the real thing, certainly the finest southern poet, whatever you think that may mean.” At the same time, she seemed to inflect his notoriety with humor. “Jim has a new come-on. Now he just walks up to girls on the street and says, ‘wanna fuuuck?’” she drawled, drawing out the vowels. ‘”Is that the best he can do? It’s outrageous! Jim was a real poet before he started writing fiction. I think the success just went to his head, and he lost his critical sense. He was also one of the best critics of poetry in the country—and a hard critic too. Now he thinks anything he writes is only going to increase his stature, but it doesn’t work like that.” “Jim called me up the other night and announced that he was going to be riding on an elephant in a parade. The booze has wrecked him.
Even his ridiculous, never-ending skirt-chasing hasn’t hurt his poetry, only his reputation. I remember when he was a serious young man before he became a success. Now he doesn’t defer to anybody, just cranks out his unreadable new poems.” In the back of her mind, Jim was a funhouse reflection of Roethke, a mansplaining yet serious craftsman who numbered many women poets among his peers.
One day in the late ‘90s, she mused, “Jim used to compare himself to Roethke. When Cal Lowell died, he said, ‘Now it’s just me and Ted’. Can you imagine?” I brought the recorded lecture, popularly known as “Dickey’s Last Class” to her attention. The title was not aspirational: it was in fact his last class, conducted at home in Columbia by his son Chris. Carolyn was in her decline but read Jim’s remarks with interest. “He’s right, you know,” was her response. In the lecture, Jim Dickey had elevated the poet to the status of a modern hierophant who interprets the mysteries and rescues meaning from the chaos and reversibles of modern life that leave so many humans at a loss.
“The feeling that we are living existences in which nothing matters very much, or at all: that is what’s behind all the drugs and the alcoholism and suicide—insanity, wars, everything—a sense of non-consequence. A sense that nothing, nothing matters. No matter which way we turn it is the same thing. But the poet is free of that.” Carolyn was not herself someone who subscribed to the notion of the truth-bearing of last words, or of oracular proclamations generally. Her quips were more barbed, as in “Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.” She was memorable in her maxims without sounding apocalyptic. And yet, at bottom, she sided with Dickey. One day, when Jill and I were vacationing with friends at Pawleys Island in South Carolina, we found ourselves before Dickey’s grave at the Anglican All Saints Church, and there fenced in stone, the Spanish moss hanging in folds, we found the grave. At the bottom of the epitaph, in caps was the motto “I MOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD.” It was the last line of one of his most memorable poems, recalling his childhood with his deceased brother, “In the Treehouse at Night,” a poem that certainly resonated with me too, as I had a similar story and poem.
Carolyn’s final piece in her collected poems was “The Erotic Philosophers,” which she considered one of her most mature works. The poem ends with a quotation from St. Augustine: “Let me enter my chamber and sing my songs of love” (Confessions, Book VII). The poem is about the fear of women in the work of Augustine and Kierkegaard. In the poem, the old-fashioned dread of women arose and grew, was denounced, then repressed, as God was inserted into the philosophical mind. The male mind, that is. Kafka it was, I think, who said that in the last analysis, the world isn’t ironic. It was Charles Simic, no less, who wrote to Carolyn: “You’re our one true philosopher poet.” Having eviscerated the timid sage in her poem, Carolyn finally joins her voice with his and replaces his title “philosopher” with the truer, but more elusive, “Saint.”
Carolyn’s final piece in her collected poems was “The Erotic Philosophers,” which she considered one of her most mature works. The poem ends with a quotation from St. Augustine: “Let me enter my chamber and sing my songs of love” (Confessions, Book VII). The poem is about the fear of women in the work of Augustine and Kierkegaard.
As our friendship grew down the years, she would first look askance at my pursuit of a graduate degree, then ask, when we had settled, “So tell me. What’s Derrida all about?” She did have a soft spot for philosophers, as her attachment and affectionate down-scaling of a Sarah Lawrence professor of philosophy, as well as her late poem, “The Erotic Philosophers,” showed. While that poem satirized thinkers like Kierkegaard for paling in the face of passion, she took passion as her leap of faith. She dipped into Nietzsche, but more likely came to him second-hand through the thenpopular work of Walter Kaufmann. She had no use for the existentialists (du Beauvoir excepted), struc-turalists, French deconstructionists, or for that matter, anyone whose work smacked of theory.
While she sedulously avoided abstraction in her own work, she did maintain that “poets get their ideas from philosophers.” Be that as it may, Carolyn’s patience for philosophical digging was not unlimited. What philosophical ideas seeped into her poems arrived, if they arrived at all, by memory or by hearsay. In the end, her depths were lyrical, her faultless ear more to be trusted than her brain.
She often spoke fondly of her history teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Renaissance scholar Charles Trinkaus, author of books on Italian humanism. She maintained a long and affectionate relationship with Trinkaus, and I remember meeting him in the 1980s, when Carolyn and husband John had moved to Sonoma. He was sitting by the swimming pool in a business suit and seemed much interested to learn what had become, not of his own student, but of his student’s student. I liked him immediately and frowned inwardly at Carolyn’s patronizing accounts of her beloved teacher. He was clearly more Erasmus than brainy schlemiel. Later she no doubt felt vindicated in her avoidance of postmodernism when the Times obituary of Trinkaus quoted a colleague as saying, “‘What set him and the tradition of Renaissance studies he represented apart from the scholarly tradition that followed was a deep belief that past writers and their texts could not be understood without careful historical study.” He, therefore, “had little patience for the post-modernists and deconstructionists who preached that texts had to be separated from their pasts.’’
She was like her teachers, logocentric to the tips of her writing hand. It was one of the things that set her apart from the next wave of feminist writers, whose adoption of theoretical approaches struck her as a kind of unproductive professionalism, even as it reminded her that her aesthetics, like her politics, were rooted in a tradition somehow under threat, although the enemy was often murky or out of view.
I raise these anecdotes as images involving the philosophical arm of my mentor’s thinking as she approached her own work. She wanted there to be a philosophically resonant element to poems, and her own works reflects this desire. I took this from her, and I see it in the work of my contemporaries, whether they admit to it or not.
On the one hand, she derived reassurance from her teachers—Campbell and Roethke; on the other, she maintained a distant apprehension about the postmodern turn, wanting to know if there was something in it that she ought to know. “I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about” became a recurring phrase, along with the familiar arch snub, “Never heard of him!”
In Sonoma, as in Chapel Hill, she would perch on her couch, drink nearby, and launch conversational openers: “You know, John Stuart Mill may have said it all, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him to say it had he not read Mary Wollstonecraft first.” “There are very few thinkers who come by their thoughts sui generis. I would make an exception with de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf. Wouldn’t you, David?” This was taken as an invitation to push back, and I often did—which pleased her. You could tell by her Cheshire Cat smile that took in a pause after I made my reply. As with a lot of poets I came to know, like Judy Sherwin Johnson and Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn liked to make global pronouncements outlining the way things really stood. And they were often plausible, although sometimes not so much. She possessed the confidence of core ideas and could expound them at length: the psychological springs of misogyny, the frame of the civilized world that poems embodied and passed along; the often self-subversive torch-carriers of tragedy, the Olympian role of satire.
I raise these anecdotes as images involving the philosophical arm of my mentor’s thinking as she approached her own work. She wanted there to be a philosophically resonant element to poems, and her own works reflects this desire. I took this from her, and I see it in the work of my contemporaries, whether they admit to it or not. That doesn’t matter—the fact is that poets show their hands, and they do so regardless of whether this is top-of-mind for them or not, despite the stories, points of reference, the embarrassing details, even the fates of the players. If Carolyn, Creeley, Dickey, or others are remembered (if at all), their work reveals examples of a worldview we should keep in focus, if not reclaim.
Available at: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/
Alan Walowitz
Alan Walowitz lives in the suburbs--Great Neck, NY-- and is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, comes from Osedax Press. The full-length, The Story of the Milkman, is available from Truth Serum Press. From Arroyo Seco Press, the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars. From Red Wolf Journal, download gratis The Poems of the Air.
Boys’ Swim (1964)
Short, tall, black, white, freckled or not, slightly flushed, blushing bright, some cheeks newly-nicked by their pop’s Gillette. Some a bit older, here to finish up, but for this class-and maybe a wayward math. Meantime, tending a goatee, odd hairs here and there straggling from pimpled chins. Mostly crew-cuts left from olden days, a few slick-back DAs from earlier still, nonchalant enough in pose though would mightily strive-no matter the instruction-to keep their hair above the water line.
We lined up naked next to the pool, our eyes, of necessity, riveted ahead, and not a clue what to do with our hands. One clown tried to break us with a mouth-fart. Coach Smith was old, couldn’t hear so well, or knew enough not to use his rabbit-ears, though he flashed a quick, harsh look as far behind as his neck let his bald head get. He’d been through the war, still limped a bit and teen asses, goose-fleshed, were nothing compared to what he’d seen-as he strode between us and the pool’s edge on his way to the podium. Attendance sheet beneath his arm, he twirled his whistle on a chain, but had no ill-intent. Was enough that we were here, though only God might know what sin we had committed by age 16, that being thus ashamed could possibly repay.
Snapshot from Pomonok Schoolyard
Play the game; don’t look at me. In the photo, the basketball screeches to a cartoon-halt, the way nature never let it, and holds the eye of every player as if it were a stillborn promise no one would ever keep.
But there was one who disobeyed and mugged for the camera, as was his way. He was young and figured he’d live forever —if only he knew it would be stuffed in an envelope on a shelf in the cellar where no one much went.
So this is how I get to remember myself yet forget the names of those I once loved and casually released like koi in a pond. Wise enough, at last, to know gone is gone, but not to purge the places these images reside like shadows in an empty house.
(1974)
And she who took this shot? I couldn’t hold her face when she was there-memory distorts like a camera when held too close; She said: Play the game; don’t look at me. But why can’t I see her clearly now, a face I promised over and over I would always keep?
Angela Patten’s publications include four poetry collections, The Oriole & the Ovenbird (Kelsay Books 2021), In Praise of Usefulness (Wind Ridge Books 2014), Reliquaries (Salmon Poetry, Ireland 2007) and Still Listening (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 1999), and a prose memoir, High Tea at a Low Table: Stories From An Irish Childhood (Wind Ridge Books 2013). A new collection, Feeding the Wild Rabbit, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies Born and raised in Dublin, she maintains dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States, where she has lived since 1977. She is a Senior Lecturer Emerita in the English Department at the University of Vermont. continued overleaf...
