issuefourouroboros by ouroboros review

ouroboros review

ISSN 2040-5782

Featuring Cecilia Woloch Louisa Adjoa Parker on black and minority publishing in the UK Poetry from Sophie Mayer, Iain Britton Susan Millar DuMars, John Walsh, Matt Merrit and more.......

Issue four November 2009

poetry and art

Contents Issue 3 Features Collin Kelley interviews acclaimed US poet Cecilia Woloch Louisa Adjoa Parker on black and minority ethnic publishing in the UK Poets

poets & artists

Sophie Mayer Iain Britton Julie E. Bloemeke Susan Millar DuMars John Walsh Aideen Henry J.P. Dancing Bear Annie Clarkson Jenny Sadre-Orafai Matt Merritt Dick Jones Gerry Galvin Laura Solomon Amaris Gutierrez-Ray Julie Sampson Graham Burchell William Doreski Jéanpaul Ferro

Andrew Demcak Corey Mesler Daniel Casey Luca Penne Krista Benjamin Scott Owens Dr Ehuda Sela Laura Sobbot Ross Ken Fifer Kelly Davio Elizabeth Polkinghorn Ashley Bovan Louisa Adjoa Parker Michelle McGrane Arlene Ang Deb Scott Janann Dawkins Barbara Crooker

4 6 8 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 25 26 31 32 33 34 35

20 28

36 36 37 37 38 39 39 40 41 41 42 43 43 44 44 45 46 46

Artists Jennifer Delaney Julie Bloemeke Jéanpaul Ferro Tammy Ho Lai-ming Deb Scott About the artists

Cover artist, 16, 31, 34 8 - 11 13 37, 47 38, 42, 45 47

EDITORIAL Editors: Jo Hemmant (London), Carolee Sherwood (New York), Jill Crammond Wickham (New York) Website: http://www.ouroborosreview.com Please read submission guidelines at website. Submission address: ouroborosreview@gmail.com Cover art: This image was taken June 2008 at the Boboli Gardens, in Florence, Italy by poet and artist Jennifer Delaney: ‘I leaned to take a drink and was fascinated by the disembodied faces in the bowl of the bronze fountain. In intimate proximity, the whimsical faces seem to be ready to kiss or sip. I was delighted to seek and discover other water fountains around the grounds by the same creator.’

From the editors What an amazing first year for Ouroboros Review! With the publication of this issue, the magazine has released four issues and featured the work of approximately 100 poets and artists. Listen to all these beautiful symphony notes coming/ together in harmony… - Jéanpaul Ferro In "Gossamer," a poem in Issue Four, Matt Merritt writes, they have "unlearned the knack of gravity." We like to think of the trajectory of ouroboros in that same way, rising up and up, refusing to adhere to the rumored limitations of literary life on Earth, where they say people aren't reading poetry anymore, where they say poets aren't writing poems of magnitude, where they say the internet is destroying the mystique of publishing. “…a ghost/ from the dust and rubble raised on high…” -John Walsh As contributors to the magazine and dedicated readers, we watched with delight this first year as the journal -a stunning print/on-line hybrid -- emerged so beautifully, an idea between two poet friends. There’s a heaven where women want to be stars… - Sophie Mayer We are two poet friends ourselves, and we thrive in the energy that builds between us and within communities of writers; it not only fuels our own writing but also creates all sorts of literary-inspired opportunities for mischief, such as readings, open mics and festivals. The most recent "trouble" (oh, glorious mischief!) we've found ourselves in is joining Jo at the helm of Ouroboros. The new domains, smooth/ and golden… - Janann Dawkins We have been Poets Above All Else for years, actively participating in writing groups -- for support, encouragement, accountability and critique -- for the duration of our 6-year friendship. We are interested in discussions about the craft of writing good poetry and the promotion of vehicles for poets to share their work. Teaming up with Jo as editors of an established, quality, international poetry journal is a dreamlike combination of those interests. We love poetry. We love collaboration. We love sharing great poetry with other people. …woven with bits/ of foil to lure/ the birds in… - Julie Bloemeke We are honored to be working with Jo to assemble poems and artwork that shine, foil-like, much like the work you will discover in these beautiful pages, poems with the most musical arrangements of words, as J P Dancing Bear’s poem The Quantum Musician, begins, “...playing in a crowd of musicians … the instruments are bending: snaking and wrapping themselves around the players and themselves.”

Carolee and Jill

Jo Hemmant

Carolee Sherwood

Jill Crammond Wickham

Sophie Mayer On Being Dismissed as ‘Plathlike’ “She rose at nine that December night; above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgement day.” Charlotte Brontë, Villette

The Cantor’s Daughter (for Yasmin Levy) She rises, at once inside and out, twig fingers at the window; wraithlike, she could haunt the moon. She is nothing, and nothing is like

Her dress is alight with god particles and the disinherited; her heels stacked gematria.

the breath that steams through what is said of her – it flits, mothlike, spectral. His words. Her words. Annotations cross and writhe like

She is one long argument over sweet Carmel wine, velvet as night, her brilliance as impossible

thrown punches. His hand. Her hand. Nothing could be less lifelike than this – this throwaway. This trashing. It leads us false, a marshlight

as a talking cat. Her name is Córdoba, is heart-flowering jasmine and the lovers celtic-knotted

wisp of a will not her own rewriting her flight into myth. Like the many she stands for, one more blonde American. Stepford wifelike,

beneath its fragrance. She is congruence, dusty gazelle-golden plazas at prayer-time: bimah and medina, heart centre.

you domesticate her, canonised and tamed so we cry for her strife like she was directed by Sirk. Come, critic, this is fat that your knife likes

In the guitar’s blue voice she mourns the grafted rose, the drying-up of the courtyard’s fountain,

to cut through. Cast aside. Who needs fat? And so she is waiflike. Her body, her work: hysteria, anorexia. She eats herself. Like

the closed gates of paradise: these her poems, woven in golden thread on scraps of leather, finely-inscribed (right to left)

it or not, that’s your thin volume. Your scorn is like wrath, like envy, perhaps. Perhaps incomprehension. Or fear: stealthlike,

on the flyleaves of books. Her ink is tears, sweet rain rare as the words of women that she gathers in the net

the ghosts you invoke will show your thinness, waft like breath through you. Discard you, a worn sheet.

of her hair, wears around her neck: gold coin to buy her passage, this coin (and the soldier’s wine-eyed reverie) is not stolen,

And rise. Plathlike.

this coin (of gazelle, jasmine, roses, reverie) is a house-key carried across generations, this coin (warm as worn close to the heart) rings true.

Sophie Mayer Sterndlich After Sally Potter's The Man Who Cried

There’s a heaven where women want to be stars, you know that. The heaven of silver and silence, of silk and lacquered screens. It’s not for you, that much is visible. Even through your skin. But the way the sky kindles open when he sings, it wings you. A great northeast wind under your naked, outstretched arms. Phrasing passed from mouth to mouth until it falls, alive with flame, from a window. Every gold sequin on your skin tingles as – You cannot turn your head fast enough towards – Night cold is nothing to the goosebumps of – For all there is darkness, not least in your kohl-rimmed lulu eyes, it’s your firmament. Tremble. Illumine. Fly west, towards night. Mend your stockings with the thread of a hummed tune, Yiddish words a blur, crumbs of a dream. Lost without language is lost in it. Carry gold always, always hidden – still smelling of her kitchen although the words on its face have been worn out of meaning. Would she even recognise you now, with your chignon and your spangles? Your kiss would taste different: cold everything. Alight. And burning.

Medusa Sets Sail Menteith, Spring Equinox 2009

Medusa sets sail in an abandoned bathtub rigging of twigs and twig-snagged twine roots (exposed by dry erosion) are her oars the shore’s small pebbles clink as she casts off in her ceramic coracle running the line of twilight as the sun hauls itself in, hand over hand and gold greys down to black at earthtilt

Sophie Mayer is the author of Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009) and The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009). She writes about film and poetry, together and separately, for Artesian, Esprit de Corps, Hand + Star, Horizon Review, Little White Lies, Sight & Sound, and Vertigo, and is a Commissioning Editor at Chroma. Her creative writing has appeared in – among other magazines – HOW(2), Masthead, Seam, Shearsman, Stand, Staple and Stride. News, events and new work can be found at her website: http://www.sophiemayer.net

stars in skerries across skirred clouds trees are seaweed as the moon is the moon and its reflection it continues above blue hills and bones this shadow home it’s just her and the ducks in love season, honking at the edge of her binoculars and Orion on the still surface, a bobbing lure to catch the moon in its lost hour found as she dredges the lake with the net of her hair unruly snakes smoothed by a southerly hint summer is icumen in

Iain Britton The Evidence Talk me through this survey of an urban field after the sun has finished

pulling up dandelions has finished

milking soft thistles,

stretching the black necks of deadly nightshade. Take me via circuitous routes

past the evidence

of occupation domestic pillaging the red-river run of discoloured fish.

Sunday and the streets seem emptier than usual. A brass band has found its band rotunda taken over by levitating rewinds of past recordings

10 moons ago

I remember clearly

a kite dropping in dragging a boy.

Iain Britton Interlopers Does it matter who loosens the scarecrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perch who loosens

the rush of a wet night

watches the roll of neonlights fragmenting dark streets.

Does it matter if you dirty my carpets with your patched-up body.

Interlopers

come without introductions

without letting me know. I have pictured birds feeding the scarecrow falling Iain Britton's first collection of poems Hauled Head First into a Leviathan was published by Cinnamon Press (UK) in 2008. Interactive Press (Australia) published his second collection Liquefaction this year. Poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Ambit, Agenda, Stand, The Reader, Magma, The Stride Magazine, The Warwick Review, Mimesis, Wolf Magazine, Succour, Ouroboros Review, Blackbox Manifold, Great Works, Equinox (UK), Harvard Review, Drunken Boat, Slope, Nimrod, Tinfish, Rattapallax, Fulcrum (US), Poetry NZ, Jacket, Cordite, Heat, Southerly, Meanjin, Island (Aust). Iain Britton's website â&#x20AC;&#x201C; www.iainbritton.co.nz

your sleeves

pictured you rolling up to study my brailled edges

to grub at the soil for family names cut up by the weather.

You are quick to pull yourself upright pull a face

if it suits.

Julie E. Bloemeke Mobile Home This trailer is not a trailer. It is a bed without a roof bleached by sun. It is Cosmo 1982 still on the kitchen counter. It is the washer and dryer missing, their empty holes like eyes, mouths, watching, speaking. This is not something to haul away, this home leaning into wild strawberries, pine needles. This is us, tipped, our uniform still hanging on the towel bar, wrapped in plastic, waiting to be worn. Julie E. Bloemeke, Window

It is the medicine bottle, open, waiting to be taken. It is the mirror half unhinged, and when you get close, peer through leaves it is our reflection staring back at us.

