Mg82 by Datura

mgversion2>datura mgv2_82 | 10_15 edited by Walter Ruhlmann ÂŠ mgversion2>datura & contributors, October 2015

Contents Cover photograph: François Biajoux — Photographs: François Biajoux Christopher Barnes

Ghost Walks 46 to 50

poems

Tatjana Debeljacki

Waiting in Silence

short fiction

Steve Klepetar

Uncle Ernest Mysteries of Quantum Physics

poems

Mike Price

No substitute for Terror

fiction

Amitabh Vikram

Now We are 10 Silence

Wafula p'Khisa

I Shall Leave Redemption Afar

Basile Rouchin Howie Good

poems

poems short prose

When It Rains Listening to a Seashell Manhunt

poems

Tom Sheehan

An Awed Submersion

fiction

AJ Huffman

I Dream in Desperation

James B. Nicola

Short Dreaming

poems

Blade

poem

Those who have something to say – An interview with Karla Linn Merrifield mgv2>publishing 2015 titles

mg_82 | 10_15 Ghost Walks 46 to 50 by Christopher Barnes GHOST WALKS 46 …Fed Specials hawk-eyed stirrings

Of the Subject on explicit daylights. Channelling a (redacted) minute – Soviets let fly an open door, inviting Marilyn Monroe. A bash at the Embassy, Run across the attached… A ‘might-have-been’ shifts up the ramp! Looseness in froth-talk holds This breath-takingly old-world credence - All those concerned’s psyches Ferment into beaks, claws and wings. Caw-caws are prognostic – streaming hazards. Web-spinning down-rushed on a face is incurable. Off-beam clouds snap luck. GHOST WALKS 47

…Sinatra devised Marilyn Monroe’s incursion Into Mexico. Die-hard briefly, Roving with our nightcrawler to Tolves. A tresses primper & housecraft stylist – She was accessorised by an FBI Agent…

Pengersick’s grandee ratsbained a spouse, Toppling the compound, rooting scales in her follicles. Serpent torsoed she lifts ruins Chanting up ghouls, a for-the-dark tongue. Hag-ridden menials puffed into lightning; On a wobbling night-shade the castle was smelted.

mg_82 | 10_15 GHOST WALKS 48

…Marilyn Monroe & her squeeze Roamed Cuba, once upon a hotspot. She pickets a line-up of dissident typesets: The Worker, National Guardian etc. Seeding them amongst the pally. The FBI’s executing its burdens… Flukely pistoled, the tightwad, Mrs. Bains, Has no zeal to dissolve. Her proud threads ding-dong. Upset powdered hair-clips, crewel bonnet. She yerks doors, unhinges commodes. Flounces lagging at elbows, grind smashing tea sets, Decanters. Rumbling in her spinning wheel Inspires the night moth’s grunts. GHOST WALKS 49 …New Haven patrol solicitation.

Frisk binders toy with the connection lowdown On Milton Greene’s underground bustling, Vice President of Marilyn Monroe productions, Stagy & televised, Countersigning his ménage for espionage…

Bludgeoning into Porthcurno On cussed gusts, Evil-course frigates outline Across tides insane with pickings. Impenetrable in mist Ale guzzlers tongue-lash. Our sneak-thief ancestors hark back, Screaming mouths salt then putrefy.

mg_82 | 10_15 GHOST WALKS 50

…Jeopardy review. Days hitherto, Marilyn Monroe was high spirited, Quizzing The President with Leftist misgivings On the fair play of atomic trials & what it thrusted into America’s scruples…

A sealed-book recess in Polbreen Mine; Dorcas grinds her smeddum. Dig-outs set teeth on edge, wilt. Balderdashing pitfalls huff toilers. Demonologists shoulder the fear, When virulence trundles hounding light.

mg_82 | 10_15 Waiting in Silence by Tatjana Debeljacki I had no other choice because I loved him. I had no other future but to yearn for another phone call asking me on a date. I went out only when I really had to. Sometimes I felt that he might come. I hated dreams whose cruelty tore me apart. I rushed everywhere in fear of missing his phone call, but in vain. I stopped myself from turning on some music or a hair dryer, terrified of the noise butting the sound of the phone. When the phone rang, my soul was ready to pick it up – it wasn’t him! Oh God, why are you doing this to me! Anticipation, endless, painful, obviously filled with jealousy. What am I really waiting for? I was seized by the moment. I was in constant fear anticipating his steps, the sound of the door closing quietly. He left me for three, four days between his arrivals and departures. I didn’t want to think about anything else. I waited and repeated to myself: He’ll come, he’ll come, I know he will. I’d say these things solemnly as if to justify or comfort myself. Every time, something was added to our relationship but nothing changed, except the waiting, the waiting that took all the time, the time that passed through me. We accepted the risk of love. Think about it. You never lied to me, that’s what you said while I stood in front of the truth, disappointed. Don’t compare my love model to hers. While you sing here, she’s gone. Ask for this confession, you only have desire and nothing else. It is at your hand, it’s in your nature and you can’t escape it. Say my name, say it at least to yourself. Outside that bed, somebody else is dying of the same desire. Damn you. Give me the right to stand up to her in your head. Two weeks of phone calls, promises to come, I believed them a thousand times, but a thousand and first I cannot. How am I feeling now? Nothing can be changed not even by the reality of the voice. It’s a challenge of pleasure, the future pain. I wanted to learn your language, fly somewhere on the plane, choose some silk of your taste, enjoy the citruses, feel my body as a whole. Wake me up on the isle of love, take me back to dreams. Waiting is just the time that lasts, where it’s lost – it’s not lost. The time that lasted, the time I didn’t want to stop. The most beautiful time of my life which I didn’t want to end. I’m tired, tired – who cares? I’ll wait again for you to come to my flat. How will you caress my morning, which of your kisses will wake me up? I’ll say: Honey, guess what happened to me? Somebody hit me on the head. Somebody wanted to chase you out. All broken, I still cannot pick up the pieces. I admit I’m confused. I lived with you in my imagination for so long while you were gone. All alone, now I have to invent you in order to bring you back to life. In as many ways as there are those of losing you. Let it not be long and sad, God! I need to invent. All these years, I might have been creating a false picture of you. You might have become a creature of imagination and not a man of flesh and blood who walks with people and 8

mg_82 | 10_15 celebrities. I still don’t have the courage to compare the truth with reality. I’m afraid, be patient, be gentle while I’m calling you between the two seasons. Be patient with a silly and stubborn woman. We should have met long ago, we should have done it while I was waiting and being silent. What I did was crawl into myself like a snail. Be patient, deep inside I feel that I need to wait for a turnover. I felt alive again when I heard you were coming, it makes me happy thinking that you still might want to do so. I’m so emotional, I simply cried because of my soul, cried with anger or was it panic? I thought I was able to forget your-my face in all of these years. Suddenly, the pressure is here again like an iron mask. Don’t be afraid, I’ll gather my courage again. Sooner or later, we’ll meet again and look each other in the eye. When? I don’t know. I don’t know.

mg_82 | 10_15 Uncle Ernest by Steve Klepetar He walked to the other side of the room, face already covered with clouds. I didn’t want to hold his hand. He called my father by a strange name, full of blood and lies, a brother’s name made of hair and wire, pulled from the hearth before it smoldered into flame. He was good with tools, fixed my mother’s watch, though he hated her with reptilian fury that made his cold eyes burn. He’d sneak down to the kitchen to have a drink while her back was turned. They say he abandoned his wife and daughter in Peru, walked north with a sack full of diamonds sewn inside his shirt, then wrote letters to a Nazi girl he left in Berlin when the city broke into rubble and the air smelled of smoke and ash. Later he lived in Saint Paul, forgot German, worked weekends on his Oldsmobile, maybe took up golf. That night we went to a Chinese restaurant on Spring Street. It was November, and Chinatown felt gray as an old man’s hat. Inside was warm and fragrant with dim sum and spice. He got drunk and spoke for hours, laying down the broad, flat vowels of his adopted state. We sipped our wonton soup. My father used too much hot mustard, choked for ten minutes while my mother slapped him on the back. 10

mg_82 | 10_15 My fortune cookie read: “You will go on a long journey,” and I have, following a road winding ever westward through the country of the dead.

