Dreamers: A Christmas Canzonet

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A CHRISTMAS CANZONET DREAMERS

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, mail the publisher at thelinnetswings@gmail.com

Ordering Information: See our website: www.thelinnetswings.org ISBN-13: 978-1977809070

2017 Frontispiece Julbocken by John Bauer Date: 1912

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Other Publications by The Linnet´s Wings "The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow" ISBN 13: 978-1480176423 " Randolph Caldecott, The House that Jack Built" ISBN-13: 978-1483977669 "One Day Tells Its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine" ISBN-13: 978-1480186354 "About the Weather-- Spring Trending" by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN-13: 978-0993049330 "This Crazy Urge to Live" by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN-13: 978-0993049-0-9 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN-13:978-1522869504 "Three Pounds of Cells" by Oonah V Joslin ISBN-13: 978-1535486491

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue: Notes from a memorandum-book of Mr. Knickerbocker: xv Epigraph: When Gods Ruminate by Tom Sheehan xvii

SECTION ONE: WHEN NATURE MATTERS Love came down at Christmas; love all lovely, love divine The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry 3 The Creation of Eve by Ronald E. Shields 8 Star Potential by Mike Lewis 11 A Walk on a Windy Day by MLF 13 Edwin Booth by Jan Wiezorek 17 In The Absence of Infinity by Jennifer Lothrigel 19 Current Affairs by Marie Fitzpatrick 21 Party by Alan David Pritchard 23 Winter's Last Breath by Oonah V Joslin 25 Portimão 2017 by Dolores Duggan 26

CHRISTMASPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEARTMUSICPR OSEPOETRYLYRICILLUSTR ATIONPHOTOGRAPHY

SECTION TWO: SOMETHING MORE SLEEP, sleep, beauty bright/ Dreaming in the joys of night

Interlude From An Interlude by Barry Charman 32 Listen Without Prejudice by Sergio A. Ortiz 34 The Arrival of Spring by James G. Piatt 37 Light Whispers Through the Skin of the World by James Owens 39 Imaginary Translations from the Falling World

by James Owens 40 The End by Ceinwen E C Haydon 42 Pilgrimage by Robert Nisbet 44

The Clown (James Bollinger Mazutreek)

by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Date: 1868

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Summer’s End by Cindy King 47 Patient Zero by Cindy King 48 xmas tree by Cindy King 49 The Great Synagogue of Constanta

by Brandon Marlon 50

SECTION THREE: A CONSPIRACY OF LOVE The hills are shadows, and they flow/From form to form, and nothing stands; Christmas Catchup by Oonah V Joslin 55 Storied Lives by M. M. Adjarian 57 The Green Seed of Jealousy by Lesley Timms 64 Our Night Watchman by Lesley Timms 67 Galloway Shipwrecks by J S Fuller 69 Papa Panov's Special Christmas

by Ruben Saillens Translated by Leo Tolstoy73 Waltz in 5 Time by Daniel Timms 75 Season's Greetings 84 Judith A. Lawrence, Art, 86

CHRISTMASPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEPEACEHARMO NYJOYLOVEARTMUSICPR OSEPOETRYLYRICILLUSTR ATIONPHOTOGRAPHY TLW/ix

SECTION FOUR: MURMURATIONS

The bells of waiting Advent ring, the Tortoise stove is lit again My Dog Ate My Fleurs du Mal by Oonah Joslin 95 Skating By William Wordsworth 101 Ode For the Boy With a Smile and Guitar

by Michael Seegar 104 A Mess for the Sages by Tom Sheehan 10

CONTEMPORARY ART Judith A. Lawrence Moving Christmas 86 Red Wheelbarrow 87 Sled Ride 88 Winter Walk 89 Urban Christmas 90 BIO 91

PHOTOSHOP

Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Hanging the Moon, PS: MLF, 2017 xi Birds in Flight, PS: MLF, 2017 12 Man in Flight, PS: MLF, 2017 14 Ship, MLF 2017 39

OTHER DREAMERS CLASSIC ART In the Grass by Arthur Hughes 2 Plaid Sweater by Grant Wood 9 Art:Starry night by Edvard Munch 10 Trishka's coat by Valentin Serov 12 Art: Edwin Booth by John Singer Sargent 16

Art: Refugees by Jēkabs Kazaks, Latvian National Museum of Art

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Joyous Woman by Ferdinand Hodler 43 My Loved Ones by Carl Larsson 45 The 12 wild ducks by Theodor Severin Kittelsen 46 Angel, I will follow you by Jacek Malczewski 50 White Bear King Valemon by Theodor Severin Kittelsen 54 Awabi Pearl Fisher by Shotei Takahash 56 Green Eye Mask, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso 65 A Christmas Carol, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 66 The Storm, or The Shipwreck by Theodore Gericault 68 Neptun's Horses by Walter Crane 70 Music Lesson, Nikolay Bogdanov Belsky 77 Art, La Goulue and Valentin, Waltz by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 78 Large Christmas Card by Aubrey Beardsley 85 The Schoolgirl's Hymn, William Holman Hunt 94 A Hand Holding a Letter, George Romney 99 Skaters in Fredericksberg park by Paul Gauguin 100 Still Life with Guitar by Juan Gris 105

Art: Extracted from: Merry Christmas in the Baron's Hall 1838, by Daniel Mclise

Sketches of a Man with a Ladder, Other Figures, and a Cemetery by Vincent van Gogh, 20 Surprised Nymph by Edouard Manet 22 Chorus by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky 33 The Dragon Of Smoke Escaping From Mount Fuji, by Katsushika Hokusa 21 Woman on Ship Deck, Looking out to Sea by Maurice Prendergast 27 Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap by Pieter Brueghel the Elder 35 A Song of Springtime by John William Waterhouse 36 A flycatcher on cucumber bush by Ohara Koson 40

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Hanging the Moon MANAGING Marie Fitzpatrick EDITORS FOR THE ISSUE: Marie Fitzpatrick Oonah Joslin SENIOR EDITOR Bill West

The Linnet's Wings Christmas Canzonet

WEB DATA AND SUBMISSIONS Peter Gilkes DESIGN Marie Fitzpatrick OFFICES Surface: Publishing, Mullilngar, Co. Westmeath, Ireland Design, Carchuna, Granada, Andalusia, Spain Online for This Issue The Linnet's Wings Submissions Office

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Prologue: The following are travelling notes from a memorandum-book of Mr. Knickerbocker:

The Kaatsberg or Catskill mountains have always been a region full of fable. The Indians considered them the abode of spirits, who influenced the weather, spreading sunshine or clouds over the landscape, and sending good or bad hunting seasons. They were ruled by an old squaw spirit, said to be their mother. She dwelt on the highest peak of the Catskills, and had charge of the doors of day and night to open and shut them at the proper hour. She hung-up the new moons in the skies, and cut-up the old ones into stars. In times of drought, if properly propitiated, she would spin light-summer-clouds out of cobwebs and morning dew, and send them off from the crest of the mountain, flak- after-flake, like flakes of carded cotton, to float in the air; until, dissolved by the heat of the sun, they would fall in gentle showers, causing the grass to spring, the fruits to ripen, and the corn to grow an inch an hour. --

### Merry Christmas

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Epigraph:

When Gods Ruminate

When poet gods ruminate on affaire de coeur ere the state where poets tend to reign o'er endless dream's campaign, they cede to Eavan frst, then to Kate.

Puff the Adder's just a snake, works both sides, f'heaven's sake, one piece here, borne from 'Eire, one other over there still hiding out from Sir Francis Drake.

Thus robed to adjudicate judges try to supplicate, ask witness from Dublin Town how long they'd don the gown if they were forced to demon-straight.

Tom Sheehan

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Love came down at Christmas; love all lovely, love divine; love was born at Christmas, stars and angels gave the sign.

Christina G Rossetti

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When Nature Matters

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The Gift of the Magi

O

by O. Henry

ne dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

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There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the look-out for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."

The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of "Dillingham" looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result.

Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him.

Something fine and rare and sterling - something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honour of being owned

by Jim. ii

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 Bat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its colour within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride.

One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out of the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures

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piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her.

And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she cluttered out of the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: 'Mme Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.'

One Eight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the 'Sofronie.'

"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della. iii "I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."

Down rippled the brown cascade.

"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.

"Give it to me quick" said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation - as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value - the description applied to both. Twentyone dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 78 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing

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the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task dear friends - a mammoth task."

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do - oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?" iv At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please, God, make him think I am still pretty."

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two - and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was with out gloves.

Jim stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold it because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again - you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say 'Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."

"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet, even after the hardest mental labour.

"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?" v Jim looked about the room curiously.

"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

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"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you - sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?" Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year - what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs - the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise-shell, with jewelled rims - just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone. vi But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!" And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to {lash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at

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the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."

The magi, as you know, were wise men - wonderfully wise men - who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi. xxx

William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. His stories are known for their surprise endings.

