mgv2_en_02 | June 2008

mgversion2>datura mgv2_en_02 june 2008

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Mauvaise graine, revue créée à Cirencester, GrandeBretagne, en 1996, publiée jusqu'en 2000. mgversion2>datura en ligne depuis 2002.

--Mauvaise graine – a literary magazine – was created in Cirencester, UK in 1996 and published until 2000. mgversion2>datura has been on line since 2002.

2

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

mgversion2>datura | mgversion2.free.fr |mgversion2@free.fr mgv2_en _02 | June 2008

Cover illustration : Norman J. Olson Contents: Chris Major

page 4

Dimitris Lyacos

page 7

Steve Klepetar

page 9

Christopher Mulrooney

page 11

Jan Oskar Hansen

page 12

Belinda Subraman

page 14

Norman Olson

page 15

Suchoon Mo

page 16

Sam Hunt

page 17

James Morris

page 18

Daniel Y. Harris

page 19

Laala Kashef Alghata

page 20

3

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Any Street – A Car

Chris Major

4

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Over the Limit?

Chris Major

5

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Print

Chris Major

6

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Z213: Exit (extract 10)

Dimitris Lyacos

translated from Greek by Sorsha Sullivan Dimitris Lyacos was born in Athens in 1966. His trilogy Poena Damni (Z213: Exit, Nyctivoe, The First Death) has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian and German and has been Shorsha Sullivan was born in Dublin in 1932. performed extensively across Europe and the He studied Classics at Leeds and has spent most of his working life in England. He has an USA. A sound and sculpture installation of interest in Modern Greek theatre and poetry. Nyctivoe opened in London and toured Europe in 2004-2005. A contemporary dance version of the same book was showing in Greece between 2006-2007 culminating in a performance at the Athens Concert Hall (Megaro Mousikis). Lyacos' work has been the subject of lectures and research at various universities, including Amsterdam, Trieste and Oxford. The German translation of The First Death is due to appear

by J.Frank Verlag in the forthcoming months.

For more information on the author visit www.lyacos.net.

go girl from rock-cut dwelling take her up share well-drilled among us you summoned drew up twelve whose names are and others around you a great crowd on the ripples stray leaves from an autumnal circling around you of a theatre.

And rusted cymbals behind the gate past feasts fringe of a life that flutters in the cupboard oil in a bottle like milk and who were they here perhaps in nightly rites from where are they gathered from they are the As if their bodies appear under their clothes like membranes under the light strange confused all together a web that opens webs that seized empty insects tremble in the wind take the spider watch it running between your fingers it flees you to run behind the icons God. His mild cold eyes she who you came into now is around me you sprinkle the earth with fruit, eyelids with vinegar, our cities with blood secret cities secretly born secretly mated hot eyes of an adulteress like this church I wonder when did anyone sleep here, who and the painted bodies will bend kindly faces to face just lately I know 7

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

I have never slept before on their monuments they expand their wings above me as if I were to see your dress God was wrapped up there frozen expressionless you would say there were thousands of eyes together all the crosses silver above windmills grind from below white caterpillars and dust Inside the your breast they did not pass however if I were to hold some of it the bread they gave me and a little meat too That train was going out of the Zone remember what they told you something about the exile’s why do you always clasp your stomach just as you go asleep above you the saint, horseman with the spear in his hands above you Like a flute, a flute-player painted with fingers emaciated which he sews in the monster’s mouth At the back paths go up to the rock a tree it too from a rock the ivy which on her lips and climbs into the most fertile God climbs, at the back the roofs the country that they were saying after the evening sleep all those around her a bed collects the petals a nest of hair around there your spider weaves its eyes your eyes mild still cold when you share out his body, one piece to everyone full of light steeped in the fire bouquets of thyme and the dirge below the crowd they lift him up in their hands candles twelve of the bastions and the men behind them in war

8

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Whose Dog?

Steve F. Klepetar

Whose dog am I not, snuffing at the base of this hawk-heavy tree?

Steve Klepetar teaches literature and writing at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota.

His work has appeared in many journals and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web. These poems come from a new collection called Thirty-six Crows.

See where I pull at earth’s chain?

If I never spoke again, my breath’s shadow might climb hand over hand to the blue pillar of ghostly mirage. Fear is exactly nothing but the worm spiraling through caverns in the mind’s broken night.

