Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025 by Live Encounters

2010 - 2025

P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G Free Online Magazine From Village Earth January 2025

Mark Ulyseas Word Song Cover artwork by Irish artist Emma Barone 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

LIVE ENCOUNTERS MAGAZINE

©Mark Ulyseas

Photograph by Mark Ulyseas. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G

January 2025

Support Live Encounters.

Donate Now and Keep the Magazine Live in 2025 Live Encounters is a not-for-profit free online magazine that was founded in 2009 in Bali, Indonesia. It showcases some of the best writing from around the world. Poets, writers, academics, civil & human/animal rights activists, academics, environmentalists, social workers, photographers and more have contributed their time and knowledge for the benefit of the readers of:

Live Encounters Magazine (2010), Live Encounters Poetry & Writing (2016), Live Encounters Young Poets & Writers (2019) and now, Live Encounters Books (August 2020). We are appealing for donations to pay for the administrative and technical aspects of the publication. Please help by donating any amount for this just cause as events are threatening the very future of Live Encounters. Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om Mark Ulyseas Publisher/Editor

All articles and photographs are the copyright of www.liveencounters.net and its contributors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the explicit written permission of www.liveencounters.net. Offenders will be criminally prosecuted to the full extent of the law prevailing in their home country and/or elsewhere. 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

Contributors Mark Ulyseas Terry McDonagh Thomas McCarthy David Rigsbee Daniel Lusk Carolyne Wright Jordan Smith John Philip Drury Gillian Roach Randhir Khare Jean O’Brien Lorraine Gibson Angela Patten – Feeding the Wild Rabbit, book review by Anton Floyd Anne M Carson Lincoln Jaques Sinead McClure Mark Roberts Linda Adair

P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G

January 2025

Jane Frank Richard W Halperin Alan Walowitz Angela Costi David Ades Ally Burnham Justin Lowe Kate Mahony Dirk van Nouhuys Lynda Tavakoli – A Unison of Breaths, reader’s review by Mark Ulyseas

2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

PUBLISHER/EDITOR

Word Song Lyricism is the Word, a surreal dream state where poets scuttle between reams of remembrances, composing incantations to lure readers to embrace and ponder their messages of love, hope and enlightenment. The path across eons is strewn with these messages that crumble under the thoughtless feet of those that seek meaning in every breath, instead of rejoicing in the Word itself.

Word Song continues to be fuelled by poets castigated by the frailties of humanity, and constantly reminded that this must continue to exist and grow from generation to generation, never halting for war, Nature’s retributions, nor life’s hardships. The lament is ever presence… “But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” - William Butler Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Not everyone is a poet, just like not everyone can be a car mechanic or aeronautical engineer.

The poet creates and composes because the poet is born with a soul willingly held hostage by the lyrical world. There is little money to be found in this, but a rich legacy to be left behind for the generations to come. And there are no hurrahs for the poet stressed with the tedium of editing and rewriting to the litany of life’s longings.

Standing in the aisles are the critics throwing brickbats and platitudes in rhythm to their own self-importance. Only a reader can be the critic, to accept or reject or worse, ignore. The reader is the solitary figure one sees walking down a deserted street.

MARK ULYSEAS Mark Ulyseas has served time in advertising as copywriter and creative director selling people things they didn’t need, a ghost writer for some years, columnist of a newspaper, a freelance journalist and photo-grapher. In 2009 he created Live Encounters Magazine, in Bali, Indonesia. It is a not for profit (adfree) free online magazine featuring leading academics, writers, poets, activists of all hues etc. from around the world. March 2016 saw the launch of its sister publication Live Encounters Poetry, which was relaunched as Live Encounters Poetry & Writing in March 2017. In February 2019 the third publication was launched, LE Children Poetry & Writing (now renamed Live Encounters Young Poets & Writers). In August 2020 the fourth publication, Live Encounters Books, was launched. He has edited, designed and produced over Live Encounters’ 300 publications. Mark’s philosophy is that knowledge must be free and shared freely to empower all towards enlightenment. He is the author of three books: RAINY – My friend & Philosopher, Seductive Avatars of Maya – Anthology of Dystopian Lives and In Gethsemane: Transcripts of a Journey. https://liveencounters.net/mark-ulyseas-publisher-editor-of-live-encounters-magazines/ https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Ulyseas/

Published or unpublished is the difference between heard and not being heard, nothing more. To be heard is to be remembered in time by someone somewhere unknown to the poet. And through this remembrance, the poet continues to breathe life in nothingness. Poets and writers have travelled over the years through the pages of Live Encounters. Many have revisited on a regular basis, whilst others have cleared the undergrowth of the lexicon to create new pathways into other worlds.

Some poets, whose work had featured in Live Encounters, have migrated to another Time, and they are missed. But their legacies remain in hard copy and online for others to be enriched by their words, among them being – Philip Casey, John Maxwell O’Brien, Kevin Higgins and Breda Wall Ryan. We are grateful to them for sharing their work with us.

Live Encounters will continue to be a beacon of hope for lyricists and their readers around the world who are smothered by hate, violence and rancid politics.

There is much work to be done in 2025 by this august gathering of poets and writers. Peace and Love

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Om

IN THE ERA OF DICTIONARIES

Terry McDonagh. Photo credit: Joanna Longster McDonagh © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

TERRY MCDONAGH Terry McDonagh, Irish poet and dramatist has worked in Europe, Asia and Australia. He’s taught creative writing at Hamburg University and was Drama Director at Hamburg International School. Published eleven poetry collections, letters, drama, prose and poetry for young people. In March 2022, he was poet in residence and Grand Marshal as part of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Brussels. His work has been translated into German and Indonesian. His poem, ‘UCG by Degrees’ is included in the Galway Poetry Trail on Galway University campus. In 2020, Two Notes for Home – a two-part radio documentary, compiled and presented by Werner Lewon, on The Life and Work of Terry McDonagh, The Modern Bard of Cill Aodáin. His latest poetry collection, ‘Two Notes for Home’ – published by Arlen House – September 2022. He returned to live in County Mayo in 2019. www.terry-mcdonagh.com

In the Era of Dictionaries In the era of hardback dictionaries I was young and proud to be the bearer of a mighty book – bigger than a bible, all bound, covered, arranged, dressed and as full of mystery as any dream. It nourished and defied me with reams of words – all fresh, smirking and nonchalant as you like. It didn’t ever complain when I dog-eared while snatching at elusive meaning like a young saint sucking up sanctified water from an eternal spring. Dear Dictionary, I haven’t lost respect or forgotten but, like others, I’ve joined the net race to look elsewhere for untried language and on evenings when noises die down I see you – quiet as an endless autumn – smiling down from a top shelf, urging me to sit on a granary step in a canopy of calm among breezes, perusing and skimming through leaves, as song-birds sing songs I’d like to sing. After all, we are of element, word and creature. We are one.

IN THE ERA OF DICTIONARIES

The Law Graduate and the Stolen Bicycle Admittedly, it was weekend and very late which meant the policeman could have committed a grave error of judgement even a blunder, error, lapse or slip – but no, only the departed could not have seen the law graduate swinging a loose leg hither and tither over a crossbar like one coming down with love sickness, like a mythical mushroom trying to find its way onto a film set. I live so far away, Officer. The bike was lying there and I’m a law graduate on my way home from a holy city in the Orient hoping to avoid sunburn and lads along the way. There is no crime.

A restless air filled the darkness. He wondered if she was trying to take the mickey – if she was waiting for the next breath to come upon her – lovely and all as she was – before the east began to fill with sun.

TERRY MCDONAGH

But the voice of reason will say blushes can be hard to detect before dawn, and disturbing moments can come upon an officer on duty – at first, a disturbance might seem nothing louder than the sting of feral sand by a windy seashore or the yelp of a rabbit in the jaws of a fox, but when a wily love-potion darts out of a nowhere corner, lost to all eyes except one, and thoughts – soft as sighs fix upon an unlikely law graduate, there comes a cry of one struck by one hot thought after another. I am almost not myself he pleads and being more poem than person, I call upon the doves of the air and mockingbirds on perches to advise me on how to get a stolen bike to vanish and find its own way home.

In the blazing blue of morning, they were not rational. Even with closed eyes, he could see she hardly touched the ground. When he dared to peep again, the bike that had come between them had evaporated into what was left of the dawn chorus. © Terry McDonagh 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

WITHOUT LOOKING

Thomas McCarthy. Photograph by Catherine Coakley. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

THOMAS MCCARTHY Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork. He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing programme, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published The First Convention (1978), The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996), Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (2009) as well as a number of other collections. He has also published two novels and a memoir. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review. He has also conducted poetry workshops at Listowel Writers’ Week, Molly Keane House, Arvon Foundation and Portlaoise Prison (Provisional IRA Wing). He is a member of Aosdana. His collections Pandemonium and Prophecy, were published by Carcanet in 2016 and 2019. Last year Gallery Press, Ireland, published his sold-out journals, Poetry, Memory and the Party. Gallery Press published his essays Questioning Ireland in September of this year.; and Carcanet will publish a new collection, Plenitude, in 2025.

Without Looking A tree that brought no pears Sulks into the brick wall, and cuttings

Are scattered across the wet grass Where you’ve been pruning late roses,

The dextrous movements of your hand As you pruned the loose fibres, The promise of a second chance Creating a happier atmosphere.

Under the trees it is October, Here the loosened beech leaves have

Fallen apart and the piercing sting I felt when I grasped without looking Was a trapped wasp quietly dying – Full of attention, in momentary pain, I considered the horrors of this year And the lateness of the hour,

And thought again of the year as so much Hard rain falling slantwise in our thoughts:

This unimaginable year the world’s just had, The ruined pear tree, the stab of pain.

WITHOUT LOOKING

Blackberries Beneath Dromana House There, where the tidal Blackwater meets the winding road At Killehala Pier, we had stopped abruptly to take a longer Look at winged Dromana, its pale lilac in the late sunlight, Its magisterial importances. I knew that it was to this house And on this road that Grania Fox had grieved for her lost love As she regained her foothold in the gentry’s valley. High Windows among trees and balustrades, the house still pulls Us upward into sunlight and ebbing tides. Though it is the Wild fruit we picked by the water’s edge that now fills Both mind and mouth: a sweetness I’ve never tasted, never Before in all my childhood blackberry-picking. It must be The taste the gods reserve for those who wish to remember.

THOMAS MCCARTHY

Ballistic Missiles Overhead Are not bound for us this day, us being neutral – Though accidents might easily happen And an entire Irish city could noisily expire

As Cork expired in 1920. A bad year, that year of flames.

We’ve seen so many buildings shudder in loosened robes, The pink streamers of a child’s bedroom Hanging from the seventh floor, Swallows returning to a blown-away street.

In this way our poem must be the last carrier of wreaths, Bearing phrases to make every coffin silent.

The sky is full of disorientated migrants. Destruction with its fake magnetics keeps them airborne, Each meridian spattered with blood. Commentary is so intense it is biblical,

The cold blood of the eclipse is cold, its cover total, Making the time left to us wide open

To human error. Make no mistake. These missiles Are not meant for writing with. Wherever you look

This page is in flames; and the night-sky, it is likewise.

PULLED FROM THE WRECKAGE

David Rigsbee © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

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.

Pulled from the Wreckage This month my friends die in a row. The pines and firs seem to love us, But they are only trees. Snow reflects the sunlight but the heat is left to wane.

I remember how my kind father would give me twenty bucks to fill up my car with gas each time I visited him. He insisted on doing the pumping himself and stood there proudly, like a toy soldier. Yesterday my friend told me how he reached down to take the hand of another friend who was about to leave the earth. He knew it too. I knew it. It felt good, you said. And then the kiss.

A watering can waits on the terrace table. A mouse cowers in the humane trap. The trees stand at attention, bits of snow resting on the limbs. All in the indicative, including the forest shadows.

Let’s make a holiday instead, someone said. From the window I can see the cars, tanks full, flying to their stations.

PULLED FROM THE WRECKAGE

Joshua Tree He found a pair of panties on the floor, my friend tells me. It was an unusual find in his otherwise orderly writer’s house. He makes light of it, as he should, He confesses he’s fallen in love late in life, in France. Outside my window, a mockingbird issues its invitation and pretty soon comes a response down the block. Silence ensues. Song was the form, desire the content. This we know, as we know even dolts carry it.

Another man’s last transaction took place at Joshua Tree. It was gas, before storming on across the Mojave, locked and loaded. By one of those coincidences I was listening that very album the same day

it was confirmed, and the message began to ripple out. It was for the first time since the ‘80s, when I was married to a beautiful woman whose family had escaped on the last ship out of Hamburg. This is recorded too.

I remembered sitting around the kitchen table with the girl who would become the other man’s wife, talking about Paradise Lost the way you would talk about making a birthday cake, or flora in the heart’s mighty desert.

This friend the novelist thinks about character as such. Then the mill of plot sends him back to the computer. I worry about him, surrounded by vineyards and strangers with little English. I worry about the encounters he dreams up.

DAVID RIGSBEE

“As the woman disrobed on the deck, showing off her Improved breasts, her husband inquired, ‘Would you like to take my wife?’ Politely, he declined and climbed up into the cockpit from which he set out over the night sea.” There were birds swooping who had no song. Spring was nothing to them, only a shift in current and wind, like the moment of hesitation in Paradise Lost. All this happened in one day.

Rarely do I see people moving around in the cul-du-sac. When they do there’s a dog involved. Then there are urgencies, something calling from the desert, the dark sea, from the window wanting to frame our mortal life.

PULLED FROM THE WRECKAGE

Second Person I like the way the wind lifts the glass twine of the green spiders, but I save my praise for the switches to which they are tied, also leaning into the air. I was thinking of switches the other day, how you had to go and select just the right ones when you had been found guilty of something shameful, selection itself being part of the penance and symbol too of how that might be forgotten (it never was) in wake of the lashes, formally laid on to your tiny hide. And nature is both creepier and more absorbing than you thought it would be, coming down to breakfast in your slippers, the little edemas now peeking out from your ankles, like you, bleary to no one in particular. How you hove off into the morning again, switching your point of view into the second person, like a sedan having rounded a curve at the bottom of a hill. Momentarily the glass flashes. Sunlight connects with the windshield and the oncoming traffic behaves itself.

DAVID RIGSBEE

As I say, the cables lift and hold, a fine enmeshment easy to look past, necessary even, in the dappled confusion of ordinary morning, its grim processing of nothing special. The mind says “Let…” and off you go in your fabulous jalopy. Even the weeds may be said to mean you well in their nihilistic way, as you blow past, half in daydream, baseball cap reversed, shading those mythic eyes in back.

PULLED FROM THE WRECKAGE

Blackberry The dog’s nose is a glistening blackberry, now laid on the footstool’s floral fabric. She had her walk, marking the much-marked grass that garlands the creosote poles. A call came: a professional voice, configuring its duty-bound syllables. As with any mocked-up summons, I felt no hesitation in dismissing it. Just so, planes of water wind around the rocks lying at the bottom of the brook, tracing an S, edifying the hawk, as it drives the helix of a thermal, looking for food. I remember a portly, crazed, bipolar poet of my youth spinning into the room, “I would have drunk the maker’s wine from my own goatskin, but who am I to delve?” That old aristocracy that makes Athens of a dentist’s storefront façade. Another voice on the phone said, “Is this…?” I put it down. I played sortes vergilianae with Tsvetaeva: “He loved poetry, conversation, loved to tell stories himself, only no one wanted to listen.” Especially poetry, which was obscure, and no one wanted to listen. When I asked my oracular uncle what the talent of my family was, he replied, ”To follow a mule.” But what if he had felt the inward, already deep, fall away? The stream is not a well. The hawk’s cry bears no truth. I hear the bow drawn across the strings of the double-bass.

DAVID RIGSBEE

It is the lead-out to the ending, in the silver of the room, where a summer shirt hides among the dented hangers. Or downstream, where there is nothing left but the takeaway feel, like an effulgence at sundown, streaming, low-angled, a sustained chord, before the outer bracket of thought, of memory and reason, propped up by hope, before the inner wall sends it back again.

PULLED FROM THE WRECKAGE

Two Shames I told you I always carried shame that I couldn’t save my brother from the bullet that took him down. You replied it wasn’t my place to rescue such a man, that there was something underneath he was keeping, his own shame, and the fear of it, that parental curse that trailed our childhood and darkened the way. Of course, he had done something. Yet it was always there. But why, I asked, did he call me so soon before imploring me to come to dark Ohio, if not to stop him? I turned him down, and that was the shame. You said mine was something I fed on, that let me nibble away over the years. But for him, it was the underlayment of every step he took. You couldn’t have saved him, you said, and I just murmured again: So why did he call me? And why did I not go when I heard the shake in his voice? You looked a long time at me as he would have. He didn’t call you for help, you corrected. He called to say goodbye.

DAVID RIGSBEE

©Mark Ulyseas

Photograph by Mark Ulyseas. © David Rigsbee 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

BEFORE I WAKE

Daniel Lusk. Photograph by Alison Redlich. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

DANIEL LUSK Daniel Lusk is author of eight poetry collections and other books, most recently Every Slow Thing, poetry (Kelsay Books 2022) and Farthings, eBook (Yavanika Press 2022). Well-known for his teaching and widely published in literary journals, his genre-bending essay, “Bomb” (New Letters) was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Native of the prairie Midwest and a former commentator on books for NPR, Daniel and his wife, Irish poet Angela Patten, live in Vermont (USA).

Before I Wake “There was no logical reason to ever walk a high wire in the first place. That was what he liked about it.” Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito

(Voice-over) “These fishermen sew their bait to the underside of the docks.”

Waves of fog on screen. Sounds of clogs on wood. Shadowy faces begin to emerge. He is neither Shelley nor Rimbaud so could not imagine Mad Tom speaking to his King in French. And now cannot recall what Ma said with uncustomary erudition at the last. She was disappointed he abandoned the pulpit and the blue serge suit, the humble-bumble confessional tune.

So he never issued the lowing call, the come-on down. For he didn’t belove the Christ was white. A meager sacrament after all—juice and crumbs.

Now this scene, pretending the Bard never dropped a saucy line to catch an audience off-balance in mid-expectation—there’s another shoe to drop but don’t look down. These hawks of morning: gorgeous isn’t it, John O’Dreams?

BEFORE I WAKE

Daydreams Off Vicars’ Close What big sister bird, traveling northward through this valley just at dusk, is calling: Timmy, Timmy, Timmy? Old Poet is roaming free one long, untethered moment… Everyone he meets is dressed like a drugstore cowboy or an extra in a spaghetti western with Terry Thomas. Alone on the porch with a pipe and a drop of Irish to soothe the bite. Waiting for the sleepwalker who came naked to his door last week. The fox…

Wasn’t he confiding how Wm. Faulkner came to him in a dream after his father died to tell him how to write a novel.

Raven negotiates a landing, skidding sideways to a stop. Soft voices in the midnight room as women come and go. Aries holding the left hand of reclining Sagittarius in party undress, heels in shining stirrups, speaking of Astrology. Her Cleo lashes glisten. This is his own private holy well.