Art: In the Grass by Arthur Hughes, Date: c.1864 - c.1865, Style: Romanticism, Genre: portrait, Media: oil on canvas

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Bio/Comment I have been writing poetry for

The Creation of Eve by Ronald E. Shields

about four years.Some of my poetry can be found at Extract(s), of/With, The Earl of Plaid, Right Hand Pointing, and The Linnet's Wings. I have a poetry blog at www.poetryontherun.wordpress .com. The major influence in my writing life is James Wright. Reading The Branch Will Not Break was an epiphany. Until then I hadn't the foggiest idea of what poetry is and how to write it. If I ever write a decent poem it is because of the genius of James Wright. I am working on getting my first chapbook Native Land published. I currently live in Rochester, NY with my wife, two children, two border collies and one stubborn cat.

This is what I ask you to imagine:

Art: Plaid Sweater by Grant Wood, Date: 1931, Style: Regionalism, Genre: portrait, Media: oil, cardboard

The moment it begins beneath the object of her demise, rising from her lover, separation into perfection.

The first question arises, the ripeness of the fruit is its answer.

Wandering the fields, brushing the tips of tall grass, naming what they do not know. Leaves and questions gather.

Fruit on the ground begging questions.

Fruit on the limb ripe with answers.

Yearning interlaces with the tedium of useless rain.

Bodies brown beneath the revealing sun.

He is drawn into the embrace she imagines.

He lifts her above his head, discovers the unbearable lightness of her body.

He names it desire.

In her mind is a thought, what perfection does to the soul.

She names it death.

There is something in all the unanswered questions.

They name it doubt.

Again he lifts her, to stretch for the fruit.

The limb bends. The fruit yields.

Free now from perfection,

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they are tethered to pleasure and shame, reborn as if from a spectral existence.

Stony ground yields to a new force – the strength of independence hard won with pain, loss.

Yearning now interlaces with the serendipity of rain.

When the heavens open Eve holds out her arms.

They drink from the cup of her calloused hands.

--This poem was written after seeing the painting "The Creation of Eve" by Bartolo di Fredi

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Art:Starry night by Edvard Munch, Date: 1922 - 1924, Style: Expressionism, Period: Late works, Genre: landscape, Media: oil, canvas, Dimensions: 119 x 140 cm, Location: Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway

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A Walk on a Windy Day

by Marie Fitzpatrick (Following Lear)

Art: The Birds in the Air, PS: MLF Art: Man in Flight, Following Lear, PS: MLF, Page 14

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i When Fear1 went out walking the wind took him up.

It lifted his raincoat and billowed it out, And all of a sudden he was tumbled about, And he flew through the air until!

Caught up in a current: He straightened out-And there he lay: With his face to the sky And his back to the earth, and it was as well for Fear, was a-grá2-phobic and afraid to look down.

So with nothing to hang onto, Fear hung onto his tie as he whispered A prayer to the gods of the sky, To be gentle with him and run him aground.

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ii

Now Fear had a beard that was bushy and long.

It was noticed by wild birds who were Flying along; they mistook it for home.

And they settled in, until Fear said: "hey lads let's go for a spin." and the birds: Lifted, squack landed, and lifted again-Then called to their friends: Come see what we have found-Is it a bird or a plane NO! A man from the ground?

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( Now a man from the ground can't play in the air A man from the ground has hands, feet, and life cares!

Ground-man in air is blinded by glare, Ground-man in air draws in old nightmares.)

Once settled down, The birds made a plan.

And four took each leg, And four took each arm.

And one perched on his head to run him aground, And Fear was so thankful he invited them round. iii Once back on his feet Fear walked up the beach His friends by his side squaked a casual screech Until they got to his gate (he lived by the sea) And together they went into his house to take tea.

And there they talked about life in the air, And Fear spoke of life on the ground.

And when the birds heard the tales of man's feats, They flew up in the air to share them in tweets. ### Fear:From Irish translates to man Grá: From Irish translates to love

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Bio/Comment Jan Wiezorek has taught college English in Chicago, and his poetry is forthcoming from Schuylkill Valley Journal online. He is author of Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011) and holds a master's degree in English Composition/Writing from Northeastern Illinois University.

Art: Edwin Booth by John Singer Sargent, Date: 1890, Style: Realism, Genre: portrait, Media: oil, canvas

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Edwin Booth (1833-1893) by Jan Wiezorek Absent photographs, early recordings, and memories from others, we would know little of his art, except that my grandmother’s grandmother may have said that he had the sweetest voice she had ever heard. Forgot how he defended his drunken “Tom Fool” father from fits— or survived a career tainted by his murdering brother. We forgive and, thanks be, never forget unmatchable Edwin Booth. Rehearsing, a fellow actor worried whether his action suited Booth, who replied something to the effect that he shouldn’t worry, as Booth would find his partner on the stage alright. In our collective memories, that’s how we find him— alright, and then some. Twice married, a father to Edwina, himself plagued by depression, Booth gave us a natural style that departed from ponderous pronouncements of presentation.

I crawl the black iron statue in the park and ask him my own questions, wrapped in circles, hushed in birding, grown in green, and vaulted in clouds as sweet as voice.

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Bio/Comment Jennifer Lothrigel is a poet and artist residing in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has been published in The Bitter Oleander, Poetry Quarterly, The Tishman Review, Cicatrix Publishing, Five Poetry and elsewhere.

Find her on twitter @JLothrigel

Art: Poster for the ChauveSouris Theatre, Serge Sudeikin, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: poster

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In The Absence of Infinity by Jennifer Lothrigel Call me speckled pebble in the moonlight, the moisture slick on my smooth body.

Call me incense smoke dancing across a red stained glass window.

Call me unafraid of losing myself.

Call to the mediator of impermanence, digging her long fingernails into resistance.

I want to hold on like strangling vines, like the haunting ghost flickering bedroom lights.

Who am I in the absence of infinity?

The overstayed lover reliving her abandonment issues, the foggy morning rolling itself into nothingness, the blue tide reaching towards the shore crashing over and over again?

Call me void of belonging to one thing, call me the dripping nectar of a swollen blood orange drying sticky to goose-bumped skin in the thick of winter’s reign.

I am the moon howling back, inaudible to human ears yet deeply fulfilled.

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Bio/Comment I'm a mother and grandmother I write, paint and design for print and web

Art:Sketches of a Man with a Ladder, Other Figures, and a Cemetery by Vincent van Gogh, Date: 1885; Nunen / Nuenen, Netherlands, Style: Realism, Genre: sketch and study, Media: chalk, paper, Location: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

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Current Affairs by Marie Fitzpatrick I saw the ladder reach the cloud.

And just before it spilled, It leaned into the brackish shroud, And zapped a flashing, summer, thrill, when Dali stepped off, took a bow, And with his easel sat and chilled; Then dribbling paint onto the black, He made a sun, and then stepped back.

And from the air Sun peeped through, And saw She had a rival, So She scored the light, made it brand new.

Oh boy, was there revival!

And life just is—the story goes Made up of clouds and chimes— I,too, like to paint a sun, And to make up rhymes.

It was a bright and sunny day.

When fiends reached the town.

They came to scare, to maim and flay, To beat the masses down, Where once there was a gentle breeze, That beckoned to all souls.

That spoke of lives lived, at ease In text laid down in olden scrolls—

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But, back there too, not all agreed, For some they liked to fight.

And would do anything to weed, The joy from those who lived in light.

And on it went and went and went; Each time the dark moved in to kill, The light shone from a different vent.

For when a cloud moves to spill Then folk, like Dali, move to thrill— Like police and docs and army, too Medics, teachers and clergy: Their will is to create anew!

And I'm thankful for this earthed crew.

I'm grateful for these guys. Aren't you?

Bio/Comment I am a published novelist and playwright, and I write resources for teachers, too. This poem deals with the joy of being an introvert, and the fascination with words.

Art: Surprised Nymph by Edouard Manet, Date: 1861; Paris, France, Style: Realism, Genre: mythological painting, Media: oil, canvas, Location: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Party by Alan David Pritchard I don't get asked out much these days which is why even I am surprised I'm here.

I have probably said no too often before.

I wonder (briefly) if they think I am rude, choosing to unwittingly ignore invitations to move to music, or chat with some bore in a cluttered kitchen (which despite my unsolicited efforts, will still be a mission to clean when the guests have gone).

They don't get that I prefer dancing silently to a quieter noise.

The monkey holds the magnets, and, letting go, delights in the soft clink of attraction.

Bemused that a gentle pinch is enough to separate the bewildering bond, his fingers part, his brow question marks as the metals embrace without his doing like a baby rushing unquestioningly back into the arms of his mother.

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This brings him joy.

Curiosity - what else? makes him wonder what will happen if the polarity of one is reversed ... and, after some trial, his delight turns to satisfaction when, with a gentle prod, he can use one to make the other move away without touching the repulsion of prey sensing the predator's pounce.