9

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Not likely

Steve F. Klepetar

It’s not likely that you’ll find me here when this strange weather turns from frigid gold to diamond lakes, even when steamboats find their moorings burned and dragged and rusted in the sand. Read their names below the waterline: Narcissus and Peregrine and The Insolent Antelope. Nor will you find my spectral shape dancing on a daisy’s tossing head, insouciant and unaware of all that lurks crying in the wind.

It isn’t likely that my words will paint your ceiling or mold a lover for you out of clay. Your oldest wine, red as sunset through foundry smoke, won’t likely win your bed a pair of wings or lay your cradle down by Eagle Creek. When you walk the rainy streets alone you will slip on slick pavement without friends or a yellow dog to call your own. It isn’t likely that the hole I’ve dug, wide as it may be deep, that pride of spade and shovels full, of forearm ache, that smooth and lonely effort, will keep your idle secrets underground.

10

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

In advance of many considerations

Christopher Mulrooney

Christopher Mulrooney has written poems in The Delinquent, Vanitas, Guernica, Beeswax, echolocation and fourW.

I have the honour to report to you many cohorts of the military-industrial-entertainment complex we have succeeded first in cloning the actor then in automating him what is required now however is removal however short and sweet of the desire to see an actor howsoever and then we're all finished

11

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Sunday Reflection 1

Jan Oskar Hansen

Jan Oskar Hansen is a Norwegian poet living in Portugal. His work appears in several anthologies, magazines and on the net. He has also published several collections of his Letters from Portugal. Hansen's poems have also appeared in Hudson Review and Skyline Magazine. His latest collection End of a Voyage was published by Water Forest Press (USA) in 2007. Two other collections have followed this year: Marylin Monroe Remembered by erbaccepress (UK) and La Strada by Lapwing, Belfast (Northern Ireland)

I’m back but there are no fanfares, tanned by years in a warmer clime I look as… I feel, foreign.

But all this fade I’m back in the streets of 1948 black and white the only colour was the green grass of spring, it was a time when everyone looked old at twenty five and interviewed by the local paper for reaching the grand old age of sixty five.

Too bleak for words, nothing here but silenced screams, the smell of poverty, that clings to the skin, and empty bottles of booze. I’ll unload my memories here on the pavement leave them for others to find; bleached bones, no, I cannot free myself the shackles too strong , but I can trim it at the ages and make it pretty by adding a sun and a lamb on a hill.

12

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Sunday Reflection 2

Jan Oskar Hansen

Having turned my back to the home town I followed the coast road, till it veered left and I lost sight of the sea and drove into a 1950th rural landscape where horses still pulled the plough.

Stopped across from the small farm where I had worked as child labourer, healthy life, milking cows at six in the morning, but I wished they would have let me be a child a little longer.

Remembering the child was as watching a Bergman movie, long shots of a flat landscape, little dialogue, a white church against a rain dark sky, a pitiless god and preachers of doom.

On my way back to the airport I stopped by the sea, it was so beautiful that day, and I cried for the lost child, but I was now free to write my own and better version of my childhood and in time believe it to be true.

13

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Quantum Friends

Awakened by wind, thirsty and mystified by the worm holes of truth.

If atoms are probability patterns effected by relationships then truly we infuse objects with meaning.

A keepsake is a bridge to the inner and outer worlds.

The sensations we feel sitting next to a friend or stranger is the reading of energy through shared atmosphere and atoms.

Our friends through cables and computer screens are as real as the light and sound waves we alter through thought.

Belinda Subraman

Belinda Subraman's main website is www.BelindaSubraman.com Her poetry is appearing in print journals, online magazines and podcasts around the world. Belinda is a contributing artist and show host for Gypsy Art Show played on streaming Bzoo Radio, TYNE FM and VI Radio. Her shows are available in podcast form at www.belinda_subraman.podomatic.com or available through itunes under Belinda Subraman Presents (podcast). Also she is an RN who has worked 6 years in hospice.

From the ancient Indian metaphor Indra's net: Pull one thread and all else is effected.

No act or thought is secret.

It ripples through the web.

14

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

on visiting the HR Giger Museum in Gruyeres, Switzerland -- April 27, 2008

my fingers twitched like patterns of black shapes in webs and layers of translucent paint. hours crawled up the walls like spiders. a cute boy in a black shirt typed cryptic equations into a cash register and light slipped through the windows like a ghost made of alpine snow. airbrushed rivets and girders beat bound flesh with straps and snakes I imagined the staircase without walls, my knee hinges flexing on rubber steps. in my scalded skull, a dizzy brain spun as I stumbled upward on a flimsy staircase high above the tourists and the camera cobbled streets. mountains in the distance danced like zombie teeth and the sun shone like the glazed dazed eye of a Geneva junkie as the needle digs again into the familiar ruin of flesh poisoned, decaying and torn by terrible dreams. invisible screams whirled in the mountain wind.