DANIEL LUSK

When he asked the children how they would explain to strangers who had no religion what is meant by “Holy”: “I think Joey’s laugh is holy.” “Shoelaces are holy,” Joey might have said. “Lace.” “A breeze, you can see through it.” “Yes, like icicles.” Things he used to think nothing of now lie in wait like saboteurs.

Didn’t he write a letter to the son who had kept him from falling from Mt. Evans into the glistering necklace of cascading lakes…what he meant to say was “Sorry.” Sky is awash with shearwaters and terns.

BEFORE I WAKE

Blame It on Krakatoa “He has, by now, the look of a man who was waiting for something which had happened long before” Wm Gaddis, The Recognitions Fog of morning, the gas fire panting… an unhurried not quite syncopated pace… his heart the listener continuing to listen, aware the beats but slow and late—maybe jazz or blues—a trace slow like the faded singer’s pulse, and a trace shy of pitch. Or the precision so it appears on the ear of Suite #1 in C Major by Bach.

The sky-borne miasma of an eruption in 1883: another island continent and century settles on what we perceive as “the present,” dawning on a new generation with only slightly altered DNA was here already when he came in. The way cigar smoke or dense Latakia from tavern Meerschaums of the fathers and clay dúidíns of grandmothers, is redolent on the curtains of a house long abandoned. What of the auras of saints and whores visible to the old painters and lingering in words and phrases of the poets

DANIEL LUSK

and why does he weep at appearances to his ear—fractals of chord changes, nuances of spices neither tasted nor seen except once in a cave below the city—

whether he had responded to “the call,” mistaking the source but not the power as if someone else’s alarm from another room? Did he? He won’t remember.

BEFORE I WAKE

Beauty. And What of It? Lingering scent of rosemary on him where he brushed the bush of it, raising the curtain to his cold morning and spitting snow. Faded russet where yesterday the fox, the strutting raven. Empty now. Leaving the restaurant, a wall of roses on a dark side street so beautiful no one ever stopped to look at them.

And why in the morning when he goes with the others to the day room to collect his blanket does a woman tell him “thank you” and for what…? Garlands etc. Choirs… Cascades of crinoline and lace. Beauty & what of it? Now—juncos in pink galoshes on the snow.

DANIEL LUSK

©Mark Ulyseas

Photograph by Mark Ulyseas. © Daniel Lusk 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

MY FATHER’S CHRISTMAS CARDS

Carolyne Wright. Photograph by Daniel Santos © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

CAROLYNE WRIGHT Carolyne Wright’s most recent books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021), and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry. She has nine earlier books and chapbooks of poetry; a ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations; and five award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Bengali and Spanish—including Map Traces, Blood Traces / Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre (Mayapple Press, 2017) by Seattle-based Chilean poet, Eugenia Toledo (Finalist, 2018 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and 2018 PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation). A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Grant; on her return, she studied with Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington. Carolyne returned to Brazil in 2018 for an Instituto Sacatar artist’s residency in Bahia. A Seattle native who teaches for Richard Hugo House, she has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and the Radcliffe Institute, among others. A Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Brazil took her back to Salvador, Bahia, in mid-2022; she spent from June-August 2024 on the second segment of this grant.

My Father’s Christmas Cards My father had a battered Hasselblad 4x4 camera with a viewfinder hood that he peered into from above and a bellows-like casing for the big retractable lens. The camera lived on a shelf in the hallway closet in its scuffed, fitted hard-leather case with rusted metal buckles. He got it, he said, from a German soldier at the end of The War. My father never said how, and I was too much a child to ask.

Every holiday season of my childhood, my father took black-and-white Christmas photos, developed them in a darkroom he set up in the basement bathroom, and had them printed onto glossy card stock to mail to friends, family, and his colleagues at The Bank. The first image I remember: myself a chubby toddler plumped down under the living-room Christmas tree, turning some tinselly ornament in my hands in the hot glare of my father’s photo-studio lights. I’m alone in this photo—my brother still swelling in my tiny mother’s belly.

Another year: both of us under the tree’s bulb-laden limbs, little-girl me grinning toward the camera and gripping my toddler brother’s shoulders as if to turn his face toward the lens—his anxious smile still tentative, the flower of his worry not yet fully blossomed.

continued overleaf... © Carolyne Wright 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

MY FATHER’S CHRISTMAS CARDS

The winter I was four, my father posed us on my red tricycle (soon to be my brother’s) against a photographer ‘s white cloth drop— both of us in fuzzy footy pajamas with Santa-pattern mufflers at our necks. The trike in profile, I sat astride—hands firm on the handles, fuzzy feet planted on the pedals, torso and head turned toward the lens, curly hair cascading to my shoulders, my smile electric, outsize. My little brother stood scowling behind me on the runner between the trike’s back wheels, as tall on foot as I was on the seat. His hands on my shoulders as if his palms burned, his mouth a thin straight line, face grimacing into the lens, forehead crumpled under his straight blond bangs as if in the studio’s glare he already glimpsed the decades of resentment ahead of him.

My father had given up asking my brother to smile. The drill sergeant just beneath the surface in him barked, “Stop squirming! Stand up straight! Look at the birdie when I tell you!” Off-camera, my mother cajoled and pleaded with them both until my father told her to keep out of it, and for a moment my brother broke his frown and smirked.

CAROLYNE WRIGHT

Smile holding steady on my sweat-dewed face, I didn’t know how to make them happy. As if for all of us, my expression surged forward toward my father’s “Smile now! That’s it! That’s my girl!” Was this the first time I played to the camera—my smile gathering force, the post-War spoils of my trying to cheer them as the shutter finally delivered the season’s greeting?

MY FATHER’S CHRISTMAS CARDS

Powdered Room The afternoon I powdered my Grandma’s room I wasn’t trying to be mean. That flask of bath talcum was probably meant for my or my little brother’s bottom when we were small and whimpering with diaper rash. But I was a big girl now, I had just turned five, not this many anymore—too many fingers to hold up to the grownups. I had to show them my whole hand, which fit so smoothly around that flask of Johnson & Johnson on Grandma’s dressing table when I tiptoed through her bedroom’s open door. I’d watched her softly powder her doughy arms, pat talcum onto her pillowy bosom as it descended into cleavage of her flowered rayon old-lady dresses from the War. Blonde sunlight streamed through my Grandma’s bedroom windows, glowing across the chenille bedspread, the glass-topped vanity table and chest of drawers, the nightstand and steamer trunk from her own parents’ voyage in steerage from the Old Country.

I let myself go cheerfully creative for an hour, humming some kiddy ditty from a cartoon show and shaking talcum snow over the hand-stitched pillowcases, the bureau tops, the big easy chair (a cast-off of my Dad’s) with its crocheted afghan throw—even the shepherd and shepherdess figurines with their separate family group of ceramic sheep, and the Swiss music box, its vellum top painted with a boy in lederhosen blowing on a child-sized alpenhorn in the shadow of the Eiger.

CAROLYNE WRIGHT

How better to celebrate the colors and shapes and textures of my Grandma’s room, the snowy angels of art descended into my big girl’s shaking hand? Dinner time and I skipped upstairs to the kitchen, so richly satisfied that I can’t recall what happened next—did I announce my handiwork before astonished grownups at the table?

Or did Grandma’s cry of consternation—Gott im Himmel!—rise from the basement through the aroma of my Mother’s after-dinner coffee? Did my Daddy paddle my bottom with his hand or wallop me with the belt he always threatened before my parents sent me back to Grandma’s room to clean up everything? I doubt I cleaned up everything. Even with artful angels in her big girl’s hands, how could that fiveyear old have pulled a queen-sized bedspread off Grandma’s high antique bed, shaken it out in the yard, hauled it to the laundry area in the far corner of the cellar, bundled it into the top-loading washer, set the stiff controls, slammed the washer door, then dragged the clean wet bedcover to the laundry line outside to hang with Grandma’s wooden clothespins? Then repeated the process with afghans, pillowcases and throw rugs? Or wiped and polished the antique sheep without their slipping from my fingers to shatter on the concrete floor?

continued overleaf... © Carolyne Wright

2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

MY FATHER’S CHRISTMAS CARDS

I don’t recall, and only one image remains: my chubby hand pushing a damp rag vaguely across the glass top of Grandma’s vanity, smearing a moist swathe through the gray-white snow-dust of Johnson’s. My bottom stung, I sniffled and whimpered as I wiped, but a secret grin was gleaming through my tears. (for my grandmother, Mary Klenk Lee)

CAROLYNE WRIGHT

Saturday Night Dinners with Perry Mason Always the roast from the oven roto-grille on its pewter platter in the middle of the table —my mother’s dining-room set from before the War. The roast beef’s au-jus pure, no thickeners or roux, cooling in a gravy boat and waiting to be drizzled over the unbuttered mashed potatoes. The quick-frozen peas, steamed brilliant green (never canned), next to the other two food groups.

My father at the table’s head with a glass of something (beer? wine?), my brother and I with milk or juice, my mother with black coffee and a cigarette burning in the ashtray by her plate. Even in baggy house robe and metal curlers she hung on to her career girl’s figure and blonde highlights from those Midtown offices in the middle of the War where she out-typed and out-filed everyone. The TV in its faux-mahogany console faced the table, turned to Perry Mason so we didn’t have to talk. My father’s glass emptied and filled, my mother picked at her tiny piece of beef, sipped coffee, dragged on her cigarette. My brother muttered at her under his breath: This meat’s too pink inside, and Why are the potatoes cold?

continued overleaf... © Carolyne Wright 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

MY FATHER’S CHRISTMAS CARDS

My mother’s face twisted as his sotto voce rose, she kept silent as he went after her like a D.A. badgering a witness, and my father finally spoke: Leave your mother alone! You’re lucky to have food, and someone to cook it for you! Stop scolding him, my mother barked at my father, and my brother smirked, beaming in triumph with my mother glowering between them. My brother went on murmuring taunts at my mother until she finally cried out: Leave me alone! For God’s sake, I can’t take it anymore! My father scowled and raised his hand as if to strike my brother, glanced at my mother and gave up, took another gulp from his glass and pushed himself up from the table. I tried to focus on Perry Mason with its safe, formulaic plots and post-War characters— the willowy blonde with her beehive bouffant or pageboy flip, down on her luck but always stylish, speeding a late-model convertible around hairpin turns in the Hollywood Hills, out of cash and second chances, soon to be murdered, her snub-nosed revolver at the ready. The good guy in pressed trousers and polo shirt, his distinguished jaw with its five-o-clock shadow; the bad guy overweight in rumpled, plaid suit, jowls quivering in a perpetual snarl. Every actor with a California accent, every actor white. Except sometimes a Chinese gardener or colored maid, the token walk-ons. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

CAROLYNE WRIGHT

Perry Mason stolid and deliberate in his dark suit, glancing at some brief the judge handed him and looking past the camera with a cryptic, knowing smile. Was there any message for me in these episodes?

By this point, my brother had stalked down the hall to his room and locked his door, my father had stumbled downstairs to whiskey at his basement workbench, my mother had pushed aside her plate, her tiny slice of beef half-eaten. Meanwhile, Mason asked all the right questions, sent his detective on leads for just the right pieces of evidence. Every episode ended in the courtroom, Mason’s client innocent—sympathetic and perplexed—the courtroom audience on the edges of their seats as Mason kept questioning, catching witness after witness in compromising lies, each one the likely killer as the hearing reached an impasse and in the hush the real guilty one rose slowly from audience or witness box and blurted out, “I can’t stand it anymore—I’m the one, I did it.” Who in my family, would have stood up and admitted, I did it ? Silently, like cleaners clearing away a crime scene, my mother and I stacked the dirty dishes, wiped off the placemats and tablecloth and put away cold roast and mashed potatoes, and then I fled to my room. “I always believe my clients,” Perry Mason said. In my family, there was no Perry Mason to believe us.

MY FATHER’S CHRISTMAS CARDS

My Worst Job Had to be in that grubby phone-sales room downtown, the one I could get to on the #7 View Ridge bus: not one of those clean suburban call centers in windowless pre-fab warehouse sheds in the office parks of Redmond, Renton, or Enumclaw—the indigenous Lushootseed name that one non-Native person told me once meant something like Unholy Place of Death. This room was in a crumbling, 1880s-style brick office block on notorious First Avenue —where my parents warned me never to walk alone— between a pawn shop and a payday loan, where I had to walk alone: from the bus stop down a gauntlet of burly, hooting men in coveralls and hard hats lounging against construction scaffolding, and drunks muffled in ragged parkas in midsummer, extending their dirt-creased palms for a handout. Up three flights of unlighted stairs, the elevator next to the stairwell busted—yellow crime-scene tape and an Out-of-Order sign fastened across the halfopen door to the airshaft; and into the seedy phone room with fly-specked fluorescent tube lights casting a jaundiced glare over the long tables pasteboard-partitioned into cubicles, each with a greasy rotary-dial Ma Bell desk phone: solid, old-style phones so heavy that one of them could break your foot if it fell just right. Each cubicle with a stack of stained and dog-eared phone books, with overflowing ashtrays and brown burn scars on the tables’ edges where forgotten cigarettes had balanced while smoldering down to their ends.

CAROLYNE WRIGHT

My cubicle was in the corner farthest from the smokers. It had no ashtrays—I’d offered them on my first day to grateful co-workers who carried them off and right away began filling them. I wiped the dust from my cubicle’s surface every morning so I could almost endure hunching there all day, dialing for consumer dollars and the stingy commission I was supposed to get if clients signed up for whatever dodgy product we were selling that week: lava lamps? toaster ovens that cleaned themselves? vacation-condo time-shares in Taos with sweeping ocean views? Were there suckers gullible enough to fall for those? How could I know? I’d just graduated from Roosevelt High, not yet eighteen, clueless of career choice and empty as yet of love’s devastating resonance. My attention was overwhelmed by the mumbling, mouth-breathing presence of our boss, Cliven, who hovered over the younger women at their stations, or prowled the narrow aisles between cubicles, barking at everyone to snap to it whenever the phone voices fell silent in the sweaty summer lulls, the First Avenue traffic through the open windows a constant blare and rumble. I was a distracted dialer, all right, when Cliven pressed his half-unbuttoned belly against my chair back, leering over my shoulder and rubbing his stubbly chin between thumb and stubby forefingers as he tried to squint at my call notes.

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MY FATHER’S CHRISTMAS CARDS

In one move I hoped was cat-like, I leaned forward and away from his advancing gut, but I caught the reek of his underarms from the sweat stains ringing the armpits of his Hawaiian shirt. “You need to rewrite those call reports,” he mumbled. “Too many words.” Too many words, indeed, when forty-something Cliven and his girlfriend, barely my age, took to making out on a pair of weldedtogether folding chairs in the center of the room. She sprawled across Cliven’s spraddled thighs, and they kissed and groped on that clap-trap love seat most of one afternoon, while we dialers averted our eyes and pitched our pitching voices into the phone receivers’ black holes—squeals above the kissers’ smack and slobber and the screech of traffic below us. Next morning we labored up the wretched steps to our workspace as furtively as we’d tiptoed out on the lovers before they could achieve complete undress. We stood before the door to the phone room— it was bolted shut, a City Ordinance - Eviction Notice plastered across it. We milled like pigs in the wrong chute, asking each other whom to ask, noticing for the first time there were no other offices left in business in that building.

CAROLYNE WRIGHT

Eventually we slunk away, dispersed—dialers deprived of connections, decades before cell phones could promise all the answers. Back home, my worried mother hovering in the background, I kept dialing: the company’s main office with its hours of on-hold Musak, weary receptionists’ exaggerated sighs and promises to leave a message for management. Home early from The Bank, my father took the phone and took charge, shouting into the receiver about lawsuits and small claims court as my mother hustled me down the hall out of earshot: Let him handle it, those assholes won’t be able to brush him off.

I’d never heard my mother use such language! Next week the final paycheck came in the mail. Deposited, it bounced—stamped Returned No Funds— the bounce fee the bank charged my account only a little less than the chintzy pittance of the check. Live and learn, Kiddo, my father shrugged and walked away after I showed him. The world is full of cheats and horse’s asses, you’re lucky to be learning this early. I thought of creepy Cliven and his nearly naked lady spilling out of their chairs and roiling the heart of our tedium—what did they know on that last day? What did I know then of attempted connections? It would be years before I fell in love with anyone. (with thanks to Jeffrey Harrison)

*The name Enumclaw is derived from a Coastal Salish Native American term that translates as “place of evil spirits” . . . The City of Enumclaw says the name means “thundering noise.” –Wikipedia

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OVER THE MOUNTAINS AND WATERS

Jordan Smith © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

JORDAN SMITH Jordan Smith is the author of eight full-length books of poems, most recently Little Black Train, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Prize and Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, as well as several chapbooks, including Cold Night, Long Dog from Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations, he is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.

Over the Mountains and Waters Last month, a friend of almost four decades—twenty years as colleagues sharing an office suite, twenty separated by the Atlantic, with too-brief reunions in the happily off-rhyming Galway and Schenectady—sent me his takes on classic Chinese poems. A literary biographer and critic, he doesn’t identify as a poet, still less as a translator; like Robert Lowell’s Imitations, his poems are versions, derived from other translations that are somehow unsatisfactory, at least when compared to the writer’s more personal idea of what the poems could be. That’s what I look for as a reader or at least what I hope to find. Not the poem as it is, but what I can make of the way the writer’s sense of possibility interacts with my own. The poem is not the repository of encoded meaning as much as it is a check on the possibilities of significance I can bring to it, which is the sum of my knowledge and experiences refracted through the words of the poem. It engages my qualities of mind while adding its own. In this way it is like “the world, this shadow or other me,” which, as Emerson wrote, “lies wide around.” In this way it is like friendship.

There’s an old word for this, sensibility, the sum of what any of us brings to bear on what bears on us, a style of resistance and invitation, perhaps more visible to others than recognizable to ourselves. The reader becomes the book, as Stevens wrote, and the book also becomes the reader. If this sort of interchange isn’t all that makes literature and friendship possible, it is what makes them revelatory. And to encounter a friend’s particularity of mind in a poem, concentrated as poems should be, and informed by absence as much as by memory, is to balance recollection with the elisions of the present. I don’t need a poet’s construction, or really any words at all, to show what’s there. But to show what’s not? Here’s an opening stanza, after Liu Yu, from my friend’s McGregor Bay sequence At the lakeside, I pass the day in tranquillity. The mirage of ambition lifts. I see what’s around, Mind empty. I am getting old. The days return When I first came here—left the car behind, And set out by boat through the islands.