Julie E.Bloemeke On the Corner of Hopewell I have always been fascinated by abandoned and neglected spaces, both in metaphor and in image. How do the places we initially create survive once we leave them? How do they slowly fold back into the surrounding world? Where are the marks of us underneath tangled vines, broken windows, empty doorframes? Do we dismiss these places, missing how much about them is evocative, compelling, rich with suggestion? I have been to a home where canned peaches were carefully labeled, still resting on the kitchen shelf. I have marveled over the house that had no roof but a bed, still made, sagging with rain and leaves. What compels us to walk away with photos still on the wall, a toothbrush balanced on the edge of a bathroom sink?

Asphalt meets gravel, right angle. Down the road trucks signs of progress â&#x20AC;&#x201C; moving boxes, treated lumber, loads of mulch, brick. Across the way, a shining example: dun grey of new, blinding eggshell columns, copper caps, white pansies smiling, a driveway curved in welcome. No trees to filter the light, no patina, no dust, a real estate ad, one woven with bits of foil to lure the birds in.

Just as we pass by derelict spaces daily, perhaps rarely noticing, so these poems needed not only words, but images, placed on the page, unmistakable. Photographing allows these spaces to emerge from hiding, uncamouflages their decay, forces us to see them in a perspective away from, and because of, their roots. It is my hope that text and image will play off of each other, resonating in a way that invites us to stop and realize our spaces, to ponder, to explore, to see past the overgrowth and into the story of them.

Flip side. Some familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abandoned repair shop, shutters oddly in place, cracked with weather, but still saying Come on up. The main door closed, other doors propped, left, right, fallen, which way does one go in?

Julie E. Bloemeke

See the lightbulb, still hanging, serpentine belts stacked on the bench, glass fuses catching the sun. Note the brake pedal, alone in the corner. Here there are holes, and termites, windshield wipers tucked under chains, panes broken out, weeds growing in. Squint for the birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nest settled in a washer box marked 1964. Know that light slivers in all ways: the roof, the walls, the broken floor.

Julie E. Bloemeke, Door

Julie E. Bloemeke Pokeberry read this place: abandon notice what is left a swing set, warped, waiting, a red seat lost in bands of vine a deck, also red, barely standing, houseless, tangled in upturned trees, the very ones that kept it from sun a mailbox, leaning, lonely, defunct, reluctant sentinel to the shopping center that heaves itself over the once lolling cattle farm, witness to the gravel path paved, from one lane to two to five, burying the spot where someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s someone stood, coffee in hand to watch the sun rise each morning know for now there are weeds, heavy with tender purple berries, aching little hearts that stain passing hands, feet, looking for all the world like blood wonder: where the wound begins and if it ends.

Julie E. Bloemeke, Wall

Julie E. Bloemeke Mailbox Mailbox, your heart, Waits. Give me news, slide in your words, your hand reach me. Ignore the spiders, lock and key, a carcass come past rust into one chamber waiting, always waiting for more. Sometimes there are hinges, and bright red flags saying â&#x20AC;&#x153;Yes! Me! Here!â&#x20AC;? Sometimes only numbers, a name, catching the sun, this place, this address

Julie E Bloemeke, 15530

open for the waiting inside.

Julie E. Bloemeke has been writing about and photographing abandoned and neglected spaces sporadically for the last ten years or so. She has been particularly drawn to the homes of Southern families who have owned land, and the houses on it, for many generations. When some of these families outgrew one house, they simply built a new one and left the former behind, often surprisingly intact: roller washers on the front porch, curtains hanging in the windows, furniture placed around a fireplace. Though she considers herself a poet first, she enjoys experimenting in the art of photography. Almost all of her images are captured on film because she feels it lends certain veracity to the idea of the abandoned and neglected. In her quest for poems and photographs, she has been attacked by countless mosquitoes, cornered by a growling turkey vulture and endured a variety of reactions from the human species.

Susan Millar DuMars Coffee Was thin and bitter; brown dust and boiled water, when I was young.

Make Me an Instrument

Her spoon clanked as she questioned why the world had turned against her.

Why can’t I be the old man so still on the green in a circle of flung breadcrumbs waiting for the seagulls? See them lined up on my neighbour’s roof, a row of semi-colons; watch them lift off, soar, bellies yellowed by the low sun – have them come to me?

Life in its overcoat shuffled past our windows’ yellowed blinds. That summer the breeze smelled of tar. The mug smooth as bone in her dishworn hands. The coffee I pour into my own cup tingles like neck kisses now, lifts me up.

Why can’t I be St. Francis, birds brushing the hem of my tunic? The wolf placing his trusting paw in my hand? Why can’t I meet the world half way, be free of everything but faith, feel the low sun, like love, warm on my skin?

Italian, expensive; every sip moves me from the overlooked people we were. But I know, as I linger in this greener breeze it takes me further away from her.

If I could be the old man who smiles and waits, would words lift off, soar, flock to me?

Susan Millar DuMars is an American writer who lives in Galway, Ireland. Her debut poetry collection, Big Pink Umbrella, was published by Salmon in 2008. A follow-up, Dreams for Breakfast, will appear in 2010. One of her poems will appear in the Munster Literature Centre's Best of Irish Poetry 2010. Susan and her husband run the Over the Edge readings series in Galway.

Susan Millar DuMars The Way You Die Again In My Dreams You slide away from me down into the orange winter evening. The runners of your sled sing, “Shush…shush.” I stay behind on the hilltop, as still as the black barked trees. My fingers are stiff with cold. I never see you reach the bottom. As still as the black barked trees, I stay behind on the hilltop. “Shush…shush,” sing the runners of your sled. Winter evening. Down into the orange you slide, away from me.

Jéanpaul Ferro, Ghost walking

John Walsh Interlock Maria D’Antuono, ninety-eight years old, who was trapped beneath the ruins of her house after the earthquake in L’Aquila, told reporters she had spent the thirty hours, while she waited to be rescued, knitting. When they carried this skinny, little lady out, a ghost from the dust and rubble raised on high, she smiled for the world press and mimed with shaky hands two needles clicking. Since then I have decided

Finally

to take up knitting. When they carry me out after my trauma in the ruins, I will have my handknit Aran sweater mended, the one my girlfriend always borrows. My hair matted, contrite with quake ash, I will brave the international media to show I am a survivor, following in the tradition of Signora D’Antuono.

This is where I am right now in my poetry, writing about the holes in my carpet that needs replacing after the number of people who have walked over it in all these years, leaving their own indelible mark. When I started out, I was writing about trees, digging up and planting them, sifting clay through awkward towny fingers. Some people, no need to drop any names, you all know who I mean, were not impressed. After that the relationship phase, where everything including me fell apart. That’s where my therapist comes in. The journey back, the twisted roots, the whole Philip Larkin thing. He still lives near that busy roundabout in town, my therapist of course.

Spread-eagle Way before the troubles ever started, my uncle Pete insisted you’d get a worse hiding from a Free State garda than from any RUC man.

Now I write about the small things, a lot about what my next door neighbour gets up to. He’s interesting. And that weird dog of his, the one I’m sure is blind. I could talk all night about them but I don’t get paid for that.

When the army raided his house (the time they raided the whole street) my aunt Josie swore the officer had been a gentleman. Yet every week the Derry Journal carried more pictures of homes that had been ransacked. Were people doing it to themselves, out of spite? Maybe I was glad the night they pinned me spread-eagle up against the wall, kicked my legs apart, told me not to make any funny fuckin’ moves or they’d blow my head off.

John Walsh is a poet from Derry, N. Ireland, who now lives in Galway on the west coast. He has published two collections: Johnny tell Them (Guildhall Press) and Love's Enterprise Zone (Doire Press). His third collection is due from Salmon in May 2010. John is the organizer of North Beach Poetry Nights, a highly-acclaimed performance poetry event in Galway.

Aideen Henry A garland of freshly cut tears... (Leonard Coen; Take this waltz) You sent me your socks. The parcel so heavy it might have been body parts. What could it mean? That life with socks is no longer worth living? That you will go sockless forever without me? That you cried bitter tears into them each morning after I left? That the world would be a better place without socks and or me? That we, the socks and I, deserve each other? That you would like me to wear them in your memory? And your malevolence, shall I wear that too? Maybe your shoes, toenail clippings or vests will follow. I’m surprised you bothered to send anything at all, when you can’t give me back how I loved you.

Beginagain What’s there left to say, after 40 years together, apart from pass the salt, or has the post come yet? I watch an Italian couple; She, with her Marlon Brando voice, wall-eye, kneading gnarled hands. He, with his thin greyness, tobacco-paper skin, and able volleys. Maybe sleep wipes the memory clean each night; they have forgotten they discussed this before, they build a house of cards afresh each day, sure in the knowledge that they will reach agreement on this vaguely familiar territory.

Aideen Henry has had poems published in numerous journals (including Crannóg, West 47, the Shop, Revival, Stony Thursday Book, Ropes, Southword, the Cúirt Annual). Her first poetry collection will be published by Salmon in 2010. She completed the MA in Writing at NUI, Galway in 2008.

J. P. Dancing Bear The Quantum Musician you are playing in a crowd of musicians again: the instruments are bending: snaking and wrapping themselves around the players and themselves: ouroboros oboes: springy string bass: and you lean and lunge forward with your snaking saxophone: all your life you’ve heard this kind of jazz: living within smoke rings: coiling: and the drummers are pistoning out beats: everyone trances: everyone wants to dance: even the seated drummers and the piano player: you’re right in the middle: a tide of bodies, flow and heat for George Mario Angel Quintero

Artist deep within the body is a staircase: not well lit: somewhere spiraling into the darkness is the place where art lives: little creatures that are working: furious brushes on canvas: and when a painting is finished it is jogged up the steps to windows: admired for a quick moment and then the head wants more: another image: another café scene: or a woman lying on a bed: possibly reading a book: while the little creatures in the pit of the soul: try to please: they are right now working out the angles of light: perspective: how the body may or may not bend: to make art for Stephen Page

J. P. Dancing Bear is the author of Conflicted Light (2008), Gacela of Narcissus City (2006) and Billy Last Crow (2004). His poems have been published in Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, National Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Verse Daily and many others. He is editor of the American Poetry Journal and the host of "Out of Our Minds" a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP. His next book, Inner Cities of Gulls, will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2010.