This almost irresistible inevitability captivates him: a fascinating frisson, a terrible attraction like a child whose Lego creation creates itself when he lets go of the blueprint in his mind.

"You're very quiet tonight.

What's on your mind?"

"Magnets," I reply, moving to the balcony to play with the monkeys alone in the trees.

Bio/Comment Oonah Joslin is poetry editor at The Linnet’s Wings. She has won prizes for both poetry and micro-fiction. Her book “Three Pounds of Cells” ISBN: 13: 9781535486491 is available online from Linnet’s Wings Press and you can see and hear Oonah read in this National Trust video. The first part of her novella A Genie in a Jam is serialised at Bewildering Stories. You can follow Oonah on Facebook or at Parallel Oonahverse https://oovj.wordpress.com/ Parallel Oonahverse

Art: Solveig's Song (Hut in the forest), Nicholas Roerich, Date: 1912, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: design, Media: paper, tempera, Dimensions: 77.5 x 67.5 cm, Location: Roerich Museum, Moscow, Russia

Winter's Last Breath Blow me a blow of wind high in the tops.

Leafless, still leafless, lifeless winter drops whiter than bone and through hard bitten ground delicate bells push up and make no sound.

Screech me a screech would make a spirit quake.

Moan all around, leave terror in your wake.

Frighten mere children while it’s in your power.

This is your final battle, your last hour.

Yes, you have fight but you can’t win the day.

Change as change happens. Spring is on her way.

Look, I have taken off my winter vest.

See how gently light rain comes to rest there on your grave, old withered winter wind.

Sleep there a while until the season’s turned.

Go now, let bird song tune you from my mind.

Oonah V Joslin

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Bio/Comment I'm a creative person.

Love to write especially poetry.

I spent many years working in the Finance Industry but have moved on.

Completed a crime novel.

Looking for inspiration for a new book or a sequel.

Portimão 2017 by Dolores Duggan A westerly wind opened its jaws onto the coast.

A gaggle of ships hunched together to waft and dip to the music of the sea.

Gleaming decks and fancy names.

Swirls of masts and ropes make love in the breeze.

A gnarled sailor steered his tiny boat to safety. His nut brown hands steady the tiller. He has used-up eyes.

Now an eerie chant. A Banshee wail. The sea is riven and torn as it throws its menace onto the shore.

A ships bell cranks its coda.

Art: Woman on Ship Deck, Looking out to Sea (also known as Girl at Ship s Rail), Maurice Prendergast, Date: c.1895, Style: Impressionism , Genre: portrait, Dimensions: 10.5 x 15.9 cm

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Bio/Comment "I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now live in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with my wife and daughter. I earned a BA in Philosophy from the University of Dallas, and my poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including 2River View, Coe Review, and Amaryllis. I plan to finish my first novel this year. In addition to writing, I enjoy kayaking the Diamond Lakes here in Arkansas, microfarming, and exploring the Ouachita Mountains."

St. Mary of the Stair by Daniel Fitzpatrick Her beauty breaks the wave of consciousness.

Sun in the window flames the olive core to oiled sheen, the smooth Semitic mantle blossoming over the virginal curve.

St. Elmo’s fire stuns me in the stairwell thus, killing me turning toward the door confiding in a love I can’t confess without Democritus’ atomics.

The endless dead do not discriminate.

They form their fate in chosen feats of love, urging voided vesicles’ ecstasies and the cumulate wings’ kenotic shock.

Still sculpted eyes stare spiraling above.

The stars engraved upon her shoulders swerve beyond the sway of superstitious sticks twin visions view, involve, and animate.

The brown eyes oversee the Pleiades.

The brown hands lift the lightness of the Rock.

Art: Winter Fantasy, Serge Sudeikin, Date: c.1925; France, Style: Post-Impressionism, Genre: cityscape

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SLEEP, sleep, beauty bright, Dreaming in the joys of night; Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep Little sorrows sit and weep.

Cradle Song by William Blake (1757-1827)

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Something More

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Bio/Commen Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, including Ambit, Firewords Quarterly, Mothership Zeta and Popshot.

He has had poems published online and in print, most recently in Bewildering Stories and Gyroscope Review. He has a blog at http://barrycharman.blogspot.c o.uk/

Interlude From An Interlude by Barry Charman The day is expressionless.

You feel withdrawn, thinking too hard about little things that have gone wrong.

Something is needed, to stir your soul.

So music gently intrudes; Britten’s Interlude from A Ceremony of Carols, to lift a rainy day.

Notes that tremble, eternally poised, making the rain drops beautiful again.

Art: Girls Chorus by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky, Date: 1916, Style: Impressionism, Genre: genre painting, Dimensions: 79.8 x 97.5 cm

A harp-kissed crescendo, that builds as only music can and hesitates as only beauty would.

A dead man’s hand outstretches through time, to shake yours.

His strength, and a little hope in whatever there is, outside that window, passes on.

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And the rain stops, as you realise it always does.

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Bio/Comment

Sergio A. Ortiz is a Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a twotime Pushcart nominee, a four time Best of the Web nominee, and a 2016 Best of the Net nominee.

He is currently working on his first full length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

Art: Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Year: 1565, Style, Northern Renaissance, Brussels Period (1563 1569) Media: Oil Panel, Dimensions: 55 x 37 cm

Listen Without Prejudice by Sergio A. Ortiz It's December and it snows with the voice of George Michael.

The apartment is a giant bed where the hard parts of love are covered.

The mattress in my bedroom is gutted.

There are nights overflowing in the ashtrays.

He clasps his hands and a bird appears on the wall.

Look at this elephant walk, she laughs, and repeats.

He rolls another cigarette and changes channels.

God is spoken. Death.

Beneath the sheets there are attentive knees.

He reads stories with his blood on fire.

She falls asleep just before she cries.

It's the voice of George Michael snowing.

Clothes hang in the soul of the two.

They look at each other as if they've just returned from a party.

Time does not understand these things.

For him they're all animals.

They all have lessons to learn.

On a Friday, there’s a crack in the air.

The back door is wide open.

George Michael lies silent in a drawer.

That's how it had to be. He wonders why he no longer frequents certain places.

And he's suddenly still, especially when he hears tiny steps in the ceiling.

He recalls the rushed tone of his words: Winter is December and it snows like his voice

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Bio/Comment

Dr. Piatt, a retired professor, is a 2014 pushcart and 2013 best of web nominee. He has published 2 poetry books "The Silent Pond" (2012), and "Ancient Rhythms," (2014), and over 650 poems. His poems were chosen for the 100 Best Poems of 2015 & 2014 Anthologies. His third poetry book, a collection of over 200 poems, is scheduled for release in November. My poems concern aging, death, (I am 81 years old) and the ocean which resides only 25 miles from my home.

Art: A Song of Springtime by John William Waterhouse, year: 1913, Style: Romanticism, Media: Oil on board, Dimensions: 82,55 x 70,07 cm

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The Arrival of Spring by James G. Piatt Spring arrived, singing and dancing Like a prima donna,

The sun’s beams lazily heated the earth And the hushed stream’s coolness

Like a green clad pixy prancing on Ornately flowered tiles,

Welcomed tired walker’s feet, as Clamorous voices of woodpeckers

Like the presence of a beloved Grandmother come back

Awakened lazy frogs that had been Sleeping amid restless reeds along

From the tomb to awaken nature’s Beauty in her garden,

Sides of fast flowing streams, during the Long winter.

Like the saccharine fragrances emitted From vibrant colored roses,

With the arrival of spring, life became Abundant as perfumed fragrances of

Like a beautiful memory emerging from A deep sleep.

Wildflowers permeated the air, and Balmy breezes whorled around the

Spring, clothed in vibrating colors, tip Toed on the earthy aroma of damp loam

Leaves of Sycamore and gnarled Oak Trees reaching for sky, causing them to

In floral-laden meadows where blue Ponds of transparent moisture

Undulate to the chords of Verdi’s Symphony of spring.

Warmed by the spring’s sun, allowed Tiny silver fish and green frogs

Spring, an inscrutable period when Temperate rains wearing a moistured

To gleefully swim and jump, like silly Children.

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Grin dampens the dry earth in the early dawn.

And new born animals rouse to The loveliness of life, it is a time when Weary people with fading years can Stop to collect their breath from the cold Trials of winter, and renew their spirits.

Photo: Ship at Sunset, La Chucha, Andalusia, Spring 2017, MLF

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Light Whispers Through the Skin of the World

by James Owens one stone on another stone a little click when you tap them together

then stillness there is nothing else longing shivers in the blood

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Bio/Comment James Owens's most recent collection of poems is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems, stories, and translations appear widely in literary journals, including publications in The Fourth River, Kestrel,

Tule Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in Indiana and northern Ontario.

Imaginary Translations from the Falling World

by James Owens 1.