The Strasbourg Clock
“Every hour figures of Death and Christ do battle, and Death wins every hour except the last.” Medieval Robots, E. R. Truitt
This morning a stick insect like an animated pencil clinging to the garage door.
Innocuous as a fallen twig, it rode the space between sentient and insensate life.
Like the fantastical automata on the medieval Strasbourg clock whose theme was Time itself—
Roman gods in chariots chased each other through the week.
A mechanical angel turned an hourglass every quarter hour
and the crowing of a clockwork cock reminded us that another cock
once crowed three times when Saint Peter denied his faith.
These robotic figures might be kin to the huge washerwomen wearing headscarves around their placid faces and the squareheaded garbagemen of Bread & Puppet Theatre’s Domestic Resurrection Circus whose final pageant, perfectly timed to the rhythm of the sunset brought giant puppets advancing like a wave across the fields.
Or perhaps their descendants were the drive-in moviegoers of the 1950s and 60s their cars hooked up to speakers kids in pajamas silently regarding the giant screen with its godlike stars their holy hunger for transcendance.
A Day Without Clocks
It was still morning when I went out to the woods to see the purple asters the yellow goldenrod, ducks paddling unruffled on Preston Pond thickets of sumac turning russet in the golden glow of early Fall.
When small anxieties flew up beneath my feet, I was able to bat them away like cobwebs. And when I felt around for misery found it had taken a hike no doubt due to the lovely weather.
In late afternoon I hesitated, then said yes when friends invited me to paddle on the lake.
In our lightweight kayaks we traversed the shore gazing up at red quartzite cliffs that loomed in rocky tiers like a geological layer cake haphazardly thrown together
continued overleaf...
then down through the clear water where green weeds waved like grasses in a looking-glass world.
Sunset was such an excess of gold that people who did not normally notice beauty stopped to look tapping each other on the shoulder to make them look too.
But when the sun had disappeared behind the mountains and some onlookers had turned away the lake was bathed in such tender pinks and purples––the afterglow best of all.
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 four 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 etc. She read on Parliament Hill, at Austin International Poetry Festival, Edmonton Poetry Festival and universities in China, Canada and USA etc. She has designed and taught Poetry Alive educational programs since 2011 along with her daily IT job. In 2021, she started her own small press: surewaypress.com for her translating, editing and publishing services. Her 11th book will be published by Frontenac Press in 2025. https://www.annapoetry.com/books/
La Mer
Sailing freely and wildly in the moonlight I am greeted by the silver-scattered sea I become your naked pretty bride on white blossoms of waves
The wind carries the salty scent lashes my pale skin over and over with cold greetings and hot warnings
Night elongates my pale shadow clouds erase illusions of my mind urging me to halt and listen the serenity of green? the romance of blue? the profundity of darkness…
Listen, the shattering of glass the collapse of coral the teardowns of a bridal gown…
Awaken with a start an empty sea shell in my hand— a voyage not yet taken a pearl gown not yet tried
Dearly
after Margaret Atwood
The dream arrives unexpectedly with dear messages too dear to share.
In the morning air, sparrows perch in your garden chirping strange melodies. Is it spring fever or an affair? Honeybees approaching make no sound...
Your apple tree starts to bloom. You read fresh fragrance, inked leaves whisper “Remember”.
The sunlight shifts distinct shades, you see letters each memorable, echoing a song from your dearest lovers.
Emerald Moments
after brief rain a rainbow over the Grand River
above the mountain a red balloon rises no string attached winding trail behind a haunted house calls from goldfinches
on the sunset lake a snowy egret takes off another within sight
fog lifts a thrush’s song through the woods
maple trees in Autum along the Bruce trail Thomson’s vibrant paintings
Anne McDonald
Anne McDonald is a spoken word poet, creative writing teacher and festival curator. Her work is centered on the challenges we face in a society that is changing rapidly and how we respond or react to those changes. Through her writing she explores themes of parenthood, aging, death, loss, inclusion and response to the human condition. She was awarded The Irish Writers Residency in Cill Rialag, Kerry and The John Hewitt residency. She has had work published in Women’s News, Hot Press, Electric Acorn, Woman’s Work Anthologies 1 & 2, The Blue Nib, The Strokestown Anthology, Boyne Berries, The Pendemic, The Waxed Lemon, The Storms Inaugural Issue, Fragments Of Time, Blue Mondays’ Anthology 2021, 192 Magazine, Crow Name and several issues of Live Encounters Poetry & Writing. Her work has also been featured on collaborations with musicians and animators and reviewed and broadcast on RTE Radio. Her first collection of poetry Crow’s Books was published in 2020 and her second collection, Clothespeg in my Pocket, will be published in 2025. Her collaborative short film was shortlisted for the Drumshanbo International poetry film festival 2024.
Frieda Kahlos’ Eyebrows
I wish I had Frieda Kahlos’ eyebrows. Well, maybe not the brows, but the balls to wear a line of hair across my face. To dress in flowers and lace, to paint my portrait with cockatoos, never worrying who thought it was unsightly. I wish I knew how to wear a jet black unibrow lightly, a thick black line between my eyes that says look at me.
In the 18th century, would I have had the front to wear, like other ladies, eyebrows made from mouses’ hair, attached with glue made from fish, when my own fell off due to lead in my foundation? Would I worry about what people said? Even now, I feel sorry for the mice, killed and skinned, sliced into arches so we could look nice.
But I have only poet’s eyebrows, the same mousy colour of my hair, nothing that would make a stranger stare, or draw attention from a man on a galloping horse. Of course, they had their heyday in the seventies, when a thin arched line was all the rage, painted over blue pastel eyeshadow bought from the Avon Lady.
Maybe, if truth be told, for all our shaping, tinting, plucking, dyeing, we are lying to ourselves if we think we can outdo Frieda. If I end up in a nursing home, now knowing who I am or why I’m there, I hope I’ve found the guts somehow, to grow a Frieda unibrow.
The Kid On CNN
My dad is not a bad man, but he is sick. Because he is sick, I know he is dangerous I am telling you he’s about to do something bad but my dad is not a bad man.
I’m afraid of what my dad will do now that I have told the world that he is bad. I had to let someone know, he told me he was going to go, was going to do something big, something bad.
So I told, I called the cops I stayed on hold and gave my name the same as his, Reffit, Guy, a man who, up to now, was the same as you or I until things changed.
On November 8, four years ago I was a teenager in high school and I thought my dad was kinda cool. But he, a normal kinda guy became unhinged, deranged, eighty-seven percent father, worker, brother, son, husband, three percent dangerous and unpredictable. Radicalized in a white man’s army, paranoid far right remnants of a segregation era. The fear of what he could, or would do, made me sick.
So I, his son, called the FBI, said I don’t know why but this man is not the dad I know and I’m afraid, for me, for him, for anyone who carries a gun into the capitol building.
Four years ago my dad was not a bad man, he was just my dad. Now because of me, the world can see what he has become.
I heard the cries of disbelief and despair, smelled the chaos in the air from our living room.
Then, I became not his son but the “kid on CNN.” Four years ago, my dad was not a bad man.
Art Ó Súilleabháin was born in Corr na Móna, Co. Galway and spent some years in Boston USA. He worked in Dublin and Mayo as a teacher, in Castlebar as Director of The Mayo Education Centre and lectured at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC (as a Fulbright scholar) before returning to Corr na Móna. Art has published collections of poetry as Gaeilge for children. He won North West Words Poetry in 2017 and he has been featured in Poetry Ireland Review, Writing Home, Hold Open the Door, Vox Galvia, Trees, Ropes, Howl, The Waxed Lemon, Salt on the Coals, The Mayo Anthology, The Haibun Journal, and other collections. He now lives in Corr na Móna again, where he enjoys writing (in English and as Gaeilge) and fishing on Lough Corrib.
Lost on Lough Corrib (1965)
He tapped tails of copper from pipe ends fitted a silver streak along the middle Char-lined the Toby-like body and his carpenter’s alchemy produced an action that teased life into his net - a killer.
I snagged it at White Goat from a cut he took too close to the edge line snapped and it was lost with possible salmon in a murky Corrib gloom.
For years he blamed me and I searched peered into cloud reflecting glass dived on calm summer days to eye the quartzite abyss that frightened my soul but I couldn’t find his dreams.
In old age it still haunts me lying there tarnishing like dreams of boyhood.
Aunt Mary was a little different
I asked him where his aunt Mary had lived. Was it in America somewhere, Boston New York, Philadelphia or New Hampshire? Had she passed through Cobh and Ellis? Perhaps had gone to England first, moved on sailed from Liverpool or from Southampton.
Researching a family tree for Aoibhinn I had found Mary in the 1911 Census living with her family in Cloonbroone. She was four. Could speak English. No mention of the home language Irish smelled of poverty or ignorance.
There were others there that he knew of. Some had gone to New Jersey or Maine Boston, Manhattan and Long Island aways water nearby, memories of a lake but my dad swore that he had no aunt Mary.
I had to know. I enquired. Doc told me in a hushed voice near Grouse Lodge when he was going home after whiskeys Sarah told me a little once in Dooras when we were alone in the back kitchen and she was making slabs of apple tart.
Mary was different. Gravel on the long roadway to the house noisily declared visitors walking giddy cattle or pushing black bicycles, too precious to chance on a potholed narrow boreen.
There was always time for her to be hidden away. No one could say that the Sullivans were touched by a dark angel, so shadows veiled her presence and she was hushed through a door in the wainscot warned to be silent in her special place, until visitors left. Mary lived in the darkness under the stairs in Cloonbroone.
Dr. Arthur Broomfield
Ypres
In this theatre, where the stage lights are broken bones that glint in the full moon, a girl, in a walk on part, pouts, reaches for a man in uniform.
He, now a puff of vapour, drifts in the smoke and dust, props loaned from an old production.
She mingles with other men. They unearth springtime and harvest with picks and shovels, make homes for themselves where worms, who make their homes with the bristle of their bodies, mine the perma soil for rotting leaves.