Jennifer Delaney

Annie Clarkson The Sound of Rain When I stay at La Coopérative Marjana, I will miss the sound of rain against the pavement outside my window. For a while, the absence of rain will be an ache. I will wait for it as I hoe dry earth. I will miss it when the sun burns my shoulders. And when I tell the other woman about the smell of rain in the morning, the way it collects in puddles, they will watch me fascinated by my English words. I will say, je manque la pluie, and they will shrug their shoulders, these women without rain for three months. They will reply in Tachelhit and laugh when I make a pattering sound on a tin pan. They think I am making music and clap along with their worn hands. I will remember rain as I fill the metal bucket in the goat pen, scatter grain for the hens. Cats will bask in the yard, as inside the women shell argan nuts, taking it in turns to grind them. And even though I miss the rain, I will grow to love the nutty smell that never leaves us, the scratching husks of the shells. At night, we will slice onions for our tagine. They will massage their oil into my hands, while I listen to their chatter, realising their words sound like rain in this strange place, how I have learnt to hear the patter of rain in their voices.

Take me dancing She said no to the blue day, said no to the trees, no to his offer. Even though she could be everything he wanted. She said no. There were reasons buried deep, beneath her skin. She picked away at them as if they were scabs, left scars that only she knew about. He said that he couldn’t fault her, said beautiful words in the car as they waited for the right moment. He wanted to tell her, you are all those things men want, you are everything. She told him too much, said the word love. Sometimes she can’t help the way tears rush to the surface and hover on the edge of her eyes as if they are balancing. She stares the other way, and he knows by the way she bites her lip, knows by her quivering voice. It enters his dreams at night, where she is so pale it’s as if a slow light burns inside her. He lets himself stroke the creases in her dress, calls her his. She looks right at him and says, take me dancing, if it’s the only thing we ever do.

Annie Clarkson is a poet, social worker and short story writer. Her debut chapbook of prose poems is called Winter Hands. She blogs at www.forgettingthetime.blogspot.com

Jenny Sadre-Orafai Without a Net My doppelganger would never dare let this happen. She would swap out her frilled dress for your groom pants and tie at the altar. She would fling her fickle body into cartwheels down the flowered aisle, those hired-for-the-day instruments sighing at her back like some flimsy net she didn’t request. No one in the audience would know what comes next so they’ll grip their hands to fight their own applause. And, from this day forward she would remember every grocery list in her head, eat slick doughnuts only to be reminded of symmetry, let every first date feel her up in the backseat before the date, trash old tickets from movies and planes. She remembers without them.

They will name you She would take up tightrope walking to hear the bottoms of her feet slide across wire, devote additional practice time to cartwheels and splits, her specialties. After her first performance, she will look down to you from her glittered perch, and since she can’t feel, you have and hold all the applause for her. You hoard it in a jar like a souvenir. And you forgive her, forgive me, for leaving you dressed in a white dress with only the image of feet batting at air.

Clarissa. If I concentrate hard enough you will swallow me whole like a snake, like I am the prey. You and your shuffling water on all sides. You’re coming from another county where you made wood into woodpile. I slide a gaudy ring on my left middle finger. My father gave me it when I was only ten. It was too big for such small hands and still is.

Jenny Sadre-Orafai writes both poetry and prose. Her first chapbook, Weed Over Flower, was chosen for publication by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in: Wicked Alice, Lily, Verse Libre Quarterly, can we have our ball back?, FRiGG, Plainsongs, Literary Mama, Poetry Midwest, Dash, Boxcar Poetry Review, slant, Caesura, and other fine journals. Sadre-Orafai’s prose has appeared in Rock Salt Plum and in the Seal Press anthology, Waking Up American. She currently serves as poetry editor for JMWW and is an Assistant Professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

And, since I’ve never seen another ring like this one, I know that if they find this ring, Clarissa, in an open field when it’s morning, they will know you tried to take me with you, but that I tasted like an iron fist, like poison, and then like a bronze medal going down.

Matt Merritt Jubilee You see the fields of summer waving, mountains purpling in the haze and a distant flowering of smoke or steam that must be the London train. You suppose the day is warm to stifling despite the high-buttoned collars and cuffs, the neckties and waistcoats, tweeds and Norfolks. You wonder at the awkward, upright postures of bodies fretting to be away, to return to where the evening has only just begun. When you look closely at the solemn, frozen faces you hear lovers’ voices in the lanes,

Gossamer While you sleep, they’ve been running themselves to this silk, thinning themselves to a fine mesh of filament visible only under a low sun, yet with all the tensile strength of steel. They’ve been smoothing away the sharp edges and putting their soft focus spin on the night just gone.

low and urgent, and the tune the band is playing as they waltz into the future.

Corvo The rain that will find you and soak you four days from now, dashing up Belgrave Gate for the bus, or slipping out at lunchtime to the bank, is nothing more than a ten-minute cooler in the heat of the early afternoon. Every day is warm enough, and the nights barely less so. You can climb the mountain within a couple of hours, and walk in and out of clouds at will. Despite that name, a wealth of carrion, garbage dumped beyond the harbour and what the ocean brings, here there are no such things as crows.

Some have already climbed to kite the breeze that must be moving despite the seeming calm, have already unlearned the knack of gravity, are ballooning beyond sight to where the unforgiving glare threatens to dissolve them and strands snag like draglines on all that’s to come.

Matt Merritt is a poet and wildlife journalist from Leicester, England. His chapbook Making The Most Of The Light was published by HappenStance Press in 2005, and a full collection, Troy Town, by Arrowhead Press in 2008. He is a co-editor of the website Poets On Fire, and blogs at http://polyolbion.blogspot.com/

On Beauty: A conversation with Cecilia Woloch about poetry, politics and Carpathia By Collin Kelley

he first words I ever said to Cecilia Woloch were “I love you.” We had never met, but I was so captivated by her poetry that I rushed up to her after a reading in Atlanta and acted like a gushing geek. Six years later, I still love Cecilia, and my respect and admiration for her poetry continues to grow. Cecilia was born in Pittsburgh and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She has taught workshops across America and Europe to everyone from professionals and prisoners to children and seniors. She has served on the faculties of a number of graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs, and since 2006 has been a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California. She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop. She burst onto the poetry scene in 1997 with her first collection Sacrifice, which was a BookSense 76 selection. She followed that with a deeply personal book-length poem, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, which traced her ancestry back to the Roma of Europe, who have been persecuted for centuries. Then came Late, which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for best poetry collection and a chapbook, Narcissus, which won Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Series Chapbook Award. Her new collection, Carpathia, in my opinion, is her best work to date. Melancholy, confessional, lyrical and full of elegant imagery, Carpathia is the collection that cements Cecilia Woloch’s reputation as one of the finest poets writing verse today. In her own words: I’ve crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border on foot in the company of smugglers and journalists. Have been robbed by a Russian gang in Warsaw and rescued by off-duty police in Paris. I’m not talking about Havana. I prefer to live out of a suitcase. Once gave myself a haircut with a bread knife. Can build a fire and bathe in a bucket. Can apply lipstick in a rearview mirror. I caught up with her between flights for this interview. Is there a specific poem or collection of poems that you read in your formative years that made you pause and say, “Yes, I want to be a poet”?

of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, which I loved because those poems were so musical and dark. In college, I discovered an anthology of contemporary women poets called No More Masks, edited by Ellen Bass, who’s now a friend of mine. It amazes me to look back at how awed I was by those poets, and how many of them I later got to meet. I checked that book out of the college library so many times that my boyfriend bought me a copy for my 20th birthday. It was the first book of poems I ever owned, and I still have it on my shelf.

That depends on what you mean by “formative years.” As a child, I fell under the spell of musical language. My mother read to me a lot, and I just loved listening to her voice. She loved Edgar Allen Poe, very dark stuff. At thirteen I checked Nabokov’s Lolita out of the public library – I remember the look the librarian gave me; but I thought it was going to be a nice, fat book about a girl, which I What poets do you return to again and again guess it was. I can still recite the opening paragraph. for nourishment and inspiration? That novel, of course, shocked me, but what I was more deeply shocked by was the beauty of the H.D. has been hugely important to me, and Anna language. When I was a bit older, my high school Akhmatova and Sharon Doubiago. I go back to creative writing teacher introduced me to the work Merwin a lot and to Whitman’s Song of Myself. I

Cecilia Woloch also love Terrance Hayes’ work; he never stops astounding me. I read Natasha Trethewey to be reminded that elegance and courage can go handin-hand. I think the poets I return to again and again are the ones who give me courage.

of the book in his hands and showed him my name on the cover. He either smiled or cried or both and then he kissed me on the forehead. I think he always knew I was going to write, and that I wanted to write about our family, and he wanted me to do it; that’s why he wanted to tell me everything, but he also wanted to try to protect me from a lot of things in our family’s history.

You write often about your family, especially your late mother and father. Did they foster your love of poetry? Do your family members “get” your poetry? Neither of my parents finished high school. They didn’t consider themselves literary people, but my mother and father were always reading, always hungry for knowledge. I think my father started reading when he was in prison, and my mother always wished she could have furthered her education. So they nurtured my love of learning and literature without being precious about it. We were also a family of storytellers, while I was growing up. We always sat around the table telling stories about ourselves. Yet, when my first book came out, with all those poems about my family, my mother was a little shocked and a little chagrined. I think she thought our working class family wasn’t appropriate subject material for “real” literature, and was also maybe afraid that I was exposing family secrets, or that I was going to discover even darker family secrets, if I kept writing. But she must have gotten used to the idea, because my mother loved my second book, Tsigan, although I’d been much more worried about how she was going to react to that one. One of the best moments of my literary life thus far was coming home to my mother’s place in Shepherdsville one evening and finding my older sister Mary, who runs a beauty shop, sitting in the living room with our mother and our teenaged niece, Rachel, reading Tsigan aloud to them. They shhh’d me when I tried to say something. I had to go into the other room and cry. I don’t think any literary prize will ever top that. My sister even read Tsigan aloud to customers at her beauty shop. I think she lent her copy to one of them and never got it back. I realize I haven’t said anything about my father’s reactions … He was mostly bedridden and suffering from dementia and barely able to speak at all by the time my first book was published. But I put a copy

You’ve lived a fairly nomadic life, often calling yourself a gypsy. Can you speak to your travel as influence? A couple of years ago when I was on a bus crossing Poland, I realized that my life on the road is what feels to me like my “real life.” When I’m back in LA, living in one place, teaching and doing what other people think of as “normal” things, well, that feels like what I do “in between” to support my “real life.” It’s not that I don’t love my friends in L.A. and my work here, it’s just that it all feels less vivid to me, less, well, real. And I’ve gotten to feel more at home when I’m moving; being in motion feels more

