http://thebluestaye.tumblr.com/ Volume.1 Issue.1
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR Welcome to The Bluest Aye. We’re very proud of this, our first issue. Launching anything takes heavy lifting. It also requires an imagination greater than the reality of obstacles. But every writer knows this. The creative process is part fairy-grove inspiration, part blind-preacher faith, and part iron-pumping will. That’s why we’re so honored by all who shared their words with us this quarter. It’s only the beginning, and we can’t wait to publish more. Since April is National Poetry Month, we decided to begin with an ode to the poem. This issue celebrates the art of verse with contributions by seven poets, including a posthumous neverbefore-published work by John Mark Eberhart, the late book editor of The Kansas City Star. In keeping with our theme of “the eye,” each piece deals in some way with gaze or perception, and with the Otherness around which the publication is centered. Mario Duarte writes about the marginalization of loneliness; Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons and Mary Stone Dockery explore internal and external barriers in Latina culture; Megan McCormack addresses bullying; Claire Joysmith contributes an allegory on death; and Jason Ryberg presents varying pictures of existential alienation. In addition, Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg speaks about crossing genres and cultures, “speaking for” Jews, and her advice for anyone who writes. Our Editors are delighted to present a unique collection, and we look forward to becoming a forum for poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, reviews, and many future labors of language and love. Thanks for reading, Jennifer Leigh Coates Kayti Doolittle Jose Faus Missi Rasmussen
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http://thebluestaye.tumblr.com/ Volume.1 Issue.1
STAFF EDITORS
Jennifer Leigh Coates Jose Faus Missi Rasmussen
LAYOUT
KAYTI DOOLITTLE
ART
Robin Lorenson
LOGO
Maria Vasquez Boyd
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CONTENTS POETRY Megan McCormack 04
IN MEMORY OF JOHN MARK EBERHART
“Destrado”
14
POETRY Jason Ryberg
POETRY John Mark Eberhart
05 “The Garden of Punishment” 06
15
POETRY Mario Duarte 07
POETRY John Mark Eberhart
“Single”
16
POETRY Megan McCormack 08
17
18
POETRY Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons
12
13
19
“My Greatest Fears were Strangers”
POETRY Claire Joysmith “Momentary”
“Wall Cloud”
PHOTOGRAPHY Robin Lorenson
10 “Like Mother, Like Daughter” 11 Mary Stone Dockery
“January”
PHOTOGRAPHY Robin Lorenson
“Madame Lavaux”
POETRY Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons &
“New Year’s Eve”
POETRY John Mark Eberhart
“Recess Witch”
POETRY Jason Ryberg 09
“Your Letter Came Today”
“Mammatus Clouds”
PHOTOGRAPHY Robin Lorenson 20
“Cumulus Clouds”
INTERVIEW Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg 21 “Poet Laureate of Kansas” 22
BIOS Contributors 23 Bios
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“Destrado”
by Megan McCormack
Your grandmother’s tea set on the table Very old and thin, like I could just Crush This teacup in my hands I want to Swipe my arm across it all A century of china All over your tile floor. Your birthday cake on a plate Very pink and candle-lit, like I could just Lick The frosting and claim it as mine I want to Dig my hands into it Wax and flame and sugar Under my fingernails. Your favorite piano song on the radio Very soft and peaceful, like I could just Smash My face into the speakers I want to Scream “FUCK” during the decrescendo One thick syllable to your Three minutes of lullaby.
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“The Garden of Punishment� by Jason Ryberg
3AM and a bell goes off somewhere in the dank, cavernous sub-basement of my skull, sending all the lizards and crickets skittering, signaling once, twice, three times, that once again the fertile sub-terra of my soul is about to host an after-hours battle royale. Here is where the issues and controversies of the day are nightly wrestled, reconfigured and hammered out.