Art:A flycatcher on cucumber bushm by Ohara Koson, Date: c.1910, Style: Shin-hanga, Genre: bird-and-flower painting, Media: paper

like young girls, one after another, trembling --- each skittish tree ignites and rustles under the sky’s reckless caress

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2. still in the mind of the beloved a blossom trembles on the black branch after this sky swallowed the wind

3.

the wind’s hem unravels in milkweed down standing yet in my mouth the true little fire of her name

4. the dandelions are white now the words i pour over them don’t release the seeds not even absolution

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Bio/Comment Ceinwen lives in Newcastleupon-Tyne and writes short stories and poetry. She has been published on internet sites and in print. She has just completed her MA in Creative Writing (Newcastle University). She believes everyone’s voice counts. She intends to grow old disgracefully.

The End by Ceinwen E C Haydon

[response to music, ‘Wakka in the Sky’ by Lisa Gerrard] I dream and bear witness: Whirlwinds whistle in galaxies far away, above the earth, electric storms swell fear: deep-throated chaos booms and soprano descants scream questions as hubris crashes, as useless as ignorance or terror’s paralysis.

Will we eat? ask humans on parched soil.

Will we endure? ask denizens of heaven. Then all their starved urgency fades to silence.

ART: Joyous Woman, Ferdinand Hodler, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: genre painting, Media: oil, canvas

Humans, ghosts and seraphim, none of us know how to face our own annihilation.

You and I, my love, we’ve reached the end of our existence, Take back your ring.

I dream and bear orphans.

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Bio/Comment I am a Welsh poet and have published quite widely in Britain and the USA. I feel that 'Pilgrimage' is a poem on one of the subjects (in this case, renewal) which can cross most boundaries.

Pilgrimage by Robert Nisbet In love in the gently respectful way some people have, they’d wake, each holiday, in London (they’d no children of their own, just nephews calling on Christmas Day), and they’d drive on Boxing Day, two hundred miles and more, to the headland they’d known in youth, youth with all there’d been, the cliff top, and the surge, the roar, of the Irish Sea in their faces, their hearts, rushing to the fraught part of them that had known London and routine, had stayed gracious, kind, but now wanted that gulping of Atlantic air

ART: My Loved Ones, Carl Larsson, Date: 1893; Sweden, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: genre painting, Media: watercolor, paper

each Boxing Day, the hugeness, wildness, the clung-to non-suburban things, a faith, a reassurance. And then, at dusk, the calm, slow-breathing, long drive home.

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Bio/Comment I currently live in Utah, where I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Dixie State University

Art: The 12 wild ducks, Theodor Severin Kittelsen, Date: 1897, Style: Neo-Romanticism, Genre: animal painting

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Summer’s End by Cindy King Night walks on its hands, comes juggling bowling balls hunger in its corner isnt it time for more sensible magic though strands of stars twinkle the needles stars fade at sunrise are no more the most heavenly sight among my godless kin who have no saviors but the room is too cold our coats too thin and isnt it time isnt it time when the bills are too many and the dollars too few isnt it time to light the stove and not the tree and run hot water for a bath as we did in our cold cold past

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Patient Zero by Cindy King The grass sings as it’s splashed with gasoline, laughs as it burns. You, too, laugh, though you can’t really say what’s funny. Who’s the witch who stands at the child’s bedside, an excrescent hand over her mouth? Who is the child?

We are stilled by the wind in the trees, by a moth colliding its message on the window: Madame Curie tries to love me.

Louis Pasteur tries to love me.

But they wouldn’t recognize this kingdom, its rivers damned, its apples poisoned.

Its blood, no more than blood.

Why not begin again, with the grass laughing as it burns?

Sickness touches bodies with other people’s hands.

Live long enough and you will become a product placed in a Hollywood movie. I don’t think I can stop here.

Shadows follow us up the wall, shadows tell us little of what wiggles in the petri dish, even less about what divides on the slide.

A cartel of muscle draws back the bow, arrows so close to our temples that feathers sing prophesies in our ears.

Choose an enemy small enough to hide behind a bullseye.

The virus celebrates its host with a monument of blood.

It’s always five ‘o clock, and I’ve spent the day training a stray dog to wink so I’ll know that I won’t go unnoticed.

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xmas tree by Cindy King this is the time when the lights on the tree are not enough too few to cheer the room too few to keep

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Bio/Comment Brandon Marlon is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. in Drama & English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English from the University of Victoria. His poetry was awarded the Harry Hoyt Lacey Prize in Poetry (Fall 2015), and his writing has been published in 200+ publications in 27 countries. www.brandonmarlon.com.

Art: Angel, I will follow you, Jacek Malczewski, Date: 1901, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: religious painting, Media: oil, panel, Dimensions: 28 x 34.5 cm

The Great Synagogue of Constanta

by Brandon Marlon

Amid the forsaken sanctuary grows a tree green and lanky, tilting with the wind ever since the roof partially collapsed.

Standing sentinel is the yellow fleurette Star of David overseeing the amassed debris below, a congeries of chipped cement, smashed stained glass, plaster, and wood beams, ruins overgrown with shrubs, carpeted with dirt.

Arched colonnades uplifted by blue pillars attest to the Moorish Revival design of a halidom once admired by Ashkenazim from near and far keen on the sublime; now only mean dogs frequent the detritus, foraging for kosher remnants of another sort.

Where now there lies a rubble heap once stood a palace aglow with worship; where filth now strews the floor once stood congregants before the upraised scroll, devotees enthroning on their praise the Most High.

The building is the body but the assembly is the soul; bereft of its sacred entrails, the desacralized shell succumbs to the elements, a bittersweet vestige verging on demise, its hallowed scenes enshrined in memory.

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The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto123

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A Conspiracy of Love

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White Bear King Valemon, Theodor Severin Kittelsen, Original Title: Kvitebjørn kong Valemon, Date: 1912, Style: Neo-Romanticism, Symbolism, Series: White-Bear-King-Valemon, Genre: illustration

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Christmas Catch-up by Oonah V Joslin “I have some catching up to do.” Tilly eased herself out of her chair. Her arthritis was not good today. It wasn’t so much the cold as the damp. But she couldn’t afford more heating so she stayed in her onesie all day and added layers as the evening came on.

She propped some branches in the corner of the room, decorated them with holly and ivy, twists of tin foil, old baubles, home-made paper flowers. It looked quite cheery. And she had the radio and some CDs that had been thrown in a skip in the next street.

Now she was wrapping things for Christmas; things she’s found, scrounged or things stolen from market stalls. It was easy to liberate little things in a crowded market. She knocked them to the ground and walked on, then doubled back, casually picked them up, and stuffed them in her clothing. She was good at it and she reasoned that it wasn’t really stealing was it if you gave to people less fortunate than yourself. She drew holly on the newspaper wrappings, tied bows plaited from recycled clothes. She’d been to the Grand on Sunday morning and picked up packs of meat just past their sell by date, a whole chocolate gateau slightly squashed but perfectly edible, cheeses still in their wrappings.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, her pot-luck guests arrived to share what she had.

“Fred, how have you been? Martha, nice to see you. Tam, you know the house rules… I’ll take the bottle and give it back when you leave.”

Tilly felt lucky to have a roof over her head. It was hers. Nobody could take that away.

“Where’s Ella?” Old John MacWhinney bowed his head and took off his cap.

There was some catching up to do. ###

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Bio/Comment M. M. Adjarian has published her creative work in the Baltimore Review, The Missing Slate, Grub Street, Verdad, South 85, Eunoia Review, The Serving House Journal, Pif, Crack the Spine, and Poetry Quarterly. She lives in Austin.

Art: Awabi Pearl Fisher, Shotei Takahashi, Date: 1931, Style: Shin-hanga, Genre: nude painting (nu)

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Storied Lives by M. M. Adjarian Long before I learned to read, I would beg for stories. My mother would make a rhyming game of my entreaties. The minute after I’d say, “tell me a story,” she would sing out “about Jack and Norrie!” Not that my mother ever told me anything more about either Jack or Norrie. This was simply the way we opened the door to being present to each other, which was more than we would ever be able to do later on.

She would only submit to my demands after she had finished teasing me. And when she did—almost as a way of apologizing—she would read to me from Dr. Seuss or the Little Golden Books that I would sometimes pick out from spinning wire racks at the grocery store. But my favorite stories were the ones she made up herself.

When I think of my mother now, I see her sitting at the round glass-topped table in our kitchen. Perhaps I am across from her frowning at a plate of vegetables. She doesn’t chide me into eating though. Instead, she leaves the table momentarily to search for a pencil and a piece of paper and returns. Shapes emerge on the sheet before her as she begins to sketch.

“This is the laughing potato,” she says. “And he lives in a beautiful garden far away in Idaho.”

She draws two more vegetables, a handsome carrot with a long chin and a tomato with chubby cheeks set in a mischievous face. I stop playing with my food and watch fascinated as my mother calls these beings into life with just a few quick strokes.