Here, men wake to Flanders’ mud, the songs and suns of mortar fire and canon, the moans of fallen comrades,
while the nascent beast, teeth brushed, claws edged, adds the finishing touches, rouge and ruby red lipstick, before the curtain rises.
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland. His current collection is At Home in Ireland : new and selected poem. Arthur is Poetry Ireland Poet Laureate of Mountmellick.
Deborah
After Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Room’
A woman in a camisole sits on a bed in a hotel room. She’s framed in acetelyne blue and black and yellow columns. A luna light, that shines from her back, scorches her wrist. Under the pages that cool the beat of the knee that burns.
A travel bag, a closed case, quiet, on the floor.
Is she the shadow in the shade of a Palm, come to read the writing on the churning soap suds that conceal a gully trap ?
Does she know a bit more than the man who plastered it all, or the bellhop who abandoned her luggage. that maybe here the slugman will slouch to the beer snare, where the gully is sealed ?
Between the beam that will torch her back, and the promise of the dark rug beneath her feet, between the before of the kindled flames, and the after of the sterile room, she, the dancing waves and dots made flesh, pauses on a flying visit to this place, where the soul hangs in a blank canvas on a hand painted wall .
Carmen-Francesca Banciu
Carmen-Francesca Banciu, born in Romania, is a German and Romanian novelist, poet, publicist, artist and lecturer in creativity and creative writing. She occasionally writes in English and Romanian. After receiving the International Short Story Prize of the City of Arnsberg for her story “The Radiant Ghetto” (1985), she was banned from publishing her works in then-communist Romania. In 1991, she accepted the DAAD’s Berlin Artists’ Program invitation and moved to Germany. She was writer-in-residence at Rutgers University (US) from 2004 to 2005 and at the University of Bath (UK) in 2009. She currently lives in Berlin and works as a freelance author. Her books explore the author’s geographical, psychological, and linguistic migrations in Europe during and after the fall of communism. Her main character, Maria-Maria, evolves throughout the books, freeing herself from the chains of the past and stepping out of the victim role to shape her own destiny. The themes of reconciliation, peace, and forgiveness are essential and represent a constant concern in her books. Banciu created the Course in Creativity and Creative Writing, “TOUCHING LIFE—Das Leben berühren.”She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes. Her works have been translated into several languages. Her novel in verse, “Farewell, Dear Comrades and Lovers!” was longlisted for the German Book Prize 2018. Poem in English and German.
Claudia Gary is a poet, science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal songs and chamber music. She teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, “Poetry vs. Trauma,” and the science of poetry, at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also an advisory editor for New Verse Review. A semifinalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser), Honorable Mentionee in the Able Muse book contest, and three-time finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest, Claudia has chaired panels on Poetry and Music, Poetry and Science, and “The Sonnet in 2016,” at the West Chester University (Pa.) poetry conference; and on Poetry and Music at the Frost Farm poetry conference. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/ content/claudia_gary
Wet Feet
Each wave approaches whispering, departs with a hiss, tugs your ankles, leaves a line of foam along the sand until the next wave washes away that line and leaves its own.
You learn to jump up lightly so you float without a thought, experiencing all.
But if you turn and look for the sand castles you have been sculpting, gentle waves become harsh interference. Such has been this week of letting my immunity contend with Covid. When I just watch, there’s the float of knowing that however long it takes
I’ll end up standing, wriggling my toes in foam, seeing the next small wave approach and letting some of the sand castles go.
Layover
Confusion is desired before boarding a plane.
Let the word-gusts rush past from all directions, let wings and cockpits ogle us through sterile picture windows, distract us from the awkward seats in which we drift off, return, drift off again until we’re told it’s morning.
After a prayer, bring on confusion’s obbligato to quicken every hour before our destination.
In Your Element
For Indran Amirthanayagam
You are a verb that navigates across the page, across borders and generations.
Whatever home you keep is a verb’s home: syntax to balance particle with wave.
Every wave—each phrase you create and ride— recreates you.
Dimitris P. Kraniotis
Dimitris P. Kraniotis was born in 1966 in Larissa Prefecture in central Greece and he grew up in Stomio (Larissa). He studied Medicine at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He lives in Larissa (Greece) and works as a medical doctor (internal medicine specialist with MSc). He is the author of 11 poetry books: “Traces” (Greece 1985), “Clay Faces” (Greece 1992), “Fictitious Line” (Greece 2005), “Dunes” (Romania 2007), “Endogram” (Greece 2010), “Edda” (Romania 2010), “Illusions” (Romania 2010), “Leaves Vowels” (Italy 2017), “Tie of Public Decency” (Greece 2018), “Minus one” (Spain 2022) & “Wrinkles in the coffee” (Greece 2024). Also he is the Editor-in-chief of the anthology “World Poetry 2011” (205 poets from 65 countries). His poems have been translated in 36 languages & published in many countries. He participated in International Poetry Festivals. He is Doctor of Literature, Academician in Italy, President of the 22nd World Congress of Poets (UPLI), President of the World Poets Society (WPS), Director of the Mediterranean Poetry Festival (Larissa, Greece), Chairman of the Writers for Peace Committee of PEN Greece and member of World Poetry Movement (WPM), Poets of the Planet (POP), Hellenic Literary Society, National Society of Greek Literary Writers, etc. His official website: https://www.dimitriskraniotis.com/
Spears that hurt
Part I
The night laughed at me
As I wanted to steal the stars And hope spread out Of strength, of feeling The threat of victory
And I fought with dreams Chasing nightmares Of midday Chasing words of joy That became spears
I didn’t want to say How I saw the end How I forgot the smile Of a new beginning
Spears that hurt
Part II
Wounds I don’t feel How much they hurt I watch them filling Me, you And the truth of motion
The truth of the brake Didn’t laugh when I sang The phrase of a hymn
Not a word, silence And sure notes
That became spears That drowned me in forests With pools of wind That turned a word
Like the hand of a clock Back in time
Yes, the solution dazzles me And I’m hoping for a dead end Yes, memory melts me And I can feel my breath
Burning, freezing me
A spear full of tears
A spear full of courage
Spears that hurt
Part III
I didn’t grow old even though I wanted to To drink the laughter I didn’t laugh in vain At the top of life
As if I was told it wasn’t my fault For the tomorrow of now
And the tension spread Of anxiety, of sacrifice And I hated the excesses The mistakes, the promises And I hated and loved Spears that hurt me
Hedy Habra
Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist. She has authored four poetry collections, most recently, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023), winner of the International Poetry Book Awards, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Awards; The Taste of the Earth, winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa. A twenty-two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/
Inevitable Changes
After the latest storm, droopy rhododendrons sigh, and dead branches litter the grass.
In the backyard, an old uprooted willow lies in its last pose, its majestic, unearthed root reveals torn, shriveled underground threads like a disheveled underworld creature. The once erect trunk bends over the creek, bridging the brook with thick ink strokes.
A closer look shows branches heavy with green feather-veined leaves, perhaps a shelter welcoming new nests.
Flowing Current
A field of wheat flattened by the wind, bears autumnal hues.
A little farther down the creek, algae glaucous strands glimmer on the surface reminiscent of a drowned witch or a suicide’s loosened hair wavering in sinuous ripples. So much life hidden beneath its strands undulating in the flowing current.
A butterfly, resting over withered Queen Ann’s lace blossoms, tells us how ephemeral summer is.
The White Roses
I kept a couple of white roses in a small onyx vase for decades after my mother died. They came from the cascading white blossoms covering her coffin that day in Montreal till the right time came to do away with them. I look at my bookshelves surprised they’re no longer there.
Jane Frank
Brisbane poet Jane Frank’s debut collection of poetry is Ghosts Struggle to Swim, published by Calanthe Press in 2023 and she is author of two previous chapbooks. Her poetry has been widely published in Australia and overseas in publications including Westerly, Cordite, Meniscus, Antipodes, The Ekphrastic Review, Shearsman, Poetry Ireland Review and Takahe. She is Reviews Editor for StylusLit Literary Journal and teaches in Communication and Creative industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
Wild Birds, Eagle Junction
after Georges Braque’s Oiseaux, 1962
The wild birds all leave my mind at once when the train moves from the platform.
I lose myself in the archipelago of colour that is the city sunwrapped in its river, think to myself that if I travelled on this train every day, threading the suburbs on a line like beads, it might stop the birds from nesting & the mornings might be light, whipped like buttercream.
I try not to notice the wild birds through the window as they soar over the arc of the bridge in their low, elegant formations but everything is easier at a distance. The train sways as if plunging underwater & my head is drained empty, only the gentle notifications about approaching stations & which side to disembark. They will be waiting for me at my destination —the wild birds— they will ruffle their feathers against my thoughts as I walk home against a flat sky.
Dream Birds
Birds rehearse songs in their sleep like she practices kissing, their wings twitching in time with the soft movement of her lips.
It is always birds in her dreams: zebra finches & whip birds & brush turkeys that build nests among her garden ferns by day but wear the faces of people.
The exhilaration of flight & the overwhelm of distance means her brain is alight with positive & negative sensations all at once [pink + blue = a dull aubergine purple:
a code for quietly existing] but all the time she knows that her dreams are cave walls or skies where words can be scratched in ochre chalk or dabbed with cloud,
where strange imaginations beat against the bones of her being & that mostly, it is a migrating bird that visits— one eye open, one closed—whispering instructions
for how to dream across thousands of miles between hemispheres & she wonders if that bird conjures her in turn, grounded beneath blankets & sheets
but with an avian face & feathers, also caught between two lives, if the best of her, too, belongs in the starry arena between places,
whether love burns its brightest in the parallel lives of the night?
Unfastening
Distant plovers and crow song — close — a field of dew like snow beneath roughed up clouds I am always surveying the scene at the same time as being who I am now where passion and outrage are in detached floating boxes that I can see shining in an egg shell sky a long way off past the black-framed windows and above the dome-shaped hill and furrowed farms where each macadamia nut tree is a tiny calligraphy mark on the morning that must mean something I look from that agricultural cuneiform to the letters on the page: different stories—none particularly mine.
Jim Burke
Jim Burke, is co-founder with John Liddy of The Stony Thursday Book. His haiku feature in ‘Between the Leaves’ Arlen House (2016). ‘Quartet’ with Mary Scheurer, Peter Wise and Carolyn Zukowski (2019) ‘Montage’ Literary Bohemian Press (2021) Slipstreaming in the West of Ireland, poems with John Liddy, Revival Press (2024).