Mysteries of Quantum Physics by Steve Klepetar You’re standing against a blue screen, and someone is firing electrons at you through a plate with two slits and the damn things sting, so you close your eyes and they become electron waves, and they feel pretty good, like a whirlpool or a light massage. A guy hands you a beer and you’re starting to get hungry but you don’t want to eat too much, so you start thinking about the phases of the moon and you realize you don’t know what “gibbous” means and you can’t find your phone to look it up and then it’s winter again and you wish you had a blanket. You think about Australia, where it must be summer now, right? And then you’re hearing La Boheme, maybe at the Sydney Opera House, and you wish Mimi would hurry up and die already but your mother’s friend is in the hospital with pneumonia so you feel guilty and when the opera ends you walk out into the warm night looking for an upscale bar that serves Laphroaig. You remember your friend in New York who loved that stuff walking with you through Central Park singing Beatle songs at Strawberry Fields on a gray afternoon, and why can’t you understand quarks and flavors and what’s up and what’s down and what’s charmed and what’s strange?

mg_82 | 10_15 No Substitute for Terror by Mike Price first published in The Piker Press (2/23/15) His new wife tried to talk him out of it. “Sweetheart, listen... I have a good job,” was how it began. “You really don't have to do this...” “No,” he said, smiling stubbornly. “I'm the husband now.” “But you just got out of school,” she reasoned. “We'll be fine. You'll have lots of offers next year, I'm certain of it...” “I need to get started.” “... or you could do something else.” “Not a chance,” was the firm response. “It's my calling, I know it, it's what I was meant to be. Besides, it's great experience--what better training could there possibly be?” “Or we could move. Everybody needs nurses, I could get a job anywhere. We don't have to live in the city just so I can be close to work.” “Honey, you know I love you and I love what you're trying to say, I really do, but... look, you know my father was a teacher, both grandfathers were teachers, an uncle, an aunt, my sister, two older cousins... all teachers.” “I know, I know. But sweetheart, you remember how it was.” “It wasn't that bad...” * Larry knocked twice on the open door, took one large step into the classroom, inquired, “Anybody home?”--and smiled broadly at the seated students. Twenty-two sixth graders stared back at him in silence, blatantly unimpressed. “Okay,” he gulped, striding toward the blackboard, stopping directly behind the teacher's chair and over-sized desk. The term buffer zone bolted through his head, masked by a more normal smile. “And a good morning to you all, ladies and gentlemen.” No response. Larry licked his lips with a dry tongue. “Okay again.” He turned and picked up a sliver of chalk. “My name...” writing on the board, “... is Mister... Maschke.” He set the chalk back in the tray and faced the class, an assemblage impressively unified in its expressionlessness. Larry inhaled deeply, exhaled quickly, and utilizing his pleasantest tone, “Now, as I understand it, you've already

mg_82 | 10_15 been informed that your Mrs. Brewer is starting her maternity leave today and won't be with you for some time.” “No shit, Sherlock.” Larry discerned the male voice from the back right corner of the room. It startled him for a second, not so much because of the profanity but due, to a greater extent, to the deepness of voice— for a sixth grader—as well as the turn of the century literary reference—again, for a sixth grader. There was a sprinkling of youthful giggles. He reached down and picked up a clipboard of papers from the desk. “And let's see, back there, you would be Mister...” He ran an index finger up and down the top page on the clipboard, stopped, and looked up again, concealing a burgeoning grin. “Huh.” Resorting to the first-day-on-the-job, get-off-on-the-right-foot, play-along-with-the-students variety of humor, he straight-manned, “Unless I'm misreading Mrs. Brewer's seating chart, young man, you must be Sabrina Whitehead.” A maleficent wave of juvenile snickering ripped through the room, lasting several seconds. After most of the laughter had subsided, “Probably not, genius,” sneered the same voice from the back corner, a young man's voice severely bitten with sarcasm. “You're an idiot.” The room fell eerily silent. “He's Brock,” sotto voced a smallish girl seated in the first row, directly in front of Larry, displaying the sourest of faces. “Yucky Brock Drew. He's older.” “Yeah,” nodded Larry, pasting on a smile, “I got that. Thank you, Miss...” he checked his chart. “... Miss...” “Whitehead.” She smiled, a helpful smile. Which elicited yet more laughter, including a mostly mirthless chuckle from Larry. “I see,” he said. Then, as jovial as he could muster, “Okay Mr. Drew, Miss Whitehead, class,” he nodded, edging his way around the desk, “I can take a joke as well as the next guy...” A spitball hit him in the ear. “Hey!” He hadn't seen from which direction it had come much less who threw it, but it evidently had traveled a fair distance and with considerable velocity because it stung more than he thought a flying spitball ought to, but he had no real reference in the matter. Larry allowed himself a few moments to compose himself as yet more juvenile snickering simmered through the room. “All right... okay,” he started slowly, suppressing mounting gall. “I hope I don't have to explain why that's the last time that's going to happen. We've had our fun for the 14

mg_82 | 10_15 day, now—are we all clear on that?” He paused in silence, panning the room, feigning extreme exasperation. Then softer, kindlier, “Okay. Now… I would appreciate it, very much, if those of you not seated at your assigned desks would take the next thirty seconds to move to wherever you're supposed to be so we can take attendance and get started.” All twenty-two students stood. They began to mingle, dawdle about, softly droning at and with each other as if it was a post-A.A. Meeting smoking and coffee confab, only for little kids. Larry sat behind his desk and waited patiently for the students to sit, but few did. “Okay,” he clapped, “let's everybody take a seat—now, please,” he volumed above the din, accenting the now with theretofore unprecedented sternness, fully aware of how precipitously close he was to slipping into the domain of actual anger, an area he had consciously resolved to avoid on his first day as a professional teacher. And again, “Now... please.” The class dissolved into silence as the students grumpily began to sit: the most uninspired round of musical chairs in history, thought Larry. He never did find out if anyone ended up where they were supposed to be. He knew for certain that at least three boys didn't. Brock Drew and two other boys, smaller in stature but with bullyish deportment, were standing, scowling, in front of a large side closet, containing, among other things, gym equipment. “Yeah teach, we usually have gym class first thing,” said Brock, opening the closet door. “Ain't that right, boys?” “That's right,” paraphrased the other two boys. “Yeah,” agreed a few classmates, softly. Larry quietly corrected, “The word is isn't, not ain't, Mr. Drew,” then flipped the top page on his clipboard. “See now, that's not at all what Mrs. Brewer says in her notes,” he said, pointing down, maintaining a peripheral awareness of Drew and his pals. “It says right here that you have language first thing in the morning.” “Bullshit.” Giggles. “I beg your pardon?” “Bullshit what Mrs. Brewer says.” “Yeah, bullshit!” Larry felt his stomach flip-flop. “Please watch your language, Mr. Drew.”

mg_82 | 10_15 “Or else, what?” Brock glowered daggers at Larry. Larry stared back, outwardly firm, Jello on the inside. Brock lifted a small softball bat from the closet, eased the hallway door shut, and stepped forward, the other two boys flanked behind him. “Who here wants to play kickball?” he voiced in the direction of the rest of the class, two wildly nefarious eyes burning directly into Larry's. “We do, we do!” unisoned the class with volume. “Now just wait...” Louder, “Kickball! Kickball! Kickball!...” Larry was losing control of the room and he knew it but this was all new to him; he was absolutely, positively unsure of his viable options under such circumstances. Later, he would recall thinking at that very moment... keep it light. When in doubt, always go with your strength. “Kickball! Kickball!...” “But Brock,” Larry stated with an uneasy chuckle, “everybody knows that bats aren't allowed in kickball...” “Shut up!” The class was now supremely rabid. “Kickball! Bullshit! Shut up! Kickball! Bullshit! Shut up!...” With ambush-like execution, Brock and his two buddies strode forward as one and penned in Larry, up against the big desk. Brock began violently hacking away at Larry with the bat. “Hey... Ow! Cut it out! Hey!” Larry blocked the first few swings with his arms; he knew immediately that his left wrist was broken. Brock's next swing landed in the pit of Larry's stomach, knocking the wind out of him, rendering him temporarily voiceless. One last swing sent him to the floor, writhing in silent, air-sucking pain. “Get 'im! Get 'im!” yelled the students, many rising to join in the onslaught. Brock dropped the bat and began kicking Larry in the rib cage, over and over and over. The other two boys aimed for Larry's head, kicking and punching with their little fists in fury, just as Larry began getting his wind back. “Help! Somebody... ow!... somebody ... ah, ow!... go get Mr. Lundquist, somebody... ah, God! Help!” “Hold 'im down!” bellowed Brock, the driving force of the young mob, over the din. “Get his mouth! Shut 'im up!”