“These are his friends,” she explains, sketching out their arms and legs. “They’re alive with all good things that came from the earth where they grew. And they laugh and smile because they know that they and all the vegetables in their garden will go to the market and feed children just like you.” Her restless pencil ceases moving.

“And do you want to know a secret?” She leans in towards me, a slightly conspiratorial look on her face. I am wide-eyed with expectancy. “All the magic that’s inside of them will go into your body and make you as healthy and happy as they are.” My mother straightens up and then points to my plate. She’s all business now. “But first you have to eat what’s in front of you.” Because I love her drawings and her stories, I begin to eat. I might grimace while I do

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it, but the idea that I’m swallowing something magical into my body is too powerful to resist.

My mother, of course, had learned early on just what kind of power her stories and drawings had over me. They could stop me from crying. Or make me sit up straighter and behave better. Or get me to eat the food on my plate that she couldn’t bear to see wasted. But as I got older and her interest in motherhood waned, the storytelling stopped. “Jack and Norrie” became the rejoinder that told me she had no intention of performing. She didn’t forget her stories though. When I was six, she pounded them out on an IBM electric typewriter and sent the manuscript to several New York publishers. But after her stories got rejected, she threw them away and never spoke of them again.

My father was not immune from the pestering I showered on my mother.

Most of the time, he would just smile one of his vague and gentle smiles and say “not now, chérie.” But one evening my father surprised me with the one and only story I would ever hear from him. “All right. Let me tell you about the lion and the giraffe,” he said. Memory won’t yield the details exactly as he recounted them. But there’s a version I sometimes tell myself when I want to remember him.

“Papa, will you tell me a story?” I ask. I have just gone to bed and he has come to say goodnight.

My father doesn’t respond. Instead, I watch the dark outline of his body turn around and walk to the side of my bed. He sits down on the floor, stretches himself out on the carpet and begins.

“Once there was a little lion and he lived in Africa with his family. He had a good life because he had a mother and father who kept him fed and made sure he was safe from other animals that could have hurt him.

“But the little lion was also curious and wanted to see rest of the world. He thought that if he could climb the tallest tree in the jungle all the way to the top, he would get his wish. So one day, he did just that. Then he realized too late that he could not come down again and started to cry.”

“Was he afraid?” I ask, not quite daring to believe that my father is telling me a story.

“Yes. But then a giraffe with a very long neck walked by the tree.

‘Why are you crying?’ the giraffe asked.

‘I wanted to see the world from the tallest place in the jungle. Now I can’t

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climb down.’ So the giraffe used his mouth to grab the creature by the scruff of his neck and put him on the ground.

‘Thank you!’ And the little lion ran home to the family he thought he had lost forever. He never forgot what his friend with the long neck did for him.

“One day when he was much older and out hunting, he saw a pack of hungry hyenas running after a tired old giraffe. The beasts almost caught him, but the lion chased them away.

“The giraffe was very afraid and trembled because he thought the lion was going to eat him. But instead the big cat said, ‘When I was small and foolish, I climbed up a tall tree so I could see the world. Another giraffe saved my life. Now I have saved yours.’”

He falls silent again. Then I see his darkened silhouette rise up from the floor. My father bends down to kiss my cheek. “Bon soir."

“Good night,” I say, smiling in the dark. Like the little lion, I, too, believe I have a father and mother who will always be there to protect me from harm. * My parents told me stories to teach and amuse me but also distract themselves from the rigors of parenthood.

They told other tales, too, ones that celebrated their successes as immigrants to America. The older I became, though, the more I learned to look past what my parents said and see the truths they concealed. The little girl who once demanded stories now wanted to know about the desires and embarrassments her parents kept hidden from everyone, including—and especially—their children.

Before she divorced my father, my mother would tell me about the Fulbright scholarship that took her from Italy to Cornell in 1952. She met my father shortly afterward, married him in the fall of 1953 and gave birth to my older brother the following spring. After she graduated with a second Master’s degree in nutrition to add to one she already had in biochemistry, they moved to the flat greenness of Kansas City. My mother became a researcher at the Jensen-Salsbery Laboratories, a pharmaceutical firm that produced veterinary supplies. When my father received an offer to work on contract for the UCLA Special Collections library, they moved to Los Angeles in 1960.

My father’s story—the one I know is true because neither parent contradicted the other when asked about it—began with a Cornell University librarian’s chance discovery of his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris around 1949. The woman saw a display of books my father had rebound and decorated with intricate gold-leaf tooling. She requested that they meet. “We have a library full of books falling apart. Can you help us?” she asked.

Thunderstruck by his good fortune, my father accepted immediately. He left Paris and its postwar deprivations in 1951 abundantly grateful to start a new life in America. “It was like a dream come true,” he told me. “Just incredible.” Two years later, he was a husband and father working hard to establish his rare book restoration business.

Strangely enough, my parents’ stories about their early years in the U.S. never said anything about what had

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brought them together in the first place. Perhaps it was love – for a time anyway. Once my mother told me that she would sometimes find him parked outside of where she lived. I imagined him sitting in the old Studebaker he had struggled to buy. Perhaps he would be smoking Camels in place of the Gauloises he couldn’t get in the States. He had never felt this way about any woman, not even the red headed Algerian-Armenian girl he had left behind in France. But there had never been a chance with her anyway because her parents didn’t like him. “I was the half-breed who wasn’t good enough for her,” he told me. That he had grown up without a father hadn’t helped his cause. But in America, no could tell him he couldn’t have a woman because of what he was or was not. And my mother was quite a catch. A dark-haired beauty from a fine old family and one who also happened to speak French, she was everything he could ever want and more.

My father, on the other hand, was decidedly not the love of my mother’s life.

That distinction belonged to an American soldier she told me she had met during the war. “His name was Bob,” she said, careful not to tell me anything more. What my father did have was an impeccable sense of timing. And he was interesting because he was different from the intellectuals and social elites whose company she kept. Long after they had gone their separate ways, my mother’s face and eyes would soften every time she looked at my hands, the ones I thought so bony and inept. “They’re his,” she would say. Then, with just the faintest hint of a smile, she would add, “Your father was an artist, you know. A real artist.”

I would hear this many times as I was growing up; eventually I concluded that my father’s gifts must have counted for something to her. In the bitter years after their divorce, it was the one observation that would remain untainted by any negative qualifiers. Maybe she had felt something, however fleeting, for my father. And maybe that feeling had been rendered even more potent by the newfound thrill of taking up with man who earned his living with the sweat of his body rather than the efforts of his mind.

Despite their different backgrounds, my parents were also very alike. Both had suffered through a war that had destroyed huge swaths of continental Europe. And both were outsiders to their families. When my mother’s father Paolo had died of pernicious anemia at age 39, his greedy brothers snatched up the money and property to which my grandmother had been entitled. My mother, the daughter she had with him, became a symbol of the betrayal she could not forgive. It didn’t help that she also

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resembled Paolo’s side of the family. So it was easier to send my mother away to convent schools rather than keep her nearby.

My grandmother’s prejudice eventually extended to me, not because I looked like my mother or my grandfather, but because I looked like my father. Max Adjarian was a man who not only lacked the proper social credentials; he was also unforgivably French. And as the daughter who looked like him, I bore the weight of her scorn. When I met her, I was too young to notice. She was just a tiny big-breasted woman with dyed red hair who complained that I was as spoiled as I was incapable of picking up after myself. My mother took my side and defended me like a lioness. But that all changed as I grew older and the situation between my parents became more fraught.

My father never experienced the pain and privilege of knowing his own parents. The woman who adopted him was a nurse who had been unable to have children. And the man listed on his birth certificate as his father was a Turkish-born merchant living in France. My father always said the man, whom he knew as Uncle Hagop, was not his father, and that his adopted mother had told him his real father was a doctor. But she never told him anything else. When I would press him for more information, my father equivocated. Once, he told me that we were related to Hrachya Adjarian, a linguist who had published the Armenian Etymological Dictionary. My mother told me later that my father had based his “facts” solely on the coincidence of shared last names and had no proof to back up his claim. Later, he told me another story that involved him going to England to visit the man he thought was his father.

By the time he got there though, the man was dead. His family immediately became suspicious of the blue-eyed Frenchman who asked too many questions and told him to leave.

My parents told me they had met at a gathering of the Cornell International Students’ Club. And when they did marry, it was at just about the time when my mother would have had to return to Italy. That was a matter of record, just like the fact that my older brother was born eight months later in May of 1954, three weeks after his original due date. The problem to which neither admitted was sexuality. My mother was too proud—and my father too invested in his own respectability—to boast of their carnal transgressions to anyone, including their children. But had the pregnancy been just an accident?

Once she set foot in New York, my mother vowed to stay in the United States no matter what. “I never wanted to go back to Italy. Ever,” she would declare whenever the subject came up. Marriage would mean a new life away from a country ravaged by fascism and war and from the mother she loved and hated with equal ferocity. That the man she would wed was man who was neither an American nor someone she necessarily loved and who would become the father of a child conceived out of wedlock was beside the point.