Cecilia Woloch natural to me. I actually prefer living out of a suitcase; everything is simpler, you keep your life stripped down. And I guess I crave intensity, too. My first husband used to say I had a pathological fear of boredom; maybe that’s true. I think that extends to my writing. I always want to keep trying different things; I love leaping into the unknown. I think it can be easy, when we’re living in our routines and surrounded by the familiar to be sort of cocooned and cut off from the intensity of our experiences. I also think America is a place where it’s dangerously easy to feel cocooned, isolated, cut off, because so much of the landscape of our lives here is pre-fabricated, now, “faux” and homogenized. So I tend to feel more at home in Europe, after having spent so much of my adult life there; I’m more at ease in places where things are still on a human scale, and where layers of history are still visible. The older I get, the more and more interested I am in the world and in trying to understand as much as I can about how the world works and why things are the way they are. I feel like I’m more open to new things and experiences than I’ve ever been before and hungrier. I’m 52, and I’m driving around L.A. in my pick up truck teaching myself to speak Polish. (I recently had this epiphany: when my dad was in his early fifties, he was teaching himself Russian while he drove his pick up truck to work.) If I could have three wishes, one of the wishes would be that I could speak six or seven languages. I speak French decently, now I’m learning Polish; I understand some Italian and German. It’s fascinating to me that each language has its own logic, so it forces you to think differently. Rearrange the syntax, rearrange the way you think? I think the “American personality,” if there is such a thing, would be really different if most of us spoke a couple of languages.

trying to create some beauty – that matters to me, even if the material I have to work with is difficult or dark, maybe especially then. Maybe we distrust beauty in poetry and in art, these days. Maybe that’s something that bears looking at. I’m prone to the same self-doubt that plagues a lot of writers, so there are times I worry, myself, that my poems are too “personal,” maybe too lyrical. But I just do the best work I can. I care about language and I try to use it precisely. I know spilling your guts on the page, even when the guts are spectacular, isn’t enough. When I’m writing about something from my personal life, I just keep turning it and turning it in the light of my mind and the dark of my heart until I can see more deeply into it, until some kind of transformation happens by way of the language. Carol Muske-Dukes said what we want in poetry is not the truth of facts, but the truth of art. I can’t think of a better way to say it. Someone recently called my poems “post-confessional,” and that’s fine with me, too. Although you teach around the world, you seem to be outside the usual “po’biz” circles. How do you rise above it, and what is “po’biz” doing to American poetry? I’m passionate about being a teacher, and I have a good job teaching in a university, but I’m not an academic. I’d rather dig ditches all weekend than go to an AWP conference. James Baker Hall said at Idyllwild a few summers ago that it behooves a poet to know what’s happening in the po’biz world, but if you start confusing those kinds of ambitions with the work, itself, then you’re in deep shit. He said you can let your need for worldly validation get confused with your relationship with your work, and the consequence is that it will drive a wedge between you and the work that's most precious to you.

Would you call your poetry confessional? Is that a term that bothers you or something you embrace? I embrace it. It’s not very fashionable at the moment, but I didn’t become a poet to be a slave to fashion. I’ve heard the criticism: Who cares about your life, why should it matter to anyone else? Hell if I know – why should anything matter to anyone, if you’re going to go down that road? Being alive matters. Paying attention matters. Creating some beauty, or

I think I’m clear-eyed about what goes on in the world of po’biz. I don’t know if I’ve risen above it or just flown under the radar. I didn’t publish my first book until I was 40, and by then I’d been trying to write in a serious way for 20 years. I spent most of those years living in LA, and I suspect the poetry scene here was different than it was in New York and San Francisco. L.A. poets were sort of underdogs, as far as the bigger “literary” world was concerned, and the publishing world, so we just

Cecilia Woloch kind of made our own world. There was a lot of freedom in that. We weren’t taken seriously; we weren’t allowed in that game, so we didn’t have to play it. The poetry community here was — and still is, I think — supportive and not competitive. There was a lot of diversity but there weren’t a lot of factions. There were a lot of readings, but there wasn’t much emphasis on publishing. The readings were really democratic and a lot of fun, not “staid” at all. Anything could happen. I was invited to read with Wanda Coleman, who already had a national reputation, even though I didn’t yet “have a book” — I hate that phrase, “have a book.” You can write a book, you can publish a book, but how do you “have” a book? And then I didn’t go to grad school until after my first book came out, so I feel I was able to develop as a poet without being much affected by the po’biz stuff. You write in form and free verse, and in Carpathia there are numerous prose poems. How do you decide which form a poem will take? Can you speak to your love of the prose form? I love prose poems because they seem sneaky to me, a little bit subversive. Who was it who said, ‘When you’re writing a prose poem, you don’t have the white-eyed gods of Poetry breathing over your shoulder?’ You can tell yourself, I’m just going to write a little paragraph here, maybe an observation, a moment. I think I’m less self-conscious when I’m writing a prose poem. Though once a poem starts to emerge, I work as hard to get the language and music right as I do when I’m writing in lines. Sometimes a poem begins as a prose poem and ends up in lines, or vice versa. Most of the pantoums I’ve written began as prose poems. Sometimes a poem goes through different versions – prose, lines, even form, and then sometimes it ends up as a prose poem again. Sometimes the material seems to dictate what form the poem will take; sometimes it’s the first line that determines where the poem will go, or the music of that first line that dictates where the poem will go and what shape it will take. Other times, I have to just keep trying different things. I think, ultimately, the poem has to decide. I just keep trying different things until the poem makes up its mind. Maybe that’s what Adrienne Rich was talking about when she talked about “a wild patience.”

Do you write everyday or as the mood – or poems – strikes you? I write all the time. I’m superstitious about it. I write in my journal every day. It’s a matter of keeping in touch with that part of myself – keeping the wheels oiled. Faulkner said habit is a much stronger force, in writing, than either willpower or inspiration. Sometimes I don’t think I have anything to say, but I feel the need to put words on paper every day. Sometimes a great idea for a poem comes to nothing. An idea for a poem can kill a poem. I don’t trust ideas; I trust language. After reading Carpathia again, it struck me that this is a “coming of age” cycle of poetry. That term is mostly associated with growing from adolescence to adulthood, but do you believe you’ve come of age again in your life and travels? I think Carpathia charts a kind of coming through the fire. Maybe each collection is a chronicle of walking through another fire. The first poems I wrote for Carpathia came from a deep silence I thought I might never emerge from. They were short poems, very spare; I felt I had to squeeze my heart for every word. Sometimes I felt like I was squeezing blood from stone. I re-read Akhmatova and told myself, well, if she could do what she did, I can at least try. I wanted brutality and beauty to exist sideby-side in those poems, so close that they couldn’t get away from one another. That felt like the only way I could be true to what needed saying. The “postcard poems” in Carpathia are my favorites in the collection. How did these begin, and when did you realize they were viable and evolving into the hinge of a collection? The prose poems were sort of the other side of the coin from the stark little lyrics I’d started to write. While I was struggling with those very compressed poems, on one hand, I wanted to give myself permission to be reckless and expansive and even sloppy on the other. I would write in my journal about these “moments,” things that happened along the way while I was traveling, and I just tried to record them and let them veer off in any direction they wanted to go. I was just saving these moments,

Cecilia Woloch just saving my life – in a couple of different senses of the phrase. As I started to become more conscious of what I was doing, started seeing that some of these pieces were interesting and surprising, and the language pleased me, I just did it more and more, and tried to keep being reckless about it. I started to really enjoy writing them, because I wasn’t putting any pressure on myself about what I was doing. I didn’t know how any of it would add up until I started putting together the Narcissus chapbook, but then I saw a shape emerging, saw that the best of the postcards – I probably wrote at least five of these for every one that ended up in the book – made a kind of counterpoint to the short lyric poems, that I could weave them all together into some kind of whole. I know you’ve written a novella, but what other projects are you working on?

also very dark and complicated – and the story of these journeys that have brought me closer and closer to understanding what happened, if not to the truth. So I just have to be patient and allow myself to make a big mess, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I want the prose to read like poetry, to be lyrical and intense, but I also want the story to be told. I’ve always had this strong impulse and desire to tell stories; right alongside the desire to make poems that are as close to songs as I can make them. Maybe those two impulses can be brought together in this book. I hope so. I’m praying for that.

Whose Hunger Whose/hunger is a dress for my song – Brigit Pegeen Kelly

I’m writing more prose these days, writing personal essays and also working on a long prose project about my paternal grandmother, who disappeared before I was born. I started traveling to try to catch up with her ghost, to try to find out what happened to her – that’s what led me to the Carpathians, in the first place.

Whose one white note is feast enough for all the throats of dusk Whose name is light inside my mouth a humming light (I will not tell)

I found the place where she was born, thanks to my friends, Sarah and Luaksz Luczaj, and started to uncover some of her story, which is very complicated and dark. My grandmother may have been involved in some of the underground political activity that was going on in that part of the world when she was a girl, and she was definitely involved in the underground labor movement once she came to the U.S. She was an American communist. It seems she was murdered by the last of her husbands, and politics were somehow involved. The story scares me, but I feel strongly that it’s the story I was born to uncover and write; she’s the reason I became a writer, and this is my life’s work. I realize that probably sounds mystical and a bit loony, but I’ve known this all my life: that I had to somehow bring my grandmother back from the secrecy and darkness and terror her memory was relegated to. And I’ve realized that, in order to do this, I have to tell the larger story of this family –

Whose story has a child in it of jade, a child of gold Whose sorrow can’t be kissed away Who made a sparrow of my heart Whose brightest ghost my brightest ghost uncleaves from, cleaves unto Who stands within the mirror and the mirror turns to rain Cecilia Woloch, Carpathia (2009)

Dick Jones Superstitions

Gerry Galvin

Across my godless sky a magpie skids, a barcode flash, trailing misfortune.

Midsummer Evenings, towards the longest day, malinger, Like the waiting fox Staring out the light, Birds gone to nest, Bats criss-crossing emptiness.

I paint a cross onto the air. And then that night it’s the full moon bagged in clouds swollen with snow. I must drop three wishes into

Audacity rests by a flowerpot In a garden Where the young cubs Come to play Well-known games of bafflement, Tripping through the ramparts of a hedge, Voyeurs on a window ledge.

her milk-heart before the clouds hustle her away. In a last heartbeat

Inside, lives, laid out in beds, Dream of Thailand, India, Beaches and boutiques. Disorder has the kitchen to itself: Crashed cushions on a couch, Books abandoned on a chair, Newspapers, underwear.

of light, I invest a trio of dreams. But silently, as if to confound negotiation, snow fills the bowl of the universe, the sky falls to meet the rising earth

Night infiltrates the quiet corners. Sleep gets up to pee, To watch the dawn desire, Like pink memory, Exiting the dark. There’s an art to it, Glass full or half, Jubilant or melancholic.

and the seams are drawn. White darkness, a breast of feathers. Without my lodestars, compass spinning, this sailor must dead-reckon his course alone.