Believer’s Tale
When I was beaten For being stupid
I was stupid
When I was beaten For being ignorant
I was ignorant
When I was beaten For being useless
I was useless
When I was penitent For being a sinner
I was a sinner
And they held Their holy vows
As I was beaten—
Chat
Reason says:
Time changes everything. Road, ditch, yard, Joe the dairyman’s whistling smile of black curls, his Gypsy Rover song. Heart says: It’s hard to endure what lies beneath the clouds.
Reason says:
Time pushes on, skirts Madigan’s place, old Jack Grady’s and flits upon a bridge, crosses to the opposite side gobbling all the unfamiliar stretch of river.
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.
Haiku While Walking My Dog
Ginkgos wave their fans. Come Fall, their slot machines pour jackpots of gold coins.
Yard sign for the judge who married us. House sparrows campaign: vote, vote, vote!
Boundary markers, crumbling, nicked by mowers, hide summerlong in vines.
Our Golden Retriever rolls over, kicking on slick lawns, then swimming.
A two-toned squirrel, red with gray tail, climbs a tree half in leaf, half not.
A white chihuahua makes a tiny whirring growl—electric toothbrush.
Red maple swaying— pool of dropped leaves—flamingo mirrored on one leg.
Our dog belongs to a cargo cult, searching on the shore for flotsam.
Neighborhood fireworks pop and fizzle behind trees— lightning bugs light up.
Guinevere halts, won’t budge or go on, turns to rush back, towing me home.
Laps after Midnight
Slipping from the party’s glow, we step over garden wickets and find a leafy swimming pool. She dips her bare feet in dark water and places my drink on wet tiles. Behind us ice cubes clink and giggles mix with arguments between guests. She doesn’t mind me stripping and hopping in the pool, treading water among the flotilla of leaves.
It’s all deep end. When I ask for a sip of brandy, she tells me, Swim a lap first. When I crawl back, she laughs and gives me a sip. Now do a backstroke, and I’m off again. Opening my arms to stars I can’t name, I hear the ocean booming through groves. Another sip. Now butterfly. And I kowtow through the dark below overhanging oaks.
Everything blurs but her round eyes half-hidden by bangs. Even in the dark, their fire catches light from somewhere: distant torches or the rising moon. Now, she croons, a breast stroke. I spread apart the waters, the curling leaves. And when I return this time, she kicks up a wave and whispers, Now the deadman’s float. I try it, face down, arms and legs loose, until I come up gasping. I’m surprised how far I’ve drifted. Across the pool, she’s a shadow with a cigarette, her scarf rippling, a single empty snifter on the pool’s edge, an enormous moon hunched like a gibbon in the leafy branches.
Ghazal of the Kraken
This nautical monster never haunted ancient Greece: the Kraken. Scour texts and myths. Zeus never cried, “Release the Kraken!”
That’s Hollywood, Laurence Olivier, a prompt for Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion masterpiece, the Kraken.
The source is Norse, but Tennyson gets the blame for his swollen sonnet of a sleeping beast, “The Kraken.”
Really, though, it’s a giant squid with “enormous polypi” that haunts the poet, making plausible, at least, the Kraken.
Mantle, eight arms with toothy suckers, two tentacles, lots of ink: a wonder in its reality, enough to cease the Kraken.
Student of awe, which of the following does not belong? □ Perseus, □ Poseidon, □ Medusa, □ Golden Fleece, □ the Kraken.
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 Ghost in the Mix Tape
For Liam Rector
Abba up against Sinatra, the Pogues, the Pretenders, Or Lenya or Marianne Faithfull or Yeats, Or Eliot reading Gerontion, Mailed out of nowhere.
You who meant to save us all from our lesser selves, Precise and florid, frank and hilarious Beyond decorum,
How could I have thought your spirit would stay in the shadows, Telling the same sad story over and over?
Terminal Shipping
Baltimore, summer 1979
He liked to call her at work in the afternoons, When the colleague next door he hardly saw Whose matched pair of champion Viszlas
Pulled down the office curtains
Leaping about for the hell of it
Finally got off the phone line they shared, And his last conference was another no-show, And their apartment was blocks away, sweltering, Crammed with their boxes half-packed For another new start in another September, Just to hear her answer Terminal Shipping
In her voice that barely carried over the teletype And if it was easier to imagine her in another Coffee house in another church basement in another life Or another decade, and not in the warehouse district
Watching from the sixth floor the forklifts shuffle The containers, and the flat tar roofs of Fells Point, When she told him about the scents of cinnamon, Nutmeg and coriander from the McCormack factory
You could smell all the way to Bolton Hill
Where Scott and Zelda lived, or Mount Washington And the string quartet busking outside the conservatory, And the Quebecois cook who jumped ship, holed up
In a five-star hotel, ordering haute cuisine
From room service and charging it to the company
Since they couldn’t sail without him, and no one Knew what to do to get him back in the galley
While the phones lit up, and even if it was another Dull hot day, and even if she didn’t have much to say, It was still her voice, tinged with that other world
She always opened for him.
Sometimes, Late
He tunes the top two fiddle strings down a step
So he can feel the century-old wood Wake from its tempered sleep
Into the night world of drones until there is another pitch, a distant Unnamable overtone, and the tunes-Blind Dog, Blackest Crow
Are beyond choice, are wind in the darkness, are a radio, drifting To one of those stations he might have caught Driving at night in the hills above the lakes, every commercial signal out of range, Even the talk shows, but then a few notes, a few more, The cheap speakers in his borrowed car crackling, And a squeal of static as if his bow slipped From his hand, as it did in those first gigs
When he was still drinking in the old inn
On North Main, the main room gutted Down to lathe and plaster, gypsum dust on the dance floor, The dancers’ steps leaving traces
Like the streaks in the almost-antique cloud chamber In the corner of the physics lab, before the draft ended And he dropped out, hitched around the Finger Lakes For a summer, picking up work in the vineyards And marinas and the fiddle by ear from a handful Of 78s he found in a junk shop and a housemate Who sat on the porch and played even into fall, and said If you ever need a friend, a fiddle is your best shot as he retuned The high strings down, and that’s what he remembers Now that the inn is a bistro and the dancers in their boots And long dresses crossing the floor are the figures of nothing but the memory In the bowhand’s flex and drawl as if keeping time Were anything but that.
Laura Johanna Braverman
Laura Johanna Braverman is a writer and artist. She is the author of Salt Water (Cosmographia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Reliquiae, Plume, Levure Litteraire, Rusted Radishes, The Fourth River, and MER, among other journals, and in the anthology Awake in the World, vol. II. She is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at Lancaster University. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, her painting works were exhibited in 2015 (Source), in 2023 at the Mina Image Centre (An Ever-Changing Stream), and in 2024 at Saleh Barakat Gallery (Faith in the Forming). Austro-American by birth and upbringing, she lives in Lebanon with her family
Autumn Polyphony
We will remember the sirens of ambulances, their rising and retreating whines along the highway. Remember the strange frequencies of flying carbon-fiber structures given calculated intelligence. Bass implosions that thrum through viscera and bone. The cresting, breaking waves of speed surpassing sound.
And still the olives are shaken from the trees, offering their green and purple fruit –as they should when earth begins its tilt away from light. The rhythmic beats of stick against branch –the practiced movements over years immemorial. And still the coastal soil is red. Still, we are all of water made, of mineral –all held by skin.
Confinement’s Alterations
Through glass I meet the outside now: eucalyptus trees with swaying fringes, an oak, fuchsia bougainvillea blooms at the window’s edge. A white sky, a flat sea. I imagine jumping in from where I sit, ignoring for a moment the probability of sewage in it. From here, the water is all invitation. The jetty’s arm reaches across the blue.
Emblazoned at repeated intervals over white, I see the logo BMA/Paints. Once a noiseless stone concrete, the quay
used to go unnoticed in this country of disfigured coastlines. Something I fantasize about with two broken knees:
hide this small defeat in a covert operation. Paint it over maybe –in the darkest hours. Who is with me?
I ask my husband and two sons. Sometimes I shuffle out, beyond the glass on my extended arms. Rubber ends
of my crutches like the knuckles of our primate cousins pressing down. I am unsteady on the gravel pebbles.
Or I ask my husband if he can push me in the wheelchair borrowed from his father – up and down the driveway.
And again – I am a tree, a rosemary bush, that lizard perched on a rock.
LaWanda Walters earned her M.F.A. from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Nine Mile, Radar Poetry, Antioch Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The American Journal of Poetry, Laurel Review, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, Alligator Juniper, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, and I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, poet John Philip Drury.
The Linguistics Professor
(A short story in verse)
“My bar is somewhat further down the street.” —Anthony Hecht, “Third Avenue in Sunlight”
I’m wiped out. I’m thirsty.
I’m gonna go get a beer, said the linguistics professor. Let’s go get a beer. This was in Ballantine Hall at Indiana, “Mother Bear’s” just across the road.
I had been in line, waiting to talk to him, but he kept talking to the two male students. It wasn’t like they’d gotten there first. It was the way he managed to arrange things. And similarly, he arranged his words to sound like no big deal, let’s go next door to talk. I can’t talk to another student without a beer. That way. That’s how he said it, how I took it. But when we were walking to his car I must have said something like, “Oh, I don’t mind walking across the road.” There was a hedge, but everybody stepped through or over it. He said he had some other place in mind. And we started driving. We left the old part of Bloomington, and I thought, oh, are we going
to some bar at the mall? I was feeling funny, then, but I didn’t want to sound like I didn’t trust him— after all, he was my professor—I was planning on getting my Ph.D. and you were required to take linguistics for that. He hadn’t answered that question I’d stood in line for. Oh my, the view was getting boring, crew-cut yards, ugly little sixties houses with their swing sets rusting and the cookie-cutter streets some builder’d planned—right-angled corners, squared-off little blocks.
I knew there were chain restaurants on the highway going out of town, but we kept turning onto one small street after the next. How does Let’s go GET a beer signify wandering a subdivision? Dante with squares instead of circles. I knew if I asked him why, it would make the worst come true. It’s when Red Riding Hood questions the wolf that he tears off her grandmother’s bonnet. I could not push him to expose his motive. I’d escaped a violent marriage. I chatted to—what, cheer him up? I’d heard he had lost his tenure, and that was why he acted so arbitrary in class. We turned into one of those tic-tac-toe driveways. We got out and he opened the trunk of his car. There was a case of beer. So he thought
a grad student in English, taking classes in linguistics and deconstructionism, wouldn’t notice the gap between get a beer and come to my house and drink some warm beer, little girl?