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And at this particular instance of Insomnulant Non-dream, the scenario has assumed the furious manifestation of a steel-cage match; (complete with razor-wire, cowbells and kabuki sticks!). In one corner, the surly, pissy demon of Pernicious Debt! In the other, the voracious troll of Conspicuous Consumption! An audience of Shriners, nuns and Boy Scouts howls for blood and tits! For they know, they know, before anyone may enter the Kingdom of Dreams, they must first walk through the Garden of Punishment.
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“Single�
by Mario Duarte
When you are single the night only has one digit to poke the world with but it is enough. And the wind has no heart but its blood splashes your face and hollows out your eyes. In the white distance, the sea has no fist and yet it smashes boats bobbing in the harbor. Snowflakes may have no fingernails and yet their points scrape your wordless tongue.
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“Recess Witch” by Megan McCormack
I make spells and potions in the playground In a mudpit far away from the swings and the see-saws. While the others chatter about their God and their Jesus, As they climb around on the monkey bars, I throw dandelions and dead bugs into a hole in the ground. I am everything their preacher warned them about I am a gentile, a freak, The girl who whispers into the dirt. They don’t talk to me because I am sin, and sin is infectious Breathe my air, and you’re bound to get The pox. They say beneath my skin is tar, My brain is full of worms, And my tongue is split in half, Which is why I whisper into the dirt.
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“Madame Lavaux, Fortune Teller and Police Psychic, Hands out a Little Free Advice” by Jason Ryberg To come upon a red guitar propped in the corner of an empty room at that exact point in the day when afternoon is about to shift into evening means you will soon be embroiled in a scandal with a blue-eyed girl. To dream of an elevator shaft coughing up an ocean of blood is a sign that someone close to you, maybe even family, is plotting your downfall. A noose swinging from a tree on a hill means you will marry many times before you find the right one. A beer bottle standing in the middle of a country crossroads means that a decision of some importance must soon be made. To dream, repeatedly, of a votive candle burning in an attic bedroom window means you will soon change religions, political parties or the color of your hair. To wake from a dream of washing dishes and find yourself washing dishes is a sign that you are about to receive a large inheritance. Too see a telephone pole by the side of the road suddenly begin to shoot sparks and smoke means that you will soon encounter temptation you might not be able to fend off. To see the face of your enemy in the skin of a potato, in a bank of clouds or looking up at you from the coffee in your cup means you should probably keep a low profile for awhile. To find an ancient map folded up in the pages of a book on seventeenth century French Painters means you will soon begin a strange journey with someone you haven’t spoken to in years.
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“Like Mother, Like Daughter” by Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons
They drop me off at the house on Bell the house where Tía lives Only for a few hours they say they drop me off at the house on Bell with Tía my godmother my look-alike (same eyes nose and chin) and eyelashes long droopy like overgrown palm lashes that are always being brushed by hands Touch them Mamá tells her comadres Touch them or you will give her el ojo This is the house the house on Bell where Tía lives with her best friend And as I enter this house I ask May I watch some television It is Saturday morning and I never miss School House Rock Land of the Lost and BOO Sí Tía’s best friend tells me I make myself comfortable in front of the T.V. I am brought a glass of leche and pan de dulce which I devour before BOO
I don’t want to miss the show’s opening when the letters B O O drip in blood in the background a werewolf howls Today’s show is about a girl with special powers she burns her neighbor’s barn because he calls her Evil she sets his barn ablaze just by thinking about it
And as the episode continues Tía comes to sit near me Bruja bruja is what I hear Tía say Esa niña es bruja and the woman who is Tía’s best friend the one that she lives with the one that always finishes Tía’s sentences says— Tu mamá es bruja tambien continues on about santa muerte pictures of people with pin pricks on photographs my mother’s altar and something about burning hair My look-alike nods a deafening— Sí
I pretend not to listen but I do my eyes shut tight my nose purses my chin crinkles my lashes lap tears and I do my own thinking:
May the earth part (but only at 1106 E. Bell) And devour them both
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“My Greatest Fears Were Strangers”
by Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons and Mary Stone Dockery mal ojos piercing like BBs from pellet guns Touch them, Mamá would say. If you don’t, you’ll make her sick.