2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

OVER THE MOUNTAINS AND WATERS

This is at once familiar and not. I’ve spent days by lakes, but as they involved the pleasures and distractions of family, I never had a day simply to pass; there were always things to be done or avoided. (Later in this poem, it turns out that a son and a grandson are along on the trip, but somewhere out on the water where they emerge only as possibilities rather than interruptions.) And I’ve known the mirage of ambition, but I haven’t known it to lift, not fully. Nor, aware of how hard my friend has worked, and how difficult the subjects he has tackled and how he has continued despite the sometimes fierce responses his writing has provoked, am I sure that he has. But the metaphor–ambition rising like the mist, to reveal the waters, islands, shores of a presence minding its own business, which is also ours, and also no business at all, not Emerson’s shadow-self but everything that projection is not–is so apt as to be believable, if not as illumination than as the desire for it. It’s no easier to be sure that the speaker’s mind is empty (there are words in it, after all) or whether that emptiness is enlightenment or the drifting of age. But an old mind is no more likely to be empty than to be full, even sinewy, either with experience or with resistance to it. (“Sinewy” is a word I thought I remembered from Gary Snyder’s tribute to old minds in “The Sweat.” It isn’t there—“tough” is Snyder’s choice—but when I reread the poem, I still imagine it, and now both words and Snyder’s poem are part of my gloss on my friend’s rendering.) And as the poem continues, more and more contents impinge on its consciousness: a story of origins that echoes the continent’s European exploration, and in the next stanza, an island that reminds the speaker of his absent wife’s sleeping profile; further along there will be memories of academic strife, a reference to a hip replacement, the search for a book and a working pen, until finally the poem comes to rest in the gaze of a turtle “looking back at me.” As I shift between what the poem says and what I think it wants, my reading self moves between what I know of the Chinese poetic tradition (not nearly as much as I should, given how important it was to the generation of poets who were my models), what I remember of what those American poets made of what they found in the Chinese originals, what I recall of my friend’s stories of his time teaching in China before we met, our conversations about the Tao when we both taught it to first year students at a small college in upstate New York, his descriptions of the cabin he purchased in McGregor Bay, the woman he met and married in Galway, and, before that, © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

JORDAN SMITH

the son running around the living room with his sister in Glenville, his emails about the near-crippling pain that led to his surgery. If I want to go further into this valley of associations, I can, but by then I’ll have gone well off the rails that the poem has laid down.

I like the opening of Kris Kristofferson’s “Love Is the Last Thing to Go”: “The angels were singing a sad country song. It sounded like something of yours.” What’s moving is the recognition of a singular sensibility informed by a shared tradition. But you might as well substitute experience for tradition, since that’s what a tradition (the ballads, the three-chord country song, the sonnet) encodes and creates at once. When I hear Kristofferson’s song, I think of my poet friends whose voices I believe I would know anywhere. We’ve been sending poems and letters back and forth, over the mountains and waters (the phrase is from Carolyn Kizer’s epistolary poem to Robert Creeley, “Amusing Our Daughters,” which also cites a Chinese original) for a long time, each poem a presence, each poem a stay against absence: Taking leave of Wang Wei

I’ve put it off more than one day. Now I really must go. The journey would be a pretty one, Old friend, if it didn’t mean goodbye. The rulers of our time were not our sort, Even the schoolroom got strange In the end. I must turn for home, I will say no more. I will close The garden gate behind me as I go.

(after Meng Haoran)

It’s the presence I remember and the absence that I recognize, even as I shy away from it, the possibility of the mind at last truly empty, the gate closed. It’s the poem that is the gate left, with gratitude, a little ajar. © Jordan Smith

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OVER THE MOUNTAINS AND WATERS

The World’s Worst Taoist Give up learning and put an end to your troubles… He kept a copy under the driver’s seat, So he could pull it out and read a verse When he was stuck in the bottlenecked Traffic on the Twin Bridges where Rt 87 Crossed the Mohawk, and even after He figured out the work-around (Rt 9 And then a left just before the county Landfill and then along Cohoes Falls And the abandoned hydroelectric plant, And down the hill past the textile mills, Gutted out for condos coming someday, And behind it the brick tenements Where the workers lived) he still read a line Or two before he even left the driveway, Maybe just the first (The Tao that can Be told is not the eternal Tao), enough To keep his mind in check when the words He dealt with all day seemed to supplant Any world he knew, and once, curious,

JORDAN SMITH

He drove behind them mill to an alley Of rowhouses, expecting the usual Pre-gentrification emptiness, but surrounded By kids on bicycles (sturdy, Pound said, Unkillable) who clearly wanted him The fuck out of there in his SUV, he Pulled around the block past The gangway to the loading ramp Where he’d stopped once, years ago, To photograph the brickwork, and As he accelerated down Mohawk Avenue Towards the interstate, remembered The reassuring weight of that old Pentax Slung from his neck, as if it were enough To record the world’s attritions, and Never realize that you moved through Them as they moved through you.

RATTLETRAP GHAZAL

John Philip Drury. Photo credit: Tess Despres Weinberg. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

JOHN PHILIP DRURY 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.

Rattletrap Ghazal In a film noir, you try to step quietly, but your keys rattle. Both on screen and in your home, moments of unease rattle.

My first memory is bare feet on snow when I snuck out of our house. My wife’s first memory is the pink and blue on a baby’s rattle. Colonials put coiled snakes on flags. Fine then, but now, I don’t want to hear Don’t Tread on Me’s rattle. Shakers, maracas, and castanets are running in place— the way Venetian blinds, moved by a breeze, rattle. My mother was alert to noises under the hood, but no mechanic could puzzle out her jalopy’s rattle.

When wind picks up into gusts, and tornado watches begin, even samaras, dangling on sugar-maple trees, rattle. When I crack open a book of poems, I want to say Please shake me up. Please stir and swizzle. Please rattle.

RATTLETRAP GHAZAL

Ghazal of the Dark Why do we humans claim to foresee dawn in the dark? Afraid of what nightmares and blankness spawn in the dark? When I was a kid, I never admitted my fear, but I kept my door cracked, and from the hallway a light on in the dark. When trouble roiled in our house of two women, one man, my father drove off in our Chevrolet, gone in the dark. When I walk my dog after midnight, I worry about each step I take on strips of lawn in the dark. Walking late at night on secluded calli in Venice, I carried my keys as a weapon drawn in the dark.

Fighting off phantoms, brooding, I try to divert and divest paranoia, brain calming brawn in the dark.

Sometimes, my dog spots something and stops in awe, and then I make out a doe and her fawn in the dark.

I love our empty neighborhood, late at night, people asleep or fretting alone. Walking my dog, I never yawn in the dark.

JOHN PHILIP DRURY

Ghazal of Home When it gets dark, and I have to stop at a seedy motel, I’m at home, especially when I look down at coins in a wishing well. I’m at home.

When I catch a whiff of lavender, or hear a cardinal’s riff and glimpse a red blur, or notice a green vial on a windowsill, I’m at home.

When you happen upon my house, past boxwood hedge and crabapple trees, even though I don’t answer the broken doorbell, I’m at home. When the dog days and doldrums of August arrive, I’m anointed with sweat. Insulated in “air-conditioned air” during the hot spell, I’m at home. When I find myself alone on a waterbus’s deck, drifting past marshland, channel markers, lagoon smell, I’m at home.

When a deadline looms, I’m lounging on the sofa, pen on pad, or typing at my stand-up desk. Like a monk in his cell, I’m at home.

When an actor sings “poor Jud is dead,” but I hear my own name, John, and the broken doorbell finally peals a festive knell, I’m at home.

TWO POEMS

Gillian Roach © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

GILLIAN ROACH Napier poet Gillian Roach won the NEW VOICES – Emerging Poets Competition 2018 and was awarded runner-up in the The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems in 2018 and 2019. She has been published in Landfall, Takahe and the Poetry NZ yearbook.

Things Hairdressers’ Kids Know It’s only hair, it will grow back. Pride feels no pain.

Time spent angsting over a fringe or long bob is all our time wasted.

Those small snips that sneak past the black cape into collars or cowl and needle as they dry are just desperate not to separate.

Hair is technically dead but listen to the hair, it knows what colour it should be, what shape. Sometimes the hair knows she went too far and wants to get back a head.

TWO POEMS

I start a poem after reading hot new girl the moult we know it’s coming through the long nights of Matariki puffas All Black tests tights and boots and into spring when the sun rises

lemon-jelly tart they cannot wish their feathers back faster who will champion

the transitioner pin cushion plumage in disarray so many fail to get past the dogs

GILLIAN ROACH

Photograph courtesy https://pixabay.com/photos/stockings-tights-leg-legs-428602/ © Gillian Roach 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

THE BOOK OF DAWN

Randhir Khare © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

RANDHIR KHARE Randhir Khare is a national and international award-winning poet, writer, artist, playwright, teacher and folklorist. He has published 40 volumes of short fiction, poetry, novels, essays, and translations, exhibited his drawings and paintings in 7 solo exhibitions, led 2 poetry-music bands (Mystic & After Rumi) , and performed and read his work in national and international festivals. He has collaborated with A.R.Rahman who has set his poems to music. His two recent books are THE FLOOD & AFTER A Memoir of Leaving and a novel – WOLF, END TIME which explores the role of shamans from traditional communities in the preservation of sacred spaces in wildernesses. Both the books have been published by Vishwakarma Publications. His monumental magic realism novel TARA, THE DOG WHO ALWAYS WAS will be published soon. As a Mentor he has groomed numerous children, young adults and adults to grow into writers, artists and story-tellers. He is the winner of the Gold Medal for poetry awarded by the Union of Bulgarian Writers, The Sahitya Akademi’s Residency Award for his life time contribution to literature and The Palash Award for his lifetime contribution to Education and Culture. A film, TRAVELLING LIGHT, is being made on his life and work. He is the Director as well as Counsellor of a school and College in Pune.

Artwork by Chetana Sudame.

Introduction to THE BOOK OF DAWN The experience of Dawn is apocalyptic in its own special way. Akin to the cycles of living and dying, of feeling and unfeeling, of loving and unloving, of being and becoming, of Divine creation and destruction within and around us, recurring with defining certainty. I never gave much thought to this and lived each waking day with the intensity of my being then slipped into a night flooded with dreams which I experienced and explored. Then the next ‘day’ I went through the same cycle again and again and again, being the addictive person that I am.

In my insane rush to experience but not assimilate, to celebrate the sensations that bathed me rather than allow them to percolate into the reservoir within, in trust, no matter what the consequences - I missed those divine moments of being that could have awakened and transformed me. Then one night, I lay struggling to sleep, a fractured swirl of confusion suffocating me. Had I become, what I feared most - a superficial being, skimming on the skin of water like a long-legged fly? Yes, probably. I stumbled out of bed, feeling like a body shot by a sniper, trying to reassure myself that I was alive. I was frantic. Out on my balcony, I breathed deeply, letting the late- night air in and out of my lungs, relaxing them until I was still. I looked up at the Raintree in front of me and waited. I didn’t feel time pass. It was a continuous present of which I had become a part. Light washed leaves and gently trickled through. The tree hummed and sang with birds. I began writing the first of the first entry in the THE BOOK OF DAWN.

This continued for two hundred dawns. Sharing them with my painter-friend Chetana Sudame triggered extended dimensions of creative expression as she responded through her art. US based musician, has been responding by composing pieces for piano. Sanket, the dancer-choreographer has been creating performances. So the spiral has begun to expand outward towards intimate, community and public performances, readings, exhibitions and more.

Dawn is becoming for me, the seamless link between waking and sleeping, flowing one into the other, between the self and the other, between losing and finding and becoming whole. © Randhir Khare

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THE BOOK OF DAWN

Artwork by Chetana Sudame. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

RANDHIR KHARE

Prayers At Daybreak ONE I offer these prayers to the spirit of water to be cleansed, dissolved, flow from form to form until I cannot recognise my former self. Finally free.

I offer these prayers to the spirit of earth that I may be given the love and strength to nurture and protect all beings, forget myself in the forest of rejoicing. I offer these prayers to the spirit of fire to allow me to embrace its molten heart and accept the ash I am. I offer these prayers to the spirit of wind to carry me away like a winged seed to join the journey of becoming.

I offer these prayers to the spirit of space to help me see for once the wholeness of your creation. Dear One, blessed are you that embodies all and keeps my universe safe in your breath.

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THE BOOK OF DAWN

TWO Bless me with the wisdom to acknowledge my mistakes and the compassion to forgive myself.

Bless me with the patience to listen to someone I consider a fool for I just might be a fool myself.

Bless me with the courage to face myself and expect an apology each time I hurt myself by not trusting my own judgement. Bless me with the healing power of self-forgiveness each time I hurt another sentient being.

Bless me with generosity that I may share everything that I say is mine because it is not - I came with nothing and I’ll go with nothing. Bless me to love all life with all my being till I am you.

Bless me to hear the song of the cricket and dance like a dervish, filled with ecstasy. Bless me to walk into the unknown in my search for truth. This Dawn, give me the strength to be me.

RANDHIR KHARE

THREE Below the green earth, below our feet, below the streets and cars and factories, below our love, below our hate, our wars, our marriages and births, below our ash strewn rivers, below all that is alive and dead and waiting to be born - are the roots of trees, wandering, breathing, from space to space, holding the earth together in their arms. We come from them, we go to them, full with their blood. They are with us and join us, body to body into one. And you, Mother Earth, hold us inside you, protecting us.

Through the membranes of your womb the sky seeps in - filled with the joy of being. Praise dawn, praise our new selves today, our preciousness that you’ve made abovebelow the earth that we stay one though separately unique. The day with gleaming scales swims through the air, fins swirling.

Great Mother of infinity, we greet your day, turn rainbows in gratitude.

I am ready Mother for the bounty of today - singing trees, and life when it awakes;

I am ready for the joy, the disappointments, breath of breeze that flows with flights of birds; I’m ready to embrace with all my love the pain you offer me, unfeeling words, I’m ready to begin again what I’ve achieved, I’m ready to walk down untrodden ways;

continued overleaf... © Randhir Khare

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THE BOOK OF DAWN

Artwork by Chetana Sudame. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

RANDHIR KHARE

THREE (cont/...) Every dawn I’m ready to begin a new song though my throat is dry and hoarse, my body’s old, my lungs are worn and numb; I’m ready to swim through the dark of my unknowing, be empty and fill my heart again; I’m ready to follow you Mother Into the blast of never-ending rain. FOUR Tell me, why am I awake when I am dreaming and dream when I’m awake? Why do I see dark when there’s light within myself? Why do the swollen clouds not rain? Why does the storm not blow? Why does freedom taste so bitter and prison feel like home? You listen to my questions, you listen to me wait - for answers that you never give because they’re on my plate.

You know me, love, so deeply, you know my breath, my soul, though I’m lost in some by-way and I’m anything but whole. There’s light inside me glowing but it’s not reaching anywhere without your breath to blow it into the pitch-dark air. You are dawn that bathes me and opens dust-filled pores, helps me to love and embrace my failures and my flaws. So move the light within me and help it burn the dark, though freedom is so bitter and I’m ready to embark.

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THE BOOK OF DAWN

FIVE I come to you at dawn when pink and grey stream over the trees and settle in fields, wet with dew and risen butterflies cloud grass tips and rest in streams of first light, burning with joy; I come to you with all my heart like a lover returning home expectantly;

I come to you with no words, unable to speak for I have nothing to say, lost without expectations; I come to you with feathered songs on the wings of forever unable to move;

I come to you with nothing but my dreams that are locked in a box and I cannot find the key; I come to you after a long journey, dusty and exhausted with longing;

I come to you for I do not know where to go in this confusion of a lifetime; I come to you like prayer beads and unspent blessings; I come to you like I always do like a seed to a womb;

I come to you to be sheltered in the cup of your palm; I come to you

For I do not know where to go because I’ve lost my way; All dawn is burning with desire,

RANDHIR KHARE

Help me find my way in the grey-pink of dawn among clouds of butterflies In a world that doesn’t care; I come to you. SIX Droplets of dark hang from eyelashes, settle on lips, gather in the streambed of my mouth, jelly-words hardening. Here alone, I wait to greet light that seeps through the flat rock of the dark, easing through pores, trickling along bark and leaves, floating on silence. I hear your footsteps through the forest of dawn, feet treading the damp leaves Give me the courage to empty my lungs till there is nothing left inside and I sit suspended in stillness, unafraid. Yes, there is space enough in this emptiness to fill myself with your grace so my being is alive and my thoughts in tatters are blown away into nothingness.

In emptiness there is space enough to grow, become, un-become and grow again till the heart filled with stardust becomes everything there ever was and we are free.

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THE BOOK OF DAWN

Artwork by Chetana Sudame. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

RANDHIR KHARE

SEVEN What have you done to me, love, that I can no more see the horror of living, the injustice, the hopelessness, a world at war with itself, inequality, regret, oppression, the passing of belief and trust?

I only see the immense possibilities of each moment, the miracle of each breath, seasons arriving with arms full of promises, time pirouetting with rebirth and songs of forever. You have given me the purity of hope, the simplicity of wonder, the wild open skies of freedom. You have led me down corridors lined with mirages and brought me to the doorway of myself, a glistening newborn. This dawn as I walk the open spaces of the sky, gratitude cleanses me, joy envelops me, acceptance makes me whole. Blessed be your presence in my life, I am unchained, empowered. Praise be your presence great and beautiful one -

Gifting me this day wrapped in light that shivers leaves and coaxes the dawn to permeate my being and wash away regret and longing;

This is the first day of my life, still wet and shining with water from the spring of my beginning bubbling with wonder.

Surprise me with every step I take, every breath that heaves through me, every being that shows me truth and offers me a shadow to rest under when the sun at noon is unforgiving. I embrace this new life with all its possibilities.

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THE BOOK OF DAWN

Artwork by Chetana Sudame. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

RANDHIR KHARE

EIGHT Teach me the way of light as it falls drop by drop on the trees and shrubs and shrouded hills and streams down my body, entering pores, cleansing the earth within me. Teach me the way of the wind as it moves through space, on feathered wings gliding single and in flocks, migrating from land to land, river to river, field to field, cloud bank to cloud bank, season to season, churning storms, filling sails over foamed water, moving from world to world, experience to experience.

Teach me the way of emptiness where I can float without expectations, without dreams, without love, without hate, without fear, free. To live is to be awake to the surprise of becoming.

My love, stay with me as I change from moment to moment, thoughts abandoning the hive of my head.