mg_82 | 10_15 Now every student was up, all twenty-two sixth graders, all but a few involved in the fray. They pinned Larry flat on the floor, face up, three or four students per extremity. Larry could barely move, only his head side to side, and only a little bit. One of the smaller boys stuffed an eraser in Larry's mouth; Brock took some white tape from the medicine kit from the same side closet, wrapped it tightly over the teacher's mouth and around his neck, to secure it in place. “Uueh! Uueh!” was Larry’s muted cry for help. A boy grabbed a stapler off the teacher's desk, opened it flat, and repeatedly punctured Larry's face when it wasn't being pummeled by the students’ battering fists and feet. The biggest, chubbiest girl in class, hesitant at first, got into the melee by bouncing up and down on his stomach. Not to be left out, two of the smaller girls collected stick pins from the bulletin board and jabbed him dozens of times, all over his lower abdomen and legs. Everybody else was, indeed, playing kickball— with Larry's beaten and bruised body in the featured role as the ball—the entire class with wild fury blazing in their eyes. But it could have been worse. During the savage frenzy of feet, fists, and all else, nobody had noticed little Sabrina Whitehead slip out of the classroom. “STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!” She had calmly walked down to the end of the hall--because you weren't supposed to run in the hall, not ever--to inform the school's principal, Mr. Lundquist, very matter-of-factly, that her class was killing the nice substitute teacher. “Uueh... Uueh...” And she was just in time. Just as the principal arrived, Brock Drew discovered the desk drawer in which Mrs. Brewer kept her scissors. “GET OFF THAT MAN!” screamed Mr. Lundquist. A fractured skull, three broken ribs, collapsed lung, broken wrist (in two places), broken nose, several chipped teeth, countless bumps and bruises (both external and internal), and seventy-seven stitches. “It really wasn't that bad...” And a concussion. * “Sweetheart, please… you don’t have to do this.” “Yes, I do, now more than ever.” 17

mg_82 | 10_15 “You could do... almost anything else.” Larry sighed. “Honey, we've been through this.” “But... so soon?” “I told you, it’s what I was meant to be. It's my calling in life.” “But sweetheart, you remember how it was...” “Chalk it up as an experience. It'll be different this time, I promise.” * Larry rapped twice on the open door, took one large step into the classroom, inquired, “Anybody home?”--and smiled an unseen smile at the seated students. Sixteen kindergarten students stared back at him in stunned silence, most of them terrified, thoroughly unnerved at the sight of all the bandages, as Larry strode to the front of the class. All except one five-year old boy, a child noticeably larger in stature than his classmates, sitting in the first row, who immediately stood and peed on the substitute teacher’s feet.

mg_82 | 10_15 Now We are 10 by Amitabh Vikram Now we are 10 The equation is “10.” I am single and free. And he is not more. His presence was a burden. A life that I passed in a den, Our marriage was an incident; No, an accident that occurred As a life imprisonment I was sentenced to. I lived those years As if I were dying Day after dayMonth after monthYear after year But now I have won the war finally. One is to zero, Yes “10” is my score. I will rejoice. I will sing. As I were born again; I am free today.

mg_82 | 10_15 Silence by Amitabh Vikram Her eyes spoke something, So softly, so calmly, That it created a chaos in my mind. I imagined: “Her solid head is in my feeble arms, Her broken hair and my broken heart Remain derelict when she moves on.” What leftHer waste hair and my waste love! She said: “Listen!” This time she put her tender head on my solid heart. I was silent but her eyes said: “Speak!” I spoke: “Come, let’s move.” We parted silently, we said goodbye.

mg_82 | 10_15 I Shall Leave by Wafula p'Khisa When, out of exhaustion To set hurries the sun; I will be on toes To respond to call of time. I shall leave With the little I'd have reaped From the golden stool of prominence; I shall leave Behind the sacred palm My people have tended and irrigated With oceans of sweat and blood. I will need no cry I will need no lambs for sacrifice NO! When the song and rhythm of time go down My fragile bones will be aching; I will dance to more. And when the One Above calls That my hallowed space is ready, I will exhibit no lag So To unburden the burdened; To settle the unsettled I shall leave!

mg_82 | 10_15 Redemption Afar by Wafula p'Kisha Those who sent their men to war Still wait, forever wait Their return at full moon. Those whose men returned long ago Still wait, forever wait To be issued their fortune. We hoped amidst the struggle Our blood shall dry not, but sprout Into long-bearing palm trees of joy As we wrestled with nightmares of time We remained awake to see dreams; We marched to death with pride! A messiah arose from shadows then Throned at twilight, And immediately fell asleep; Our songs of glory waned As the skies vomited rains on us. We think in Canaan we've arrived Every time we throne a king Only to realize we're still on thresholds of Egypt: Fortune comes not with ease You must open your thighs, know people or fill one's stomach To taste the kingdom of your dream Fortune comes not with ease... Our stars are shattered In darkness we wander thus, condemned Waiting, forever waiting The beautiful ones to come forth Upon the kingdom promised. Our shepherds in cathedrals The few chosen to look after us Too can't stand hunger and thirst-They scramble for sheep, To us sell salvation expensively; And eat us with relish-Robbery without violence!

mg_82 | 10_15 Short Prose by Basile Rouchin Un été, en bord de mer, âgé d’environ 5 ans, j’ai trompé la vigilance de maman qui me serrait par le bras. Fuyant sur la digue, à hauteur de présentoir, j’ai volé une barre de chocolat et l’ai mangée devant la terrasse d’un café. Une dame assise me souriait du sucre dans le regard. Mon cœur dissout tenait dans sa main.

Pourvu d’un harnais et d’une laisse, j’accompagnais parfois maman, à la plage. Il s’agissait à l’époque, d’une mode éducative pour petit fugueur, ni plus, ni moins : je n’ai pas été traumatisé ! Mais pourquoi exposer, au vu et au su des estivants, un tel attachement ?

Maman m’a souvent narré cette anecdote. A la plage, elle m’interdisait de prendre la pelle d’une petite fille. Aussitôt, je m’en emparais et triomphant, narguais maman. Par la suite, mes initiatives de petit mâle impétueux équivaudront à des provocations : pelles à emprunter, pelles à rouler.

mg_82 | 10_15 When It Rains by Howie Good 1 I was watching it and thinking, The most expensive work of art ever, cast in platinum and encased in diamonds. 2 I stared miserably at my mom’s grave. For god’s sake, why put it there, in the rain? 3 Rain – Reign = Rein Rein + Rain = Reign Reign ÷ Rein = Rain Rain x Reign = A sound no letters can spell. 4 Ever hear the same story a million billion times? Ever see a street performance by an armless juggler? Rain is like that.

mg_82 | 10_15 Listening to a Seashell by Howie Good All I can hear are the sighs of an old woman wheeling a day-old baby in a shopping cart down an endless aisle of bare shelves.

Manhunt by Howie Good Night falls when least expected, a really shitty thing to do. I hear peculiar noises rising from the dark. It may just be the wind, or it may be prowling wolves. Cops appear at the door with guns drawn. The fat one begins to recite the evidence against me while still struggling into his bullet-proof vest. I laugh, even if the dark canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t.

mg_82 | 10_15 An Awed Submersion by Tom Sheehan The moon, maybe the night, perhaps the damned river itself, had begun to suck some of the beauty out of her. He could see it happening, the edges beginning new exposures, showing new lines. She was different, emergent, from or to. Something had moved away from her, a departure subtle at first but now gathering an identity. He thought how strange it sounded, his declaration. Carmella couldn’t stutter if she tried, but the words came out as if she had, “I don’t understand why you’re like this,” while her hands were shaking, drama at full exhibit. Maybe she had practiced for this performance, an actress doing her lines for the director, her becoming something else right there in front of him. They were under stars, on the bridge, and eye to eye but only for short intervals. They had been arguing on the bridge for more than an hour, where the river begins its snaking, its slow uncoiling, slipping off to sea like it was out of breath all the way down past the First Iron Works in America and the docile marshes and the lobster boat fleet at rest, and the huge General Electric plant hovering downstream like a ghost on the far side, the whole magnificent route lined with growth that fed on saline tastes, upland deposits, whose cast-offs became another man’s treasure. “Oh, not that,” Eric said, “not that again. It’s just because you can’t hear where the river ends up. It disappears and becomes something else. There’s more than mystery here.” He wondered if she could understand another approach to the matter at hand, doubting it at once. Meantime, the water flowed beneath them, past too many bends ever to be heard from this point, even at midnight when the air became as thin as the old lace curtains in her mother’s parlor. He was deep in thought, the words threatening to be vocal, but held in place. “Oh, yes,” he was thinking, “the one place where our hungers truly met, blossomed in a burst, in your mother’s parlor, on the Persian rug. Wild and beautiful. I swear your legs at times like a referee’s touchdown signal. You were ignited and lovely that one time, a rose before cruel July kicks the hell out of it. “You’re too slippery on things, Carmella.”