The stories my parents told me also hid the class differences—as well as the unspoken longings and resentments—that developed into the major fault lines that underlay their marriage. “When I met your father, he had so little. He didn’t even have a change of underwear,” my mother told me once upon a time, her lips curling in disgust. “The ones he had were so old and stained with urine. It was awful.” Unable to stand my father’s poverty, that she took it upon herself to buy him several new pairs.

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My father told me something else. In his version, it was my mother who had nothing and he who had shown munificence to her. “Your mother—she had nothing, I tell, you, nothing.” He spoke of taking a second job washing dishes in a local restaurant so she could complete her master’s degree. That made sense; her fellowship had only lasted for a year. By the time my father met the woman who would become his second wife, though, those facts evolved into another story about growing up in a family that, with its titles, gloved servants and village estates, sounded almost exactly like the one my mother had known.

My mother’s story also changed from one that celebrated accomplishment and aspiration to one that expressed an inconsolable regret for missed opportunities.

“I could have done so much!” she would sigh.

And I would ask, “Why didn’t you?”

The answer was always the same. “I met your father.” One thing I knew for sure was that UCLA had also promised my mother a prestigious fellowship to continue her research work in nutrition and biochemistry. Yet—and of her own free will—she had declined the offer and decided to have more children instead.

The reason behind my mother’s refusal was more complicated than what appeared on the surface. I would learn much later on from my brother that when he was a child in the late 1950s, she had suffered a mild nervous breakdown. Was it the wolfishly petty and competitive atmosphere in the laboratory that did it? Or was it the combined pressure of working, raising a family and being a wife at a time when the imperative for women was to stay home? If she felt out of place in her profession and burdened by too many responsibilities, a retreat to the hearth must have seemed like the heaven-sent answer to a painful dilemma. Just like my father’s evasions and exaggerations, though, the domestic life she intended as the storybook solution to her problems was anything but magical. Storytelling could redefine the world long enough to temporarily mask personal frailties or pacify a petulant child, but it could not change reality.

THE END

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Bio/Comment "My ruthless jailers. M.E. and Social Anxiety, have curtailed my career as a teacher of French and Spanish. On the flip side, this affords me more time to write poetry; to scribble down thoughts which need to be vented or to simply indulge my passion for pure sillliness."

The Green Seed of Jealousy by Lesley Timms Carelessly the seed was cast And might have dropped on granite bare, Left to die unnourished there, Shrivelled; hopes of growth all dashed.

Alas, it fell on fertile ground, And smug in those conditions ripe, Burst through husk and true to type, Plunged deep roots; green shoots unwound.

Hydra-like the stifling creeper Overwhelmed its stricken host.

Insidious, quiet as a ghost, Toxic tendrils probing deeper.

Art: Green Eye Mask, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Date: 1915, Style: Cubism, Expressionism, Genre: portrait

Corrupted now, the poisoned mind Is warped, devoid of lucid thoughts, And into sneers the mouth contorts, Whilst anger and suspicion blind.

Othello’s downfall is replayed, As the green-eyed monster feeds Upon the fragile ego’s needs And true love, strangled, lies betrayed.

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Art: A Christmas Carol, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Date: 1857, Style: Romanticism, Genre: genre painting, Media: gouache, watercolor, paper, Location: Spencer Museum of Art (University of Kansas), Lawrence, KS, US

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Our Night Watchman by Lesley Timms Gazing westward, late October, Hearts sink with the dying light.

Early nightfall heralds Winter’s Darkness. Spring’s remote tonight.

Gone. Those endless balmy days When minds were numb to gloom ahead; Drugged by heady twilight scents. Then Summer died when swallows fled.

Yet now, as Melancholy’s fingers Snuff out hope; paint bright leaves black, In the east a slight dome rises; Peeps above a chimney stack.

Full-faced now from shade ascending, Gliding over inky skies.

Glowing midst the crystal starlight, Waxy friend, so old, so wise.

And beaming down, our dear Night Watchman Banishes all dark and fear; Lights the way, our lunar Guardian, No need dread the dying year.

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Bio/Comment Jane lives in the South Rhins of Galloway on a gale battered cliff overlooking the sea. The spectacular Scottish landscape inspires her poetry and prose which has featured in a variety of journals and websites. She particularly enjoys contributing to community projects in her local area.

Art: The Storm, or The Shipwreck by Theodore Gericault, Style: Romanticism, Genre: marina, Media: oil, canvas, Dimensions: 51 x 62 cm, Location: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Rouen, France

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Galloway Shipwrecks by J S Fuller How flat the water looks.

We watch a couple skimming across the surface on a jet-ski.

Middle-aged but you can tell their love is new.

They hoot and holler, exhilarated by the speed of it.

Shall we tell them that between here and the next headland lie eighty-six known shipwrecks?

Smacks, schooners, luggers, brigantines, yawls, sloops, barques, skiffs. All decaying on the sea-bed with the armed Fleet Auxiliary vessel the Romeo torpedoed in 1918.

We talk about foundered lives.

How the soft tissue of a shipwrecked heart rots away. But how love survives being submerged, if it is held at deep anchorage.

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Neptun's Horses,Walter Crane, Date: 1893, Style: Neo-Romanticism, Genre: mythological painting

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Bio/Comment Saillens was born in SaintJean-du-Gard on 24 June 1855. At the age of fifteen, during the Franco-Prussian War, he served with an ambulance crew. He was converted to evangelical Christianity in 1871. Although he had attended Free Evangelical churches (Eglises évangéliques libres), he discovered as a young man that Baptist beliefs better reflected his own convictions.Saillens married Jeanne Crétin on 1 August 1877. In October 1921, they founded the Institut Biblique de Nogent-sur-Marne, in the eastern suburbs of Paris, a school for pastors and missionaries.

ART: Little Girl in Blue by Chaim Soutine, Date: c.1934 c.1935, Style: Expressionism, Genre: portrait, Media: oil, panel, Location: Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland

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Papa Panov's Special Christmas

by Ruben Saillens Translated by Leo Tolstoy

Translated into English by Leo Tolstoy, yhe original story was written in French by Ruben Saillens and demonstrates the virtues of kindness and compassion. It is based on a verse from the Bible, Matthew 25:35: "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.."

It was Christmas Eve and although it was still afternoon, lights had begun to appear in the shops and houses of the little Russian village, for the short winter day was nearly over. Excited children scurried indoors and now only muffled sounds of chatter and laughter escaped from closed shutters.

Old Papa Panov, the village shoemaker, stepped outside his shop to take one last look around. The sounds of happiness, the bright lights and the faint but delicious smells of Christmas cooking reminded him of past Christmas times when his wife had still been alive and his own children little. Now they had gone. His usually cheerful face, with the little laughter wrinkles behind the round steel spectacles, looked sad now. But he went back indoors with a firm step, put up the shutters and set a pot of coffee to heat on the charcoal stove. Then, with a sigh, he settled in his big armchair.

Papa Panov did not often read, but tonight he pulled down the big old family Bible and, slowly tracing the lines with one forefinger, he read again the Christmas story. He read how Mary and Joseph, tired by their journey to Bethlehem, found no room for them at the inn, so that Mary's little baby was born in the cowshed.

"Oh, dear, oh, dear!" exclaimed Papa Panov, "if only they had come here! I would have given them my bed and I could have covered the baby with my patchwork quilt to keep him warm."

He read on about the wise men who had come to see the baby Jesus, bringing him splendid gifts. Papa Panov's face fell. "I have no gift that I could give him," he thought sadly.

Then his face brightened. He put down the Bible, got up and stretched his long arms to the shelf high up in his little room. He took down a small, dusty box and opened it. Inside was a perfect pair of tiny leather shoes. Papa Panov smiled with satisfaction. Yes, they were as good as he had remembered -- the best shoes he had ever made. "I should give him those," he decided, as he gently put them away and sat down again.

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He was feeling tired now, and the further he read the sleepier he became. The print began to dance before his eyes so that he closed them, just for a minute. In no time at all Papa Panov was fast asleep.

And as he slept he dreamed. He dreamed that someone was in his room and he knew at once, as one does in dreams, who the person was. It was Jesus.

"You have been wishing that you could see me, Papa Panov." he said kindly, "then look for me tomorrow. It will be Christmas Day and I will visit you. But look carefully, for I shall not tell you who I am."

When at last Papa Panov awoke, the bells were ringing out and a thin light was filtering through the shutters. "Bless my soul!" said Papa Panov. "It's Christmas Day!" He stood up and stretched himself for he was rather stiff. Then his face filled with happiness as he remembered his dream. This would be a very special Christmas after all, for Jesus was coming to visit him. How would he look? Would he be a little baby, as at that first Christmas? Would he be a grown man, a carpenter -- or the great King that he is, God's Son? He must watch carefully the whole day through so that he recognized him however he came.