2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

DREAM VISION

Jean O’Brien © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

J E A N O’ B R I E N Jean O’Brien is an award winning poet with six collections to her name, her latest being Stars Burn Regardless, (2022 Salmon Publishing). She was poet in residence in the Centre Culturel Irelandais in Paris in 2021. She has won, been places and highly commended in many competitions, coming first in the Arvon International UK and the Fish Internation and amongst others has been Highly commended in the Forward Single poem prize (UK) Twice Highly commended for the Bridport prize (UK) and was awarded a Catherine & Patrick Kavanagh fellowship and various Arts Council awards including a travel and training grant to Texas (USA). Her work has been broadcast and has appeared in many anthologies and in Poems on the Dart (Ireland’s Rapid Rail System). In 2023 her celebrated poem Skinny Dippying was set to music and voice by composer Elaine Agnew and sung by New Dublin Voices at the inagural launch in Trinity College, Dublin. She has collaborated with the artists Dixie Friend Gay (USA) and With Ray Murphy and Irene Uhlemann (Irl). She holds an M. Phil in cw/poetry from Trinity College, Dublin and tutors in same in places as diverse as Prisons, Community Centre, Schools, Travellers Centres, the Irish Writers Centre and at post graduate level.www.jeanobrienpoet.ie

Dream Vision – Year of the Dragon for BBA Beware the sky dragons, they eat the sun. The walls of white are actually clouds and the door hook is the tip of the fading sickle moon. With reticence I am slowly waking, caught in that liminal space between the seeming reality of dreams and the woke world. My dream has no timeline I am no age, I view the world from far behind my face an unfettered being. I am all eyes, slowly the soft rush of the running shower fades the roar of the sacred Alph river and the sweet sound of the dulcimer is replaced by the indecipherable droning of a radio in the next room and the ping of my phone on the bedside table. I stretch my legs, grow back into my toes, feel the skeleton of my spine unravelling, my mouth filled with the hum of tongue and teeth again. I am back, the sun is struggling from the dragon’s mouth, his stinking breath all red, gold and umber dancing before him. The sun has snagged on his teeth, a spill of light a dart of blue, the horizon snaps I am untethered again floating on white sheets like ice floes in a sunless sea.

DREAM VISION

Mandible For Maisie Jean That first tooth started pushing through raw gums when you were merely months old.

You viewed the new world around you seeking clues, for this your second pain. The first that tortuous route

from your mother Sarah’s womb, into hostile air and now just as you get comfortable, feel the world relent; Your mouth starts to ache, your tongue makes itself known, one entity you can control, it scrapes across the burning node that with each day seems to rise higher from your gum, or mandible, if you knew of such things. Eventually the torment eases

you no longer contort in pain, you smile in relief, showing your single tooth, and the whole world smiles back again.

J E A N O’ B R I E N

Carillion I hear nearby church bells chime the hour, cannot help but pause and count, the peals vibrating the still air of the courtyard unravelling. They finish calling. I settle back to my work, pick up my pen, make marks again between collapsing lines, try to write my mind. Suddenly the tolling starts anew;

Loud, insistent, going clapper and gong, demanding attention, carolling out with a wild tongue, the clamour changes, tightens, deepens — seems to strike a warning note. A clank, a clatter, bellow, blare, blast – all bell clear. the hollow cup warning of Milton’s pandemonium. We recall our Latin; bellicose, belligerent, a call to war, hiding in plain sight. The bells, Poe’s brazen bells.

A WORLD FOUND WANTING

Lorraine Gibson © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

LORRAINE GIBSON Lorraine Gibson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and lives in regional Australia. She began writing poetry after retiring from her work as an anthropologist. Her poetry has been shortlisted in The Bournemouth Writing Prize 2024, Calanthe Collective Poetry Prize 2023, and Flying Islands Press Poetry Manuscript Prize 2024. Her work appears/is forthcoming in journals, magazines, and anthologies including: Meniscus, Antipodes, Prole, The Lake, Quadrant, The Galway Review, Live Encounters, Booranga FourW, Hecate, Brushstrokes IV, London Grip, Backstory, Eureka Street, and others. She is the author of, ‘We Don’t Do Dots: Art and Culture in Wilcannia, New South Wales’. Sean Kingston Publishing, UK.

A World Found Wanting Girls, don’t run or walk alone. Home is also risky in a world found wanting. Dear men, perhaps silence is a type of culpability in a world found wanting.

Pollyanna died! Observe the butter mountains abundant and rancid as greed. Five loaves and fishes are profane to the economy in a world found wanting. Small humans bound in winding sheets; meet death in aid of ego and policy. Under stripes, power seeds discord with impunity in a world found wanting. Do you cross the bridge by carriage or languish in the mud of history’s cart? Who will rise and slacken the bridles of indignity in a world found wanting? In a race to the bottom, beware the ‘scrolling’ forces stealing your potential. Chains of language broken, traded for uniformity, in a world found wanting. What a wonderful bird is the pelican. I’ve seen its beak hold more plastic… I pick my shadows wisely; caves are ten-a-penny in a world found wanting.

A WORLD FOUND WANTING

The Twins Habitus is “society written into the body, into the biological individual” (Bourdieu, 1990).

We were a class of nine-year-olds when the twins arrived minus uniforms or school bags; they wore stripy jumpers knitted from wool scraps that unravelled over time like rainbow-coloured rat tails. The brother and sister smelled of laundry left too long to dry, in a kitchen given over to everyday fry-ups. I guessed they had been bussed-in from the new high-rise estates, built to replace Glasgow’s overcrowded slums and filled by families before the mortar had been mixed to build their schools.

It’s fair to say (at this point) I was raised a ‘snob’.

The twins were given ‘Free School Dinner’ tickets by the City Corporation. Unwittingly perhaps (or perhaps not) this spoke to social class and want; this positioned the twins within my programmed hierarchy of ‘us and them’. Full marks to me for reproducing with such ease, my family’s bias and practice of assumptions.

LORRAINE GIBSON

One boy gave the twins the nickname, wee rice eyes, for their eyelashes—a sticky mass of grey-white lice with the constant itch of deprivation. They appeared to have year-round colds. One day, the girl twin sneezed in class; number-elevens of pea-green snot exploded from her nose. Her brother tried to shelter her from prying eyes, wiping the mucus with his sleeve, causing his sister’s face to dry with a tight, silvery sheen.

But then, the brother told the teacher this sheen resulted from a rare disorder. I flushed with the heat of insult. Come on! Did this boy really think ‘we’ did not know that snot is not some rare condition.

Change is possible. Time, and will, and unexpected situations can (in part) re-set the hard-drive of subconscious dispositions. Sometimes I think of them, the twins. I recall the brother’s caring, his courage in the face of certain judgy children. In the echo of these recollections a long roll-call of shame still speaks my name.

ANGELA PATTEN Angela Patten’s publications include five poetry collections, Feeding the Wild Rabbit (Kelsay Books 2024), 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). 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.

Feeding the Wild Rabbit - Poems by Angela Patten • Kelsay Books (November 2024) • Language: English • Paperback: 88 pages • ISBN: 978-1-63980-662-1 Available at: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/feeding-the-wild-rabbit

ANTON FLOYD Anton Floyd was born in Cairo, Egypt, a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese. Raised in Cyprus, he lived through the struggle for independence and the island remains close to his heart. Educated in Ireland, he studied English at Trinity College, Dublin and University College Cork. He has lived and worked in the Eastern Mediterranean. Now retired from teaching, he lives in West Cork. Poems published and forthcoming in Ireland and elsewhere. Poetry films selected for the Cadence Poetry Film Festival (Seattle, 2023) and the Bloomsday Film Festival (James Joyce Centre, 2023), another, Woman Life Freedom, dedicated to the women of Iran, was commissioned by IUAES. Several times prize-winner of the Irish Haiku Society International Competitions; runner-up in Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar Competition. Awarded the DS Arts Foundation Prize for Poetry (Scotland 2019). Poetry collections, Falling into Place (Revival Press, 2018) and Depositions (Doire Press, 2022); a special, illustrated edition of Depositions translated into Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots with an introduction by Professor Emeritus Seosamh Watson (Gloír, 2024). New collections On the Edge of Invisibility and Singed to Blue are in preparation. Newly appointed UNESCO – RILA affiliate artist at the University of Glasgow. He is an Associate at the Centre for Poetry Innovation at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Anton Floyd Review of Angela Patten’s

Feeding the Wild Rabbit Kelsay Books 2024

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (Gnōthi seauton) inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi is the best known of the Delphic maxims and has been variously translated as know your limits or know your soul or know thyself. Patten in her newly published collection, Feeding the Wild Rabbit (Kelsay Books, 2024) has acted on that ancient injunction. Patten’s is a rare gift. Her work is rooted in experience, woven from the fabric of her being. And here we have a poet, writing in free verse, intent on the keenest exploration of her self and like Heaney in Personal Helicon who writes to set the darkness echoing, Patten in a dream state glide(s) effortlessly over ice. No fear / of falling, no searching for / safe harbor. Just this flying (from the title poem of the collection, Feeding the Wild Rabbit). Again in Serpentine she states: ...the supple shape of a stream murmuring by the road side, going somewhere I have never been.

ANGELA PATTEN

These lines come from section No. 4 in the opening poem of the collection, The Hidden Life of Words in which Patten sets about the intricacies of language - the tool with which she equips herself to make her explorations possible. The poem, set out in a series of seven sections, prefigures the kind of patterning the reader encounters throughout the book. Her focus is directed at the multiple layering of connotations in words, that is to say that poetry obeys the subjective logic of intuition to exploit the power of suggestion and association. No. 6, in two short stanzas, demonstrates this kind of layering: Venial: a sin that is slight and pardonable, committed without full knowledge or full consent. How one sin clasps the hand of another as they slide down the sensual slope of pleasure. How one syllable leapfrogs over the next, gathering momentum, constructing association opening linguistic windows to learn new words. Typically Patten’s imagination leaps from thought to thought, never ending where you would expect it to. This kind of surprise is deeply satisfying as the poem The Writing Process illustrates. It begins with Mornings I lie in bed sipping coffee but ends some 21 lines later with a gobstopper /...winched up into the light. Between start and finish we encounter the poet comparing herself to a multicolored mongrel, off its weekday leash who amongst other things is rooting at the tuberous rhizome / of family relationships... the labyrinthine radicle of memory. We find ourselves in the midst of words such as crosspatch, snoutfair, colossive; An archaic adage - to be moithered. The unexpected comparison of poet to a mongrel unifies the poem and sustains the conceit demonstrating how Patten’s imagination works; how her ear tunes in to her world. The poem finishes by suggesting how words and memories can act like a tug of the choke chain, remembering / the moment. In this instance the word gobstopper is particularly appropriate as it is a long lasting sweet, typical of mid-century Irish childhoods, and as the name suggests it is a mouthful that can be a choke hazard. Words, too, can carry all these inherent qualities, sweetness and light as well as dangers for the psyche.

ANTON FLOYD

The reader will find this process of constructing or shaping of a poem throughout the collection whether the themes are drawn from a life of letters (this is her fifth poetry collection), childhood, journeying, home, family, religion, or nature. Patten can take you further in fifteen or twenty lines than others can in a sheaf of poems. The tricks of language and recollected events cast long shadows and raise questions about being and belonging - of striking out, of identifying as an outsider so as to maintain a sense of personal integrity and the tension that arises from the sometimes necessary compromises involved in being part of a group. Another of her stylistic tools is well-honed narrative. Her haunting storytelling draws us into her rebellion against the deeply constraining strictures of her Dublin Catholic and working class formation. Hers is an upbringing that might find cathartic expression in her poems but it also becomes a powerful revelation for her reader. In the opening stanza of Tissue Paper, Patten deftly creates a narrative and cultural context: Father kept his rolls of colored tissue in the cupboard under the stairs to wrap the gorgeous flowers he grewblue irises, prickly pink roses, dense chrysanthemums, huge moonfaced dahlias full of earwigs -

In stanza three we see how with a flick of his wrist / he created graceful cones / to be conferred on smiling aunts / and the churlish nuns at school. The aunts in the following stanza, praised father’s gallantry / sometimes glancing askance at their husbands / who liked to back a horse or have a drink / instead of working themselves / into a muck sweat in their / rented backyard gardens. The poem segues neatly into the existential questioning of significant elements in a carefully observed childhood.

ANGELA PATTEN

The final two stanzas are unequivocal about the child Angela’s critique of the nun’s behaviour: The nuns accepted flowers on god’s behalf but could not love them openly. Never buried their noses in the bouquets to inhale their heavenly scent, but only placed them on high altars out of reach for some cold effigy to savor.

I wondered at the waste of all that toil and artistry, that beauty that would wither in a week. but was not old enough to question why god needed cut flowers in the first place, or a harem of virgins dressed in black to sing his praises morning noon and night. We see in this poem how Patten can vehemently distance herself from the religious rituals of family life and school in an uncompromising language. My Parents Were Always Kneeling ends: Mother absorbed in prayer and I absorbed in watching her, wondering even then at her unwavering belief which I steadfastly refused to emulate.

Further examples can be found throughout the collection in poems like Of Saints and Secrets, The Joyful Mysteries, Speaking of Things That Are No Longer in Use, and in Black Babies...bought on the black market / at cut-rate prices from / the Daughters of the Heart of Mary. Even so, Angela the daughter, sister, niece and friend is fiercely loyal. In Idle Hands while she trailed her hands in the soapy water she creates vivid pen-portraits of the women in her immediate family - Aunts Veronica, Nancy, Kathleen; there’s Granny and mother who have long since laid down their needles / ...Their hands are still / Rosary beads twined in their tired fingers.

ANTON FLOYD

She then completes the thought:

I gazed down into the soap bubbles as if I could see them there in living miniature like tiny figures waving from snowdomes of a kitchen shelf. What are my labors but a kind of posthumous devotion?

It is a fact of irony that this rebellious, profoundly secular love finds expression in a Catholic diction. In the clearsighted poem Shine the poet watches her father / polishing shoes on Sunday mornings... our glowing brogues lined up / in a row on the red linoleum / like little soldiers of Christ. She notes, too, the angers of the house... If only he had not berated our mother / for the state of our clothes, fumed / while she was putting on her lipstick, / shamed her by racing up the street / to Our Lady of Victories ahead... he might have / earned a more Christlike comparison. Patten adds in a tellingly compelling image: As if we children cared with our four pairs of feet encased in their shiny shoes already pointed away from the past.

The poem concludes in an unexpected way. Patten even now in foreign cities despite her lacking one iota of religious belief has discovered a way of demonstrating her love and appreciation of her parents in terms that they would understand: I visit churches to light white votive candles, pay homage to their long hard labor and remember their romantic souls, their spit-shone servitude.

And in the intriguingly titled poem In the Adirondacks there Is a Town Called Paradox she is very aware that the only appropriate response to photographs of the horrors of a Polish concentration camp discovered in sepulchral silences of the adult library is to kneel down: Maybe genuflecting is all that you can do.

ANGELA PATTEN

In many poems such as Swallowing the Lexicon, Springtime at Starbucks, Cures for Insomnia, we find elements of Patten’s impulse to break free of the narrow definitions of her sex. In Swinging Boats for instance we see a girl clad in a secondhand frock / going nowhere fast in a swinging boat. This is more explicitly explored in A Fine Romance where she meditates on the dismal life promised by secretarial school: If only I had known the manual typewriter as the mouthpiece of poetry, not symbol of my servitude. That somewhere in small rooms above the shop or stable there were women poets facing Royals, Smith-Coronas, Underwoods, tapping out their thoughts into words made flesh that dwelt amongst us.

The very poignant final line speaks laconically of the dead-end prospect of her secretarial training as the infernal clang of the carriage returning home.

Ironically, even when she has escaped the constraints of Dublin and has made a life for herself in the United States, we discover Angela, the outsider. In Out in Left Field at Dodgertown, Florida she takes cover from a sudden downpour with other spectators at a baseball game in a shelter overlooking homeplate where the Aromas of onions, mustard, pickles / mingle with lush smells of the tropics - yet here in archetypal (male) America she writes: It might be Ellis Island and I a displaced immigrant hiding behind my notebook’s paper wall for all that I can fathom this melodrama

in which everyone seems to know what to wear, what to eat, what to say on cue like the songs in a musical I’ve never seen but all the others know by heart. The interplay between rejection and acceptance is a thematic constant and at times the experience of both registers is exquisitely intense. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

ANTON FLOYD

Motherhood with its witty use of a gaff from student essay as an epigraph: Many young mothers suffer from post-mortem depression.

interestingly details another aspect of separation, how For a long time, years perhaps, / you are the breast, perfect / center of the universe, the home planet. When: Then things change. One Sunday the father dusts off his baseball glove and all is over for you, girl who can’t catch a ball to save your life.

Patten is grounded in the everyday realities of place. It is understandable and natural, therefore, for the outsider to return imaginatively to places and times, to those feelings of belonging, to the Ireland where she grew up and where the bonds of family were forged. For this exploration read the poem Last Time I Saw My Sisters in which she writes: We were like the Greae old from birth, who lived in the white foam on the waves of the sea and rejoiced to share one eye among them.

Her intuition in the flush of memory draws her to make poems that give life to her family relationships. The focus is on isolating moments and places that would have been easily missed or forgotten had she not chosen to memorialize them. Nearly always some small moment of acute perception has much larger implications as in her poem The Pancake Artist. The scene is the family kitchen on Shrove Tuesday; the objects include the big black frying pan, the blue gas burner, the fat that spat and sizzled, a milk jug full of batter, pouring a creamy stream, to form lumps and craters, the colours are brown sienna, khaki, burnt umber, buttermilk; the actors are the famished children home after school who hovered at their mother’s elbow and she the Artist who with one flick of her gifted wrist... landed the pancake like a fish / on your plate and, in marvellous Dublinese, it was all scarfed down! © Anton Floyd

2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

ANGELA PATTEN

There was No rest for her aching shoulders / until we were all contented sinners, / licking our lips, as full as eggs. The word sinners is the giveaway for me as I imagine the same nuns who appeared in Tissue Paper or the abstemious monks Of Saints and Secrets here waving an admonishing finger at the children alarmed at their overindulgence!

It would be misleading to focus solely on themes related to childhood formation family and memory - in this collection. There are poems that cast a revealing light on the living world which continues to be a source of inspiration and ecological concern - an example is to be found in Umwelt, a carefully observed poem that celebrates the diversity of tropical wildlife in Rincón: Three green parrots, then two more flying over rooftops...

It is a world of abundance and superflux: Hundreds of yellow mangoes fallen on the ground...

while Out on the ocean, pelicans dive-bomb / their prey, gulp it down, then settle back / on the water like bad-tempered old men / groussing about the menu. Here is also an animated multicolored world under the sea where fish grazing on the reef’s edge twist and ripple. They flick and riffle. The poem ends with an implied understanding of responsible stewardship: our faces behind masks and snorkels bent over them like angels.

Patten writes with an emotional and intellectual reach. Hers is a passionate reverence for wildlife. There are moments of bittersweet reflection on the possibly irrevocable ravages of the natural world by time and climate change. A poem that sounds a explicit warning is Green Up Day at the Superfund Site which describes a poisoned land. It shows how Someone found...A robin’ nest with a hole in the bottom, / bobbing on a sea of soda bottles. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

ANTON FLOYD

In similar vein, the poem Domestic Science offers a marvellous nature lesson showing how animals will exploit the built environment to build homes of their own, will continue to procreate despite the dull rumble / of a stumpgrinder at work; a mouse will make a home from scaps of insulation. The human response is suitably sensitive: We had to halt construction on a new garage because a Phoebe made her nest on the light fixture in the half-constructed ceiling. Our carpenter downed tools, refused to continue until all the chicks were fledged.