cursed by lechuza eyes her beauty in curves that meander like feral rivers
Touch her or you’ll fill her with locura. The owls perched on limbs, straining to see. Each sound from them a touch, touch, touch. It wasn’t like song, but like strangers standing behind doors. You always see their feet in movies. My mother made me lift the curtain no matter how scared I was, forced me onto my knees to see beneath my bed, then sat me by a smoldering fire outside, telling more stories of them. the fault lines of my woman body my breasts, hips nipples, stole eyes my fault, my fault She told me stories of little girls being picked up by strangers in malls, having their hair chopped off in the bathroom so they could escape looking like little boys. I plead for her to cut my hair, the shadows flickering off her face like black tongues. She hisses, drops a stick in the fire. rojo is the color of fall, harvest when pumpkin patches overgrow in the backyard mother’s hands ache in green scars. My body is mine, not mine, mine again. She told me stories of lechuzas who turn into witches at dusk, in flight and with their talons, carry little girls by their hair. The owls, perched on limbs, strained to see. Found me. anaranjado is the color of fall, harvest when pumpkin patches overgrow in the backyard mother’s hands tangle in tresses. My body is mine, not mine, not mine again.
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“Momentary� by Claire Joysmith
She saw it as if in slow motion how life flew from blue into transparency yellow streaming into a window a suspended ruffle of wings a flutter of fall the dog aiming teeth first her mother rushing past the door to laddle it off the cold concrete cupping it into warm comfort the open beak pleading air beady eyes unblinking the plumed body a rosary of gasps a sudden limpness into surrender crumpled eyelids closing slowly into cold, into stiffness it reached her beyond silence time broke and every window shattered as she turned witness to startling brevity fitted into a cupped hand
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Honoring the memory of John Mark Eberhart (1960-2013) John Mark Eberhart, poet and former book editor of the Kansas City Star, lost his battle with cancer in March. He was an avid supporter of Kansas City’s literary community, and his family has given permission for us to publish these three works of his in our inaugural issue. We are particularly honored to present the unpublished work “New Year’s Eve” for the very first time.
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YOUR LETTER CAME TODAY (from Night Watch) The envelope was tobacco-stained; a muddy thumbprint marked its edge. I am hiding in my upper room. I am shadowboxing memories. I am a barnacled house on the outskirts of town. I am the instrument of your pain. I have traded the sea for a wheat field. I have bartered salt for summer thunder. I am a stonefish that can swim land. The river road leads back to you.
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NEW YEAR’S EVE Another fallen year, and I pick my way through its days, my many failures and few triumphs, trying to divide black from white, forgetting that life is mostly tan or grey. Things look as they always do – this room full of bourbon and books, scattered ashtrays, cigars half-smoked: another year’s time strewn about, a man’s debris. Another year above ground, I joke, but it’s neither as grim nor as funny as I try to make it. Another hour past sunset, and my friends will arrive to exchange good wishes – saints and witches, reveling away the year’s last night. But as the party tinkles on to twelve and past, I grow distracted, mind moving across the fields and rivers, to a farm tucked into Missouri’s northwest corner, where the night has fallen, where the ground freezes on a tract of land not worked since my uncle died – where the wind whispers nonsense to the wheat and the chaff.
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JANUARY (from Broken Time) The nothingness after New Year’s Day. The shadows cast by the faithless sun. The difficulty to do a thing, the voices that say “Slip away, sleep, slip away.” Yet at night, the hungry spirit roams, trying to forage its way out of winter. A truffle, the dregs of the egg nog, one last stogy, “Twilight Zone” on TV.