mg_82 | 10_15 It was said. It was out. Then he added, as though a piece of him was talking other than his heart, “Just too damned slippery.” There were parts of her he’d already forgotten, out of reach; a curve of whiteness so sinful it could choke him, a curve near a hip taunting from first appearance behind the sheerest silk and darkness, her Mound of Venus, complete with gesture of wish, of command, like a finger drawing him, a road marker. One of her breasts, he realized, was more perfect than the other. Just then he could not remember which of those stars lit him up. Once, during a night at the beach, hidden by dunes and sea shrubs and high grass, everything dizzy in proportions, a seed seemingly broke loose from that nipple, which he savored for hours. Did she miss it? he wondered. Did she even know? That time she waited almost two weeks before she said, “Why didn’t you do something at the beach that night?” It was the only way she could say anything like that, sliding at him later, coming at an angle, never saying what was foremost in her mind. It was another piece of her mystery. One late evening, during a walk beneath occasional streetlights, in the midst of solitude, she suddenly blurted out, “What in God’s name,” spun on her heels and hurried home, leaving him in silence. She had plenty of similar moments, so many they faded into indifference, lost in the current. Carmella was not at all like some women he had known, remembered without restraint, so direct they were beautiful, saying, “Do you know what I’d like to do right now, Eric? I’d like to suck that.” Or another loveliness saying, after her same bit, “Oh, Eric, you’re fuckin’ suckin’ beautiful,” even as the gin vapors rose in the night air and she from her haunches, silk talking a language he thought he’d understand all his life. And her repeating her words, saying them three or four times, making sure she’d be one of the women he’d remember, her words alive forever. A smile crossed his face, a tremor of a smile, saying it worked either way; he knew her now, and often. As a result of the rush of memories, the one night of true mystery with Carmella came back in pieces, but it was all attached to her aroma, her taste, with a rush quicker than the river; electric it came, her straddling his mouth in trepidation at first, her eyes locked down on his armor, one hand 30

mg_82 | 10_15 eventually holding him and stroking him in disbelief, then shifting, moving, meeting, assenting, moving again, and again, dropping slowly in acknowledgement of the deed. At the moment both of them were cresting, he saw the door open just a slit at first from the hallway and her mother, a matching beauty of 40, a widow, eyes deep and dark as sin itself, standing in the midst of her own awe, hands to her face, studying them, her frame twisting subtly into a wholly and sudden emptiness, yet a wanton release, almost a cry he could hear, until her eyes locked onto his staring back at her. With sudden desperation and loss taking her by the hand, she slowly closed the door on them, with her eyes still locked on his, drawing something from him up off the Persian rug. But who knew what, for her? Remembering every detail with a sudden helplessness, right there on the bridge, water trickling over rocks, whispering an evening song in his ears, he admitted he didn’t know which one of the women he loved the most, Carmella the daughter or Carla the mother. There were arguments. The fading of Carmella’s parts was dramatic, the way she came out of spells, the way he came out of day dreams of her, near trances where the flesh stayed master longer than he might let it. Some of the parts, he agreed wholly, were gone. Had they gone behind that door when it closed, gone with her mother? Had her mother owned them from the beginning? Would their ownership be proved? The here-all? Lie? Lay? Lain? The words jumped all around him. Caught he was between the matter and the form, between the harshness of beauty and the spirit of beauty. The look on her mother’s face hadn’t left him; it came as acceptance, as desire, as a promise of what could be. It didn’t end up in a small niche, that feeling, but made a continuous assault on him, kept touching back at him from wherever. 31

mg_82 | 10_15 From then on, in every instance of thought, Carla, perhaps in her mother’s destiny, seemed more desirable, more mature, more woman who would sacrifice her own passions for those she loved, not those she wanted or needed, or had made an overture to. The punch of it all came at him again as he looked down at the water flowing under the bridge, going wherever it was led by an accustomed route, shaped, pulled, pushed. And Carmella looked down too, most likely seeing something other than what he saw, another image, and another idea so new it might have frightened her at first. Eric realized he had brought Carmella to the bridge because of deep curiosity and a need for comfort. It was a place that caught him in general ease. A hundred times he’d been here, fishing, dreaming, and seeking resolutions. It was his place. Here he’d been caught up in the romance of the plants and flowers that had drawn him to many illustrated books about such growth, and the litany began to spill from him as if a torrent had broken loose, like the river in April, the rush from inland: the landscape in a thousand parts coming with it, torn loose by awesome strength, ripped out by brute force, or eased away by the same unknown power of green growth that separated concrete walks, parted asphalt with its green knife. He knew crowfoot, toad-flax, snap dragon. Columbine, dog’s tooth violet, arethusa bulbosa, horned sedge, sea pink, Plymouth gentian, oysterleaf, riverbank wild rye, marsh marigold, sweet aster, bloodroot, poke weed, squaw root, papoose root, lizard’s tail, wool grass and cord grass for miles and miles. For miles and miles. The water below him, in its run, nurtured such growth, provided cover in the growth and feed for animals of all kinds, and had filled his mind for delicious hours of study and contemplation. “Here's a list of plants to choose from,” he had once said aloud to nobody but himself, not abetting his memory but enjoying a near-movie of filmy images: thyme, rosemary, rock rose, lavandula, rugosa rose, seaside daisy or fleabane (erigeron strigosus), catmint, coastal golden wattle, bougainvillea, valerian (centranthus ruber), vinca minor, cape plumbago. Never once did his tongue trip over a name, even those in Latin or another language applied for classification. He was lost in his own comfort zone when she said, looking at him and then back at the river’s flow, as if an answer had come to her, eyes sunken, cheeks gone dead flat, without an ounce of charge in them, no eye lights or highlights. “You just don’t care about me anymore. You wander. 32

mg_82 | 10_15 Well, I’m pregnant, that’s what I’ve been meaning to tell you, trying to find a way to say it the way you’d want me to.” With that delivered, her hands and arms in cheerleader flings, before he could move, before his mind came back to him from her mother staring into his eyes, or from a litany of flora and fauna, she jumped over the rail and into the river … Taking her unborn child with her. He did not hear the splash. He did not jump after her. Not immediately. It was more of her thinly clad dramatics, he thought, because she was an excellent swimmer. The river was not dangerous, though it had sudden twists in its course, hidden obstructions, debris of the ages one might guess. He couldn’t remember how many times his fishing lines were hooked onto some hidden clutch while he stood at this very spot, the only solution being to cut the line with a knife, try again, never knowing what clutched at him, grasped at parts of him. She didn’t surface. The river ran its way, past the arrows of reeds, the cord grass and glasswort, on bank after bank at every turn where flowers fought for a grip, where upland debris and dosage piled atop itself, for good, for now, for the tidal change to creep and seep its way back home. He looked for her bobbing head, the one he had seen so many times come up in the water of the lake, her hair as if it had been combed back severely on her head, her mouth wide open at last and drawing air. All he saw was the unbroken flow of the stream; no bubbles, no foreign objects in the float, no sharply-combed head of hair. Nothing. Nothing! 33

mg_82 | 10_15 Panic, in its moment, swiftly obliterated her mother’s wanton gaze, and swung through him pushed by its own bellows. Off came his shoes, wallet out of his pocket and dropped on the bridge for a signal to someone coming onto the foot bridge, anyone, or for preservation of contents. On the bridge were his shoes, his wallet, his last thought in the air as he jumped over the railing, hit the water, found himself deep, screwed himself back to the surface, looked again for a bobbing head, saw none. He’d been in here before, in these same waters for a youngster fallen from the bridge on a prank, the boy’s pals on the bridge all stunned, all screaming their fright. The boy’s wild commotion in the water made it easy for him to be found, Eric’s hand clutching him by the belt of his pants, drawing him up for air, onto the banking, his pals still screaming, but now in joy, in release. He remembered how the boy tried to clutch at him in the water, and how he’d held him apart, not harming his own success at rescue. He’d get Carmella the same way. Heard himself telling Carla how it was: I found her in the grasp of lower water, near the bottom, near dangerous roots, debris, the awful stuff the river brings with it to the sea; it was not going to take you away from me. He actually said that, afraid of being a failure here, at this attempt. He rose again, arms pumping, his head up, eyes scanning the river ahead of him. Nothing. He dove again. Saw nothing. Rose again, dove again, searching underwater for a commotion set off by Carmella. Only the water provided motion, slight debris with it in the seaward march.