That love of the outdoors is one Patten shares with her reader in the calm yet faceted language of Lingering Over It. I enjoy the authority of her voice informed by a lifetime of practised observation. In it she describes and appreciates the effects in November of the surprise largesse of the sun on the natural world such as the whirling butterfly bush that refuses / to die back, intent on splaying / its delicate white flowers. We realise that with the geese honking their confusion, no action on earth is without its rippling implications: Isn’t it supposed to be winter? How to find our cue to flee the coming cold in all this blinkered kindness.

Why I Would Like to Be a River is the final poem in the collection and I read it as emblematic of Patten herself as a woman poet or an allegorical summation of her (writing) life. The river begins as a whisper... unnoticed, then first as a slender girl /...a river swells with rainfall. It can by turns shrink, slacken or strengthen to a torrent. The surface is full of natural interest and fecundity - skimming reed buntings, an emerald dragonfly, a kingfisher. Its voice is never a jabber, only song.

ANGELA PATTEN

Despite being impressionable, / foolish, easily led it will in the end / come round to its intended course. Like the independent spirit of Angela herself: It cannot be contained by fences, ditches, levees, dams. Leaves everything it has ever owned behind it in the past.

The poet’s detachment is key. In the final lines we find a clarity of statement that serves as a mask for much deeper moral understanding: It runs its own way home, holding a kiss in its watery mouth.

It is a remarkably confident way to conclude a collection of poems: it conveys an understanding of how the past influences the present yet in the acknowledgement of her seminal experiences Patten’s focus shifts to a guilt-free embrace of the now and the liberating vistas of the ocean. What Jane Hirshfield says of a poem I believe can apply to this collection as a whole: A good poem shocks us awake, one way or another - through its beauty, its insight, its music, it shakes or seduces the reader out of the common gaze and into a genuine looking ...make no mistake I consider such a moment of transformation to be a radical event.

Angela Patten’s own words from the poem Making Strange could work, too, to describe Feeding the Wild Rabbit - there’s nothing strange in it absolutely nothing and everything. I would simply add that it lands in its entirety and repays repeated readings.

ANTON FLOYD

To contact the author for interviews, readings, and other events: carraigbinn@yahoo.com

FLOCKING BIRDS: SYNCHRONICITY

Anne M Carson © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

ANNE M CARSON Anne M Carson is an Australian poet, essayist and visual artist whose poetry has been published internationally, and widely in Australia, receiving numerous awards including Commended in the Ada’s (2024) and shortlisting in the SWW NSW 2024. The Detective’s Chair: prose poems about fictional detectives was published Liquid Amber Press (2023). Her PhD, comprising poetic biography of George Sand – prolific novelist and social progressive – as well as accompanying dissertation, was awarded in 2023 . It was recognised with an Outstanding Dissertation Prize from the Visual and Performing Arts SIG of the American Educational Researchers Association in 2024.

This chapter is an excerpt from my manuscript Flocking Birds: Synchronicity as a path home, which grew out of the methodology chapter of my recently completed Creative Practice PhD. The text traces the thinkers (and some of their critics) – particularly Carl Jung and George Sand who have been influential in finding my own pathway ‘home’. I have adopted Jung’s definition of synchronicity as ‘meaningful co-incidence’, where he posits meaning as an ‘ordering force’ and where ‘similar things coincide’.

Chapter VI: ‘Flocking birds’ synchronicity It was 2019 and I was out of town overnight, staying in the leafy outskirts of the regional city of Daylesford in an Airbnb with majestic trees towering over the yard. I had come on a road trip to see if I could entice regional booksellers to stock my latest book. In the hour before check-out time, I had been writing about a surprising connection I had found between my poetic biography subject, George Sand and psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung (who I had studied in the 1980s); both had an uncommon relationship with birds.

When Sand was forced to spend a number of weeks in 1823 in bed-rest, preparing for the confinement of her first child, she tied fir branches to her bed and covered it with a green cloth to make it an attractive haven for the birds who were suffering in that particularly harsh winter, at her rural estate at Nohant.[1] She had taken to her bed on the basis of advice from her family medical advisor, François Deschartres. The birds flocked inside for warmth and food. They perched on Sand’s feet, and some ate from her hand. Contrary to prevailing attitudes of her day, there was no hard divide for Sand between herself and other creatures, in this instance birds, leading me to call her ‘the Bird-woman of Nohant’.[2] Sand had learnt this avian rapport from her mother, and maternal grandfather who was a bird seller on the Quai D’Oiseaux (‘Street of birds’) in Paris. Jung also befriended birds, and Jungian scholar, Tjeu van den Berk describes one bird perching on Jung’s head for ten minutes as he sat outside his retreat at Bollingen, and another taking hair from his head for her nest.[3] van den Berk describes Jung paying attention to …

… sudden or unusual movements or the appearance of animals, flocks of birds, the wind, storms, the suddenly louder lapping of the lake outside the window of his consulting room, and similar phenomena as possessing symbolic relevance for the parallel unfolding of interior psychological realities. [4]

FLOCKING BIRDS: SYNCHRONICITY

Back in Daylesford, I made notes and adjustments to a poem I had started some weeks before, dealing with these themes. That iteration was called “George Sand converses with Carl Jung about birds.” I focused in on the flocking behaviour of birds – trying to feel my way into the viscerality of this occurrence, searching for apt words to describe their ‘swirl’, ‘circle’, their ‘wheeling’ in the sky, their navigating dexterity as members of large flock on the wing.

I wondered if Jung and Sand were both modern augurs – although in ancient Rome it was only men who played this role of interpreting the ‘will of the gods’ by studying events such as bird flight and calling. I meant it in the sense that augurs discerned meaningful connections between happenings in the natural world and used them for human guidance. Dismissed in modern times as superstitious, maybe augurs relied on connections to birds similar to Sand and Jung. It made sense to me that augurs would look to birds and insects for guidance as these creatures are particularly attuned to danger for survival – for example in the weather. I could see the logic in augur’s responses and the ancient ways of attuning to them.

Many threads wove into my interest in contemplating Sand and Jung as modern augurs, serving to compress and intensify the energy of my thinking. I had long for instance had interest in people who had special relationships with creatures, or who lived in so-called ‘wilderness’ areas, (and wrote about them). Most recently the documentary “My Octopus Teacher” had enthralled me. I craved this kind of ‘bioegalitarian’ intimate relationship, almost more than human connection. Apart from mice, my relationship with otherkind has to date been with numerous domestic animal companions, mostly cats. These have been vital and sustaining relationships but of a different order than those my favourite authors describe. I have wondered what drives this yearning for cross-species communication with non-domesticated animals; always having felt kin to them, registering keenly harm done to them. But deeper, recognising that I too am an animal, I have a profound desire to have that animal nature recognised by other animals. It reverses the more conventional social view that animals are found wanting when human standards (of intelligence for instance) are used to assess them. This has been a theme which I have explored in a number of poems over the years. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose writes that the hierarchy of anthropocentrism leaves animals with “a cluster of inabilities”.[5] Rather than this dismissive attitude, my own view is that animals have wisdom and skills not only that humans are not privy to, but that against which I feared I could be found wanting. My thirty-five years of vegetarianism grew out of these orientations. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

ANNE M CARSON

As had my seven-year stint living surrounded by bush in a mud-brick cottage without electricity or mains water. I was driven by the desire for co-existence. Or as Deborah Bird Rose gleans from living with Indigenous Yolnu people, “… participants [exist] in tangled co-becomings: nothing stands alone. Everything, at pretty well every scale, depends on others through flows of energy and information.”[6] Did Sand and Jung also tune into this sense of ‘tangled co-becomings’ – perhaps this was behind their connection with birds. Ronald Hayman in his biography of Jung writes, “… [g]iven silence that was almost tangible, it seemed possible to make contact with thoughts that were centuries old, to experience trees and birds as an extension of himself.”[7] This accords with notions of animism said to be “the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena,”[8] as well as panpsychism, (which I explore elsewhere). The climate emergency is forcing change upon us, and this is reflected in the academy, although it is painfully slow. Dominique Lestel calls the emerging recognition of nonhuman subjectivity “the true scientific revolution of our time”. The import of this revolution is that ‘the human being is no longer the sole subject in the universe’,[9] a fact many of us have always known, but is yet to infiltrate decision makers. I had long been alert to opportunities for cross-species connection where they presented themselves. While at in my mud-brick cotteage I read a book, title now forgotten, whose author advised how to behave when tracking birdsong. Become aware, the writer coached, that as soon as you enter their domain birds perceive you as threat, and express this by stopping their calls. The first time I applied this listening I was amazed to hear, just as the author said, that as soon as I entered the forest adjacent to my cottage in St Andrews, the orchestra of bird voices fell silent. What a rude awakening. I knew in theory I was a potential predator of course but I had never before felt myself as birds would experience me. It was salutary. I found a posse, sitting and leaning against a tree, rugged up with winter woollies, gloves and a beanie. I let my heart rate settle and tuned into what surrounded me – dusty, faintly eucalypt smells, patches of sky visible through the canopy. I sat quietly long enough for the small woodland birds who surrounded me to realise I was not a threat and resume their calls. I had turned, as long as I didn’t move, from a potential predator into the benign presence I hoped to be. © Anne M Carson 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

FLOCKING BIRDS: SYNCHRONICITY

In one of her novels, Indigenous American novelist Louise Erdrich describes the training which would refine a simple listening process such as I had undertaken into knowledgeable receptivity; She taught her how to tell from the call of birds what animal had entered the woods, how to tell from the call of birds which direction and what type of weather was approaching, how to tell from the calls of birds if you were going to die or if an enemy was on your tail. [10]

Sand was not Indigenous but her working class mother and bird-handler maternal grandfather passed on unusual and highly developed avian skills. Sand writes;

As for me, the sympathy for birds is so deeply ingrained that my friends have often reacted to it as though it were some prodigious feat. I have, in this regard, done some miraculous training, but birds are the sole beings in creation on which I have ever exerted a power… [11]

The kind of ‘power’ Sand exerted over birds, can be inferred in a passage from her novel Teverino (1845). This text explores bird-tamer Madeleine’s avian relationships. An advocate for the girl expresses the nature of Madeleine’s power as “a particular intelligence, a sort of secret magnetism, entirely exceptional”.[12] I believe the “miraculous training” Sand received from her mother allowed her also to exert this kind of “magnetism”, and for this to be the source of the “power” she claims to have exerted on birds.

So, augurs were probably highly attuned to the natural world, skilled in understanding their ‘normal’ behaviour as well as behaviours which deviated for normal. One of the consequences of living predominantly inside a built environment is that we are often protected from such ‘natural’ phenomena, and for Anglo-Australians, at least, collectively we have lost wisdom in knowing how to ‘read’ the behaviour of birds and insects, the approach of storms, or to connect our inner and outer worlds symbolically and meaningfully. Perhaps the Climate Emergency forces this upon us (disproportionately on the poorest members in our global community) with extreme weather events.

ANNE M CARSON

Meanwhile, in Daylesford, it was almost check-out time. Putting pen and thoughts of augurs and birds aside, I took a couple of bags out to the car. A strange rumbly sound coming from the east, approached me, and stopped me in my tracks by the car. Some moments passed before I realised it came from a flock of birds. I heard them before seeing them; wingbeats, a grumbly, whooshy sound, and their voices, energised, excited, exuberant. They hurtled into view, first the leaders, then the main body, pushing forward, dark shapes against the light, whipping across my field of vision – not very far above. They were Little Corellas; I could see their orange eye feathers. There were so many of them, I felt both dwarfed by the hugeness of the space they took up and somehow strangely taken into it. Their arrival and departure happened very quickly, but I was caught, pinned to the spot by surprise. I was contemplating the connection between Sand, Jung and augurs. Then I myself was standing under, but somehow aurally enclosed within, a flock of birds. My heart started hammering, adrenaline fizzed. Energy surged into my nervous system, lighting it up. Is this really happening? I was critiquing it, trying to assess the likelihood of its occurrence, attempting to minimise its charge. At the same time, I was enclosed within it, affirmed, amazed, full of wonder and buzzing. Suddenly Jung, Sand and myself were brought startingly close together. The most striking element about this synchronistic experience was how it collapsed the usually hard boundary between psyche and matter – between my internal thinking/ feeling self (Sand, Jung, and birds) and what was outside me, between me and the world. These two domains – inner and outer – had intersected simultaneously, “shrinking the space/time gap between them to zero”, as Payne-Towler describes a hallmark of synchronicity. Immersed in ideas about augurs and words for flocking birds, my internal reality matched momentarily with the external reality of an actual flock of birds flying low overhead, seeming to swerve in my direction. Of course this could be dismissed as mere coincidence but the simultaneity felt uncanny. As I had felt with previous synchronicities, it felt pointed. No-one else would have had that confluence of connections had they walked out while that flock of Little Corellas flew overhead, unless they too had been honing in on birds’ flocking behaviour. Such an encounter may have been impressive, as large numbers of animals en masse often are, but the experience would not have joined up internal and external realities rendering the experience personally significant. © Anne M Carson 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

FLOCKING BIRDS: SYNCHRONICITY

So uncanny does this internal/external matching seem to be that it raises “awkward and unanswerable questions”, as Payne-Towler calls them, making one feel observed, making it feel like one’s thoughts are not confined to one’s mind alone.

Who is out there/in here, reading my mind? How could this event be so clearly reflecting and answering my inner dialogue …? Even the first hint of this thought breaks open the unspoken existential questions … Who or what is witness to my inner acts? What is this reflective medium that registers and responds to my self talk? What is it that receives my psychic declarations and stances, which in themselves have no material dimensions, but which magically dictate the shape that my outer life takes? Collective consciousness doesn’t even supply a word we can use to discuss these considerations. [13]

Because such occasions strike the recipient so forcefully, because they have struck me so forcefully, breaking through usual modes of siloed self-perception, the meaning they carry seems charged. The next step is to unravel that meaning. ‘Focussed intensity’, I had learnt through PhD research, was one of the preparatory attitudes for synchronicity ‘generation’. When I first began my research even the notion of synchronicity ‘generation’ was new to me – putting emphasis on the role of individual agency. According to Payne Towler and (other researchers such as Austin and Beitman) the role of individual consciousness is central in synchronicity; playing roles both in leading up to synchronicity, as well as permitting recognition and discernment of meaning (“witnessing” in Payne-Towler’s lexicon) when it occurs. She claims that the ‘catalytic individual’, … must possess the necessary emotional charge to trigger the potential outcome into manifestation. The triggering of a synchronicity doesn’t have to be consciously sought or envisioned, but the energy for it must be latent in the personal unconscious. This component of personal responsiveness specifically ties a human ego to the ultimate manifestation, marking it out as “mine, for me, because of me” in no uncertain terms. [14]

When Payne-Towler writes “mine, for me, because of me” I don’t read this as an egoistic claim – I interpret it as meaning that synchronicity is individualised and personalised to a high degree – the energy and meaning for the synchronicity has been sourced from the personal unconscious and is addressed specifically to that individual. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

ANNE M CARSON

I felt tied to the ‘flocking birds’ synchronicity in this most personal and keen way. In contemplating it, I felt affirmed in how I was connecting Jung and Sand – as contemporary (from the vantage point of ancient Roman) augurs, as if the synchronicity legitimated the connection I had made. I like to think of these two impressive humans – transgressive thinkers, activists for change and self-transformation as my literary/creative forebears. I like the idea that they may also have been drinking from the same well, both having an unusually deep connection to the ‘natural world’. In legitimating the connection I had made between them, I felt in turn legitimated in the way I was becoming a scholar.

I also felt that Sand would not have been unhappy with the connections I had made between her and Jung (though she never met him, preceding him by decades) as she herself read meaning into her connection with insects, as one biographer, Belinda Jack makes clear after a grasshopper named Cri Cri which she had befriended while her marriage disintegrated was accidentally killed by a domestic worker inadvertently slamming the window on it. She read the death of the insect as an augury. Unlike the grasshopper, she would not allow herself to be crushed to death at Nohant. She would find another way out. Writing offered imaginative escape, but it also suggested possibilities for real escape. [15]

You could say Sand wrote her way out of the prison her marriage had become. But writing became much more than that – giving her the opportunity to become over the course of her prolific literary life one of the most celebrated writers of her day.

I became engaged by the creative writing potential of my ‘birds’ synchronistic occurrence, particularly its proto-poetic aspects. But despite multiple drafts, I couldn’t make the poem fly imaginatively. I got bogged down in describing how the synchronicity had worked – rendering my words clunky. Dissatisfied, I put it aside. Some months later, I found a totally new beginning with the supposition ‘what if’, positing certain propositions, all attending to the question of ‘how could this have happened?’. I found a poetic way to reflect my questions.

FLOCKING BIRDS: SYNCHRONICITY

Say it isn’t all about me Say birds have agency Say flocks have group minds Say they turn them outwards, scanning the environment Say they register planes of energy, vibration Say they discern disturbances in the field, changes in air pressure Say they recognise planes of resonance Say my trying to find words to describe their flight generates thoughts and feelings Say my thoughts and feelings vibrate at certain frequencies Say these bird-empathic thoughts and feelings emit energy, create a plane of resonance Say my thoughts and feelings are not confined to my physical body Say my bird-empathic thoughts and feelings are a field or a plane Say that plane is recognisable to the flock Say they recognise me on that plane Say it’s not personal; that beings recognise signals from other beings Say they resonate to this plane Say the flock swerves my way

My poem acknowledges the agency of a flock of corellas and the possibility of them responding to human focussed intensity. It also endeavours to represent one of my keenest, even uncanniest experiences of cross species connection and synchrony. In commenting on Deborah Bird Rose’s writings about ‘shimmer’ a group of scholars suggest that, If we were to hold ourselves open to the experience of nonhuman groups, we would see multispecies gifts in this system of sequence, synchrony, connectivity, and mutual benefit.[16]

Even though I’m uncertain what benefit the birds could have obtained from a moment of synchrony with me, perhaps curiosity is sufficient. This essay has explored my own openness to synchrony as well as involvement in ‘new immanent modes of existence’ with other species and how this was demonstrated in a powerful unanticipated event of flocking birds.

ANNE M CARSON

1. This anecdote and the following details are taken from Sand’s autobiography: Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: A Group Translation), ed., Thelma Jurgrau. New York: The State University of New York Press, 1991. 2. I explored these themes in an essay titled “The Bird woman of Nohant: exploring George Sand’s avian relationships” forthcoming in George Sand Studies. 3. Jung quoted Beitman, “Synchroners”, 281. 4. Ibid. 5. Rose, Shimmer, 18. 6. Ibid, 24. 7. van der Berk, Jung and Art, 36 8.Oxford Languages, retrieved 25/4/24. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+animism, n.p. 9. Bird Rose, Shimmer, 73. 10. Louise Erdrich, LaRose. London, Corsair: 2016, 199. 11. Sand, Story, 78 12. Sand, Teverino, in The Collected Works George Sand. Delphi Classics, Series Thirteen #2. UK, 2022. E-Book, retrieved 21/12/22. https://www.delphiclassics.com/shop/george-sand/. 13. Payne-Towler, “Synchronicity”, 70. 14. Payne-Towler, “Synchronicity and Psyche”, 76. 15. Belinda Jack, George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. New York: Vintage, 2010, Kindle, loc2958 of 8525. 16. Malone, Karen; Marianne, Logan; Lisa Siegel: Julie Regalado; and Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen. “Shimmering with Deborah Rose: Posthuman theory making with feminist ecophilosophers and social ecologists” in Australian Journal of Environmental Education (2020), 1–17 Retrieved 24/3/21. doi:10.1017/aee.2020.23 Works cited

Beitman, Bernard. “Synchroners, High Emotion, and Coincidence Interpretation.” Psychiatric Annals (May 2009): 280-286, doi: 10.3928/00485713 20090423-02. Erdrich, Louise. LaRose. London, Corsair: 2016.