Here we were walking through his garage and I was clinging to the fantasy he merely wanted me to meet his wife. Instead, in the kitchen just the hum of the refrigerator, alphabet magnets holding photos of children
with their mother stuck underneath, slanting and curling. When I asked, he said the kids and their mother were visiting someone.
“Oh, I guess you wanted to have the beers here,” I said, trying to make sense of things.
Yes, he answered, monosyllabic as a madman, and it was then I confessed that I didn’t actually like the taste of beer. (I’d planned on a gin and tonic when we went into “Mother Bear’s”).
He must have been delighted when I asked, “Say, do you have any gin”?
For the first time he smiled at me. He did, indeed, have gin. And so we proceeded from there. We walked into the living room,
me with my hefty gin and tonic and ice as if that might suit for armor. We both sat down on the couch and had some kind of desultory conversation for a while.
And then I had a saving thought. Enunciating clearly, remembering advice from some old drama class, I mentioned that I’d forgotten I had told someone I’d go to a late party tonight. Oh, really? asked the wolf. What time are you supposed to be there? “Ten,” I said. Ten? he repeated. “Yes, it’s for a friend who is having to take this grueling test.”
He kept trying. That seems like a pretty late party for a weekday. He tried, but by that time I had the image in my head—it was neon green, blinking like the numbers on a digital clock.
And after what seemed like enough small talk in his living room, gulping gin, saying yes to one more, I stood up and said, “I really hate to, but I know I need to get back.”
For that party? he asked. “Yes,” I said. Then he made one of two moves on me. He placed his hands on my shoulders as if he might be planning to choke me, but then he just shook me gently— as if he had been joking the whole time. After that he took me to my place. I had to hug him in the car, of course— I’ve blocked out whether this linguistics professor stuck his tongue in my mouth when he kissed me. In the textbook for the class, I’d learned the words fricative and plosive, how the tongue must touch the roof of the mouth to say certain words. He waited until I got up to the lit porch and drove away. I felt so grateful I thought I’d misunderstood something. At my next class with him I held my hand up, eager to continue being a good student. He never called on me. He looked straight over my head. Then I decided I’d been in danger. I knew I had to drop his course before I received
a withdrawal “failing.” I decided I’d get my M.F.A. in poetry instead of my Ph.D., even though I understood the linguistics book—I’d even found a mistake in it, which is what I’d wanted to ask him about that day. I was advised to go to his office with a withdrawal slip. I was scared, but he did sign it. Nevertheless, at Christmas break, back in Cincinnati, my grades arrived in the mail and then I knew what he was. An F instead of “withdrawal passing.” So there was the wolf, disclosed. The head of the department walked to the Registrar himself to change the grade. That’s how I came to be a poet.
Louise Wakeling was born not far from Botany Bay at Arncliffe in Sydney. Though she would like nothing better than to sojourn in the south of France, she feels she has come home since she moved to Dharug/Gundungurra country in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Her poetry has been published online in journals such as Burrow and in the print or online anthologies The Best Australian Poems, Antipodes, Guide to Sydney Rivers, Live Encounters, Cordite, Contemporary Poetry, Caring for Country, Wild Voices: An anthology on wildlife, Messages from the Embers, an Australian Bushfire anthology, Guide to Sydney Crime, and The Best Australian Science Writing. A part-time English teacher/mentor via Zoom, she is currently working on a fifth collection of poetry, and a novel set in London and Sydney which explores coercive control and trauma and survival in the lives of three women between WW1 and the early 1970s. Off Limits (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021) is her fourth collection of poetry, ranging across ecopoetics, sewer-surfing and the tragi-comedy of relationships.
Iron harvest
armed drones are the accepted weaponry point of the realm, the new normal. cluster bombs pelt steel rain, bomblets air-dropped or ground-launched –a 40 % dud rate obvious in the field. undetonated, mother-bombs sprout landmines damage immediate and for years to come
grenades lined with phosgene deadly tubers unearthed in potato-fields loitering munitions cradled like ruined infants are ferried from the site in tiny stretchers
farmers ploughing their fields are routed by a deadly hail, children stumble on half-buried ordnance, broken-winged missiles cued for maximum damage
speech gone, a shell-shocked child in the hospital ward holds up shaking hands, bewildered, trembling like an olive tree in winter
Before the inspection
sure, relocate, move to the coastbut will you throw words like clay on a wheel the way you can here, thin mist rising from the highlands, wind groaning in the branches whispered syllables of rain threaded through dawn? still more could be committed to paper or screen, arrows straining at a distant target. more to the point, will they find their mark? how to leave, when you’re hoarding words on paper like clocks divorced from time - severance poems from lovers, manuscripts muted in drawers, marinading in dust
with faded photos of people whose names you scarcely recall. marooned in folders, are they waiting to be rescued, or do they know in their bones they’re yellow bin-bound, drabs of poems cosying up to faded atm receipts, grades of former students and other
flotsam of a life well-lived –well, lived. rifling through them, you imagine a conflagration, a letting-go of worldly things. all very Dao. to shred or not to shred? or, opting out, will you re-inter these remains under “something precious that must be saved”?
for now, all’s neat for the inspection, a thin patina of order tarpaulined over rooms. you fling open the study door with a warning: “Don’t look in here”, and the agent, poking his head in, exclaims, “Oh, yes, the smell of old paper …”
Silenced
when children wither in a manufactured famine, and watchers wring their hands and say nothing, tongues silenced in fear in mute outrage or worse smooth voices invoke collateral damage righteous death all normalised in war nothing to see here though blood spills from a young girl’s mouth and far and wide there is only rubble and refuse and folded earth where no flowers grow
when the bodies of children are cries punctuated with shrapnel, indecipherable, made monstrous, words that might have been uttered because we are human, because they are human, drift like official leaflets from above to sink in smoky air unread
Bombed cave in north Laos where man civilians died. Photograph by Mark Ulyseas.
M. L. Williams
M. L. Williams is the author of Game (What Books Press), the chapbook Other Medicines, and coeditor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets. His poetry and prose is published in many journals and anthologies, including Salt, Western Humanities Review, Hubbub, Plume, Miramar, The Journal of Florida Studies, and The Cortland Review. He teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Valdosta State University.
My Tosca
Puccini never imagined an alto Okie kid picked from glee club to sing Tosca in English, nor the thick pancake a volunteer makeup artist sponges backstage roughly across my cheeks and brow, stabs a brush at my eyes with scarlet and white greasepaint, rubs on thick rounds of rouge, and goos lipstick blood red until she smiles at the clown she’s made of me before moving on, nor that I spill away in a red cassock to find my zucchetto so I can play Battling Tops until curtain call when we rush out at the end of Act I to sing our “Te Deums,” which we mumble, then in English loud and clear, “Go on, do tell!” so the Sacristan can boast of Napoleon’s defeat too soon, nor that my father whispers at the end of Act II, “We need to get home” so I never see Tosca leap from the tower, instead watch in my skirt and cap, lipstick smearing, this end to the plot: Tosca triumphant over Scarpia’s bloody corpse, then penitent with candles and a cross, then home in time for Dad’s football scores and beer.
Lacuna: Grandfather
You have a long face, deep, piercing eyes in the one photo I have of you, equal parts Liam Neeson and Mr. Green Jeans, but I know nothing about you beyond dates and places I find online and the fact, unverified, that you were full-bred Irish, dead so long when I was old enough to connect and question, your family never mentioned you. I piece you together through my father, six uncles, two aunts, all dead now, all so different I can’t find them in the handsome face softened by work, a hint of sadness in the eyes your picture offers up. Your wife held the family together all the years I knew her till she died, generous to her children and grandchildren, devout Southern Baptist, part of a big Scottish clan that came west from Texas. Did she pick up the family line when you fell, or were you among the many she bore up?
When I asked about you, she said you had a car and owned a store, that you took her on her first car ride. I asked her if she liked it. “Why, Yes!” she sparked, and that was all, the only time I saw a flash of lust in her old blue eyes, and she held it in the silence that followed.
So you had a store and a car you lost, you fathered ten children, one who died an infant, you farmed cotton in Oklahoma and Texas, you came out west and died. That’s all I have to lay upon your long handsome face softened by work, your deep piercing eyes, their hint of sadness that may just be mine.
Ode to Nothing
Not zero, zero is math’s everything, as is the nothing you answer when someone asks what’s wrong, not the pause between breathing in, breathing out, not the true gift of white space, the silence between notes, nor the starless dark meteors streak with light, not death, its churning mulch of decay feeding all, not the word itself, as things that are not fill imaginations of children, artists, conspiracy theorists— no nothing, the very word ode precludes it.
Mari Maxwell is a writer based in Ballinrobe. Her work features online and in print in Ireland, USA, UK, Brazil, and elsewhere. She received an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2023 and a Professional Development Award in 2020/21. She is working on her debut poetry collection and a hybrid novel.
Townie
i Down Bower’s Way, a flush of pink and cherry poppies spread their petals with attitude. Polar bear and swan puffs foam and froth down river in the gushing Robe.
ii
City dwelling, I tell new neighbours who giggle at my reference. Yet city living it is.
We no longer hear Farmer Tony’s horn calling his sheep down meadow. Nor the call of the heron across the turlough, or the swans along Lough Mask. Our cats no longer stroll the village boreen, nor snooze on limestone thrones.
iii
Four weeks in and we are readjusting no longer under siege nor threat from landlord, relations or tradesmen. No peering in our windows, unannounced, uninvited. No sneaking by our kitchen window at dark, nor spinning tyres in our driveway on holiday weekends. No cigarette fumes wafting in in the wee hours of the morning.
continued overleaf...
iv
Here a robin guards my solace serenades me from a wooden post. And in the shade of the chestnuts, bittersweet, woody nightshade blooms. I am reminded of the lilac harebells I once swooned at.
v I no longer smudge just sit by the weir, thundering water one side stilled upon the other, as my heart beats a new steady. No trembling finger tips, panic attacks.