mg_82 | 10_15 He did not see the old fender of a car, or the jagged edge of metal strip ripped from place by an accident so far in the past it might have pre-dated his birth. But he felt the slim edge, sheer, knife-like, as it sliced down along his stomach under his shirt, felt the initial pain, felt its grasp settle directly under his belt buckle, like a lure by a striper that once had come this far upstream for his hook, almost to the foot of the bridge. How could he tell Carla he had failed? Would she hate him? Would her eyes still hold his eyes like that one time? Or his eyes hold hers? He tried to rise again. The clutch would not let go, and then he could no longer see ahead of him in the water as it become too cloudy. The last word from him was “Blood” as the red swirl moved with the flow. He said, “Blood,” loudly, open-mouthed. He couldn’t find a name he wanted to say. Downstream, the excellent swimmer, nearly around a bend in the river, rose once more, took a deep breath, made for the cluster of saw grass and reeds on the nearest bank, and saw, in a flash of red and black, a red-winged blackbird rise free from its hidden nest in the high grass, in the reeds standing like spears in a quiver.

mg_82 | 10_15 I Dream in Desperation by AJ. Huffman Reticent heart reacts aggressively to submerged stimuli. I am drowning in unrecognizable degrees of impetuosity. I blink unopened eyes, attempt to adjust to their own barrenness as years of tears shower me in menial memories. The idea of insubstantiality lingers like wind. I echo the silence that comes after too many screams, wish I had lips to pray, arms that comprehended the concept of holding.

Without Dreaming by AJ Huffman The tape I use to close my eyes seems pointless, misguided in its attempt to feign sleep. I am just as blind with them open, staring into the darkness of an empty room. Tonight I will try tying shadows to strings. Maybe their dancing will pass as posed inspiration, grant my stubborn mind wings to fly on as it continues its vain attempt to catch the elusive edges of sleep.

mg_82 | 10_15 Blade by James B. Nicola Like a slash of virgin grass in a green communal ignorance proud, pointed, reaching up slicing toward an azure or albion or ashen or effervescent ebony beyond through a nothing light as any unhummed air caressed—no kissed—by what must be the gusto of a mere breath, I know no puff-cheeked cherub imp exhaled nor windgod bellowed angrily or bored but cannot help but feel and want to bow: as a Man of bone and fist I’m unable to, and tremble; but as a Mind I imagine my soul supine on the lawn and every now and then wake up just so amazed and renewed by that imagination’s conquest

mg_82 | interview series | 10_15 Those who have something to say: Karla Linn Merrifield “Poetry furthers the sacred” Karla Linn Merrifield is part of these few poets I have the honour to publish regularly in mgversion2>datura. She has been a faithful contributor to the journal since 2012 1, and has carried on responding to the many calls for submissions since then. I wanted to explore with her the notion of the vagabond poet she claims to be, and really is (this interview had to be buckled in haste because she was expected to leave to Florida the weekend prior to publication). Since our first “encounter” online through the aforesaid issue, we have been working on various projects together. One being the editing and prefacing of my latest collection Crossing Puddles2 – I could not ask another poet than a vagabond one to write the foreword to a collection which theme is clearly the changing of places, and how this affects the poet's inspiration and mood. The latest being me writing a foreword to her collection Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada. The two of us being so much absorbed and absorbing the places where we live and write as she rightly write as a presentation on her personal blog: “I have been creating poems rooted in place, first experiencing specific habitats (e.g., in Florida, Utah, Alaska, Canada, Antarctica, Africa, the Caribbean), observing with a naturalist’s and poet’s eye. I inhabit place, it inhabits me thru' my poems.”

Walter Ruhlmann: How did you become a vagabond poet and how important is it in your life? Karla Linn Merrifield: I think I’m genetically predisposed to wanderlust. It feels that way, but more likely it’s a convergence of experiences during my childhood in West Virginia in the 1950s. My parents vacationed on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; my brother and I along for the are-we-there-yet ride that led to The Beach (shelling, swimming, fishing) and the boardwalk, and stopovers in Washington, DC (the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian institution and all those dinosaur skeletons), and Baltimore (where we ate crabcakes standing up at the counter at the Lexington Market); once we went through New England into Maine. My father taught me to read the Sunoco maps when I was in kindergarten. I was hooked. Today the addiction has led to the hard stuff-- Mapquest plus two GPSs, one on my cell, the other a Garmin on the dash. When two years of serious illness at age 6-8 kept me home for weeks at a time, I did my school lessons, pored over the World Book Encyclopedia, discovering far-away places with beautiful names from Australia to Zanzibar. Still home sick, I did a geography project for which I earned an A. My mother had suggested I write all the tourism bureaus at the states I’d visited, requesting their travel brochures. The arrival of the mailman (we did not call him a “postal carrier” back then) became an1 2

Issue 69 Fifty Stars and a Maple Leaf, January 2012 Robocup Press, February 2015

mg_82 | interview series | 10_15 almost event for a couple weeks: big envelopes appeared with my name on them from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Ontario (Canada)…so many more. I had a dresser drawer full of them. They’ve disappeared into deep time, but I never stopped collecting brochures. I have a few boxes of travel literature upstairs in my archives. Give me a good stateline visitor center any day, a vagabond poet’s candy stores. And it’s all free. So, yes, the travel bug bit me at an early age. As did poetry, which came along when I was eleven, living then in Rochester, NY, where our family had been transplanted. It took another eight years before travel and poetry converged. On my own for the first time as a study-abroad student, I spent a summer in Europe, six weeks of it in L’Isle Adam sur L’Oise, a town just north of Paris. Afternoons I sometimes sat listening to George Moustaski albums, writing in my journal, writing poems, a few of which were published. Juvenilia but not too shabby in retrospect. Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada attests to my enduring addictions to travel, to poetry. It’s joined a family of books about the places I’ve been, all of them with my beloved husband Roger Weir who gives me exotic gifts of foreign countries, alien (to us) biota, oceans and rivers that have appeared in Bunchberries’ progenitors, including Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing); The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica (Finishing Line Press); Lithic Scatter and Other Poems (Mercury Heartlink); and Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems (FootHills). Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North is with Salmon Poetry. Several more manuscripts are still looking for a publisher— about Africa (Saharan and Sub-Saharan), the Caribbean, and a trilogy of archipelagos from the Galapagos to Hawaii to the Hebrides. Over the holidays, Roger and I will be off to Cuba on a small-yacht cruise. I’ve already written my first Cuba poem. There’s no getting over it.

Walter Ruhlmann: I knew you had a soft spot for the French language. Did you first flirt with this language in Paris? Was it a language you studied at school? Karla Linn Merrifield: As a girl, I heard my Austrian grandmother converse with my mother in German, so it seemed natural I would take German in high school to fulfill the New York State Regent’s language requirement. What a disaster! At the end of three years I still had not mastered German’s convoluted (IMO) grammar and got my only D in the Regent’s final. The bruising sent me into the French classroom in college to meet its language requirement. Now here was a language that did come naturally to me. By the end of my freshman year, I became a double major in English and French. The following year I was off to Quebec to do an independent study in separatist poetry, and the year after that to my summer abroad in France. I fell in love with both the language and French literature— Marie de France, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Flaubert… Le français had

mg_82 | interview series | 10_15 come so easily and the literature felt so familiar that for a short time I entertained the notion I’d been French in a previous life. I got over it, but my poetry is still very much influenced by mes chers poètes français. A new sequence of poems is very much inspired by Rimbaud.