Jack, Belinda. George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. New York: Vintage, 2010. Kindle.

Malone, Karen; Marianne, Logan; Lisa Siegel: Julie Regalado; and Bronwen Wade Leeuwen. “Shimmering with Deborah Rose: Posthuman theory making with feminist ecophilosophers and social ecologists” in Australian Journal of Environmental Education (2020), 1–17 Retrieved 24/3/21. doi:10.1017/aee.2020.23 Payne-Towler, Christine. “Synchronicity and Psyche”, Jung Journal, 14:2, 64-90. Retrieved 25/9/20. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2020.1742556, 80. Rose, Deborah Bird. “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed” AURA, 5/9/14, Retrieved 18/2/19. https://vimeo.com/97758080.

Sand, George. Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: A Group Translation), ed., Thelma Jurgrau. New York: The State University of New York Press, 1991.

Teverino, in The Collected Works George Sand. Delphi Classics, SeriesThirteen #2. UK, 2022. E-Book. Retrieved 21/12/22. https://www.delphiclassics.com/shop/george-sand/. van den Berk, Tjeu. Jung on Art: The Autonomy of the Creative Drive. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebrary. Website

“Animism” on Oxford Languages website, retrieved 25/4/24. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+animism, n.p.

A SMALL VIEW OF SKY

Lincoln Jaques © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

LINCOLN JAQUES Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, including Landfall, takahē, Live Encounters, Tough, Noir Nation, Burrow, Book of Matches, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Blackmail Press, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Mayhem. He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural I Te Kokoru At The Bay hybrid manuscript awards, and was the Runner-Up in the 2022 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. He was guest editor for the 2023 and 2024 Live Encounters Aotearoa Poets & Writers editions.

A Small View of Sky He sat in the broken chair the only item of furniture in an otherwise empty room. The company of his own reflection from the window with no blinds

He’d moved in with nothing slept on the floor breathing in the fresh paint that plastered the growth of mould. Not so much as an AM radio to tune into human voices. At first someone brought him blankets, another a banana box of groceries. Still others came out from their simple units, walking the path to his door.

Bringing utensils they needed themselves they tried to build him a life again his frailty an apostrophe to our mortality. In the evening I saw a light burning as he sat still in his chair the untouched goods laid out. He would move forward reach out to an object his hand stopping mid-air

as if to open an invisible door into another forgotten life where someone he knew waited for him, once more to disappear.

A SMALL VIEW OF SKY

A Letter for the Dead A friend died last week. I’m not even sure he was a friend, more a close colleague, an ex-colleague at that. And I didn’t even know he’d died until today, when suddenly I looked out the window, and noticed a branch of my lemon tree had drooped, heavy with fruit, or weeping.

When colleagues or friends die nowadays you rarely get told in-person. It’s posted on Facebook, a News Feed item that pops up. “So sad to inform all our FB friends…” You stare as the pixels evaporate in a mist.

My last SMS to this colleague-slash-friend: No worries…enjoy yr day. Catch up soon. Thumbs up emoji. LOL. 22 May. I’d travelled down to the cold blade of the Coromandel the hills caving in with the Miners’ bones, the fog laying in the valley like a tiger’s tongue. We hadn’t managed to catch up. I was there in his town and it didn’t work. I’d missed him again. Not the first time.

LINCOLN JAQUES

We were so close at that moment yet again something got in the way. A week later on FB he’s pronounced dead. Nothing seems real—no coroner’s report, no doctor’s certificate—no reasons. Only the FB fallout.

Today I drove through streets of dead mists; through a city shedding its colour. It’s June, the sun barely acknowledges us. But this morning after I read the outpouring of grief online I noticed a cobweb that captured the early splinters of light, soon to fade, and I kept driving away from the bland grey skies, until I reached the city limits. There I glanced in the rearview mirror as a clap of thunder made all the trees shudder.

A SMALL VIEW OF SKY

A Suicide I heard, much later, that a friend of a friend of some 30-odd years, got out of bed early on that morning, the birds not yet awake

locked all the windows, checked the gas knobs were turned off on all the appliances, went back into his room. By then the birds started to realise what was happening. They get a feeling for such things, birds. He dressed before his mirror in a fine cotton

shirt. Buttoned it up to the neck then unravelled a silk tie—the only one he owned all his life— the light beginning to come through the curtains. The shoes he’d polished the evening before. He’d planned it that way, to save time. A pair of leather Clarks. He wasn’t extravagant.

He left his house, after locking the back door behind him, putting the key under the geranium pot knowing someone would find it eventually. He would have taken the path leading to the garage which he’d cleaned out, ready. He went into the garage without locking the door

LINCOLN JAQUES

behind, that would be senseless and waste everyone’s time. I’m not sure what he did after that. But the lights were not turned on in the garage and when they found him he’d made sure that the noose would stop rotating when his body faced the rear window because when they entered the first thing he didn’t want them to see was his tie, being ashamed that he only owned one tie his entire life.

He would rather they see the clean pressed back of the cotton shirt and his brilliantly polished Clarks and the last light coming through the rear window.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Sinéad McClure © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

SINÉAD MCCLURE Sinéad McClure’s writing is published on radio, in anthologies, in magazines and online including; HIVE, The Long Poem Journal, The Honest Ulsterman, The Cormorant Broadsheet, The Stinging Fly, Southword, Live Encounters and many other fine publications. She was recipient of the Roscommon Bursary Award for her first solo chapbook The Word According to Crow. She was shortlisted in the 2024 Fish Poetry Prize and Highly Commended in the 2024 Patrick Kavanagh Award. www.sineadmcclure.com

Don’t be afraid of the dark The night my husband died there was a temporary calm, after a storm. It was close to midnight and I was on autopilot. My world had stopped. I was trying to avert a tailspin, figuratively and literally as I manoeuvred the car past the hotel I had booked into, and headed out across town for home. There was something primal in my reasoning; I needed to go home because that’s where my husband would be. Pulling left into the rural Irish town I live in, everything was in darkness. The storm had done its damage, we were in blackout. Now our home was cold, dark and lonely. I was in some sort of shock, aided by a glass or two of sickly red wine, and a tearful call to my oldest friend. It was the darkness that seemed both fitting and disturbing. It was also a sudden realisation that life would never be the same again. The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.[1]

It isn’t all darkness, though, is it? As Anne Sexton says in her poem about Van Gogh’s painting, there is something transformative about how night is perceived. In my case the town did not exist either. For that night and as it turned out the night after too, the lack of power – left me in a deep mourning, accompanied by the cries of foxes. The ghostly songs of foxes happen at this time of the year, but on the night my husband died it was as if the foxes knew. The blackness of a collective grief, boiling with stars.

Having electricity is something us westerners take for granted now. My parents remembered an Ireland without it. I remember a childhood of no central heating, of chilblains, and their raw potato cure. Not wanting to leave bed on a frosty January morning. I remember at least two Christmas’s with my husband where we had no electricity and no running water. Memories that aren’t a hardship, like Sedaka sang, sometimes, I miss the hungry years.[2] However, organising a funeral without a full phone charge or access to a computer was impossible. I rang my provider it would be another three days before this outage could be rectified. I rang back and explained my predicament. My husband died...I didn’t really need to go into any other details. In typical, warm Irish fashion the lady just replied, leave it with me. © Sinéad McClure

2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

SINÉAD MCCLURE

Half an hour later the electricity linesmen were outside my gate, less than twenty minutes later I was fully connected to the grid. The first thing I did was turn on my computer and listen to my husband. And I need you more than want you And I want you for all time And the Wichita lineman Is still on the line[3]

Let me tell you about Jho Harris. He was born in 1957, in County Wicklow, the youngest of four siblings. From a very young age he knew what he wanted to be in life, but in Ireland in those darker days, wanting to be a radio producer when you were working class wasn’t an option. He would get a more sensible job. This wasn’t for Jho though. He started working in pirate radio in the 1970s. He was a disc jockey. A man who had a voice butter soft and deep, perfect to accompany the discography. He had a huge passion for music, not just for listening to it. He wanted to curate it. When I met Jho he was a radio producer for a talk radio show that I had begun working on.

We were instantly drawn to each other. I didn’t think I had anything I could offer radio, but Jho showed me otherwise. He taught me how to edit. He taught me how to broadcast, how to present. He also opened my ears to an expansive, varied collection of music. In our early dating days he made me mix tapes, and up until two days before he died he was doing the same, albeit in the mp3 digital format. Together we produced the arts programme for the Northwest and Western region of Ireland for a decade. He interviewed a myriad of people from Joan Armatrading to John McGahern and all disciplines from visual art through to music and literature. He had a certain style. It was conversational, compelling to listen to. In recent years Jho was the series producer and editor of many of our children’s radio dramas for RTEjr radio. He championed the arts and did most of his work for little or no monetary reward. He set-up a podcasting site years before podcasts were a popular medium. He was a kind of revolutionary with a brilliant mind. When I listened back to Jho two days after he died, he made me laugh. © Sinéad McClure 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

1. Anne Sexton, The Starry Night, The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton,Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981 2. Neil Sedaka, The Hungry Years, Sedaka/Greenfeild, 1975 3. Jimmy Webb, Wichita Lineman, 1968 4. John F Dean, Late October Evening, The Instruments of Art, Carcanet, 2005 5. John F Dean, Late October Evening, The Instruments of Art, Carcanet, 2005

SINÉAD MCCLURE

I knew missing him would be all encompassing but the memory of his voice would always be my light. We sat and watched the darkness close —like a slow galleon under black sail nearing; and grew conscious again of those of our loved dead who might come[4]

For some the dark is a great phobia. Leave the light on. Open the door a snatch. Can I bring a torch to bed? Does it matter if I fall asleep with the television on? Where will darkness take me? Jho had a metastasized brain tumour, and one of the many vagaries of this despicable disease is the inability to sleep. His only reprieve from a brain that wanted to end him every day was music. He craved the dark. He wanted the peace it could bring. This essay marks a year since Jho left. I began writing this in December during another blackout. This one went on for almost a week. I had to adjust to my solitude. I managed to find an enviable space with my own thoughts. The light from a crackling fire, such starry, starry nights. I drank better wine, opened the Christmas brie, listened to classical music that made me cry, argued with talk radio, lit candles, cuddled my dog. A storm bookended the year, a year where there has been a lot of darkness, not just personally, but globally. I can’t even begin to place myself in some of the deep, dark holes that humanity has had to endure in 2024 only to say I have dipped my toe in. When I turned back, near sleep, to hold you, I could pray our dead content again under black sails, the tide brimming, then falling away.[5]

But listen, don’t be afraid of the dark. It is the dark we came from and the dark we go back to. It is a good night’s sleep. It is the shadow that falls softly. It is the light returning.

Jho Harris was a radio producer, editor, podcaster and supporter of the arts. He died on the 22nd of January, 2024, at 11pm. © Sinéad McClure 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

SUBSIDENCE

Mark Roberts © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

MARK ROBERTS Mark Roberts is a writer, critic and publisher living on unceded Darug and Gundungurra land (NSW, Australia). He is co-editor, along with Linda Adair, of Rochford Street Review. His last poetry collection, Concrete Flamingos, was published by Island Press in 2016. His next collection, The Office of Literary Endeavours, will be published by 5 Islands Press in 2025.

Prose poems from Subsidence 1. Last night I dreamt again of escape. Not of how I could leave the city by walking to the transit station and catching a bus to the underground car park just beyond the city walls where I left my car months ago, but of how I could keep climbing the stairs, laneways and skyways of the city until I could step onto a soft grey cloud and drift to the islands I sense wait just beyond the horizon. 2.

Outside my room there is a mass of people pressing in on me. I can feel them against the walls. I need to open the door to relieve the tension.

SUBSIDENCE

3 I rarely talk now. Only when I walk to the road on the other side of the hill behind the city and wait at the side of the dusty road for the bus that travels to the town on the river where there are still shops and cafes, bars and people. I speak then, request coffee beans, rice and wine. Check at the post office for the cheques that arrive from my publisher. But my words are limited, nouns mostly and no abstractions.

My language is almost entirely written. I hear words in my head but rarely utter them. I write a poem, wait a little, and then translate it to Italian. The poem lives for a while split, each word stretching to another.

MARK ROBERTS

4 I look out across the old promenade, abandoned now as the ocean rose. I imagine I’m making a film, a record of what is being lost. The cafe is framed by my lens. Black and white. Abandoned on the walkway above a beach of small pebbles now covered by a rising sea. My camera goes inside - a king tide surging through the empty cafe, water lapping at the top of the bar. The camera just above the surface of the water, hand held as if floating. Then dissolving into a shot from above, perhaps from the top of a nearby building or a drone. The view moving from a close up of the sign on the roof slowly back to show the building flooded, surrounded by the sea reaching out to a retreating camera.

SILENCED MOTHER TONGUES WHISPER BACK

Linda Adair © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

LINDA ADAIR Linda Adair is a poet, publisher & co-editor of https://rochfordstreetreview.com living on Darug and Gundungarra Country. In 2020 Melbourne Poets Union published her debut book The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering. Her poems has been anthologised in several volumes, and various journals both in print and digitally locally and internationally. She is currently working on a verse memoir of the women in her family.

Silenced mother tongues whisper back Máire’s mathair Ellen wore jet-black mourning brooches of braided hair a crucifix recovered from a French field like medals of maternal sacrifice of weans lost to war pestilence calumny and the Crown.

She forbade her brood to speak Gaeilge -- the Old People’s language that the charming fiddle player bantered with her girlish heart before they wed and raised twelve children until a bushfire took their last baby and all hope

Later the deserted mother urged her daughters to make ‘good marriages’ conceal their Irish heritage become a Mrs Initial Capital, British Surname: your life and your children’s lives will be easier than mine if you do most of the girls took their Mam’s advice rarely thinking and never speaking Gaeilge in public only the older Máire remembered fragments from her morai – the grandmother who’d travelled from Roscommon to Sydney in search of a new life skerricks of information recounted sometimes over a pot of strong tae agus siucra with her inions (daughters) and garinion (granddaughter)

continued overleaf... © Linda Adair 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

SILENCED MOTHER TONGUES WHISPER BACK

tales of habit and superstition trickled down the generations - believing ‘pearls were for tears’ pouring a cupán tae to read the leaves knowing you may be abused if you wore green my rebellious Nanna, Máire named her first-born in honour of St Theresa but also adopted a fictional Irish girl of good character’s name and now I carry that heroine’s name. After a lifetime immersed in the English Canon I now actively listen for the whispered voices of the generations of women before me who were silenced, othered, even outlawed

then sent here to serve empire’s colonial project ‘to populate or perish’ the Stolen Wealth that has never been ceded nor had a treaty signed. As long as Australia keeps the ‘Butcher’s Apron’ in the flag, daily tiny woundings will continue to cut out the mother tongues whether they are from Eire or Indigenous to Country or any latter group of people seeking a home

the linguafranca of my comfort zone is a site of contest between lives lost in transportation and languages suppressed in the service of assimilation and endless wealth for some glamourised as ‘civilisation’ and common sense.

LINDA ADAIR

Excerpt from the Honour Roll Cards Beneath a framed Jesus of the Sacred Heart two women exchange a look of infinite sadness Christ gazes with unseeing compassion into the chiascuro setting warm yellow light from the lamp on the cedar table contrasting the cool sepia portraits of two young men in uniform photographed heroes before they sailed.

Within the lamp light’s glow two small envelopes addressed to Mrs Murphy postmarked the Australian Imperial Force sit unopened alongside a quill pen, a bottle of ink, and a blotter --- paltry defences against the dispassionate bureaucracy of the Imperial War Office.

Ellen wears mourning dress like a second skin ever since that jet-black horse-drawn hearse made its way along the main street of another town came out to pay their respects as two infant grandchildren were taken to rest in their other grandmother’s grand marble grave their names elegantly enscribed on the cold white pediment -the shades of black have intensified with each ensuing loss. Her upright posture belying the load etched on her face she sits on one of the spindle-back chairs watching her youngest daughter’s delicate pale hands reach out from the shadows to set two Willow Pattern cups and saucers and place the tea tray down on the small square table. She wishes she had a bottle of brandy the nerves could do with a steady but this house has long been a refuge from ‘the grog’ and the horses well at least after Tom left her.

SILENCED MOTHER TONGUES WHISPER BACK

The Honour Roll cards II Ellen picks up the first envelope tears it open with suppressed rage then slowly places the card on the cedar table Cecily dips the nib into the ink bottle and offers it to her mother inviting her to say what should --- but never can --- be said. Ellen recoils from the pen as if it were a bayonet aimed at her womb another kind of death awaits simple words that will order reality once completed.

Amorphous grief will solidify from personal burden to immutable public fact such words mark a boundary a surrender of maternal hope that her two boys will again walk mud through the back door hungry for a roast lamb dinner.

LINDA ADAIR

Charles resembled a lead actor in a silent film standing 6 foot 2 inches tall with black hair and eyes handsome and seemingly invincible Allan was less striking but academically gifted his blue eyes twinkling with bravado as underage he enlisted at the call up with a group of rowdy mates The tears well up behind her glasses she begs off Cecily your handwriting is much neater than mine will you be scribe please -- I’ll just sign it.

SILENCED MOTHER TONGUES WHISPER BACK

Wolga (Clematis aristata – the climber that gave the Wolgan Valley its name) The Wolgan Valley enclosed by high cliff walls a green, bottle enclave invaded by Europeans to graze cattle and sheep

our wild west story untold and unconsidered damage that meant a carelessly thrown cigarette made a river burn

Newnes is a parable a myopic example of fossil fuel dependency on one product the world no longer wanted (Sound familiar? Sound like coal?)

Before 1825 wolga vine grew lushly in the safe valley there Traditional Owners may have sheltered from the brutal Bathurst Wars

LINDA ADAIR

The Wiradjuri pathway in -- renamed ‘Donkey Steps’ as livestock took hold trampled the rich valley floor for the Lord of Capertee.

Now shale oil ruins the over-capitalised folly of a media baron of his day doomed relics of greed only remain of your childhood world.

INCANTATION

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.