I don’t pick from the thick blackberry briars here, nor offer these neighbours baked goodies from my kitchen. There will be time here in the pulse of it all. Cattle and sheep in these fields, swallows readying for their September farewell while across the way the Partry Mountains.
vi Nature trills where moorhens and chicks dabble in the reeds and lily pads, herons by the weir. Ukrainian brothers fish from camping stools, and a daytime gaggle of teens swells the gravel path.
Joy and laughter beneath the towering chestnuts, and dangling ash branches sweeping the river. All of us picking up, scraping off, regrafting the pages of our lives, stories unfolding.
New beginnings by the banks of the Robe.
María Castro Domínguez
María Castro Domínguez is the author of A Face in The Crowd, her Erbacce–press winning collection, and Ten Truths from Wonderland (Hedgehog Poetry Press), a collaboration with Matt Duggan. Winner last year of the first prize in The Plaza Poetry Prize and third prize in Brittle Star´s Poetry Competition 2018. She was highly commended in the Borderlines Poetry Competition and this year’s The Red Shed Poetry Comp. Shortlisted in Renard Press’ 2024 poetry competition ‘Building Bridges’. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals such as Popshot, Live Encounters, PANK, Empty Mirror, The Lincoln Review, The Friday Poem, Orbis, Chattahoochee Review, The Cortland Review and Backlash Press.
Gently saying goodbye
The art of staying alive is difficult to do, on a national holiday my man died. When children at school practise anthems and woman and men dress in traditional costumes.
I remember the day, more night than day, crowds were singing to a timple * how teenagers licked pink candy from their hair and cheeks, whilst my temples were turning white and it hurt to talk.
Even the doctor forgot his case, anxious to get home to his girls and the ambulance aids, high on Monster, forgot their postcovid gear. How hard it is to live on a day like this, and even harder, to gently forgive.
*(a small guitar)
Michael Simms
Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi and the founding editor emeritus of Autumn House Press. Ragged Sky has published three collections: American Ash, Nightjar and Strange Meadowlark. A fourth collection Jubal Rising will be released by Ragged Sky in May, 2025. His speculative fiction novels published by Madville include The Talon Trilogy (2023, 2024, 2025) and Bicycles of the Gods (2022). His poems and essays have been published in Poetry (Chicago), Scientific American, Plume and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-aDay. In 2011, the Pennsylvania Legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts. Originally from Texas, Simms lives in the Mt Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife Eva and their kelpie Josie.
The Deed
Mart, Texas 1908
Someone who knew him called His name and Chester came out
To the dog run between the two halves
Seeing no need for his shotgun leaning Against the stones of the fireplace
And the man who used to live near Didn’t say his name and Chester didn’t Remember his name and the man Told him to bring out his mother And Chester did holding the thin arm
Of the old Cherokee woman who Rarely moved from her rocking chair
Beside the fire even in summer
The man held up a deed
You need to sign he said What is it Chester asked what Trouble are you bringing
She ain’t done nothing he said While his mother stood staring darkly At the man her white hair braided
Are you working for the judge
Chester asked the man he’d known From before but didn’t know now
She gotta sign the man said again This for her land near Spindletop
Chester asked The land Sam Houston Deeded to the Cherokee forever
Chester asked The man shrugged
Don’t matter what’s it for the man said She don’t sign Sheriff’ll come
continued overleaf...
Chester remembered his shotgun
A .410 he used for squirrel leaning
Against the stones inside he looked
At Blue and Tick the hound dogs
Sleeping in the dog run shade They must’ve remembered the smell Of the man from before cause they paid him No mind They gonna pay her
For her land? Chester asked But the man looked away at the field Of cotton Chester and his 12 children
Farmed for somebody else then the man
Looked at the pretty roan grazing
In the far field Chester had given To his oldest daughter Zelphia
They called Red for her hair
It’s best your momma sign the man said All the Indians are signing And if she don’t?
Chester asked casual-like as if making Conversation not trouble
If she don’t the man said There’ll be hell to pay the man looked
At Chester remembering when they Was boys I’m real sorry about this
The man said but these men Are serious and they’ll send hard cases Out here you’ll be lucky if they just Send her to the reservation
As the men talked the old woman Squinted at the man remembered Feeding him corn pone and molasses When he was a boy who ran From his father And Chester now Remembering the bruised hungry boy Watched his mother scratch her mark And return to sit beside the fire And wait for death to come
Bloodroot
Palestine, Texas 1932
For her all roads lead
To the shack beside the bayou
Her father glancing at his hand
On the wheel the girl watching
The man’s worry the healer
Waiting for them somehow knowing
They were coming her father
Unsurprised by the knowing
The girl in her green wisdom
Accepting the men’s faith
In old ways
Without greeting
Her father held out his hand
Palm down the warts
Spreading on his brown wrist
The healer took the offending
Appendage muttered maybe
A prayer maybe a spell
Common in the bayou
Woods and farms The healer
Rubbed the warts with his right
Thumb cupping the man’s hand
In his left fixed his eyes
Speaking tenderly whether
To enchant or merely to pass
The time the girl couldn’t hear
Then the healer let the hand drop
Refused the dollar the man
Held out The man and girl
Drove back to town the girl
Pointing to the black smudge
On his wrist Her father
Shrugged it’s the old way
And years later the girl
Now a grandmother recognizes The curvy lobes of Sanguinaria
And harvests the fat red
Escharotic roots near the bayou
Chops carefully grinds
By hand the blistering
Blood-like sap diluted with Oak ash a drop of olive oil
Like the remedy book says
As her granddaughter watches
Clutching a baby doll named Serena against her chest
Red River
Bonham, Texas, 1963
She’s returned, the woman
He killed twenty years before He saw her in the face of a child Who looked up at the tower
Of the church spire that seemed To rise from the past in that city
Where he lived like a drunken monk
Writing every morning, drinking Every afternoon until he passed out He loved her and wanted nothing
But a tender moment of understanding
But she mocked him and he struck at her
Only once, his hand closed in anger
Shocking him and she fell back
Hitting her head on the edge of a table
Where they lived as a couple. He hadn’t meant it. He’d meant To love her and somehow the passion
Turned ugly and he had become In that single act a monster
And he left their home and became No one, sleeping in alleys, beneath bridges
Below the traffic of ordinariness
Passing above and now thinking Of her, he walked beside the river
Dark with insolence, unresolved
Weather breaking above him
And he came to a dead animal
A possum its belly open
To the flies and worms
Its tongue eating itself,
Returning flesh to earth and air
And he waded into the dark
And swam to meet her
Author’s note on these three poems: according to family legend, my Cherokee great-great grandmother whose name I never knew was visited at her son’s cotton sharecrop in 1908 by two agents who made her sign over the rights to the land in East Texas which Sam Houston, the first president of Texas, had given to the Cherokee “for all time.” Spindletop, the first oil gusher in Texas, had suddenly made the land valuable. She signed over the deed because she was afraid of being taken to the reservation in Oklahoma. Her daughter-in-law whom I called Maw-maw was Cajun and her family relied on folk remedies for healing. And finally, the poem Red River is fiction based on actual incidents in East Texas. When I was a boy, I read newspaper accounts of Dean Corll, aka the “Candy Man” who raped and murdered at least 28 boys and buried them on shores and banks of various lakes and rivers in East Texas before being murdered by one of his accomplices. These stories merged in my mind with that of Jennifer Harris whose murdered body was found floating in the Red River by fishermen on May 15, 2002.
Nathanael O’Reilly teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His thirteen poetry collections include Dublin Wandering (Recent Work Press, 2024), Landmarks (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024), Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Downingfield Press, 2024), Boulevard (Downingfield Press, 2024), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), and Preparations for Departure (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017). His work appears in journals and anthologies published in fifteen countries, including Anthropocene, Cordite, The Honest Ulsterman, Mascara, Meanjin, New World Writing Quarterly, Rabbit, Southword, Trasna and Westerly. He is poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.
The Turning
We caught the eleven o-clock train, kissed on an island, stood on the wall of King John’s Castle looking out over the grey Shannon. The rain soaked our clothes and hair, glistened on skin. We talked through wind and lightning bursts until dawn. Smoke rose in the distance. Her gorgeous face turned from joy to despair an ocean and half a continent away.
Sacred Study
Framed paintings, illustrations, etchings, maps and photographs cover three walls. My late paternal grandfather’s favourite beer glasses rest in a black-velvet-lined red case on the shelf beside an empty flagon of Flagstaff Hill port above journals and notebooks spanning thirty years of life in Australia, England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and America.
My late maternal grandfather’s Irish green corduroy flat cap, saved from the seat of his car the day after he died, hangs from a carved wooden knob at the end of the curtain rod above the window in front of the desk. A library of poetry, fiction, drama, history, criticism and philosophy packs the shelves. The music collection lives
beneath the black record player. LPs and CDs contain thousands of hours of rock, folk and reggae. The blue suede covered album my maternal grandmother created before her death lives beneath the music, preserving photographs, letters, family stories, ancestors, records from three countries for six generations of birth, marriage and death.
Undertaking
Lift your feet from the ground, clutch the restraint, sway on the suspended bench rising above the snow uphill through clouds towards the summit and a blank horizon. Surrender to movement, gravity, forces we can never fully control. Travel blind with me to the jagged peak where I will steady you.
Note: A terminal utilizing the end-words from Richard Siken’s Turpentine.
Olivia Longe
Sparkle In Birmingham
On the moonchair, the cat stretches languidly, muscles slack from too much sunshine through the window. Fat stomach bellows contentedly beneath a fine fiery pelt. Only a scant scrap of excitable orange and white, when dubbed Sparkle by my daughters.
We picked him up from a young family, somewhere in Birmingham. A dreck damp Saturday, at a crushing grey house, out of the pale arms of three children, dressed only in their underwear, at two o’clock in the afternoon.
Were they playing a game?
My eldest asked, comforting the mewling ball in the back of the car. How to tell a six-year-old? Those children likely had no clothes, because they were all in the wash. I hesitate to explain, she settles for a mumbled ‘maybe’.
Olivia Longe originally from Clare, but via a long rambling detour in the UK, now resides in North County Dublin. She is a member of the Argillan Creative Writers group and likes to write prose as well as poetry.