Papa Panov put on a special pot of coffee for his Christmas breakfast, took down the shutters and looked out of the window. The street was deserted, no one was stirring yet. No one except the road sweeper. He looked as miserable and dirty as ever, and well he might! Whoever wanted to work on Christmas Day -- and in the raw cold and bitter freezing mist of such a morning?

Papa Panov opened the shop door, letting in a thin stream of cold air. "Come in!" he shouted across the street cheerily. "Come in and have some hot coffee to keep out the cold!"

The sweeper looked up, scarcely able to believe his ears. He was only too glad to put down his broom and come into the warm room. His old clothes steamed gently in the heat of the stove and he clasped both red hands round the comforting warm mug as he drank.

Papa Panov watched him with satisfaction, but every now and them his eyes strayed to the window. It would never do to miss his special visitor.

"Expecting someone?" the sweeper asked at last. So Papa Panov told him about his dream.

"Well, I hope he comes," the sweeper said, "you've given me a bit of Christmas

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cheer I never expected to have. I'd say you deserve to have your dream come true." And he actually smiled.

When he had gone, Papa Panov put on cabbage soup for his dinner, then went to the door again, scanning the street. He saw no one. But he was mistaken. Someone was coming.

The girl walked so slowly and quietly, hugging the walls of shops and houses, that it was a while before he noticed her. She looked very tired and she was carrying something. As she drew nearer he could see that it was a baby, wrapped in a thin shawl. There was such sadness in her face and in the pinched little face of the baby, that Papa Panov's heart went out to them.

"Won't you come in," he called, stepping outside to meet them. "You both need a warm seat by the fire and a rest."

The young mother let him shepherd her indoors and to the comfort of the armchair. She gave a big sigh of relief.

"I'll warm some milk for the baby," Papa Panov said, "I've had children of my own -- I can feed her for you."

He took the milk from the stove and carefully fed the baby from a spoon, warming her tiny feet by the stove at the same time.

"She needs shoes," the cobbler said.

But the girl replied, "I can't afford shoes, I've got no husband to bring home money. I'm on my way to the next village to get work."

A sudden thought flashed through Papa Panov's mind. He remembered the little shoes he had looked at last night. But he had been keeping those for Jesus. He looked again at the cold little feet and made up his mind.

"Try these on her," he said, handing the baby and the shoes to the mother. The beautiful little shoes were a perfect fit. The girl smiled happily and the baby gurgled with pleasure.

"You have been so kind to us," the girl said, when she got up with her baby to go. "May all your Christmas wishes come true!"

But Papa Panov was beginning to wonder if his very special Christmas wish would come true. Perhaps he had missed his visitor? He looked anxiously up and down the street. There were plenty of people about but they were all faces that he recognized. There were neighbors going to call on their families. They nodded and smiled and wished him Happy Christmas! Or beggars -- and Papa Panov hurried indoors to fetch them hot soup and a generous hunk of bread, hurrying out again in case he missed the Important Stranger.

All too soon the winter dusk fell. When Papa Panov next went to the door and strained his eyes, he could no longer make out the passers-by. Most were home and indoors by now anyway. He walked slowly back into his room at last, put up the shutters, and sat down wearily in his armchair.

So it had been just a dream after all. Jesus had not come.

Then all at once he knew that he was no longer alone in the room.

This was not dream for he was wide awake. At first he seemed to see before his eyes the long stream of people who had come to him that day. He saw again the old road sweeper, the young mother and her baby and the beggars

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he had fed. As they passed, each whispered, "Didn't you see me, Papa Panov?"

"Who are you?" he called out, bewildered.

Then another voice answered him. It was the voice from his dream -- the voice of Jesus.

"I was hungry and you fed me," he said. "I was naked and you clothed me. I was cold and you warmed me. I came to you today in everyone of those you helped and welcomed."

Then all was quiet and still. Only the sound of the big clock ticking. A great peace and happiness seemed to fill the room, overflowing Papa Panov's heart until he wanted to burst out singing and laughing and dancing with joy.

"So he did come after all!" was all that he said.

END

Music Lesson, Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky, Date: 1897, Style: Realism

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Waltz in 5-Time by Daniel Timms

Art, La Goulue and Valentin, Waltz by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: genre painting

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Season's Greetings

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In 1843, while working as assistant keeper of the new Post Office, Sir Henry Cole commissioned John Callcott Horsley to design a Christmas Card. The cards sold for a shilling apiece, and had a print run of 2000. A couple of years before that , in 1840, Sir Henry--a man who had a sharp creative mind, and who would be caricatured as 'King Cole,' in Vanity Fair, in their Men of the Day series, in 1872--had helped to introduce the Penny Post, and for the first time the regular Joe could enjoy the benefits of an affordable mail service.

It was the 1840s in the UK, the railway boom was in full flow and it facilitated the fast delivery of mail, and as printing methods improved Christmas Cards became more popular and were produced in large numbers, and when the cost of sending a card through the post dropped to a hal'penny; and when they could be posted in an unsealed envelope for half the price of an ordinary letter the custom made its way onto our annual timeline, to become part of our national customs.

It took a while for the USA to catch up, it was in the late 40s that the cards were introduced there and they were too dear; few could afford the pleasure until in the 1870s when, Louis Prang, a printer who had worked on early cards in the UK, started a mass--production print service—Mr Prang's first cards featured flowers, plants, and children. However sometimes slow starters win the race, for it was in 1915 that John Hall went into production with his HallMark imprint.

We have Christmas cards to present over the next few pages: A mixed media original card art design

by Judith A. Lawrance, an artist, writer and poet, Judith is based in Florida. ###

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Title: Moving Christmas, Artist: Judith A. Lawrence : Style: Impressionism, Mixed Media: Watercolor, acrylic, and ink, Genre: Original Art Card Designs

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Title: Red Wheelbarrow, Artist: Judith A. Lawrence : Style: Impressionism, Mixed Media: Watercolor, acrylic, and ink, Genre: Original Art Card Designs

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Title: Sled Ride, Artist: Judith A. Lawrence : Style: Impressionism, Mixed Media: Watercolor, acrylic, and ink, Genre: Original Art Card Designs

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Title: Winter Walk, Artist: Judith A. Lawrence : Style: Impressionism, Mixed Media: Watercolor, acrylic, and ink, Genre: Original Art Card Designs

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Title: Urban Christmas, Artist: Judith A. Lawrence : Style: Impressionism, Mixed Media: Watercolor, acrylic, and ink, Genre: Original Art Card Designs

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J

udith A. Lawrence was born in Philadelphia, PA. She began sketching portraits at a young age. A selftaught artist, she progressed to oils, acrylics, pen and ink, and watercolors. Some of her paintings have been featured in art shows in Yardley, and New Hope, PA, as well as Lambertville, NJ. She also designs greeting card series, and book covers. Judith is the editor/publisher of River Poets Journal, a literary magazine in its tenth year. She is a poet, a writer of short stories, and books. She sometimes writes and paints under the pseudonym, Juniper Rue. To purchase her cards or prints of her work please send mail to: lillypressrpj@aol.com

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The bells of waiting Advent ring, The Tortoise stove is lit again And lamp-oil light across the night Has caught the streaks of winter rain.

In many a stained-glass window sheen From Crimson Lake to Hooker's Green.

Christmas by Sir John Betjeman

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Murmurations

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ART: The Schoolgirl's Hymn, William Holman Hunt, Date: 1859, Style: Romanticism, Genre: portrait, Media: oil, panel

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My Dog Ate My Fleurs du Mal

by Oonah Joslin

I don’t think I really appreciated Baudelaire’s Spleen or Rimbaud’s coloured Voyelles when I studied them as a student. The day my dog ate Les Fleurs du Mal was one of my saddest though – it was annotated and somehow I never got round to replacing it – tant pis! I shall have to rectify that one day along with my neglect of prose poetry. So I am not going to pretend to be an expert in the mutable art of Prose Poetry. Rather I am going to let you into the secret of what constitutes a good prose poem for me and since, at present I am one of the people you would have to please to get a prose poem into The Linnet’s Wings, that may be of use to you – or not. So I have chosen one poem only for explication, one which in my opinion is exemplary and has been admirably translated. My choice will not surprise anyone who knows me well as the poet I have chosen translated Edgar Allen Poe! Enivrez-Vous (or Be Drunk) by Charles Baudelaire Baudelaire was never afraid to challenge thought and the first line certainly does that. The first line of any piece of work is important – the ‘hook’.

“You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it” Mind you if he had stopped at that, then that’s all there would have been to it. So my first point is that as with any other poem, a prose poem has to have something to say. If you are going to write one make sure it makes the reader think. In this case it is so as not to feel: l'horrible fardeau du temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

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In translation this is also achieved by plosives and the beat is preseved: feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

In the original this is pithy, gusty, hard to pronounce and I have highlighted the stresses in the line. It hits like punches. Life is full of hammer blows.