Tigers in Cambridge It’s not the spires that stay with you but the houses floating in gardens like boats, the sky

roughly under-painted blue, shells and their rowers over-decorated in garish sun, river falling— swelling—like breath, dragonfly buzzing an intermittent static in your head. In the park, tigers lurk

in cherry trees, trunks striped black, leaves daubed in single strokes unattached to twigs or branches, deranged amber eyes. Later, on the road north, a perfunctory call from a lonely phone box and beyond it,

a view of hell: rainbows arched across an infinity of wheat fields, the distant hills open cages.

INCANTATION

Incantation I don’t know the name of the beach where I’m standing: there’s a giddiness of the world being new again, anything possible, and a tiny theft of pleasure like anticipation when I know the sun will reemerge from behind clouds strewn above the bolt of zaffre water, across amberleaf mangrove rooftops. An incantation of salt tongues and I wonder if this mud-stained circle is where crabs meet? The tide is at crossover and there’s a feeling of time running out—it happens a lot lately even when the sea isn’t ebbing— in the distance, the Glasshouse Mountains are turning from phthalo to mauve.

JANE FRANK

I imagine tonight’s stars of iron pyrite reflected in this polished passage of ocean, the thin beach curve of sand and shingle drowned black. Emotions are messages to the muscles and I walk, notice calligraphic people sitting under lazy eucalypts— some tightly scribbled, hard-pressed, others formed of bouncing tendrils that escape their outlines. At a bend in the path, a man stands at an easel painting a landscape in time-bomb strokes and I know I must return to the car, to the bridge, to the mainland. Pure colours are separated by zones of uncertainty and I wonder if this day is the middle of eternity, at its end or just at the very start? Reading my thoughts, two pelicans glide beneath the stippled cotton trees, perch on the pale shore.

INCANTATION

Palm Reading All the blue paintings she has ever seen along an avenue of quiet dusk colours dipping soft beneath the trees the faint Morse code of insects calling from cabbage palms and steel-tipped Bismark palms and Canary Island date palms with invisible high tufts lost in haze each progressively smaller across the enamel of night that’s beginning to fall with its grit of regret Flowers in every garden stare back white or a Wedgewood interpretation of it: plumbago, magnolia, stephanotis over gateways between the endless street and the abstracted lives, occasional faceless people floating above their gabled rooftops with bouquets of lilac and green calming babies or cradling family pets

She doesn’t regard the road closely or even remember the blister yellow brassiness of the morning but wonders what these creatures of suburbia find in her face in her walking here, in the way she’s beginning to slip from sight

It is the palms that read her thoughts: the far ones are outfielders against distant picket fences that might not even be real but close ones mop the sky push puddles of stars into corners so what was written—an inventory of what matters that she couldn’t absorb in time— vanishes

JANE FRANK

©Mark Ulyseas

WE AND OUR BITTERNESS

Richard W. Halperin. Photo credit: Joseph Woods. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

RICHARD W HALPERIN Richard W. Halperin’s is a U.S.-Irish dual national living in Paris. His collections are published by Salmon (four to date since 2010) and Lapwing (18 to date since 2014). Early in 2025, Salmon will bring out Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon these collections and including thirty new poems. Mr Halperin’s work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. He reads frequently in Ireland; his most recent reading (on YouTube now) was at the Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend, Achill, Co. Mayo, last May.

We and Our Bitterness ‘We and our bitterness have left no traces On Munster grass and Connemara skies.’ - W.B. Yeats

Very young Yeats wrote that. In his late plays – The King of the Great Clock Tower, Purgatory – bitterness entertains. With gestures and ritualised murders. With words, which Yeats tells the actors to make inaudible if they feel like it, because words deceive but motion doesn’t. All of Yeats’s political poems are bitter. All of his political speeches are bitter, he was not a Senator for nothing. Do we and our bitterness leave traces? I think so. Do we and our wars leave traces? I think so. Grass remembers. Skies remember. Stones remember. Children remember, before the history they are taught gets prettied up or censored, along with books in libraries and the names of libraries. Artists remember. In Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting,’ one of the two killed soldiers who face each other in a dark tunnel says to the other, who killed him, that sunk even deeper into the earth than remembered violence, are wells of sweet water, which can wash the clotted blood clean. Britten puts the poem in his War Requiem. Most requiems – I have just re-heard Mozart’s – include an ‘Agnus Dei.’ There is something to be said for asking a lamb for mercy.

HOME INTAKE

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.

Home Intake The intake goes so long most of us have hardly breathed since the nurse arrived. Meantime, she orders morphine-enough to make any of us care a little less. And Depends, the nurse says--just in case.

The patient, certain there is no God, decides against pastoral visits unless the rabbi needs someone to argue the other side. And, she assures the nurse, she would never wet herself-not in this lifetime, at least. But please, she insists, see what you can do to get me out of here quick, so nothing goes to waste. The family is getting impatient by now, and leans closer in to hear any news that might make this easier. When asked, I apologize for adding so little: I’m only the son-in-law. The patient says, But your presence lends such calm, mistaking me, perhaps, for Ativan, as I cast a pleasant pall over the assembled who silently pray, May everyone who needs to go be quickly on their way.

HOME INTAKE

The Polio Shot (1956) Our parents had signed permission, so, what else to do, but get in size-place and march to the nurse’s office? Class 3-3--the slow readers--already in line, those rowdy kids we’d been warned about, stayed away from in the schoolyard-and here they were waiting, already, with their stance of practiced nonchalance, a few of them quivering, just like us. We never said a word--our standing order-but Jimmy, small, in front had a stricken look, and Stuie behind, always advanced for his age, mouthed, “Shit, I’m scared.” All we knew were the pictures we saw of kids our age in iron lungs, who had also got the somewhat tepid assurance-Adults looked out for kids’ own good. Though it might take ten or twelve years, we’d have final say about what’s good, and our parents’ tears would be welling as we walked out their door a final time, and swore--as we often did-we won’t ever come back. Till it got so late and hungry-the heat in the car never worked-and neither Jimmy, or Stuie, or anyone we knew was willing to take us in, feed us, or put us up for one lousy night.

ALAN WALOWITZ

©Mark Ulyseas

A REVISED STUDY OF PROJECTION

ANGELA COSTI Angela Costi is the author of five poetry collections. Her recent chapbook is Adversarial Practice, Cordite Poetry Review, commended in the Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2024, her poems were longlisted or finalists in the international Fish Prize, the Grieve Project and the joanne burns Microlit Award, and won the University of Canberra’s Health Poetry Prize. She lives on unceded Wurundjeri land, and is known as Αγγελική Κωστή among the Cypriot diaspora, which is her heritage and ancestry.

A Revised Study of Projection after Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

frame one every space in her room was danced by her body as she became feather umbrella chopsticks kite bamboo she was named Miss Torso by the Reporter with his binoculars trying to keep up with her spinning cartwheel monitoring her every move Dear Reporter, she is not your torso, she is all I dared when my bedroom was my palace the secret beat of my diary the lyrical spin of words silenced in the front row pew of an orthodox church with archaic liturgy

back then, I too got rid of lace curtains, venetian blinds to see the various tones and hues of birds in mid-air I too rehearsed for dust motes and neighborly voyeurs shunning the frosted and glazed, the tinted and barred as I read loudly, recited, chanted

A REVISED STUDY OF PROJECTION

frame two he searched with his binoculars and found another, an older one, he declared as Miss Lonely Heart but she was smart to say No to half-baked lukewarm love she was the pages of my journal, searching for a kiss that didn’t bite my upper lip or throttle my tongue she was Bravery sitting on a two-seater with that stranger, throwing him out before his groping stole her brain, inviting her self to dine with her self as I too sit with imaginary dialogue steering it towards decency

she taught me to savor reading between pages communing with words that walk her street towards the jazz bar’s stool to listen, dissect as I threw out the Mills and Boon box set, gifted by an aunty who expected me married by twenty

ANGELA COSTI

frame three the Sculptress is next to be landed by his binoculars spying on her making a man of clay, with each touch clay-man becomes skinnier until he hardens to a life without stomach, she refuses to feed him while she bakes under an unforgiving sun, fanning away her hunger with a rumbling churn of phrase emptying my inside of any decent meal and with the heat of the iron sweating my face I took pen and paper to my mother’s ironing board and wrote my first poem then steamed shirt after shirt for a father who wouldn’t

A REVISED STUDY OF PROJECTION

frame four before sleep, he spies on the Composer scrunching up paper after paper until the piano loses its keyboard to a landfill of tired melodies returning to my mother as our daily conductor from clothes line to stove top to sewing bench

to think my scratches at verse could escape the trash while an acclaimed Composer drowns his daily work with whiskey, I lie awake when the camera is dead, let the music of word after word fuel sleep for a morning’s lyric

ANGELA COSTI

frame five the Reporter roams from north to south windows to find his targets, as if it wasn’t me as daughter as single woman as artist as poet these fragments of glass illuminate the fear of a crack, an off-key note, a dumb word

out of frame when father hit me for throwing a cushion my hands begged for the sharpest knife but the curtains were drawn for the night, censoring this type of entertainment

ROBERT ADAMSON

DAVID ADES David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. His next collection, The Heart’s Lush Gardens, is forthcoming from Flying Island Books. David won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2014. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. His poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize (U.S.) and commended for the Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel). David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series “Poets’ Corner” which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8bHCZBRMB jlWlPDeaSanZ3qAZcuVW7N. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.

The Making of “Robert Adamson: The Ultimate Commitment” For once a month, in the several years before I returned to Australia in 2016, I met with a group of poets hosted by Michael Wurster at Coffee Tree Roasters in Shadyside, Pittsburgh, to discuss poetry. On any given month about ten poets would turn up for an in-depth several hours long reading and discussion of a poetry book selected by one member of the group on a rotating basis. When it was my turn to select a book, as the only Australian poet in the group, I inevitably chose a book by an Australian poet, all of whom were unknown to the rest of the group. This was in part to introduce the other members of the group to fine Australian poets, and in part to broaden my own reading of such poets. One of my selections was The Goldfinches of Baghdad by the late, great Australian poet, Robert Adamson, a book that was obtainable in the U.S. through its American publisher, Flood Editions. Each member of the group bought the book, read it, and attended the meeting to read poems from it and discuss them. It was the first time I had read a collection by Adamson, and I came out of my reading of the book and the detailed shared perspectives of other readings of it, with a deep appreciation of Adamson’s poetry. After I moved to Sydney, I heard Robert read his poetry on two occasions, once, at a Sappho’s bookshop reading where his reading was punctuated by background lightning and thunder, and a second time, at the inaugural ‘Reading the River’ poetry reading sponsored by Rochford Street Review near his beloved Hawkesbury River in January 2020. Although elderly by then, it was evident from those readings that as well as being a poet, Adamson was a storyteller, a raconteur who regaled his audience with anecdotes and recollections leavened by humour.

As the host of the Poets’ Corner reading and now podcast series, which has been running since February 2018, I very much wanted to have Robert Adamson as a guest. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen before his death in late 2022.

ROBERT ADAMSON

I kept thinking after his death how I might be able to do something to commemorate Robert and his poetry. I came up with the idea of recording a series of mini podcasts with people who knew him. I approached Robert’s creative and life partner, the renowned photographer Juno Gemes, with the idea of doing a tribute podcast in Robert’s honour. She embraced it and collaborated with me in fully supporting the project, connecting me to poets, publishers and critics to approach and encouraging them to participate in what eventually became the documentary Robert Adamson: The Ultimate Commitment. Juno also provided her portraits of Robert Adamson for inclusion in the documentary. Once Juno had agreed to the project, I ran the idea by Michael Campbell, the Executive Producer of WestWords. Michael and WestWords have supported the Poets’ Corner project from inception. WestWords had no funding for a series of tribute podcasts for Robert, but Michael agreed immediately: “Robert Adamson: The Ultimate Commitment was a project that simply had to be done. Robert’s contribution to Australian literature simply required both documenting and celebrating. And for that to be done by his friends and fellow poets gives an intimate portrait of the man and the work. A labour of love, for the love of poetry. WestWords is so pleased to be able to contribute to, and create a legacy for others to enjoy now, and into the future.”

My original intention was to ask Robert’s poetry colleagues, including friends, publishers, and literary critics, to read one or two of Robert’s poems and/or talk about Robert and his poetry by way of anecdotes, remembrances, stories or whatever came to mind! We recorded podcasts with Juno Gemes, with Robert’s U.S. and Australian publishers, Devin Johnston and Ivor Indyk, the critic Peter Craven, and poets Judith Beveridge, Judith Nangala Crispin, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Anthony Lawrence, Mark Mordue, Claire Potter, Mark Roberts, and Gig Ryan. All gave their time, consideration, and thoughtfulness to the project gratis. It is a testament to Robert’s standing and generosity to those whose paths he crossed, that such generosity was so willingly reciprocated by all concerned in the making of this film and I am grateful for everyone’s generous participation.

DAVID ADES

ROBERT ADAMSON

When we had recorded all the podcasts and had a number of hours of material, Ally Burnham, the creative producer at WestWords, suggested interweaving them all into a full length documentary, something that was beyond what I originally intended. It also resulted in something different and more: what emerged from the sketches and vignettes of Robert, interwoven to create a narrative arc, to gather together prominent themes, was both poet and man, complex, layered, troubled in his youth, grappling with demons, and ultimately finding through poetry, if not salvation, meaning, purpose, industry, a place in the world beyond the Hawkesbury River, and a lifetime commitment. I acknowledge Juno Gemes and The Bowerbird Trust in fully supporting and collaborating in the making of this documentary, I also acknowledge and thank Juno Gemes/ Juno Gemes archive for the publication of her portraits of Robert Adamson featured in the documentary. I express my gratitude to Michael Campbell and Ally Burnham at WestWords for their commitment to this project and for everything they did to bring it to fruition.

DAVID ADES

Robert Adamson: The Ultimate Commitment can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd-6v2dq7o0&t=2s

ROBERT ADAMSON

ALLY BURNHAM Alexandria (Ally) Burnham is an AWGIE award-winning screenwriter and novelist. A NIDA graduate (2016, Masters, Writing for Performance). She is best known for her feature film Unsound (2020), which was nominated for best original feature at the 2020 AWGIE Awards. The film won best Australian feature at the 2020 Melbourne Queer Film Festival and best fiction feature film at the 2020 ATOM Awards. Ally is the lead writer of Metropius, a multi-media franchise. Her screenplay for the animation won Most Outstanding Animation at the 2022 AWGIE Awards, and issue #1 and #2 of her comic book, Forgotten Rose (2022) are out now. Ally also writes as a novelist. She is a contributing author and editor to the fantasy, sci-fi & horror short story anthology The New Mythic, which features her novella, The Stolen Sword. Set in the same universe, her fantasy manuscript, Majesty, received a Varuna Fellowship in 2020. Her debut historical fiction novel, Swallow, releases November 2025.

There was 9 hours of footage about Robert Adamson’s works, his personality, and his effect on the contributors as individuals and the wider Australian poetic community. A ‘paperdraft’ was created first, the step where an editor writes a transcript, and from that text, is able to more easily pluck out connected themes, similar topics discussed, and then group them together. This was particularly interesting to do, as many contributors had different memories of the same moments of Robert’s life. The facts may be different, but the essence they were communicating was always the same. Keeping these contradictions and individual perspectives seemed important -- intentionally matching the correctly remembered facts side-by-side with the misremembered details -- in an attempt to elevate the work away from simple ‘reading the facts’ to a more human-centred recollection of a man, the portraiture of who he had become in the mind of others. In this sense, there isn’t one Robert talked about in this documentary, but twelve -- one for each person who spoke about him. While creating the paper-edit, it was important to keep in-mind the structure of featurelength storytelling and map the course of the text to that shape. The dark moments of Robert’s past are discussed, as well as delightfully funny anecdotes. Robert’s boyhood history was important context for the audience to hear, before listening to certain poems read. Likewise, it seemed prudent to ‘win over’ the audience to the lighter shades of his character, a protagonist to root for, so to speak, before fully revealing the depths of his more traumatic decades. The academic discussions of his poems contrast against a drawing of a numbat. As one of the poets discerns, Robert’s poetry changed over his lifetime: an arc from ‘gritty and raw’ to the more mystical and spiritual. Likewise, with the arc of this documentary, the intention was to reflect that: the gritty and raw anecdotes slowly giving way to the awe, wonder and adoration many poets have when recollecting him. Most documentaries usually have a question at their heart. I thought I’d keep this one simple: who was Robert Adamson, and what circumstances led to his poetry? As someone who never met Robert, as editor, I tried to use that to my advantage. Which quotes gave me insight into this man? What passing comment caught my attention and made me wish to know more? I’d been given all the puzzle pieces by those who knew him, and the remaining task was to fit those pieces together until they created the shape of him. © Ally Burnham 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

JUDY

JUSTIN LOWE Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. His ninth collection, “San Luis”, is due out through Puncher & Wattmann in October 2024.

Judy on the 24th anniversary of my mother’s passing my mother lives in her letters, and in the five of her paintings that hang proud on my thinning walls.

those Spanish lanes narrowing to a point where she finally wandered off down the dark stairs to the water. twenty-four years since her mask stopped fogging, and yet those Spanish lanes keep narrowing, down to where this whistling wind was born.

JUDY

The Rapture the house next door is on the market. this should be no real business of mine, or of the pair of turtle doves the realtor spooked off with a wooden owl the same day she threatened to call the cops on Dave for harmlessly chasing his voices up and down the street. my old neighbour was a kind but lazy man. lived alone. polite, unassuming, funny, his one Achilles heel being his aversion to dogs. for twenty years he watched his house fall down around him with a gentle shrug.

he sold it to a cult, unwittingly, and I haven’t had the heart to write him and tell him of their wall-eyed women donning their scarves so God will recognise them on the day of Rapture. my Mozart offends them, my Dizzy Gillespie.

their coarse manners, in equal measure, offend me. I imagine this is what they believe keeps the world turning, like magnets pushing against each other, their earth-movers and angle-grinders rending the peace of this quiet street at the crack of dawn. we are the defiled, you see, and merit no consideration.

Christ Jesus, please come wipe their milksop grins from their faces. Lord of Justice, please save me from your followers.

JUSTIN LOWE

Orbit there has been trouble on earth. the angels have descended.

they sewed a breach in the outer hull with their flaming wings.

we watched them from the portholes as they punched holes in the ozone

speeding towards the burning cities the huge smoke plumes like algae on a pond. our first glimpse of an angel was a glitch in the sensors,

the shape of a crow’s beak on the array a composite of green lights and red lights

creatures beyond time searching for Chagall’s lovers and a floating violin. such creatures have no concept of binary of the difference between start and stop, or of allegory, of tragedy and farce.

they pressed their foaming mouths to the glass, their dead eyes filled with a righteous anger

at our floating presence high above the burning cities, the dark ripples of Lethe, the mute cries of Absalom. © Justin Lowe 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

THE LITTLE ONES

KATE MAHONY Kate Mahony is a long-time writer of short stories and flash fiction with an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka. Her work has been published in anthologies and literary journals internationally and in New Zealand. Her debut novel, Secrets of the Land, was published by Cloud Ink Press in 2023 and was voted onto the Whitcoulls Bookstores Top 100 Books 2024-2025. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara ( Wellington) in Aotearoa New Zealand. www.katemahonyauthor.com; https://www.instagram.com/katemahonywriter/ https://www.facebook.com/KateMahonyAuthor

The little ones The name of the school in the headline in the Melbourne newspaper caught Frankie’s attention. She put her cup of coffee down on the table in the hotel lobby and glanced at the article, pausing when she saw his name. Long ago, they’d worked in the school together in a quiet suburb on the outskirts of Melbourne. Frankie’s was a temporary position, filling in for teachers attending professional courses.