Walter Ruhlmann: Quebec is indeed often present in your poems – Godwit and Bunchberries. Is it just the proximity of the border or just the appeal of the wild, and the French? Karla Linn Merrifield: I fell in love with Quebec when I did an independent study there fall of my junior year in college in November 1972 in Montreal and Quebec City. I was eating poutine long before it became a rage in the U.S., which it sure is now. I was reading the poetry of the Quebecois separatist poets, amazed that a province was agitating to become independent of Canada. Learning about the movement and its protest poets laid the foundation for much of my advocacy poetry. Talking with you about this, I realize how Rina Lasnier and her copains influenced my environmentalist poems that 34 years later manifested itself in The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America, the anthology I co-edited with my husband, Roger M. Weir. Les Separatists in no small way led me to do another anthology, one calling for social justice. Poet Dwain Wilder and I edited, Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%. I’m exceedingly proud that the later book is in the stacks at the U.S. Library of Congress. It receives thousands of books and hundreds of requests for placement at the Library, and very few make it. Liberty’s Vigil did, and all those poets are in its pages with Dwain and me in those hallowed walls. That’s a long way around to get to the why Quebec. Proximity is part of it – I don’t have to go too far away to practice my French. I still have the Quebecois accent, mind you. And Rina Lasnier’s L'Invisible is still with me, upstairs in the library. I can still read it… and remember how I fell in love with Quebec then and there. Besides Leonard Cohen still lives there half-time. Now there’s inspiration.

Walter Ruhlmann: Has music influenced your writing more, beside Leonard Cohen, of course? Karla Linn Merrifield: Interesting you should ask, Walter. I’m just now in the process of finalizing a new book-length manuscript inspired by and about a classical pianist, a man I’ve known since he was a lad of 16. The book’s titled Doubtful Symbols: A Memoir in 68 Poems. In it you’ll meet up with Chopin and get a glimpse a Brahms in his cameo appearance. Also, the beautiful language of music permeates these poems. Lentendo, crescendo, requiem. The book surprised me, coming as it did to me after writing my Leonard Cohen tribute book, When the Night Is Warm. Back to back books both starring a music man. Huh, what was that all about? I’m still trying to figure it out.

mg_82 | interview series | 10_15 But, bien sûr, ami, music has long been integral to my writing as it is for most poets, if not all of us. I pay considerable attention to what I call the “sonics” of my poetry. What kind of music do they make? A samba poem? A mazurka? Music is a mathematical art— whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighths, sixteenths. And so forth and so forth. Music theory was a little over my head when I took piano lessons (eight years), yet the theoretical manages to come through, I think, when I work in mathematical poetic forms, the Fibonacci and the poem, for example. Oh, and fractal poems! What fun! What I end up doing is a lot of counting syllables in each line. Don’t we all? I’m not nuts, am I? It is the basic unit after all. We’ve learned a syllable is a note, several syllables — a short line — equals one measure... Voilà, music-poetry, inseparable. Once again, Walter, I’m glad you asked. Tickled, in fact.

Walter Ruhlmann: So as regard inspiration, is formal poetry something that you feel inclined toward very much? You also write a lot of different types of traditional poems, can you tell us more about it? Karla Linn Merrifield: Sure thing. Understand that most of what I write is free verse, something like eighty percent, but I admit I love to play with forms. They fascinate me. Not just writing a villanelle or a sestina, but understanding how they work, where and when they were developed. What’s a tanka? What is the origin of the ghazal (one of my faves)? I like to collect new forms, too. The Joey form is quite au current in the U.S. thanks to poet John Roche who developed it in 2008 in the process of writing his book The Joe Poems: The Continuing Saga of Joe the Poet (FootHills Publishing). The form is limited to one hundred or fewer words in a maximum of ten lines, usually with minimal punctuation, and must feature Joe the Poet or a variation thereof. Since then, he’s compiled Mo' Joe: The Joe the Poet Anthology (The Continuing Saga of Joe the Poet) that includes Joeys from more than a hundred poets (CreateSpace Publishing). I’m so proud to have my JoJo/Josephine the Poet in its pages. Here’s another one for you. A few years ago, eminant American poet William Heyen created the scherzo in which there are thirteen syllables divided into two lines and containing at least one rhyme. Title not included. He’s written, I kid you not, thousands of them. He’s so intimate with the form that he can pick out scherzi in everyday conversations. They make for delightful pocket poems, like the ones Bill handcrafts for his Poemlet Press – original poems handwritten, graced with artwork, sometimes of Bill’s own making, and slipped into a baseball-card protector—a tribute to brevity, a gem.

mg_82 | interview series | 10_15 Following both Bill and John’s lead, I’ve invented a few forms myself. One is a skink, which I came up with five years ago; it consists of five lines (title not included) in which the fifth line is a variation on the second line, employing in line 5 a few words and/or word variations borrowed from line 2 to create an echo effect; a skink must contain two rhymes, which may occur anywhere in the poem (including the title) and may be true or slant. Got that?! In 2009 when I was on my Everglades National Park artist-in-residence gig, came up with the cameo because I wanted to do a series of human portraits of important (IMO) figures in Everglades history. Hence poems of exactly 100 syllables – painting a picture of John James Audubon or a Seminole woman with no more, no less than a scant 100. It was a daily exercise in the art of compression, squeezing a human being into so few words. I wrote nearly two dozen of them and have since gone on to write many dozens more. Editors seem to like my ROYGBIVs, too, drawn to “your sense of color in the lines”. A ROYGBIV cites each color of the rainbow in no more than twenty lines. The trick here is subtlety. Is that enough? Nah, I teach a workshop on forms from time to time. I had a blast researching dozens of forms and distilling them to a checklist and a mini glossary. In the opening group exercise we go around the circle or rows and name forms. When we’ve exhausted the possibilities, we tally up. Every single time I have to add a form to my master list, a form I’ve never heard of. Something new (for me) to try. Is there really such a form as the prose-tanka? Indeed there is. Bottom line? A bounty of forms is the best insurance; I’ll never be bored. (But by now your reader might!)

Walter Ruhlmann: Not at all Karla. The Everglades. Could you tell us more about this place and your fondness for nature generally speaking? Karla Linn Merrifield: Are you trying to get me to write a book here, Walter? I could go on that long about the Everglades, you know. But I’ll try to keep this succinct. I get around the planet a bit as you’ve seen from my Vagabond Poet blog. Both antipodes, several oceans, a few continents, blah, blah, blah. Yet I always return to my favorite place on Earth, the Everglades, ever since I first stepped into its strange and beautiful world. It is my Holy Land. Nothing else like it anywhere in the world – and it’s disappearing right under our noses. Sucked dry, invaded, poisoned. I’m rather fierce about my love for this harsh place that does its best to keep us humans at a distance. Touch a blade of saw grass – the plant bites! But we’ve mucked it up anyway.

mg_82 | interview series | 10_15 So I try, in photographs and poetry, to remind readers and viewers of what we stand to lose if we don’t do more to save what’s still there. Thousands of photographs, dozens of poems later and I’m still infatuated with it, still striving to do my part, my best to help it. That reminds me…. I recently received great news recently. As an Artist in Residence in the Everglades (AIRIE) fellow, I’d been invited to submit work (poems and photographs) for AERIE’s Wild Billboards, which celebrate the National Park Service’s centennial year and will be seen throughout downtown Miami. It’s an effort that will create a new awareness of the Everglades and challenge South Floridians’ pre-existing conceptions of the wilderness that surrounds them. The first Wild Billboard will be of my photograph “River of Grass with Dwarf Cypress.” The panoramic image will be blown up to 48 feet long and wrapped around a building in the heart of Miami! Across my spare vista with its wide sky and scattered whipped-cream clouds are a few words from fellow AERIE fellow Anne McCrary Sullivan: “There is no app for this”. I’m looking forward in November to revisiting the Everglades and taking a swing into Miami to see the Wild Billboard in situ. Pictures on Facebook to follow! So, yes, the Glades. First in my soul, but I’ve discovered other Holy Lands, for, in a sense, each place, every place is holy. My backyard with its woodchuck, piliated woodpecker, leopard frogs, and basswood and oak trees. And the Galapagos…the Inner Hebrides…the Serengeti…Taos, New Mexico… the Lesser Antilles…the Amazon…the Nile…. You see, I want to see a harpy eagle while there is still one to be seen, then write its poem or poems, believing “poetry furthers the sacred.”