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©Robin Lorenson 11”x17” June 2009 Wall Cloud 3
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©Robin Lorenson 11”x17” Mammatus Clouds
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©Robin Lorenson 11”x17” Cumulus Clouds
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CARYN MIRRIAM- GOLDBERG INTERVIEW THE BLUEST AYE: As poet laureate of Kansas, you’ve done a tremendous job mobilizing local poets to create something communal, with your “To The Stars Through Difficulty” Kansas Regna project. Can you talk a little about that idea and the role you think poetry can play in our communities? Do you see a role for poets as community builders?
CARYN: I’ve always found that coming together in community can help us find more of our
individual spark as well as ways through hard times. Given what our state has gone and is going through when it comes to support for the arts, this seemed as especially important time to write together and then share our work. When I started the renga, I only had a hunch we should do it without knowing completely why. As it unfolded -- through 150 parts featuring 148 poets -- it began to reveal what we collectively have to say about our land and sky, our politics and arts, our history and future. The renga played out in layers too, first on the website on which it unfolded over the year (http://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com), then through the publication of the beautiful book of the renga by Mammoth Publications, and now through the readings all over the state. Each time we come together and read, a different combination of poets show up, and so we have a moving mosaic of a poem, fresh and alive on each occasion.
THE BLUEST AYE: You’re a very successful poet, and yet you don’t just write poetry. In addition to creative nonfiction, you’ve recently published a wonderful, acclaimed novel, “The Divorce Girl.” What attracted you to poetry initially, and how is this different from what drives you to write fiction? Do you think good writers should be proficient in more than one form?
CARYN: While I started in poetry and then expanded out to prose and songwriting, I’ve al-
ways been drawn to follow the rhythm of the words instead of a specific genre. What attracts me to poetry is the music of it all -- poetry is so much an art form somewhere between music and writing. I trust the rhythm, which tells me what words to fill in, and at the same time, I also write about some things that just call out to be prose more than poetry. “The Divorce Girl” is a novel I began over seventeen years ago, and yet I’ve revised it the same way I would a poem, line by line at times (could be why it took so long!). Yet with fiction, or any big prose piece, the overall story becomes even more central than any themes raised. In my newest book, “Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor & Polish Resistance Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Each Other,” I wrote non-fiction based on oral histories, and yet I approached it the way I approach all writing. I just aimed toward the page, gave it all I had, crashed and burned some but also found ways to fly into the right words through much trial and error, revision and re-envisioning how to tell this story. You ask if good writers need to be proficient in more than one form, and I don’t think that’s necessary so. We all have our callings at writers, and for some, it’s the call to write shining short stories; for others, the call is to write in more than one genre. But I also think writers can benefit from learning more than one art (if not more than one genre) because of how creating in different languages, forms, structures and situations opens our soul a little wider. Other arts also teach us about ways to translate the world into a container of time and space. A writer can learn more about how to write from gardening, dancing, cooking, painting, and, of course, writing.
THE BLUEST AYE: Our publication deals with concepts of Otherness and the voice of the outsider.
/ 22/ BLUEST AYE You seem to be working with similar concepts in “The Divorce Girl,” from nontraditional families to feminism to a strong identification with your Jewish heritage. Do you self-identify as an “Other” in any way, and has this influenced your work?
CARYN: Otherness plays out in so many ways, and I think we all have a responsibility to
learn about ways in which we’re privileged and also occupying the role of the other or outsider. As a Jew who grew up in New York and New Jersey, I’ve certainly had opportunities to help people learn about the limitations of some stereotypes (although I’ve surely enforced some stereotypes too by simply not being a person who holds back). I’ve been the first Jew many people have met, and I try to use those moments as opportunities for making connections and dissolving prejudices. As a roaming scholar with the Kansas Humanites Council, I’ve called myself a porta-Jew for years because of the many conversations I’ve had answering lots of questions about what being Jewish is like. People so often want to move beyond what separates us, and so it’s a privilege to help educate people on what it is to have a faith that’s not Christian-based. I’m also privileged by being white, middle-class, old enough or young enough, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc. As a workshop facilitator, I’ve been drawn to work with people who struggle sometimes on the margins, particularly people living with serious illness, people of color, low-income income, and the elders among us. I find the writing of people who live on and face such edges often has an authenticity that breaks my heart open, and so I’m continually drawn to do more of such facilitation.