Norman Olson

Norman J. Olson, the artist, writer and poet lives in Maplewood, Minnesota. His images have been reproduced in dozens of art and literary magazines and publications throughout the world.

Longing for quiet and stability, Norman avoids personal contacts with the public. His art is driven by the compulsion and obsession of a man who prefers his own company. In spite of this self-imposed seclusion, Norman J. Olson is becoming an artistic underground legend.

15

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Nothingness

Suchoon Mo

Suchoon Mo is a former Korean Army Lieutenant and a retired university academic living in the semiarid part of Colorado. His poems appeared in many magazines. He has no formal music education.

you want to write about nothingness? write nothing sartre wrote about nothingness page after page a big and fat book full of nothingness he wrote something which was nothing go ahead write about nothingness as I am doing now

16

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Bus Stop Girl

Sam Hunt

Sam Hunt is a published journalist, poet, You said that you were sorry; You didn't know then what you know now. performance poet, mother and chair of a You were just doing what everyone else did. writer's co-operative-sometimes all at once!

She began writing over ten years ago, and her But I recall the time that a nurse hooked a poetry covers broad subject matter, including depression and self harm. She has recently drip in to that hard-to-reach vien began a new collection of poetry, based on the and I couldn't move for twelve hours. experience of her (very new!) journey in to They were reversing the effects of what i'd motherhood. done to myself.

Sam lives in Birmingham with her many pets and her six-month old daughter.

You said that you were happy for me; That i'd moved on,you could see And the my baby was just wonderful.

She smiled her toothless grin at you, I made polite conversation with you Making excuses and getting off two stops early.

You said that you were sorry.

I hear you-but how can I forgive?

17

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Window on the World

James Morris

rain crying down ‘‘ ‘‘‘ ‘‘‘‘ the window-pane ‘‘‘ ‘‘‘‘ ‘‘‘‘ tears on glass alas

18

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

Mantis

Daniel Y. Harris

Daniel Y. Harris is the author of the forthcoming poetry book, Unio Mystica. He holds a Master of Arts in Divinity from The University of Chicago. He is a widely published poet, essayist and visual artist. Among his credits are: The Pedestal Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, In Posse Review, Mad Hatters’ Review, Zeek, Sein und Werden, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Blue Jew Yorker, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poetry Magazine.com, Denver Quarterly, Convergence and The Other Voices International Project. Among his art exhibitions credits are: The Jewish Community Library of San Francisco, Market Street Gallery, The Euphrat Museum and The Center for Visual Arts. He earns his living as Northwest Regional Director of Development for Canine Companions for Independence. His website is www.danielyharris.com.

Narrowly escapes the butcher’s knife.

“Fried virus,” she hums in the grooves of a cutting board.

Once a husk of impurity, she is downsized to an appetizer.

Conflates her sting— catapults from the kitchen, to breed and eat her husband’s head.

19

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

The Nature of Signs

Laala Kashef Algatha

We look for signs in the creases of a lily's skirt, or the feeling of fingers pressed into our arms.

We hunt for life in the dirt and grime, go so far as to pick up a knife and shave the stems of plants, water them thoroughly when we see green flecked between the brown.

We look for signs, but signs sometimes come to us, in a friend's kiss or warm embrace, or underneath the sheets at night when we realise: we are alive.

Laala Kashef Alghata is a poet and novelist. She is the editor and founder of the online magazine, Write Me a Metaphor. Her latest book, "Behind the Mask: A Folded Heart" is a poetry and prose collection available through Amazon.co.uk. She is a poet-in-residence at Soul to Soul, Argonaut's Boat and The Peregrine Muse. Her work appears online in All Things Girl, Argotist Online and SubtleTea, among others. She is finishing a new poetry collection and is working on her second novel.

Words we want stay on the tip of our tongues and yet our lips overflow with currents we don't want exposed. With our fingers bare and our hearts open, we wait.

20

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

21

mgversion2>datura

mgv2_en_02

mgversion2>datura mgv2_en_01 June 2008 Š mgversion2>datura and the authors editor: Walter Ruhlmann contact and information: mgversion2@free.fr – mgversion2.free.fr issn: 1365-5418

22