In Silence
Air-drifts, like soft warm breath, meander through the open frame, bearing sweet, pungent garlic from below. Extractor fans whine on the roof, while sirens exclaim, reminders the world still beats.
Stuck in this laboured moment, downcast eyes, face contorting, a struggle. Allow the pain to kick free from the depths, to gasp in the light, or beat it with a shovel, let it sink for good.
Nasal exhalation alerts, a decision made. No declaration follows, just eyes met with soft gaze and twist of lips, acknowledges something happened.
A scant downy feather catches the light, it lands, improbable, on my foot. I notice two more plumes have settled beneath your chair, as though the world whispered and bore them forward as a sign. Thoughts of white wings arise, dread untethered.
Phil Lynch is a Dublin (Ireland) based poet. His work has appeared in a range of literary journals and anthologies, on Podcasts and CDs and has also been featured on poetry and arts shows on national and local radio in Ireland. He is a regular performer at poetry and spoken word events. His latest poetry collection, Moving On (Salmon Poetry), was published in April, 2024. His previous collection, In a Changing Light, also with Salmon Poetry, was published in 2016.
Haiku
a ladybird kite entangled in a treetop a spot of bother
a roadside sign said do not go round in circles it straightened me out
something familiar in the faces of the young ghosts of people past
defaced glimpsed through a slatted blind the segmented moon draped in streaks of wispy cloud casts a sinister light on our splintered world
P.S.
should I not remember that The Beatles sang “She Loves You” I hope you will forgive me should I forget to remember that you gave me all your love and that I said I love you too
Rachael Stanley
Rachael Stanley’s poems have previously been published in Live Encounters, Drawn to the Light Press and many other journals. Her debut poetry collection, Back to Infinity was published by Revival Press, Limerick Writers Centre in May 2024. She lives in Dublin. https://limerickwriterscentre.com/product/back-to-infinity-by-rachael-stanley/
A Prayer for Peace
Before we cast our gaze outwards may we first listen to the life force that connects us to each other the air freely given that we breath out and our enemies breath in.
Before we are tempted to linger within the soothing sounds of silence may we first try to listen to the laments and piercing screams of those oppressed by hatred, by war.
Before we point fingers and apportion blame before we demonise tyrants and canonise the afflicted, may we first point the lens inward and see what it is within ourselves that we need to heal, to correct.
Before we condemn, preach, wring our hands may we first use our hands and feet to take action to help in whatever way we can.
Before we are tempted to march to the discordant notes of revenge may we try to listen to the harmony of common ground to our shared wounds and triumphs.
Before we cry out for peace may we first recognise our own need for atonement, for mercy. Before we cry in anger and despair may we aim to cultivate seeds of empathy and hope.
And Jesus Wept
What did you see when you wept over the city of Jerusalem? What centuries of grief could you foretell? What could you see when you looked into the soul of humanity? What must we see in order to be free?
The Moses Basket
My first born once cradled inside followed by my second, third and fourth. Redundant it lay in the attic — now a symbol of passing years.
I carried it down steep steps one last time when the insulators came to line the attic with fibreglass.
I loaded it into the boot and all the charity shops echoed the same refrain sorry no, health and safety
till a friend reminded me of the Capuchin Friars on Church Street so google maps and I circumvented the one way streets of Dublin’s inner city to the back of the friary on Bow Street.
A man with a foreign accent approached me as I stood bewildered looking up at locked gates on this street of refuge to addicts and the poor.
I’ve been waiting for you he said and he led me across the street to a warehouse of donations where I parted company with my wicker womb on this road to new beginnings.
Serena Agusto-Cox
Serena Agusto-Cox’s poetry has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she is an editor with The Mid-Atlantic Review, she coordinates poetry programming for the Gaithersburg Book Festival, and was a featured reader at the Gaithersburg’s DiVerse Poetry reading series and D.C.’s Literary Hill BookFest. Poems appear in multiple magazines and anthologies. She also founded the book review blog, Savvy Verse & Wit, and Poetic Book Tours to help poets market their books.
Before enclosing memory in resilient love
- For Reuben Jackson and his beloved Vermont
Hair twists in shift of wind, not as violent as tornado.
Wild rage, a tantrum of debris — grief flung widely.
Breeze is your hand swiping tears from cheeks.
Streams are harder to divert when overtopping banks, tumbling cars into trees, and sweeping homes from foundations.
Emptied communities.
Gale calms, light cracks clouds, people filter through muddy streets, climb and gawk at splinters puzzle out what’s left behind.
Telescoping
- For Reuben Jackson
I watch sky for signs of you There! Rippled laugh lines hidden behind clouds.
Curved mirrors and lenses collect light, shining eyes joyful and laughing.
Collision and tumbling away captured in tear drops.
Magnify blue into black beyond clouds where fragments of your true self wait nearer I become, dear friend.
Road Work
Along the double yellow line crawling curled stripes cross a border. Slurry seal, backer rod for 3/4-inch cracks. Our disconnect outside the lines of our written charter. Destinations infinite along America’s road: bonds restored with diligence.
Silje Ree
Silje Ree is a bilingual visual poet, artist and the founder of Mellom Press. Currently living in Tokyo, she holds an MA from University of the Arts London. Through visual poetry and the medium of the book, she explores the interplay between words, languages and imagery, and finds understanding within the untranslatable. She has published two poetry pamphlets with Sampson Low: Melodilaust tone fall (2019) and E∩N (2018). https://siljeree.com/ Instagram: @silje.ree
Leaving home
leaving was easy pack my suitcase and go it was easy only for a short while now, returning is difficult not knowing what will be there and what won’t will it all feel the same or will it all be different most people I know are there but now I’m unsure if we actually even know eachother leaving was easy but I don’t know when I’ll return anymore
Living in Tokyo
Early sunrises summers that never ends fast and slow intertwines pulling in opposite directions fast paced city life events, travel and work, repeat no breaks but also, the Japanese way of life calligraphy, cooking and onsen traditions slow methods, honoring origins seasonality nothing going to waste prepared with special care and attention to details beautiful artworks to be shared and enjoyed the thrill of changing seasons a source for celebrations showcasing its treasures a feast for all the senses
I try to stop, to slow down and to enjoy the small moments sometimes I do but city life has me trapped in a trance of repeating habits to do and to do and to do and after I do this I’ll do that I love Japan and everything it has to offer sometimes it makes my head spin I try my best to appreciate it a little bit more everyday
Tim Dwyer
Tim Dwyer’s poems appear regularly in Irish, UK and international journals, including Live Encounters, and many haiku and tanka journals. His chapbook is Smithy Of Our Longings (Lapwing).. He is a retired psychologist originally from Brooklyn, NY, who now lives by the shore in Bangor, Northern Ireland.
Morning Detour
Hudson Valley
After last night’s floods barricades close my route to work— I follow a rusty farm truck onto byways you only know when you grow up in a place. With many twists and turns I lose direction, then suddenly arrive onto a familiar road. A beep from my horn, a shared wave as the farmer turns a different way.
Overnight, the gnarled shrubs along the roadside have turned a brilliant red. On this overcast morning, I’m an eternal beginner with happiness.
Mulled
During last night’s thunderstorm, apples were shaken from Gary’s tree and tumbled down the narrow lane. I pick up one and take a bite, tarty sweetness of a McIntosh from long ago. Red. Plump. Crisp. I fill my pockets, then gather the bruised ones that dot the ground.
Press, ferment, mature, mull with cinnamon, zest, and cloves. Serve the cider piping hot for one more lingering winter.
Bohemian Waxwings
They are wintering in the rowan tree near the library. We come close— in the Scandinavian wilderness, they never learned humans are to be feared.
Thriving on red berries untouched by our local birds, the waxwings sally from treetop to treetop, open wide their flycatching beaks.
One in flight pulls in its wings motionless—
watching from below we are floating in mid-air.
Tim Tomlinson
Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, the short story collection, This Is Not Happening to You, and, most recently, Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World Recent work appears in The Bangalore Literary Magazine, EKL Review, Flash Boulevard, and Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing. Tim is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing He teaches writing in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies.
Monody for a Forgotten Man
1. Bernstein
I had a friend, the name is not important. We shared an office at the university. His shelves sagged with classical music CDs and opera lps in boxes. Handel’s Acis and Galatea, the Mahler cycle conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
--Were you aware that Leonard was homosexual? I was but I said I wasn’t. He wanted to tell the story—he’d told it before. It involved the gym at the West Side Y. What he remembered most was Bernstein’s calves.
--Those leaps that he made on the podium? I nodded.
--You saw those calves, you wonder how he didn’t hit the ceiling. They met over the several weeks when Bernstein composed Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers and Orchestra
--The O’Hara and the Stein, he said, those were my ideas. But we didn’t just write.
He allowed a moment for his meaning to sink in, he was a great practitioner of the conversational caesura. Caesuras and ellipses.
--You know everyone called him Maestro?
--Of course.
--Well, he said archly, he called me Master. He left our trysts with raw knees, I can promise you.
2. Crepuscular
Everything to this friend was art: music, drama, film, painting.
--I should have been a painting, he said, and often it appeared as though he were posing for one. The flamboyance! The red satin tunic, the over-puffed berets, the yellow pajamas. The capes. Or, I should say, the accessories. He had them all, in triplicate. On his hat rack, hats on top of hats. Sometimes I’d meet him, we’d go out, and he’d insist on my wearing one, no matter that it came down over my eyes and ears.
--We don’t need to see, he’d explain, we need to be seen. His vocabulary was similarly accessorized. Grisaille, he might say, correctly, you’d learn, later, when you looked it up. Chiaroscuro was a favorite word. Crepuscular. Intervallic. The kinds of words you didn’t need, but wished you had.
3. La Parade de cirque
Above his desk hung a framed reproduction of La Parade de cirque, by Georges Seurat, a pointillist masterpiece on which he’d based a monograph, his only significant publication. It depicts an audience in the lower foreground watching a performance of four musicians. The circus ringmaster—rigid, formal, severe— appears in profile near the painting’s right edge. Under his arm is tucked a stiff riding crop. The face and the expression bear an uncanny resemblance to my friend.
--Oh, he said, obviously pleased. Do you think so?
--Think so? I said. He’s a dead ringer.
He leaned in, looking more closely.
--I don’t think that I’ve ever noticed, he said, intrigued by the possibility.