Walter Ruhlmann: A French literature teacher I used to work with told me once he would not write poetry because "it was close to the sacred.” Your motto “Poetry furthers the sacred” is close to it though not exactly the same. How do you react to this? Do you really think most contemporary poetry “furthers the sacred”? I am mainly thinking about the Beat generation and those who were inspired by this trend, but also the magic realism poets. Karla Linn Merrifield: Walter, I wish I could speak to the magical realists, but it’s not a genre that I’m familiar enough with to speak with any authority. The Beats? That’s a different story. Gary Snyder’s poetry leaps to mind with I think of the role of poetry as bringing more of the sacred into our lives, our world. Think of “At Tower Peak” with its lamentation for the mounting losses of the natural world thanks to we humans, the “Twenty million human people, downstream, here below.” Certainly elements of Ginsberg’s poems further the sacred. His Kaddish comes to mind. I find it a difficult read, but sweeping, visceral not unlike St. Walt’s poetry. Ginsberg mourns the world around him. He’s warning us when we says: “Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching

mg_82 | interview series | 10_15 school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?” To me, that’s a call for us to discard materialism and discover the spiritual within. A bit of a stretch? I don’t think so. Of course, there are poems and poetry books that are blatantly furthering the spiritual. I think of the two anthologies I mentioned earlier. Another one is Vigil for the Marcellus Shale edited by Dwain Wilder and Bart White (FootHills Publishing). The collection is baldly, boldly anti-fracking. Or the American literary journals Kudzu, About Place Journal, Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poetry and several others. They’re all furthering the sacred Earth.

Walter Ruhlmann: In Europe as over the pond I suppose poetry has become a minor genre. Do you have concerns and any idea why that is? Karla Linn Merrifield: I don’t think poetry is in its death throes as some have claimed. Sure I wish more people read and enjoyed poetry, but there are enough readers and students of poetry in this world to keep the genre alive and thriving. Think, Walter, of the explosion of creative writing programs (endless MFA opportunities, online poetry forums such as affinity groups on Goodreads, Facebook, even Pinterest; and online poetry journals like your own mgv2>datura. I think what’s happened is that poetry is alive and well via the Internet and Kindle, we’re just seeing fewer print journals and print poetry books. One of the healthiest things to happen to poetry is the wide availability of books-on-demand for those of us who want something physical in our hands to dwell in. The best of both worlds. I’m an optimist. I really believe as long as there are humans, there will be poetry.

Walter Ruhlmann: Just one more word, after Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, what would you say to an emerging poet today? Karla Linn Merrifield: I’m not sure I would recommend Rilke’s Letters, unless it were one of dozens of classic poets any poet should have read and explored, from Chaucer to Milton to Dante to Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Ginsberg…. The point is to read poetry, lots of it over a wide range of styles and eras. And write, anything, something every day. And revise, revise, revise. Read, write, revise. Read, write, revise. Ad infinitum

mgversion2>datura A nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-inResidence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had over 500 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has eleven books to her credit, the newest of which Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com). Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

Right from the title, Bunchberries, we are delivered to the natural beauty of the land as the Latin name for bunchberry – cornus canadensis – implies. From the first poems already so many places, swirling as many shots, postcards, flashes transport the mind to Canada beyond all one can imagine, like a jewel in the crown breathing in the Maritimes: Cape Breton, highland meadows, North Atlantic storms, gray seals, Lake Keiji, Brier Island, the Bay of Saint Lawrence, Nova Scotia. And unsurprisingly ferries getting people in and out, crossing seas or bays, are at the centre of these first poems too, as this land from sea to sea offers more than vast lands, no less vast shores, and maritime landscapes. Now playing “The Pirate of Penance” and reading “Special Load”:

I transport local traffic year-round and tourists in the summer. Mostly cars, pickups, delivery trucks and once a month that pint-sized fuel tanker bound for the gas pumps at Lechabeau’s General Store. Never a semi, no further roads for such anyway. No, nary a big boy for Old Joe, old Joe Casey. It is also something peculiar to go from one language to the other, as one would go from land to land. A godwit in French is une barge, a barge is.. well, a barge in both languages, isn't it? Maritime-drawn. Karla uses French words especially in her poems where Quebec is the landscape. C'est quelque chose de merveilleux – It's something wonderful (to give Karla her blink back) – to read these poems where I imagine her making her French phrases surface again when purchasing items from the local grocery store “Speaking of Québec”. 47

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I’ve fallen back into it after ten days across Quebéc: le français. I ask for directions to the marché d’alimentation, locals’ mouthful for grocery store. When I need to flip a new Bic for my foul habit, I manage to sputter Est-ce vous avez des alumettes pour les cigarettes? Lost in fog too, and smell of roses. Like the memory blanks, in “Proper Adornment” (quoted bellow) where the poet, dazzled by the glittering sea glass that may not be what it looks like, relishes on a piece of driftwood that lost both memory and bark. I also recognise the fog the waitress is lot in “Lost and Found in Les Madeleines” a Proustian poem where the poet herself cannot find the French word brouillard anymore. Fog where the bodies of the departed are lost in, then found again, on the shores of Prince Edward Island on Cabot Beach. This is the beauty to be had at Cabot’s Beach: the glittering litter not of sea glass pocketed to take home but the mantle, the jewels of the dead and gone to remember. From Walter Ruhlmann's foreword to Buncheberries, More Poems of Canada. Foothills, 2015 http://foothillspublishing.com/2015/id94.htm — 88 page hand-stitched paperbook with spine. $18.00 Appraisal from Foothills product page: Karla Linn Merrifield's poem "Ballad for August 27, 2012" takes place on the storied shores of Lake Erie, minus the bountiful hauls of sturgeon and herring. She focuses on the Mummery Brother's trawler, a "ghost boat of the Great Lakes," packed with "hopeful ice." A variety of factors from pollution to the parasitic sea lamprey have contributed to the industry's decline. Indigenous species of fish like the blue pike and the deep-water cisco are now extinct. Merrifield's poem is a beautiful tribute to a disappearing way of life, and we at The Head & The Hand Press are grateful for the opportunity to share a glimpse of that legacy. ~The Head & The Hand Press, www.theheadandthehand.com (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA)

mgversion2>datura mgv2>publishing's titles for 2015 The Dark Pool by Peter O'Neill poems 6,00€ – 90 pages Buy it here http://www.lulu.com/shop/peteroneill/the-dark-pool/paperback/product22101229.html “It is precisely in locating that realm in such dreary moments that O’Neill finds his matter, and in doing so he enacts an old feat of ancient ambition, which is to marry earth with heaven. This is a fancy way of putting it, when distrust of language these days edges so much of discourse. But the cycles of violence and song, of drunken self-immersion, and clinging spirit comprise, you might say, the Matter of Ireland, and that is, all by itself, a version of the matter of the North. O’Neill’s poems provides ample evidence that this is the case.” from David Rigsbee's review of The Dark Pool

A Few Bullets Short of Home by A.J. Huffman poems 8,54€/$8 – 54 pages Buy it here http://www.lulu.com/shop/ajhuffman/a-few-bullets-short-ofhome/paperback/product-22242044.html A.J. Huffman has published eleven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her other poetry collection, Another Blood Jet, is available from Eldritch Press. She also has two more poetry collections forthcoming: Degeneration from Pink Girl Ink, and A Bizarre Burning of Bees from Transcendent Zero Press. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has published over 2300 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com

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And Agamemnon Dead: An Anthology of Early 21st century Poetry, edited by peter O'Neill 9€ – 188 pages Buy it here http://www.lulu.com/shop/peteroneill-and-rosita-sweetman-and-michaelmcaloran-and-amos-greig/and-agamemnondead/paperback/product-22402516.html “5 stars and a delighted thumbs up for this brilliant anthology of contemporary Irish poetry. Each poetic voice leaves it's own original impression on the mind and in the landscape that resonates and remains long after the book is finished. This is one of those books that you will delight in reading again and again.” By Mark Jones X & compagnie Cathy Garcia & compagnie – Des ourses dans le ciel http://www.lulu.com/shop/cathy-garcia-anddiane-meunier-and-jany-pineau-and-gu %C3%A9nane/cathy-garcia-compagnie-des-oursesdans-le-ciel/paperback/product-22028848.html 3ème volume de la série francophone X & compagnie Cathy Garcia a invité Guénane, Jany Pineau, Perrine Le Querrec, Diane Meunier et Murièle Modély. Féminine et puissante, la poésie des ourses plane au-dessus de celle des autres.

mgversion2>datura Vincent & compagnie http://www.lulu.com/shop/vincent/vincentcie/paperback/product-22127147.html Après trois premiers volumes de la série française X & compagnie, voici le quatrième Vincent et compagnie. De très nombreux auteurs et artistes dans ce recueil orchestré par Vincent blogueur sur ma poésie et pas la tienne.