Initially wooed by the First World War poets and then seduced by the Beats, Dick Jones has been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15. He has been fitfully published in a variety of magazines throughout the years – Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Qarrtsiluni, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles, Ouroboros, Other Poetry, Obsessed With Pipework and others. He blogs at Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages.

Bewilderment climbs the morning trees For elevation and a better view.

Gerry Galvin is a writer, chef and restaurateur. He is author of two cookbooks: The Drimcong Food Affair, Everyday Gourmet and Editor of The Galway Ingredient. His poetry has been published in The Cork Examiner, Crannog, The Cape Argus, The Cuirt Journal, Hibernia and his fiction in The Fish Anthology andWOW online. He’s made radio Broadcasts on RTE Lyric fm and just completed To Die For, a novel about a food critic who is also a serial killer.

Laura Solomon After Lights Out at the Horniman Museum We only look dead. When the lights go out (and after the overly industrious cleaning lady has been and gone) You see the other side of the story. It’s only been an act all along. We spring to life – like nursery toys were once purported to do. The dodo yawns and snaps his beak. The moths and the butterflies leap from their pins, careful not to damage their fragile wings. The beetles clack. Nobody makes a song and dance. We’ve been in Blighty long enough – we know better. We’re local now. Nobody smashes panes – though it’s rumoured that one of the more melodramatic eagles threw a hissy fit last Friday and threatened to shove a wing through the glass. The remnants of decorum held him back. A severed pride. Most of the rest of us are bitterly resigned – we exist to be displayed. Glassy-eyed hostages. We’re years past asking – which side of the glass are you (stammer) which side are you on? We understand the rules – just act happy. You get a few thickos, dumb bunnies, stick-in-the-muds who refuse to play along. The merman could be one; still bitching about being excluded from The Great Exhibition. He always was big-headed. Dissatisfied with his position and his place relegated to that dank side room, with the African tribal masks. And those ridiculous glass cages filled with tiny stuffed birds perched too gaily on twigs. Ideas above his station. He wants centre stage. Reception area. Silly bugger’s still claiming to be the real thing decades (nay, centuries) after it’s been proven that he’s a fake. Us underlings – we know who we are – This precious night is all we have. We rustle for hours in the dark, grateful not to be watched until the first key of the day turns in the lock. Quick quick quick – assume natural pose.

Laura Solomon Ten Years After the Bonfire There’s only dusty earth there now. A blackened patch of dirt where before the fire blazed. If you poke around in the dust you discover remnants; A burnt pencil, a charred book, somebody’s bone white skull. We circle the vacant area, looking for that missing something, A key we think we need to unlock that secret door to the cellar, The pearl-handled revolver that is rumoured to lurk amongst the ashes. Somebody’s seen it there. Like cripples staging a coup, We limp around the circle’s edges, Sticks in hand, giving the ashes a stir, Something twitches; does it live? Will some unearthly golem come springing up out of the mud, A grimace plastered upon its face, Arms whirling? No nothing lives there, It is a place of death and darkness, Soulless, an absence, like the absence of God, A space – we never seem to find what we are looking for. An apocalypse could have taken place. Remember when the fire burned here? How high the flames leapt, How furiously they blazed. Those were the good old days, Before everything died down, Including us. You, match in hand, Try to reignite what’s left of that old piece of wood, You strike and strike again, but the damned thing won’t catch alight. You turn your face away in frustration, While I, arms flailing, continue my whirling dance, More carefully controlled than before, Wary of what might happen if I move too quickly, A cat creeping quietly over the grass, But dancing all the same, and smiling too, Though my face is frozen a sort of rigor mortis My empty hands outstretched As if awaiting a gift.

Laura Solomon was born in New Zealand. She has an honours degree in English Literature (Victoria University, NZ, 1997) and a Masters degree in Computer Science (University of London, 2003). She has published two novels in New Zealand with Tandem Press: 'Black Light' (1996) and 'Nothing Lasting' (1997). Her first play, 'The Dummy Bride', was produced as part of the Wellington Fringe Festival, and her second, based on her short story, 'Sprout', was part of the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Short stories published in the UK include: 'Sprout' (2004 Bridport International Short Story competition anthology), 'The Most Ordinary Man in the World' (2005 Bridport International Short Story competition anthology), ‘Alternative Medicine’, (Willesden Herald International Short Story competition, 2007) and 'The Killing Jar', (The Edinburgh Review, August 2007). Her poem ‘The Latest Lighthouse Keeper’ was commended in the Ware Poets Competition, 2007. Her short story collection ‘Alternative Medicine’ was published in early 2008 by Flame Books, UK. Her poem ‘You Will Know When You Leave’ was shortlisted in the Bridport 2008 Poetry competition. Her novel ‘An Imitation of Life’ is to be published by Solidus, UK in early 2010.

The Debate Goes On: black and minority ethnic poets getting published in the UK By Louisa Adjoa Parker

If poetry is meant to represent the voice of a nation, shouldn’t it do just that, represent a culturally diverse nation? It needs to tell the stories of black and minority ethnic people (or BME – and I use the term for ease, not because I like labels), stories that will later become part of history. This process has begun, but has only made a few wobbly steps along what should be a rich poetic journey. Of course, a person’s ethnicity shouldn’t matter, but it does. Britain’s history is intertwined with that of the countries it has colonised – we are living in a post-colonial, post-slavery society, and the legacy of this history casts a long, late-afternoon shadow on our society. This includes the publication of poetry from BME poets. That said, we need to see the situation as part of a bigger picture with what’s happening in poetry in general. So what is the situation? In 2004 Bernadine Evaristo found that less than 1 percent of poets published by mainstream poetry presses were non-white. For example, in 80 years Faber has only published 3 non-white poets (the most recent being Daljit Nagra). According to Bertel Martin, who set up City Chameleon, a Bristol publishing press that focuses on black writers, in 2002 only 2 percent of all books getting published (not including self-publishing) were poetry books. And 98 percent of that 2 percent were being published by mainstream presses. Martin sums up the situation simply: black and minority ethnic poets are a minority group within a minority sector. There seems to be an ongoing debate about poets and their ethnicity. On the one hand BME poets continue to find it extremely difficult to get published and this needs to be addressed. On the other hand, by drawing attention to someone’s ethnicity or indeed any other ‘difference’, are we unwittingly supporting discrimination rather than eliminating it? And does this detract from the quality of the writing? The answers are as clear as mud.

BME poetry; and more publishers to employ BME staff. It was also thought that there was poor networking between BME poets and mainstream presses.

Many publishers have one or two ‘token’ black writers on their lists – but how can this represent the large chunk of our population that comes from minority backgrounds? The BME community is rich with talent, from the mainly Caribbean poets first published in the Eighties such as John Agard and Grace Nichols, to In response to Evaristo’s discovery, the Arts Council Moniza Alvi, Lemn Sissay, John Siddique, Daljit Nagra commissioned the Free Verse report to assess who more recently arrived on publishers’ lists. Yet prejudice in publishing. Free Verse highlighted the there is a plethora of experiences for anyone living in fact that mainstream presses, the majority of which are Britain today; one or two voices cannot ‘represent’ this. run by white, middle class males, often reject writers However, there are publishers that publish work from claiming they already have one to represent the ‘Asian’ BME writers. The most widely known is Bloodaxe or ‘black’ voice. Black and Asian poets were found to be Books, but City Chameleon, Peepal Tree press and Arc well-represented on the performance circuit, but it was Publications also have BME writers. Neil Astley, editor a different picture when it came to publishing. Free of Bloodaxe, stated in the Free Verse report that he Verse conducted a survey into opportunities for BME doesn’t think this exclusion is limited to poets from poets, the first of its kind in the UK. Almost half of the Black and Asian cultures. “It’s part of a wider and more poets surveyed saw opportunities as poor or very poor, fundamental problem with the ethos of poetry however none reported racist treatment – it was more publishing....most poetry editors don’t publish poetry subtle. Poetry publishing was seen to be unsupportive for readers but for poets,” he writes. of talent, and three important factors were emphasised – the need for market development; a higher profile for City Chameleon, set up by Bertel Martin, aims to

Louisa Adjoa Parker change a situation that has long been wrong by supporting writers, developing a relationship with them, and encouraging readership. Martin wants to promote good writers from the BME community, of which ‘there are plenty around’. He believes that if we look at art in general, the tendency is to see art from BME artists as ‘other’ and different, exotic rather than home-grown in the UK. “Within poetry, values shift. People are actually looking for a ‘different’ voice, one that is authentic, for example poets who speak from the street, in Patois, will get more recognition than a black poet who writes sonnets.”

As a writer myself, I fully understand Siddique’s point of view. However, my story and perspective differ. As an ‘emerging’ poet, I am still focusing on my Ghanaian/white English heritage as being an aspect of my life that adds to my writing. But I also write as a woman, as a single parent, as a survivor of domestic violence – although I think ethnicity is the aspect that gets noticed most. Racism is a part of life for all of us in the UK, and so deeply entrenched in all our minds, that I don’t think it can be ignored when it comes to people being successful. The dilemma rears its confused head in many areas, from housing to jobs to writing to sports to singing: should we focus on the fact someone is Part of the problem, Martin believes, is to do with black or ignore this? If we ignore it are we denying part networking and contacts within poetry. Black writers, of someone’s identity? If we focus on it aren’t we in who haven’t come from a traditional literary training danger of becoming too ‘politically correct’? Should background (university networks, for example) are at a someone get the job (or the publishing contract) disadvantage as they haven’t had the opportunity to because an organisation is trying to fill its quota of build connections, without which chances of success minorities? are limited. Performance poetry has been found by many black poets as a more accessible route to getting When I started writing, I felt that my middle-class known. Yet sometimes, Martin says, black English wouldn’t be of interest– my main experience of communities are not doing favours for themselves, for black poets that sell well include dialect or writings in example by revering poets who write badly but speak other English. Being in the unusual position of being about what’s important. Also, white critics may not feel from a BME background and living in rural Dorset, I they are qualified to judge a BME poet’s work because started writing to talk about my experiences of racism. of the colour of their skin – the criteria shift and people I was an angry young woman, who had never had an can be afraid of being accused of racism if they don’t opportunity to voice what had happened to me. I like someone’s work. wanted to talk about how it was to be a single mother, isolated in a rural part of the UK. I wanted people to It’s a complicated business, but do we have to accept a understand all of my ‘differences’ so they would think label based on our ethnicity or any ‘difference’? Some twice before judging others. refuse to play the game. John Siddique, for example, is a poet who won’t be labelled as BME. “I refuse to be I also wanted to raise awareness of the different called BME as it is a false concept to make other people experiences BME people can have in Britain and talk feel better – so that they can be ‘right on’. I'm British about our relationship with the landscape, which I feel and they need to get over it, it's that simple. Everyone is something that doesn’t go hand in hand with being in this country is of some ethnicity.” Siddique, whose black – which equates with ‘urban’. Yet the more I latest collection Recital was featured in ouroboros, write, I feel less of a need to talk about this aspect of my believes it’s down to the individual writer to be just that. identity. However, I still see myself as a minority poet. He asks why artists even feel the need to belong to a Will I still be talking about my confusion over my mixed particular country. “If I could change my passport, my identity in years to come? Probably less and less. My country of birth would be literature.” Siddique has passion for equality and social justice will always drive read all over the world – India, the U.S, Europe – and what I do, but it is not the whole of me. I write as a says that what unifies us is literature and language, not woman with African heritage, I write as a mother, but the colour of skin. “The first part of the problem,” he most of all, I write as a human being looking out at the says, “for writers of all backgrounds, is that most world, trying to make sense of it all. people aren’t prepared to work. They don’t want to belong to a world of books and words.”