THE BLUEST AYE: Along the same lines, you are a New Jersey native who’s lived in Kansas for over thirty years. Did you ever feel out of place in either of those very different cultures? Do you now feel more at home in one place more than another?
CARYN: I feel so at home in Kansas that it’s hard to believe, whenever I go to New York or
New Jersey, how much at home I feel there also. I guess I’m kind of a tri-placial person -- I live here in Kansas, I’m from the NJ-NY area, and I teach in Vermont, where I live for ten-twelve days twice a year (and have for seventeen years). I have places and people I love in all these states - favorite restaurants and places to see the woods or sky or sea, and many dear ones here, there and yonder.
THE BLUEST AYE: Your tenure as poet laureate is drawing to a close. As you reflect on
what you have learned in your career to this point, what advice would you offer to poets who are aspiring to that kind of success?
CARYN: To be a writer, or any kind of artist, is to dwell to a certain extent in mystery. To
throw yourself at the mercy of the page. To be a public poet in this way (as poet laureate, but there are many ways to put ourselves out there) also means engaging with what I know and don’t know often. So a big part of cultivating success is to love the journey, and that means letting go of how I think things should be and enjoying the wild turns and sudden swoops along the way. When something I’m working toward falls away, I can let myself get stuck and harden my heart. I can also, or instead, throw up my arms, and put ear to the ground to hear what’s happening, where the next openings are, how to move toward them. This is an inside-out way of saying that we need to let go of who we think we’re supposed to be as writers and pay close attention to what is, and what is unfolding. That way, the journey is its own reward, and by that, I mean the writing itself is its own cure. The readings, publications, honors, and encounters are blessings upon the core blessing of the writing and the writing life. Everything we encounter is material, and not just for what we write but for how we live.
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Bios Mario Duarte lives in Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of New Hampshire. He is a distance member of the Latino Writers Collective. Recently, he has published poems in the Acentos Review, Broken Plate, Huizache, Palabra, Shadowbox, Slab, Steel Toe Review, and Passages North. Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons is an MFA candidate at the University of Kansas. Her work appears in Primera Pagina: Poetry from the Latino Heartland, Cuentos: Stories from the Latino Heartland, and forthcoming NewBorder: Contemporary Voices from the US/Mexico Border. A Latino Writers Collective co-founder, Gabriela is a Macondo Workshop fellow. Mary Stone Dockery received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Kansas in 2012. She is the author of Mythology of Touch, a poetry collection by Woodley Press. Mary also has two chapbooks forthcoming, Aching Buttons from Dancing Girl Press and Blink Finch from Kattywompus Press. Megan McCormack is an MFA student of the University of Missouri-St. Louis where she also teaches first year composition. In 2011, her short story “Under Warranty” won first place in the Jefferson Country Library Writing Contest. Her work has also appeared in Janus. Her background is in magical realism and women and gender studies. Claire Joysmith, raised trilingually/quatriculturally, is professor at UNAM, Mexico, focusing on transcultural, transnational and translation issues. She has published extensively (Signs, Chicana Feminisms, collective introduction to Anzaldúa’s Borderlands). Her poetry is featured in Voices Without Borders, vols. I & II (2009 National Best Book Award for Literature-Anthology), Literal, Tameme, Dondepalabra,The Momegg, and others. Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box of loose papers that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with a rooster named Little Red and a billy goat named Giuseppe. His latest collection of poems is Down, Down And Away (co-authored with Joshua Rizer: Spartan Press, 2012). Feel free to look up his skirt at jasonryberg.blogspot.com. Robin Lorenson is a photographer, videographer, director and producer. For the past few years, Robin has been chasing storms and documenting weather patterns throughout the United States. To see more of her work visit: http://www.robinlorensonphoto.com/.
A big thank you to-