4. Mexican on University Place
He was a bit of a shape-shifter, my friend. With a mustache he resembled James Joyce. Sometimes he went bald as Sibelius. He liked to lunch at a Mexican restaurant on University Place where the busboys came from Peru and not one of them over five feet.
--Can you imagine their mothers, he said. The serapes. And those ridiculous black bowlers.
His derision was performative, a conversational exercise as easily removed as a scarf.
The busboys placed the salsa and chips.
--You do that so well, he marveled. Tell us, is that what they mean by le service francais?
The way they’d back away, carefully, smiling, apologizing. Their English was poor to non-existent.
--Not at all, he assured them. But we’re teachers. We can teach you. English or French. Would you like that?
Eventually he got one over to his place.
--Oh, but that boy broke my heart, he said, positively shivering with the recollection. A young Incan god. Seventeen. Nothing breaks your heart like a seventeen year old boy.
--Did you improve his English, I asked.
--I wonder, he said, looking ruefully through the restaurant window. We barely spoke…
5. Man in Polyester Suit
Once I observed his seminar. He was in the midst of a unit that he called Chroma, Bravura, and Presque-vu. Onto a whiteboard, he projected the image of Mapplethorpe’s Man in Polyester Suit, a photo-portrait of a faceless Black man, his enormous uncut cock hanging through the open fly of his trousers like the handle of a bullwhip.
--Not to see, he told the roomful of undergraduates, but to be seen. The class appeared stunned. Speechless. Which was, apparently, the desired effect.
6. Rain Tree Sketch
He spent his mornings working things out at the piano. He’d record bits on my voice mail.
--I’m getting closer, he’d say. Tell me what you think. Long tinny passages followed. Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Takemitsu’s “Rain Tree Sketch.”
When he had the pieces sufficiently down, he’d invite me over for a recital. Him, the piano, and the din of two-way traffic on Houston Street ten stories below. And just when I might be hypnotized by the beauty and the virtuosity, he’d cover the keyboard and stand.
--Off to the club, he’d announce. Adding, mischievously, Want to come?
The club he frequented was on Chrystie Street, just south of Houston. From below the piano he pulled a duffel bag filled with paraphernalia. Clamps, ropes, masks, gags.
--Fucking chainsaws, he snickered, searching my face for a reaction, which, resolutely, was not there. You truly do not judge, he said, do you? I’m not sure I’m persuaded.
7. Rocco
My side of the office was movies. VHS tapes, DVDs. The boxed Cassavetes, British New Wave. Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers.
--Such a long sit, he said, studying the Rocco case. But that brother.
--Simone?
--Exactly. What a brute! Of course the girl went for him.
--She went for Rocco, too.
--Did she, he said. I must have drifted off...
8. Evaluations
One late afternoon I saw him at the corner of Washington Square Park and West 4th, students and professors streaming by. He stood over a wire-mesh trash basket removing papers from a folder, looking at each, returning some to the folder, letting others drop into the trash.
--What are you doing? I asked him.
--Oh, he said, as if I’d been there all along, I’m evaluating my evaluations.
--Those are student evaluations?
--Some of them will be, he said, then, smiling at me as another casualty of his scrutiny floated into the bin, and some of them won’t.
--Aren’t we supposed to leave the room when students fill those out?
--Oh, are we?
--I think so, and then ask a volunteer to submit them to the office.
--Hmm…, he said. Maybe next semester.
9. Sotto voce
He couldn’t speak without making allusions, most of which he assumed you knew. In my case he was being generous. Edith Wharton, of course. Maybe Catullus. But for my friend, a walk through the park could trigger references to Milton’s Lycidas, The Pillow Book, Fernando Pessoa, Achaeus of Eretria. As if the cultural history of the world scrolled by on his eyelids. He’d never been happier than when he was a student in Chicago.
--Except, he mused, perhaps on those five glorious days with my Incan god.
--But afterwards, I asked him in reference to his Incan god, once the loving, once the fucking is done, don’t you sometimes find that you want them gone?
He took my arm with great solemnity.
--I want them beheaded.
Once he volunteered what he missed most by living alone.
--There’s no one to hear my soliloquies, the sotto voce fruits that fall, the unfolding fecundity of fifty-five years.
I said he could share them with me.
--I do, he said, but I’m afraid they go wasted.
--Oh, I said.
--No, he said, hastening to add, not that way. You appreciate them, you get them—some of them—but you don’t live them, do you. We speak on the phone, or across a tablecloth stained with guacamole...
10. Onset
It was hard to pinpoint when the Alzheimer’s began. The range of reference remained, but it took on an aggressive, an acidic edge with just about everyone but me. Although once, when I hadn’t seen him for awhile, he showed up in the office a bit disheveled. It seemed like he’d been out in high wind.
--Come, he said, I’ll take you for lunch at the Mexican’s.
--Give me fifteen minutes, I told him. I needed to meet briefly with the Dean. But when I returned he was gone, and so were my blazer and raincoat.
It took me nearly fifteen minutes to locate the blazer—he’d thrown it in the garbage bin. He died a year later, well before I found the raincoat buried in one of his file drawers beneath a row of pornographic videocassettes.
11. The Side Show
You google him now, he’s gone. Like he never existed. But years after his death I have a dream. He’s watching the performance of a play he’s written and directed. And though I’m watching it, too, I’m also onstage. A character called The Ringmaster directs a line at me. It’s meant to humiliate, and it succeeds.
--How can you suggest that, I hiss at him offstage, softly so as not to disturb the performance.
He dismisses my umbrage with a limp wave.
--You’ve never gone all the way, he says with a self-satisfied smirk, have you?
--All the way with what? I say. How would you know?
Again he waves me off.
I awaken deeply disturbed. I open a manuscript he’d left behind, dedicated to me. On its cover, an orange post-it on which he’d scribbled “a failed novella.” Its title: The Side Show (suggested by the painting La Parade de cirque, by Georges Seurat). The frontispiece features a color reproduction of the painting. The opening page renders in prose the humiliating scene I’d dreamed from his play.
I put down the manuscript and begin writing this.
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems, was just published by Black Lawrence Press.
Available at: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland. His current collection is At Home in Ireland : new and selected poem. Arthur is Poetry Ireland Poet Laureate of Mountmellick.
Dr Arthur Broomfield Review of David Rigsbee’s Watchman in the Knife Factory New & Selected Poems
In David Rigsbee’s Watchman in the Knife Factory New & Selected Poems, 374 pages range over the author’s career with selections from at least ten collections. This collection opens with a sample of his new poems. Rigsbee cites poems from these new creations. In an interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc and Judith Vollmer that he says, “These poems are characteristic of the kinds of things I’ve been trying to do in the latter part of my writing career.”
This reviewer’s first approach to reading a new collection is to ask, do I like this poetry, its words, ideas and images that Wallace Stevens says we must love? Does it stir my interest, does it excite me? The second would be, what’s driving the poet, what’s fuelling (his, in this case) imagination: what keeps him awake at night and drives him for his pen and paper first thing in the morning?
“Red Wall,’ one of Rigsbee’s new poems, sparkles with imagery—is Ezra Pound his unacknowledged godfather(?)—summer is “Aphrodite with sparrows”; Melchior (presumably the wiser) is “without makeup”; and “The neighbour with the black knee brace and that gait drags her green bag to the curb.’ The idea of the spider looking for a possible avenue of escape—like the renaissance martyr burning at the stake—from the inevitability of death, nicely illustrates the poet’s notion of the clarity of the image leading to underlying complexities of life and death, its great and ultimate test “of course would be to raise the dead, to conquer death.”
I could see a brown spider inch up a red wall, pause, and then turn to see if there were not something there behind in pursuit, perhaps, before resuming its trek up the layered shingles.
The poet fails, of course, and then the poem turns back to the real world before imagination dissolves (the image of the spider is not just profound but beautiful as well). Rigsbee’s idea of the test to conquer death, in an earlier poem, “The Exploding Man” explodes (pun intended) in “even in/ the horror of it—the slashes/ and looping florets it is not/ unbeautiful. He wishes to be,/ in dying, a better artist than death.”
In Rigsbee’s elegy, “In Memory of James Broughton,” “A drift kicks the stick loose,/ sometimes turning, sometimes right—/ though the way scarcely matters,” the turns bring the stick through various experiences of paradise imagined by the subject from “the inconstant perceptions of grace” to “this flesh as bawdy as/ the sow’s ear of a magnolia petal/ turned to catch the western sun,” to the poet’s heartbreaking lament in “the silence of the garden/ when evening had hushed the mating birds.”
In his interview Rigsbee talks about the creative process: “My poems start when the first line comes into my head or when a situation intrigues me and I want to work it,” an epiphany many poets will have experienced. I try in the face of the realization that everything in life is complex, so the clarity of images often conceals a messiness and nit-picking that takes place below the surface.’ In “The Red Dot,” he describes an image of being reunited with deceased family members “rising from their silos” and flying up the east coast. Alas the failure to conquer death haunts in
I found myself floating, knowing how Pluto would rise from his throne pointing earthward, not heavenward,
“Once I have these, it’s as if I have the keys to them too. They (the images) will show me where I need to go.” Pound would be impressed.
Watchman is a testimony to the state of United States poetry in this era. Its poems have what Bob Dylan would call “foundation,” a setting in a believable reality, a surface that draws us into the complexities of the underlying emotions, in Watchman ’s case the big questions of existence and beyond. However, the major philosophical questions Rigsbee poses, the content, would go un-noticed if the form of their presentation were not of a quality deserved by a monumental work: images, verbs, which carry their immense load with the power or the gaiety—and so much in-between—which each demands. Poems that at their best, enthral and uplift. No serious poet, or no critic, should be without a copy.
For decades now, David Rigsbee has crafted poems of a bracing lyrical intensity that is both refined and tough-minded.They celebrate the blessings and consolations of a cultured life, one that can honor Auden and Roy Orbison, Faust, and one-hit Doo Sop groups.These elegant and lovingly constructed poems deserve to be read and—more importantly—reread.
—David Wojahn
As a fine poet and a fine translator, he is the closest thing to a potential Renaissance man that I’ve encountered in my career: intellectually brilliant, highly creative, and emotionally mature.
—Carolyn Kizer
Rigsbee walks us through our past and present even as he points us toward the future. The world that awaits will be a beautiful one as long as it contains poets and poems like these.