Louisa Adjoa Parker So are things improving? It’s not yet been fully established as to what extent things have changed since Free Verse. Five years on, Peter Beech argues in a recent Guardian article, little has changed. Beech’s article, entitled ‘Britain needs a black poet laureate,’ after Carol Ann Duffy was appointed as laureate, will no doubt have fuelled heated debate. He believes a black poet laureate will help effect a much-needed shift in the visibility of minority poets. He suggests we look towards the U.S., where the first black poet laureate, Gwendoyln Brooks, was appointed in 1985. On the other side of the argument, however, it can be asked whether a poet should be given anything, from awards, to laureateship to publication, in part because of their ethnicity? Most writers want to be recognised for the merits of their work. According to Dr Nathalie Teitler, project manager of The Complete Works (National Development Programme for Black and Asian UK poets), the situation in relation to the proportion of publication of BME poets by the big presses has not changed significantly. However, the project is involved with the publication of two anthologies with work by BME poets by Bloodaxe next year. It is anticipated that, as a result of these publications, a number of BME poets will have collections published with big presses. Teitler says that the situation with the smaller presses is generally more positive with continued publications by BME poets by Flipped Eye, Salt, Tall Lighthouse, amongst others. An official analysis of the Complete Works is to be carried out, which will evaluate the situation of BME poets in the UK and how it has changed since Free Verse. This will be available in December 2010. It seems there have been endless debates about the situation, but little has actually changed. Being a writer with roots in a non-British culture leaves one feeling an endless conflict, between wanting to talk about your heritage and not wanting to be seen as capable of doing only this. So are there any answers to remedy a frustrating situation? There is clearly a need to build up greater understanding of different cultural appetites within audiences and publishing. There is also a need to stop categorising all BME poets as either performance poets or writing from a race-focused perspective. Some of these issues could be addressed by having more BME writers working as critics and

within publishing and academia. Better links need to be forged between the presses and diverse writers, and the profile of such writers needs to be raised. The industry needs to understand that it’s not only white poets who have something universal to say. I think poetry in general needs to be opened out to the masses and promoted widely. So many people from all sorts of backgrounds still see poetry as elitist. Or they simply don’t get it. Poetry is relevant: it has a great deal to offer and we need to get it out there. It can provide new understandings of what it means to be human. Surely this is something that we can all benefit from, not just an elite handful, with diverse writers having to shout loudly to get heard – and being damned if they do, and damned if they don’t talk about their ethnic heritage. I’d like to quote a seven-year old girl at a Devon school, who summed up the ridiculousness of attributing difference to skin colour – “What is a black poet?” she asked in response to a reading of black poets’ work, ‘aren’t they all just poets?’

Louisa Adjoa Parker is of mixed heritage with a White British mother and Ghanaian father. Her first collection Saltsweat and Tears was published in 2007 by Cinnamon Press, and one of the poems 'Rag Doll' was highly commended by the Forward Prize. Louisa has also written about the history of African and Caribbean people in Dorset. Louisa runs Adjoa Consultancy, which aims to explore diversity through Literature and History. She can offer a range of workshops and projects. Please visit http://www.louisaadjoaparker. co.uk

Amaris Gutierrez-Ray Mid-morning at the Deli We had to throw away the avocados that haven't ripened in the week and a half since the truck dropped them off. They showed up in the box with the others and even though we tried to help them along by placing them in the floured paper bags that the bread comes in, accompanied by a couple browning bananas (at the suggestion of the owner's mother, who says they need each other for encouragement), fitted neatly in the only space not dampened by the leak behind the back sink, the bumps underneath each fruit sticker stayed firm, their skin stubbornly stretched over the thickest handful of darkgreen I've ever felt, the smallest one just giving in to a penny-sized patch of soft, sympathy for each disappointed customer we've had to turn to and apologetically offer another option, a substitute for the headstrong avocados that left their home down south and, chattering in the cold to each other through month-old cardboard, planned to stay young out of pride.

Amaris is currently finishing a degree in Science, Technology, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This poem came about while working at a deli on a year exchange at the University of Leeds in the UK. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been published in Trespass Magazine, Cadaverine Magazine, Erato (the arts and literature magazine at Georgia Tech), and theScribe (the arts and literature journal for the University of Leeds). This year she is the editor of Erato.

Jennifer Delaney

Julie Sampson Ballerina’s Song of the Earth (for Darcey Bussell) Just to the north high on the crown of Sorton Tor there’s a metamorphosis of rocks beneath my feet this moor-scape edge grass hillocks on greenearth salted with dew She sashayed down from mid-grey skies Ballerina! You must have seen her dancing on the ground A glissade in plié sur les pointes a pirouette

After a break of several years when she was working as teacher/lecturer and completing a PhD, Julie Sampson has recently been published in or by the following: Shearsman, Equinox, The Journal, Greatworks Online, Aireings, Suspension Magazine and is forthcoming on Agenda website. Before this she had poems in a variety of magazines and anthologies. She is working on a book about Devon's women writers and recently edited Mary Lady Chudleigh, Selected Poems for Shearsman.

that dress catches light as she bourees back en pointe it’s chiffon and satin a border of organdie and net shimmer of lilac-cerise blue sequins butterflying She’s intent on inner voices singing the Song where she went on the night of her final Farewell to earth I caught the last glimpse her terre à terre before she’d gone one with the hang-glider behind the tor the stones out of view of sight and now don’t know if she came to be part of the poem to tell us something or even flew in just for fun a trick of light simplicity itself disguised in a moving text of ballet-dress You do know though She won’t return

Note: Bussell’s last performance with the Royal Ballet in June 2007 was Macmillan’s ballet Song of the Earth

Graham Burchell Julia Seated (J.Y.M. Seated – Frank Auerbach, oil on canvas, 1996) She’s like butter in a frying pan, a shape that rides in its own melt. She wore her faces on Sundays and Wednesdays in Camden. For this sitting, dear Julia is melted into lemon-soured sunlight, dirtied to London mustard under black swipes to soot her nose, add lips and eyes and dizzy demarcations for her hair. She seems to sunbathe in a studio high-winged chair.

Graham Burchell was born in Canterbury, and now writes fulltime from his home in Devon. He is the editor of ‘Words-Myth” and winner of a number of major poetry competitions. His collection, Vermeer’s Corner was published in 2008.

Perhaps a window is thrown open to summer. His daubed lines are heavy. They pin her, head tilted back and slightly away; a stillness rankled by the parp and rumble of London. I would assume some exchange; Frankie and Jimmie sharing private trivia, she like a deposited ventriloquist’s dummy, he, head cocked, stooping with a birdlike switch between her pose and a square of canvas, wet with thoughts. He marks it diagonally and overlays with heavy-laden brush to pat her into a buttery moment; a muddle of Julia singing with his energy. She is wrung, between his fingers and his mind’s eye. She doesn’t mind that he engages the spirit, but veils her in a burqa of distorting pigment, for she thinks the world of him, and he of her, I hear.

William Doreski You Should Grow a Moustache You should grow a moustache to twitch and stroke when dark ale bottoms out in your pint glass. You should comb your hair to conform to the sine wave

William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, Natural Bridge.

of your intellect. Casual talk doesn’t amuse. When I confront you over a book about which we do or don’t agree I weigh every word. Your eyewear frowns so narrowly I wonder you can see through it. Your green checked shirt, sleeves too long, drapes you like a tent collapsed on a boy scout. Can we befriend the more relaxed parts of our minds, or must we remain as brittle as clamshells on a beach? A moustache would soften your potential scorn, tame it to fit a smaller space, and would also filter the ale that foams on your upper lip like the memory of outgoing tide. Now you’re off to Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago—straining every muscle as you map a route right over my wheezing farewell. Must you always be so abrupt? Our glasses leave rings on the table, but in this ratty brown tavern no one cares. Have a good trip, and think about growing a moustache, a tough, abrasive one like Stalin’s to both tickle and rule the world.

Jennifer Delaney

Jéanpaul Ferro An incident of black birds She’s on fire again; burning the reservoir down atop the summer waves; all those the skies out over Scituate darkening down into a bright and deep nuclear red. There are all these automatic negative thoughts inside of her head now: one beat, two beats, ½ a million beats per second, syncopation within beautiful and undecipherable jazz, a gray morning in the big city of blues without either one of us in it. She has her secret thoughts; we all have our secret thoughts; all of us have our thoughts that belong only to ourselves and God: 1. 2. 3.

What are your thoughts then? Are your thoughts even real? What if your thoughts aren’t real at all? Who are you then?

Listen to all these beautiful symphony notes coming together in harmony: Wait until darkness so you can hide in the cool and blue beautiful folds again. Watch for the North Star in the starry skies as you drive alongside the beach on your way to that opposite place from destiny. Dream. Remember. Hang on. Return perilously closer to dawn. Close your eyes. And then repeat: Who are you then?

Jeanpaul is a novelist, short fiction author, photographer and poet from Providence, Rhode Island. A six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has been featured on National Public Radio, The Columbia Review, Connecticut Review, Emerson Review, Contemporary American Voices, Boston Literary Magazine, Portland Monthly, The Providence Journal, Houston Literary Review, and others. Additionally, he is the author of All the Good Promises (1994, Plowman Press), Becoming X (2008, BlazeVOX Books), You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (2009, Thumbscrew Press), and the forthcoming Hemispheres (2009, Maverick Duck Press), 27 Hours in Palm Springs (2009, Big Table Publishing), and Essendo Morti—Being Dead (2009, Goldfish Press). Additionally, he is a 3-time Million Writers Award nominee.