The first time they met she’d gone into his classroom looking for big sheets of brown paper for her class of nine-year-olds. The little ones in his class were sitting on the mat, the girls so cute with their sparkly hair bobbles, the boys in their too big sports tops. Some were busy “reading” their books. He had a family photograph on his desk. Him, his wife and their two boys, all posing perfectly. He had his arm around his wife’s shoulders. He didn’t often join the other staff at the break times but stayed in his classroom doing his work plans. All the teachers complained about the endless paperwork. Sometimes after school he was still there and she’d go in and say hello.

One time they talked about travelling – she’d been to Europe on a gap year after university, taking the long route up through Asia to Paris, backpacking, staying one place for a while and working in a bar, before moving on. There’d been overnight train rides. He said he envied her. He wanted to travel. Something he hadn’t done. Not yet. continued overleaf... © Kate Mahony 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

THE LITTLE ONES

She stole a glance at that family photograph. He would’ve been young when he got married. Maybe later on, she said.

She took his class just the one time when he was off sick. The head teacher asked if she could cope with the “little ones.” She hadn’t taught that age before but said it would be fine. It was harder than she had expected. The children had finished their activities and became unsettled as it drew closer to the lunch break. One boy grabbed the hem of a girl’s dress, pulling it up, exposing her underwear, making her cry. Other children squealed and Frankie tried without success to quieten them.

The head teacher must’ve been lingering outside in the corridor. She came in to the classroom and took Frankie to one side. She explained, quietly, modelling good behaviour, that it was wise to have plenty of extra activities on hand to give the children when they finished a task early. She found the advice the head teacher had given her worked just as well for unruly adolescents in the school in London she went to next. This trip to Melbourne was only a fleeting visit to catch up with two old friends. In all those years in London, she had barely given the school – or him – a thought. But now she was remembering standing in the entrance to his classroom, seeing him at his desk, smiling at her, beckoning her to come in.

They were young women now, the ones testifying against him, the newspaper report said. One by one they had given their accounts of the indecent assaults. The lasting memories: one told the judge she’d been too frightened to go to the girls’ bathroom next to their classroom in case he came in. Instead, she’d wet her pants. Another spoke of the nightmares for years afterwards. Words like vile, depraved and unrepentant were used.

Afterwards, a police officer commented how brave the young women were in coming forward now. Some of them had been only six years old at the time. Frankie sat staring at the newspaper, pondering what she had missed those times she’d gone into his classroom. Then she remembered how busy and quiet the little ones had been when he was in charge of the class. © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

KATE MAHONY

Photograph courtesy https://pixabay.com/photos/shoes-girl-baby-fashion-6615585/. © Kate Mahony 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

ANNE & DENNIS

DIRK VAN NOUHUYS Dirk van Nouhuys is an American writer, computer scientist, and translator known for his work in fiction and non-fiction. His literary works span various genres, including novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is currently working on a novel centered on the history of San Jose, Ca. from 1932 to the present, of which this story is an excerpt. He has contributed something over 100 items to literary magazines and journals. Van Nouhuys’ writing often explores complex characters and intricate narratives, reflecting his keen interest in the human condition and societal issues. You can learn more about him at his web site, www.wandd.com.

Anne & Dennis Finish Their Trip Dennis and Anne had played together as children when their families had farmed neighboring prune orchards in what is now Mountain View, California. In 1942 history separated them. The government sent Anne’s family to an internment camp because they were Japanese. Her father made a handshake deal to nominally sell his orchard to Dennis’ father with the understanding that he would return it when the internment ended. Dennis’ father reneged on the deal and kept the farm so Anne’s family returned to poverty, homelessness, and a sense of betrayal, but child Dennis knew nothing of that that. In 1973, by chance someone reintroduced them. Anne was a social worker and Dennis an assistant district attorney. Her name meant nothing to him, but his was still part of a thorn in Anne’s heart. Over lunches she gradually made him recall their childhood acquaintance and his father’s betrayal. Then she challenged him to go with her to see the place where she had been interred. He accepted. After their visit to the camp, now hardly more than empty acreage in a mountain valley, they stopped in a motel and went to a local café for dinner. It had a Formica counter with stools, but rustic wooden tables and chairs; with a glance together they chose a table. The wall showed posters of desert scenes, a lake, and also one of the Creekside Inn. Three bulky men in Levi’s sat at the counter with their backs to their table. Two wore wide-brimmed Stetson hats and sat next to each other while one sat separated by one stool. A large jukebox on a side wall was silent. A friendly, middle-aged woman, blond frizzy hair and a generic blue uniform, brought menus and water. Anne ordered fried chicken and asked if they had wine. “Sure honey,” the waitress replied and Anne ordered the white. Dennis ordered a burger with all the extras, fries, and a beer. As they were waiting for their food Anne nodded at the men at the counter, who had their back to them, and wondered, “Farmers or truckers?” “The two together, farmers, look at the dirt on their cuffs. The one alone is a trucker — look at his clean boots,” Dennis replied.

ANNE & DENNIS

The trucker rose and fed serval quarters into the juke box. Take it Easy by The Eagles filled the room. Walking back to the counter he looked over Anne, who smiled at him gently. A song by Hank Williams and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On” was playing when the food arrived. Dennis slid his fries into the space between them. The Gaye was the last of the trucker’s tunes. Anne and Dennis had never talked about what music they liked and began to exchange names as if they had recently met. Anne liked the Beatles and Linda Ronstadt. Dennis began to talk of La Boheme, then thought of Madame Butterfly and dared to ask Anne if she knew it. “I’ve heard recordings. I read the text.” “What do you think?”

“Cio-Cio San and Pinkerton are both clichés. I don’t think Puccini knew shit about Japan or Japanese. Where did he get that stuff?”

He remembered that South Pacific involved one inter-racial romance and another where the obstacle was the partners’ mixed race children. He asked her about it, and she said she liked some of the songs but didn’t know the story. She sang a bit of “I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair.” She had a smooth singing voice, pleasantly rich. “Have you had musical training?” he asked.

“I was in the choir in high school and college. Do you play?”

“The guitar sometimes. I’m not noted for it.” Then he said, “You were divorced.”

“Yes.” She reached for a fry and asked, “When we were gone, did you go into town often?”

“When I was in the lower grades I got into town maybe once a quarter, to a doctor’s appointment or with my mom to shop at Hart’s. When I was ten or so I could go in on the bus by myself. I did that with friends sometimes. I’m embarrassed to ask, when did you return?” © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

DIRK VAN NOUHUYS

“In 1945, in January.”

“I’m sorry, where did you go?”

“They found an apartment in Japan Town in San Jose.” Dennis hid behind his burger.

“But you asked about when I was married,” she said. “Can I ask about it?”

“You speak by asking.”

“I’m sorry. It’s a DA habit I guess.” He was both stung and glad she’d said it. “We can talk about it.” “What happened?”

“I think it started at the camp. We had a school. It was another one of the barracks rigged up with chairs and blackboards. It was pretty nice. The teacher was a Caucasian woman. I loved her.“ “Whom did she work for?”

“I don’t know. The county maybe? Now that barrack is gone with the rest. But you see I wanted to be at school with my friends, not back in our crowded “apartment.” You know my father can be difficult. When we got out we found a small apartment in Japan Town. My father got a job in Hakone Gardens. Have you been there?” “No. I’ve heard of them.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said slowly and continued, “Some of my friends from the camp were in my class, and there were other Japanese girls because of the neighborhood.” © Dirk van Nouhuys 2025 January POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

ANNE & DENNIS

“What about boys?”

“They didn’t count. It seemed like we could be just like anyone else. I wanted to be like the other girls. I wanted to dress like them. We wanted to buy clothes at Hart’s.” She shrugged almost as if she were cold, “I wanted to be more like other girls than they were. When I got to high school I was a cheer leader.” “I can see you,” Dennis said as if the image has startled him.

“I worked my butt off. I was pretty enough and made the moves so it didn’t matter what shape my eyes were. The white guys could throw me up.” Dennis looked at her eyes. They looked at him. “Were you a cheer leader at State?”

Anne nodded, “A ‘flyer’” and took another fry. “And you married the ‘base’?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. I majored in sociology.”

“What does that mean? What did it mean then?” “Will you shut up and let me talk?” “I’m sorry”

She put her hand on his forearm, which was nestled on the table,. “Take it easy,” she said.

He turned his hand over and turned hers and looked into it as if he were reading her palm. She withdrew it. “There’s a stereotype about Japanese women, that they are quiet and self-effacing. You can’t have escaped it.” © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary

DIRK VAN NOUHUYS

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, it’s not so simple. Do you remember my mother?” “I little bit.”

“She would be in your face now.” “I only...”

She interrupted him. “The guy I married, was a graduate student when I was an undergrad. He wanted to record people’s stories. He thought sociology was too much numbers. He wanted to leave stories for posterity. He wanted to collect stories of people who had been interned. He got a grant, and the office connected me with him to work as his assistant and sometimes interpreter.” “How many people…”

“I actually got paid in the beginning. When I graduated I kept on. One thing led to another. He got a Ph.D. He wanted someone to keep quiet and be there for him. After the money ran out he married me. I thought he was in charge.” She laughed wryly then added: “It took me a while to figure out that’s not what I was.” “How long were you married?”

“Four years, from when I was 22 till I was 26.” “How did you figure it out?”

“The answer stalked me year by year, but one day he came home from the lab. There was something I wanted to tell him, like — I’ve forgotten what it was. But, before I could speak, he told me how much he loved me because I was just there, ‘like air’.” “Air is invisible.”

ANNE & DENNIS

“Yes.” She had been regarding her wine glass but looked up. “You get it.” “I try.”

“Thank you.”

“You didn’t have any children.”

“He didn’t want to be disturbed. You can go to the library and listen to the tapes. You could listen to my father and to my mother.” “I guess I have to meet them”

“That can be arranged. What would you say to them?” “I don’t know yet.”

They talked about music again briefly. The teenagers who had registered them at the Creekside Inn came in and the guy talked to the waitress. The girl held the boy’s arm and nestled her head on his shoulder. Anne and Dennis walked behind them when they left. The couple turned towards the main street while Anne and Dennis walked silently to their cabins. Venturing together into one or the other hung between them like a fissure in the air, but they did not close it.

Anne wanted to return by a northern, scenic route. In the moring they continued north on US 395 past Mono Lake, which spread out like a sky-blue veil thrown on the ground. Highway 395 continued north in a deep river valley to the intersection of a state highway. A sign warned them that it was closed from October to May. The well-paved but narrow two-lane road wound west with a river in a gorge for a while and then climbed in a steep, twisty grade to the Sonora Pass. Anne had chosen this route because of the scenery and the exciting road but fell asleep wrapped in her blanket shortly after they turned off US 395. Dennis pondered if she had had a restless night after the emotions of the day. He did not question her emotions.

DIRK VAN NOUHUYS

When they reached the Pass — 9,624 — feet he pulled over in a view space and she woke to the cessation of motion. They climbed out to survey rocky ground with sparce trees and above them looming snowy peaks. The car had been warm, but this air was thin and cold although the sun was bright. They both looked back towards the road in a twisting gorge behind them and then at the same before them. The peaks on each side funneled gentle wind around them. Gentle but chill. Dennis gestured toward the way they had come. “In the days of the wagon trains people died, froze and starved coming up there.” “Do you smell something musky?” Anne asked. “Maybe pines and dust?” Dennis said.

“But the pines are sparse and the rocks wiped bare,” Anne considered. Dennis did not answer.

“It’s a little creepy,” she said. “The smell, you mean?”

“Do you know if there are foxes up here?” she asked “I doubt it.”

“But you don’t know.”

“No. The wind is blowing west. Let’s go with it,” Dennis said

They changed drivers and climbed back into the warmth of the car.

ANNE & DENNIS

Along the narrow road in a twisty valley snow survived among black trees close to the pavement. Traffic began to thicken and sometimes the road widened to four lanes to let the fast pass the slow. Then they were in hills and then on the agricultural plain that led to Modesto. They crossed from east to west and then rejoined the road they had come on. The traffic approaching Mountain View on a Sunday evening was cloying. Dennis parked in front of her apartment building on Castro St., now the main drag of Mountain View. He could not come to the street without thinking of Cuba, but she was used to it. He pulled into the parking lot and they unloaded her suitcase. They walked together to the entrance way enclosed with clear plastic like a bus stop and turned to face each other. Dennis thanked her for making him come and said he was very glad he had accepted. Anne thanked him for coming and said he had surpassed her expectations. They stepped a little closer so they were a hand length apart. Then they each spoke at the same moment, something neither of them ever remembered, just to stretch time. “If we made love,” Dennis asked, “What would it mean?” “It would mean we are important,” she said. “I want very much to be important.” “I know.” She touched his chest.

“Are you free next Friday?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you want to meet my parents?” “Another time.”

They kissed, not passionately, but not casually.

DIRK VAN NOUHUYS

LYNDA TAVAKOLI Lynda Tavakoli is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and has been nominated for Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize (2024). Her poetry and prose have been widely published in journals, newspapers, anthologies and magazines, including Live Encounters Digital books. Lynda has been the winner and runner-up of several International Literary Awards that include The Westival International Poetry Prize, The Blackwater International Poetry Competition, The Roscommon Poetry Competition and the Mencap International Short Story Competition. ‘A Unison of Breaths’ (Arlen House) is Lynda’s second full collection of poetry.

A Unison of Breaths - Poems by Lynda Tavakoli • Arlen House (2024) • Language: English • Paperback • ISBN: 9781851323326 Available at: https://www.kennys.ie/shop/a-unison-of-breaths-9781851323326 https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/isbn/9781851323326 https://www.alanhannas.com/a-unison-of-breaths_9781851323326 Cover design by Irish artist Emma Barone.

MARK ULYSEAS Publisher/editor of https://liveencounters.net

Mark Ulyseas A reader’s review of Lynda Tavakoli’s

A Unison of Breaths Arlen House 2024

When I sat down to read Lynda’s new book of poems it was on a flight back to Bali. Initially I flipped through the book, put it aside and then picked it up again when the cabin fell silent. The only other sound was the hoarse breathing of a child lying in the arms of her mother sitting in the row behind me. I had the pleasure of working with Lynda on her ebook, The Greying Wood of Trees, A Dementia Anthology (May 2024). And so, this gave me a sense of ‘knowing the poet’, an essential prerequisite to understanding and appreciating her new collection of poems.

There are 64 poems. A kaleidoscope of words, creating images, that makes a fascinating read, and rattles the senses.

Her family features prominently in the opening pages with the dedication to her sister, Jean and a number of poems featuring her beloved mother. In Cold Tea... In the good room of our small bungalow Mum read tea leaves from china cups Rescued from the Oxfam shop, her slight frame and unassuming manner a mere subterfuge for her divining skills …. Looking back, I should have read the signs myself – Cups of tea, half drunk and cold, perched on the bird table or teetering on bathroom shelves and once or twice abandoned by our father’s garden tools, that sedge of herons she had planted by the pond.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

And then in Requiem For The Unbeliever…

I lost my faith one dog-damp afternoon In our mother’s sitting room, Where her two-bar electric fire Sizzled heat in the unfamiliar space of her leaving. …. Listen to my footfall in your heart, it said I am not gone but merely walk within you – A message of redolent of all Sunday sermons steeped in Christian kindliness and understanding. Yet in that sitting room, it would not do to set a precedent, for even the departed faithful had to learn to play the rules. And so, I acquiesced and left the room, my apostasy finally complete.

In this poem one witnesses the struggle of the poet to accept the finality of death whilst standing in the presence of her mother’s ‘space’. Perhaps the relationship between mother and daughter had been left in an unfinished mode, with ‘faith’ being shrugged off for fear of accepting the finality of death after life and what might be waiting in the unknown. This is followed by ‘Why You Should Always Listen To Your Mother’, When my daughter got her ears pierced she crumpled to the tiles like a sudden exhalation of some ancient accordion. She had done everything properly…

MARK ULYSEAS

Lynda takes us on a detour from familial encounters to the savagery of humankind in, The Letting (Auschwitz/Birkenau) There remains yet the odour of absence and a silent keening of ghosts that suppurates in weeping walls. On stoned pathways the hushed footfall of the dead still treads its beat, marking time for souls selected for their usefulness, a finger’s point away from one more beating heart or none.

The imagery of desolation and hope comes through in, When the Rains Failed, When the rains failed nothing grew, and wasted seeds dimpled dry earth like buckshot. Yet words still spoke behind the shroud of her eyeswords that painted promises; sorghum, baobab, cassava, akkerboonshe ensured the children’s tongues would never snag in their telling.

And as the pages turn one comes to, The Sadness of Crows…a poem that leaves the reader with a sense of unbelonging. Before the day opens its eyes, on a fence two black crows, their thistle throats rinsing the morning with sorrow.

LYNDA TAVAKOLI

If I could I would offer them the fragile bones of a vanished chick, its soul seeping quietly into warm-dug earth. Lynda has set many traps for the reader in this collection. From childhood recollection to What Remains, leaves the ‘onlooker’ struggling to grasp the handle of sanity… ‘Please will you come and see my war crime?’ Of everything this is what finally broke me – the request small, polite. A father. The body of his dead boy in a coffin car of cold and bloody dark. The last poem, Endings, explains what this collection is about – the acceptance of our fate, our kismet, and perhaps the legacy that we leave behind. Death meets us all, spilling its shadow into the unknown; the curve of our lives completing itself in endings frayed by private histories

And those we leave behind will know their grief the same; the privileged, the ordinary, whose sorrow sings on different winds, yet every song a sharing of its own ineffable loss.

MARK ULYSEAS

Reading this book brings with it an apprehension of sorts. How can one really understand what the poet, Lynda, is communicating? Words dilute the essence of thought. Readers from different cultures can often find hidden gems where the poet thinks there are none. And it is this discovery that makes A Unison of Breaths so ‘fulfilling’ (for want of a better word). I have touched upon only a handful of poems from this rich collection. There are a lot more gems waiting to be discovered by readers from around the world.

A Unison of Breaths is akin to an ancient mosaic floor with its cracked ceramic pieces that make up the beautiful geometric design of life. Each piece holding the memory of people both past and present, a unison of breaths. This book begs to be translated into other languages.

Highly recommended for those who like to carry a poetry book to read on a journey.

2010 - 2025

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Cover artwork by Irish artist Emma Barone © liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING January 2025 Celebrating 15th Anniversary