Patrice Maltaverne & compagnie http://www.lulu.com/shop/patrice-maltaverneand-jean-claude-goiri-and-murielle-comp %C3%A8re-demarcy-and-marc-tison/patricemaltaverne-compagnie/paperback/product22233607.html 5ème volume de la série francophone X & compagnie. Patrice Maltaverne invite autour de lui Murielle Compère-Demarcy, Jean-Claude Goiri, Marc Tison, Sylvain Jadzewski et Tom Samel. Illustration de couverture: François Biajoux

Jan Bardeau & compagnie http://www.lulu.com/shop/jan-bardeau-and-s %C3%A9bastien-russo/jan-bardeaucompagnie/paperback/product-22288079.html Extrait de la biographie par Jan Bardeau Il lui a demandé d’écrire les biographies des deux auteurs qui nous occupent ci-devant, ceux-là, oui, Russo, Bardeau, Barreau, Dusso, voilà, eux, lui il veut bien écrire des biographies, qu’il lui a répondu, mais il ignore s’il en est capable et il ne connaît pas forcément si bien leurs vies, aux deux, là, oui, ceux-là, alors tant pis il s’y colle 52

mgversion2>datura quand même mais qu’il ne se plaigne pas si c’est loupé. Le premier, là, lui, est un angloberrychon, et l’autre issu de l’immigration ritalienne de Sicilie, du sud, en bas, toc, pile vers la mer, boum ; lui, il écrit des trucs mais souvent plus souvent il ne les écrit pas, et c’est plutôt mieux comme ça, lui, par contre, il dessine des trucs, et souvent il les dessine, et bon, bof, des fois c’est bien, des fois c’est pas bien. Perrin Langda & compagnie Perrin Langda & compagnie, octobre 2015 avec Brice Haziza, Christophe Bregaint, Stéphane Poirier, Mike Kasprzak, Heptanes Fraxion, Thierry Roquet, Morgan Riet, Emanuel Campo et Perrin Langda. Illustration de couverture Eric Demelis.

Coming up in 2015 •

Documentaire humain by Perrin Langda, poems, October 2015

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Poem without a Title by Klaus J. Gerken, poems, December 2015

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Marlène Tissot & compagnie, December 2015

mgv2>publishing accepts manuscript and read all year round. Send your submission to mgv2publishing@gmail.com. Header Name_Title_Genre. Allow six weeks fore a response. Visit the blog for more details http://mgv2publishing.blogspot.com

All titles and mgvversion2>datura issues can be found on Lulu's author's page http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/wruhlmann

contributors' biographies François Biajoux est né le 05 octobre 1995, originaire de Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne, petite ville de la Dombe. Il a beaucoup d'intérêt pour la musique, la peinture, la photographie et l'effet que peuvent produire ces œuvres sur les autres. Il fut modèle pour certains photographes de Lyon, à l'âge de 17 ans. Passionné de trains, et de voyages, il a trouvé un travail où il peut exercer un maximum de ses passions en même temps. Il a signé la couverture de Patrice Maltaverne & compagnie mgv2>publishing, juillet 2015. François Biajoux was born on October 5, 1995 in center-eastern France. He is interested in music, painting, photography and the effect these may have on the people. He used to be a model for some photographers at 17. He is fond of trains and travels, he found a job that allows him to exercise many of his passions at the same time. Christopher Barnes’ first collection Lovebites is published by Chanticleer. Each year he reads at Poetry Scotland’s Callender Poetry Weekend. He also writes art criticism which has been published in Peel and Combustus magazines. Tatjana Debeljacki writes poetry, short stories, stories and haiku. She is a Member of Association of Writers of Serbia – UKS since 2004. She is Haiku Society of Serbia- Deputy editor of Diogen. She also is the editor of the magazine Poeta. Steve Klepetar’s work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His latest collections include Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications), Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing), My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press), and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein (Kind of a Hurricane Press). Michael Price received his BA in Theater from the University of Minnesota in 1980 and has been writing both short and long fiction ever since, primarily as a source of self-entertainment. Regularly published in literary journals, he performed his one-man one-act play No Change of Address at the 2011 MN Fringe Festival to considerable critical acclaim. A former photographic body model, Michael still enjoys fitness training, working on crossword puzzles and Sudokus between sets. He lives in St. Paul with his long-time friend and professional photographer, Pamela Veeder. Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is university faculty and assistant professor of linguistics at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India; and author of three books – two on lesser known Indian languages: A Grammar of Hadoti (2012) and A Grammar of Bhadarwahi (2013); and one poetry collection in Hindi titled: Chinar ka Sukha Patta (Dried Leaves of Chinar), (2015). As a poet, he has published more than hundred poems in different anthologies, journals, and magazines worldwide. Until recently, his poem “Mother” has been included as a prologue to Motherhood and War: International Perspectives (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan Press. Wafula p'Khisa is one of the emerging voices in the Kenyan poetry scene. He was born in 1990 in Bungoma, Kenya. A graduate of Moi University, Wafula studied English, Literature & Education. He currently teaches English & Literature at St. Monica's Girls' High School, Kitale, Kenya. He has written numerous poems, short stories and essays. Some of his poems have appeared in The Seattle Star, The Legendary Magazine and the NYSAI Press's Journal. Basile Rouchin est né au début des années 70. Actuellement, il vit et travaille en banlieue parisienne. Quelques-uns de ses textes ont paru dans une trentaine de revues. Premier recueil: « Détail d’intérieur » (IHV, mars 2015). Il est relecteur pour la revue Poésie Première. Basile Rouchin was born in the early 70s. He now works and lives in the suburbs of Paris. Some of his prose were published in thirty-something journals. His first collection Détail d'intérieur (IHV, March 2015). He is part of the mast-head at Poésie première. Howie Good is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Dark Specks in a Blue Sky from Another New Calligraphy. Tom Sheehan served in 31st Infantry, Korea 1951, and graduated from Boston College, 1956. Poetry books include Ah, Devon Unbowed; This Rare Earth & Other Flights; The Saugus Book; and Reflections from Vinegar Hill. Fiction/nonfiction books include Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans; A Collection of Friends; From the Quickening; In the Garden of Long Shadows; The Nations; Where Skies Grow Wide; A Gathering of Memories; Of Time and the River; and Sons of Guns, Inc., recently released by Nazar Look Books in Romania (where he was awarded a Nazar Look Short Story Award for 2014.) eBooks include Korean Echoes (nominated for a Distinguished Military Award), The Westering, (National Book Award nomination); Murder

contributors' biographies at the Forum, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment, An Accountable Death, and Death of the Phantom Receiver. He has had work in Rosebud, KYSO Flash, Copperfield Review, The Linnet's Wings, Literary Orphans, Danse Macabre, Literally Stories, Provo Canyon Review, 3AM Magazine, mgversion2>datura, Eastlit, Rope and Wire Magazine, The Literary Yard, East of the Web, Green Silk Journal, Western Online, Indiana Voices Journal, The Path, Faith-Hope-Fiction, HSS MSS, Plum Tree Tavern, Scriptor Press, Serving House Journal, Subtle Tea, Wilderness House Literary Review, Abbreviate Journal, Million Stories, etc. He has 28 Pushcart Prize nominations. A.J. Huffman has published eleven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press) and A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing) are now available from their respective publishers. She has two additional poetry collections forthcoming: Degeneration from Pink Girl Ink, and A Bizarre Burning of Bees from Transcendent Zero Press. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has published over 2200 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com With his first collection of poetry, Manhattan Plaza, James B. Nicola follows poets Frank Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hara and Stanley Kunitz and humorist Robert Benchley as a New York author originally from Worcester, Massachusetts. His second collection, Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater, will be out in 2016. He has been widely published in Europe in periodicals including mgversion2>datura, Istanbul Review, Poetry Salzburg, The Recusant, Antiphon, Word Gumbo, Sand, Krax, and Snakeskin. Stateside, his work has appeared in the Southwest, Atlanta, Lullwater and Texas Reviews, Tar River, Lyric, Nimrod, and Blue Unicorn. James won the Dana Literary Award, a People's Choice award (from Storyteller), a Willow Review award, one Rhysling and two Pushcart nominations, and was featured poet at New Formalist. A Yale grad and stage director by profession, his nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award. Also a composer, lyricist, and playwright, his childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s musical Chimes: A Christmas Vaudeville premiered in Fairbanks, Alaska, with Santa Claus in attendance on opening night. Visit sites.google.com/site/jamesbnicola