Andrew Demcak Creation No twig bereft of plot, the needs of fruit or fire. There will be no revisions. Clouds clot and billow; stars are still uncaught. Raven feathers, dry land, vast divisions. Ornament as act, as pure beginning. Red dirt is not a verb, nor a question. Day opens its eye, solid, unblinking. Both moon and sun dissolve upon the tongue of sky. The earth, one stone thrown in an arc, alive.

Andre Demcak is an award-winning poet who has been widely published and anthologized both in print and on-line. His latest book of poetry is Zero Summer (BlazeVOX [books], NY, 2009.) His first poetry book, Catching Tigers in Red Weather (Three Candles Press, 2007), won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, judged by Joan Larkin. His poem “Handhold (for a Zygote)” won Goodread’s Newletter Poetry Contest, which was read by 2.5 million Goodreaders. His poetry, including the poem “Young Man With iPod” (Poetry Midwest, #13), is taught at Ohio State University as part of its English 110.02 class, “The Genius and the Madman.” His poems/books have been featured recently at The Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Journal, Juked!, MiPOesias, The Pebble Lake Review, elimae, Oranges & Sardines, and Pearl Magazine. Visit Andrew at: www.andrewdemcak.com

Corey Mesler Me@yourheart.com Every night I consume the castoff rind of the orange that we agreed symbolized life itself. Sideways you were a pleasing range, my face in you, yours in me. Now it’s just a code, a cipher, meaning nil. We don’t even nod as we pass on the internet. We don’t even stop to sniff. Picture me, an icon, @ night, alone, hungry for connection, hungry for your html.

COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006). His first full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), is out from Foothills Publishing and his book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations, appeared in March 2009. He also has two novels set to be published in the next year. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has two children, Toby, age 20, and Chloe, age 13. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He also claims to have written “Islands in the Stream.” He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Daniel Casey A Season’s Arrival When the air first carries madness, birdsong, then you’ve found the shared extremity, edge, inclination of horizon sun that cuts a clear line from winter, to spring.

Daniel Casey earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2003. Currently, Casey is the editor of Gently Read Literature, a web journal devoted to criticism of contemporary poetry and literary fiction. In 2008, Gold Wake Press published his first electronic poetry chapbook, Well Enough. Casey currently lives in New Haven, CT.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Dawn

Luca Penne Honest with You When you say, “I’m being honest with you,” dust settles down for a rest. A curtain lifts. Begonias drop their dresses. “Can I be Frank?” you ask. You can dance on the head of a pin with your bound feet. You can spell out the seven syndromes of decay. You can look in the mirror and sing to your cheekbones, miracles of deception, a wizard pressing his thumbs against your face. Who touched you on the cleft above your lip? Who asked you to be honest? Hallelujah, I’m not your type. Hallelujah, you like a man with big hands and a nose to smell your roses. I blow bubbles in your eyes. I dole out donuts for your darker hours.

Luca Penne is a carpenter and ski-lift operator living in northern New Hampshire. His work has appeared in a bunch of magazines.

Krista Benjamin My Niece Born on the first day of spring the first year of the millennium. Imitator of waitresses and magicians; unpredictable thrower of tantrums; connoisseur of Gummy Bears, vanilla yogurt, and orange juice with calcium; disliker of onions; wearer of snowsuits, heart-shaped sunglasses, and undone braids; speaker of nonsensical phrases; expert snorter; constant storyteller; voracious imaginer of impossible scenes—backyard roller coasters, airplanes in the living room. Oh, these are my taxes, she said when asked about papers brought home from preschool one day. Moderate taker of naps in the backseats of cars; mess maker of any room in her path; blue-eyed, fair-haired angel quick-to-turnmiserable scowler; tough-footed sprinter on beaches and lawns; climber of slides; blower of bubbles in bathtubs and swimming pools; granddaughter, great-granddaughter, cousin, and big sister; turner into her mother’s shoulder, turner into her mother’s leg; frequent requester of big tickles and little tickles; answerer of telephones real and pretend; self-appointed CEO of seating arrangements at all tables; drawer of a line in the sand around beach toys and her brother and me. Hey guys, she says, this is our property line, okay?

Krista’s stories and poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2006, Creative Writer's Handbook, The Sun, Margie, and other journals. She is the recipient of a Nevada Arts Council Fellowship and the Robert Gorrell Award for Literary Achievement from the Sierra Arts Foundation. Her home is in Minden, Nevada, where she teaches elementary school.

Deb Scott, Arizona Succulent

Scott Owens Shredding Sara

Dr Ehud Sela

She had to admit the regularity of the strips was pleasing, each scrap uniform, seeming elongated just by how thin they were.

Self portrait with you Softly, softly it reached me Grabbed me firmly —such contrast— And I that thought I knew Remained speechless Observing you pass by Through my garden’s paths, So close to me you came I felt you brush against me As if a painter drew us with a brush Picked us up from color palette Our pigments nearly touched But then he left And we remained undone.

She recalled days when she felt that slender, tried out stilettos to flex the muscles of the calf, tighten the curve of ass. She kept saying she’d do it, but no one believed her, not even herself, but once she started, there was something hypnotic in the hum of destruction. She shredded letters, pictures, poems, watched her favorite red dress fan out like ribbons, become bangles the color of blood or lip-sticked mouths,

Dr. Ehud Sela owns and operates a Veterinary Animal Hospital in Margate, Florida. Dr. Sela writes both poetry and prose. His writings can be found in the following magazines—on line: Artistry of life, Events Quarterly, Mind Fire, Cat Art Club, Munyori poetry journal, Gloom cupboard, and Sage of consciousness. Print Magazines: The Ugly Tree, Mucus Art Press, UK, A Hudson View, Poetry Digest, USA. And The Saison Poetry Library: The SouthBank Centre: online archive, London, UK

saw words turn to combs, then screens, then just so much confetti, aborted origamis transformed to fodder for birds’ nests, pet boxes, various other stuffings. She learned the easy way to deconstruct, how fragile identity could be, the thousand pages of who she was falling apart like leaves from an aging tree.

Graduate of the UNCG MFA program, co-editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Chair of the Sam Ragan Poetry Prize for the Poetry Council of NC, and author of "Musings," a weekly poetry column in Outlook, Scott Owens is the 2008 Visiting Writer at Catawba Valley Community College. His first full-length collection of poetry, The Fractured World was published in August by Main Street Rag. He is also author of three chapbooks The Persistence of Faith (1993) from Sandstone Press, Deceptively Like a Sound (Dead Mule, 2008), The Book of Days (Dead Mule, 2009) and over 300 poems published in various journals. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Prize this year. His poem, "On the Days I Am Not My Father," was featured on Garrison Keillor's NPR show The Writer's Almanac. Born in Greenwood, SC, he now lives in Hickory, NC, where he teaches and coordinates the Poetry Hickory reading series.

Laura Sobbot Ross Upon Seeing a Thicket of Bleeding Hearts We’d discovered them as children after our father died, the path of pine straw flattening,

Our Mother’s Boyfriend

and all those threaded hearts lined up and bobbling on a twig. The azaleas with their buttercream thick

Yours was a green mustang convertible, that sacred dominion of he we were first allowed to step into—

branches piled high with blooming almost eclipsed the small, wild hearts waiting to be plucked and carried inside,

palming planes of emerald shellac we edged into the dustless channels of your leather seats, tossed your tennis towels in the back, watched the blue sky streaming.

a necklace of charms for our mother. Kind of like the bone-white bells of lily-of-the-valley, only these

You, turning us down highways beyond the school bus route, burning through the same old undulating horizon like a malachite bullet. Our mother,

trinkets were full and rosy, a tracery of magenta veins. Would she know we had already pulled back the soft, pink jacket of each heart to see what made it bleed, extracted the teardrop shaped

in the passenger seat, pivoting to check on us every few minutes, scarf bright as an ache, loosened and whipping above her perm.

appendage lodged in its middle, and then pinched the halves together again? Whole and unwrinkled as silk satchels

In the back we held on, all four of us wedged in your rear view mirror, tattered with currents and inclines, giddy and feigning fearlessness in the soft skins of our tee shirts.

sized to fit one within the other, those hearts we carried home, nothing but a few small fingerprints left inside.

We let the wind do the howling, the changing thrust of the gears, all the while hoping it would mean you’d stay with us behind the wheel.

Laura has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize in the past two years, and her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Calyx, Natural Bridge, Tar River Poetry, Slow Trains, and The Caribbean Writer, among many others. She was recently named a finalist in the Creekwalker Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist in the Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Contest.

Ken Fifer Maps I should have anecdotes, antidotes, Sherpa’s stones, horn talismans you can string around your wrist guaranteed to pull you up on the right elevator, maps of mar-proof Housing Project halls where no messages can ever be scrawled so you won’t get lost and have no choice but to point at flag decals on apartment doors convinced each opens to a foreign country. If you can’t climb the high and snow-blind past, a pass yaks and yeti use to enter Spanish Harlem, it’s my fault—my fault if you never get to be the traveler beset by the newest avalanche, dropping fingers, losing toes, picking a way on the edge of the incredibly abrupt crevasse— my fault if you arrive intact, if you never reach the moon-marked snow at the end of the hall or get to know how drifts are banked—wind off the crust kissing you, coldly rattling your locks.

Kelly Davio The Consistent Trouble of Water I wait out the thunder in bare feet. Having walked this far over battered rock and clammy halves, sea kelp smelling of sweat and piss, I will not be moved. I shore my flanks against a dune, stare down clouds that peel over black waves. Lightning breeds the rain I didn’t expect from a low-tide, Santa Monica beach, my back’s skin now dappled with sunscreen and gooseflesh. But if bodily sensation is the taproot of consciousness, then bracing the back under pelting ice water is pure sentience. It joggles the guts, knocks the tooth into its being. Sitting here is the kind of game divorced fathers with alternate weekends hand a kid twenty bucks to play at the pier: shooting out a cardboard star, hucking plastic balls at glass bowls where goldfish already list. Some years before I would have believed in justice— would have thought each thrown expense destined for jackpot. Now, the pier is an unwalkable distance in fog, neon strobes indistinct through the rain. I barricade my skin and dig my toes further into sand.

Ken Fifer’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, The Partisan Review, and many other magazines. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being After Fire (March Street Press, 2007). He has a Ph.D. from The University of Michigan and is a Professor of English at the Berks campus of Penn State University.

Kelly Davio currently serves as Poetry and Reviews Editor at The Los Angeles Review and reads for Fifth Wednesday Journal. Her recent and forthcoming publication credits include Beeswax, Weave, Bellingham Review, and Gargoyle, among others, and she was recently selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2009. She holds an MFA in poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and makes her home in Seattle, Washington.

Elizabeth Polkinghorn To Stefan and Yakov I remember you, my orphan boys of Uzhgorod hanging on the border of Ukraine all knobby shoulders and ribs, drawstring shorts and bare feet and crowns of fuzzy gypsy hair

Elizabeth Polkinghorn lives in Austin, TX, where she studies social work and tries figure out her role in improving the world. Her poetry has been published by Postal Poetry and qarrtsiluni, though under pseudonyms. She blogs at www.poetryetcetc.com.

Stefan, I think I can see your heart swell against your bare skin and recede Yakov in a white tank top drooping to mid-thigh, you stuff your shorts pockets with tart plums from the orchard you dragged me to chattering all the while in tongues wilder than Ukranian, chirping words that would be foreign even to your unknown mothers your slight frames flutter to the top of a plum tree effortlessly and cast down the small bitter fruits your bones must be hollow I remember you, my orphan boys of Uzhgorod hanging on the border of Ukraine faces pressing against wrought iron, all ferocious screaming hearts and outstretched arms hollow bones hallowed tongues

Deb Scott, Thistle

Ashley Bovan As You Are, So It Is Clouds reflected in windows as she approached the telephone box that sat on the edge of scrap land used for village parking. The gravel was still wet but summer warmth eased in when a section of sky cleared; grey turned blue. She stopped and glanced towards the shops; two rows of seven formed into a corm-shape. She reached into the side-pocket of her denim work-clothes (a uniform neatly offset by white nylon blouse) and pulled out a black wood rosary

Turn the corner past the disused school left then third left (stop and talk) avoid the rubbish in the gutter and alley go through a gate set into a high concretebricked wall (enjoy the holly-trellised vine, dandelion, bulrush, betony) walk to the kitchen back-door.

Louisa Adjoa Parker Kiss of life, of love You breathed life back in to me tipped up my chin to make sure the airways were clear, blew love into my throat, thawing the cold, pressed hard on my chest until my heart began to beat again rubbed at my sharp edges, smoothed them like sea glass, softened every blow I’ve ever taken with your warm breath, kind fingers, gentle lips. You kissed every bruise. I choked and opened my eyes to find you, in my life, loving me.

Admire the trestle-table, ordinary furniture, scullery and parlour, luxurious orange-spicy incense, garlands of poppy, fennel and primrose, delicious gummy muscatel raisins (followed by quiche and currant-slice). Sleepy now…wallpaper, patterned, lightly floral…cornice, frieze like icing… curtain-lace… screening daylight… vaporous material…milk-snow undulance… February-Autumn – (yes, that season again) a journal filled with illucid mischief; sulphurous medicine I confess, I was imprisoned, malnourished – destined to remain immured – picturing a way-out

Ashley Bovan lives and writes in Cardiff and is an MA student at Lancaster University. He has been published in a dozen magazines and online. (Website - www.ashley-bovan.co.uk)

Louisa Adjoa Parker is of mixed heritage with a White British mother and Ghanaian father. Her poetry reflects her early experiences of racism and domestic violence, which informs some of her work. She lives in Dorset and has a strong connection with the West-country landscape. Louisa's first collection Salt-sweat and Tears was published in 2007 by Cinnamon Press, and one of the poems 'Rag Doll' was highly commended by the Forward Prize. Louisa has also written about the history of African and Caribbean people in Dorset. Louisa runs Adjoa Consultancy, which aims to explore diversity through Literature and History. She can offer a range of workshops and projects. Please visit http://www.louisaadjoaparker.co.uk

Michelle McGrane Augusta Fabergé Following Bolshaya Morskaya's stone sweep, I hurry his meal, sautéed carp pirozhki, a shoal of small pies caught in my hands, their heat rising through the unbleached linen.

Arlene Ang

At his weathered workbench, craftsmen flock exclaiming over the Rosebud Egg, an Imperial Easter gift from the new Tsar to his blue-blooded beloved, Alexandra.

Mother, you never taught me how to cut mung bean vermicelli.

Within the guillochéd strawberry red carapace, hinged yellow enamel petals unfurl revealing a cabochon ruby pendant and crown never meant for a plain cabinetmaker's daughter.

Strewn Cellophane Noodles

After ruining three large scissors and a wire-cutter, I wonder if you really knew best: – Listen to me. Study hard. Use the Chinese technique for Maths. You're smarter than Mrs. Chen's daughter. –

* guilloché: an engraving technique in which an intricate motif is etched into metal before its surface is covered with translucent enamel.

I chopsticked your words into my mouth, swallowed each morsel like faith. When diplomas were slipped into my hands, you wept proudly: I owed you everything. You never knew about the abortions

Michelle McGrane lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her third poetry collection, The Suitable Girl, will be published by Pindrop Press in 2010.

in college, or how Wang played poker with my dowry, your savings, in less than a year of marriage. In this kitchen, tiles have come loose, the ceiling percolates rain down walls like in Jiaying where you farmed land until

Arlene Ang is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. More of her work may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.

you were sixteen, then escaped to Hong Kong. Today your lessons explode with the bean threads. Like Grandmother the morning after your father smashed chairs and plates in a drunken fit, I quietly sweep the broken pieces.

Deb Scott There is no otherness/there is only otherness ... I and all the girls of the world learned to run wild too, like wild flowers, no, no, wild, like men. All the women of the world, becoming just men. -- Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, from "In the Beginning" In becoming flesh we are all soft lips, hard pricks prickling soft we moan through closed lips, pink mewling delights, we spit -we split, so many skins dividing so many cells clamoring to join.

Deb Scott lives in Portland, Oregon. Her recent poetry publications include OCHO #24; Qarrtsilui, the Mutating the Signature edition (in collaboration with Christine Swint) as well as the Hidden Messages issue and the Insect issue; Ouroboros Review Issue 2; VoiceCatcher 3, an anthology of Portland women writers; Asphalt Sky and Tonopah la: A Quarterly Journal of Prose and Poetry. Qarrtsilui published a short-short fiction piece in their Journaling the Apocalypse issue. The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts included her essay in their Summer 2009 issue. Her photography can be found in MReview 2006 and in this issue of Ouroboros Review.

You invade me with clear wings touch me lightly and burrow deep as if what you need is saturated nectar or power or love or only heat. I prod your vibrating tongue motion you to come through beaded curtains. They tinkle invisibly. Who says only girls are flowers? If some calculating statesmen set his pen too far inside an ink well and dribbled on the page, well then, he might be forgiven but only out of sympathy, or mourning. We are all flowers, pistils, pollen. Waiting for another to linger.

Deb Scott, Narcissus

Janann Dawkins The Great Escape We're out of ourselves every night. The cat's pajamas unfurl their fleece and rumors fly into the ground underneath the naked sea of lights. We wend our way through eddies like dolphins

Barbara Crooker

sleeking through space. Every night sidewinders straddle sheer cliffs and never peer down into coral

Absence The cherry trees have let down their pink burdens, littering the ground with colored snow. This is the first spring without you, no walks in the wheelchair to see the trees burst into bloom. I want you back, but not in your body with its tired lungs. The fallen petals cover the ground like spent artillery shells. The blood-red tulip, black stamens bristling around the pistil has returned from the underworld. Why can’t you?

sheaths which slide like the mouths of tubas. The new domains, smooth and golden, train our slithering views on bright balloons of memories that swell into baubles of legs and arms, bulbous fellows filling out like dough. Sounds follow. Notes float and feather into strata, spheres fractionizing, vowels rounded and released. The fiction speaks. Hair and sunshine, glaciers and ships, lips and friction, motion and line, the stairwell and the hoosegow, bride and the chain, all come to be beneath the silver, the china, the stainless moon. Grass shivers into wakefulness. Blood cells practice zazen. Eyelids fret like horses.

Janann Dawkins' work has been featured recently or is upcoming in decomP, Existere, Poesia, Suss and Two Review, among others. Her chapbook Micropleasure was published by Leadfoot Press in 2008. A graduate of Grinnell College with a B.A. in American Studies, she now resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she manages the eclectic literary journal Third Wednesday.

Barbara Crooker’s work has appeared in magazines such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, Highlights for Children, and The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA). She is the recipient of the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Radiance, her first full-length book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; her new book, Line Dance, also from Word Press, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Garrison Keillor has read 17 of her poems on The Writer’s Almanac, National Public Radio.

About the visual artists Jennifer Delaney prefers to capture whimsical or mystical images, as well as the play of shadow and light. She won a local award for her photography, and her photos have appeared in newspapers and literary journals. Delaney’s manuscript, The Permanence of Stone and the Fragility of Glass, won Colorado University’s Jovanovich Imaginative Award for best graduate thesis. A chapter from her memoir, Coyote Heart, was published in the Sojourn Journal. She has published poetry, memoir, essays, reviews and fiction in a wide array of print and online publications. Delaney is a coach and cofounder of The Writer’s Arbor: www.thewritersarbor.com.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, UK. Her photography has previously been published in Ancient Heart Magazine, BluePrintReview, Lily, Pequin, Poesy, Postal Poetry, Stirring, Toward the Light: Journal of Reflective Word and Image, Trillium Literary Journal and Word Catalyst Magazine. More at www.sighming.com.

Julie E. Bloemeke lives in Alpharetta and is the mother of two young children. Her poems have appeared in Pebble Lake Review, Ouroboros Review and in the anthology Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word. This is her first published series of photography and poetry.

Deb Scott lives in Portland, Oregon. Her photography can be found in MReview 2006 and in this issue of Ouroboros Review.

Jéanpaul Ferro is a poet, novelist, short fiction author, and photographer. His photography has been featured on the cover of Houston Literary Review, in Bartleby Snopes, and on the cover of his collection of poetry, Essendo Morti – Being Dead. His poetry and short fiction has recently been featured in Emerson Review, Columbia Review, Connecticut Review, and on NPR.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Clouds

ouroboros review http://www.ouroborosreview.com

‘For all there is darkness, not least in your kohl-rimmed lulu eyes, it’s your firmament. Tremble. Illumine. Fly west, towards night. Mend your stockings with the thread of a hummed tune, Yiddish words a blur, crumbs of a dream. ’ Sophie Mayer

‘While

you sleep, they’ve been running themselves to this silk, thinning themselves to a fine mesh of filament visible only under a low sun, yet with all the tensile strength of steel. They’ve been smoothing away the sharp edges and putting their soft focus spin on the night just gone.’ Matt Merritt