Now Baudelaire moves the poem on by going deeper than the kind of drunk we were thinking of.

“Mais de quoi?” ha asks and immediately gives us some suggestions “Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.”

So what he is really talking about is passion. Whatever you do, do it with all your heart – get dizzy form it – make it your drug to ease life’s pains. Drunk with virtue is an interesting idea isn’t it. It’s an unexpected juxtaposition and he carries on contrasting in the next paragraph. He makes it clear that his words are for everyone, the rich, the poor, the ordianry: “And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room” Just look at all the v’s and d’s in the original here: “vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez” All that consonance brings back the hammer blows when the being drunk wears off. Like a hangover headache, the language reinforces the idea here and that is one of the hallmarks of great poetry and part of what makes for a truly great prose poem.

In English: “you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask” We might be expecting to be told what to ask – but not when Baudelaire is in charge of the poem. No he suggests not what but who to ask.

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“the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking.”

Notice here how you don’t ask other humans? You interrogate nature for your answers. You interrogate time and space.

In French this paragraph works even better as every one of those phrases is governed by à and the ‘flow’ is distinct because of this, like the flow of time itself – another example of language used in perfect keeping with the thought being expressed. “à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge; à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle,” Had I been translating I would have chosen in that second half: “all that is flies, all that groans, all that rolls, all that sings, all that speaks.” perhaps to reflect that usage. The question? “ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: It is time to be drunk!”

The humour of this is in wonderful contrast to those hammer blows of life from before and it surprises the reader. Baudelaire used humour well. Here he makes the answer reflect what he told you earlier in the poem.

He makes nature repeat his own ideas; "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

The circuit is complete. Be drunk, be passionate about something and if you ever start thinking – don’t! But you just did because Baudelaire made you think, didn’t he.

Think by all means about the use of language in this poem and that is what makes it a prose poem and not just a piece of prose. It is not a story. It is an impression, it is a thought experiment and it has all the hallmarks of poetry. Could it benefit from being put into lines? No. Take a look. HERE http://poetry.eserver.org/enivrezvous.html and I think you will see that lines ruin the flow, particularly in this section where it becomes fragmented: “à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge; à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui

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chante, à tout ce qui parle,” and make the poem difficult to read.

So how do you know when to write a prose poem and when to use stanzas? It depends on what you have to say, how you should choose to say it but be sure you have a reason for your choices. We are quite likely to ask! And I hope you see that writing a prose poem is not an easy option. The language should be as tight and appropriate as in any other poem – perhaps even more so.

Be Drunk You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it--it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you:" It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Charles Baudelaire translated by Louis Simpson

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A Hand Holding a Letter, George Romney, Date: 1757, Style: Rococo, Genre: sketch and study

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Bio/ Comment William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Title: Skaters in Fredericksberg park by Paul Gauguin, Date: 1884; Amagerbro / Copenhagen / Amagerbro, Denmark, Style: Impressionism, Period: Early works, Genre: cityscape, Media: oil, canvas, Location: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark

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Skating

by William Wordsworth 1850 And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and visible for many a mile The cottage windows blazed through twilight gloom, I heeded not their summons: happy time It was indeed for all of us — for me It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud The village clock tolled six — I wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untried horse That cares not for his home. All shod with steel, We hissed along the polished ice in games Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures — the resounding horn, The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.

So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed

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Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me — even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round!

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep. from The Prelude

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Art: The Skating Minister/1790s Medium oil on canvas/ Dimensions 30 × 25 in (76.2 × 63.5 cm)

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Bio/Comment Human. Being. Poet, Philosopher, Caffeine based life-form, balding, washedup athlete, easily distrac This poem was written in tribute to one of my students who died over winter break.

Ode -For the Boy With a Smile and Guitar

by Michael Seegar

Very sad news came to me where I teach It came to all as our principal spake Striking me deeply with a loss of speech.

A gentle boy lost his life over Break.

It came to all as our principal spake His words we could tell weren’t easy to say— A gentle boy lost his life over Break.

Our class fell silent and smiles went away.

His words we could tell weren’t easy to say— His halting news was difficult to hear Our class fell silent and smiles went away Something was missing —someone was not here.

Art: Still Life with Guitar by Juan Gris, Date: 1920, Style: Synthetic Cubism, Genre: still life, Media: oil, canvas, Dimensions: 61 x 50.3 cm, Location: Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, US

His halting news was difficult to hear As the words struck home they hit like a blast Something was missing —someone was not here The one of us we all knew now had passed

As the words struck home they hit like a blast Gone was the kid with a smile and guitar The one of us we all knew now had passed This boy’s short life was like a falling star.

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Gone was the kid with a smile and guitar Striking me deeply with a loss of speech This boy’s short life was like a falling star.

Very sad news came to me where I teach.

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A Mess for the Sages by Tom Sheehan I had recently written a piece about my location on the river, the historical interests hereabouts, and the aerial fight between a hawk and an eagle. It will appear in the local newspaper some time this week. It brought my attention to all the local birds and leaped to fiction, and thus the attached story about a character with OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a neatness freak. I had fun writing it.

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T

he wind came up the river joyous as a boy riding a new bicycle and Harry Guahagan hustled to get his paint ready, the pale blue in the gallon can looking exceptionally good to his trained eye after he stared at the expanse of blue overhead from one horizon point to the other, the Saugus River running beside his house being the axis of the whole circumference of his existence. He was giddy at the thought of carefully applying a new coat of paint on his house; for god's sake maybe insects had done a job on his most recent paint job, the pale blue besmirched in so many places, but in his mind the damned birds jamming the river were probably more at fault than all other creatures; rabbits and skunks and an odd dog or two, he knew, had no responsibility in creating this new mess. It was nearly choking him with disgust.

Most likely he thought with deeper discomfort this time, it was the birds again!

Damn them sitting the river's surface, lifting off with a flock's wings and hauling crap right out of the river to fall without care during the beauty of the flight. How could they be so divided? So compromised? He might have to call on the Gods, even though they had chased his family from Ireland a century earlier. Their names would come back in a hurry, every last one of them, on his side or the other side, birder or not birder was the keynote in the ranks.

From yesterday to today he had counted exactly 23 spots on the pristine pale blue of his recent painting task, and barely two months old at that. What a disgrace!

It was the birds again, for sure, he thought anew with a haranguing displeasure, as he spied more birds climbing off the river's surface and loosing their offal garbage from overhead in their flight pattern; clumsy, intolerant creatures at that! And all that crap coming down against his pristine blueness, splattering itself hither and yon, but mostly hither!

Readying himself for the task at hand, he adjusted his starched shirt collar, made sure his dungarees had a happy crease down each pant leg like a pair of railroad tracks glistening in the sun, or a pair of tracks torched by the moon on the few splendid occasions of the moon's majesty and splendor. The moon often held at great disfavor with him when it hid its absolute roundness in a mere patch of clouds. Oh, there were times he was absolutely sure that the moon itself was out of roundness; it was inevitable in the sloppy universe that squandered above him.

Things, though, at odd times, could be so neat they'd twist his head into a kind of happiness of the soul; a pair of stars matching twinkles in the sky, the edges of newly mowed grass showing exquisitely trim lines as if they had been designed and manufactured in a factory, and the toes of his work shoes not marred by a single blemish. Oh,

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things always in their place and a place for things; life could be so simple at times.

Why not all the time?

His comfort, or discomfort, was on display at all hours; some neighbors ignored him, his wife tolerated him, his sons had little contact from afar. It was like he wore a plaster cast on his personality, like a chunk of it was broken the way a leg might end up from an accidental fall from a child's see-saw.

Finally, his arm in the slow music of the swing, finding the true rhythm, the paint in a creamy solution, the color rich in its intensity of a sky's pale blueness, he knew the paint was ready to be applied. Joy itself, like a spirit, overcame him; he was at balance, fully prepared, the brush loaded to a specific weight, he was ready for the task ... for the joy of application, covering the horrid smirches.

For the curious, I have to tell you that I am only part author of this tale of utter neatness, for Harry's wife Mirabel told much of it to me in secret.

"We, Harry and I," she said once in a whisper, "have two sons, Evan and Jules, and neither one has been home for a visit in five years. Evan, a few years older of the two, is a highly paid dresser of the Hollywood Gods of the screen. He designs and makes and selects the clothes for many great movie hits and stage presentations. He makes an awful lot of money at it. And his younger brother Jules is in so many advertisements, in print and on television, that he's a household name and practically without a voice; he doesn't seem to need to use his voice very much, just the clean, neat art of being impeccable in his dress.. He signs contracts that guarantee him his choice of clothes for each advertisement, and uses a lot of Evan's designs, and rules much of what he does."

"Where'd they learn all this stuff?" once she was asked, to which she replied, "Oh, Harry took one look at youth sports in their early years and said no on baseball because lots of times they would have had to slide into base and get their uniforms in a horrid state and he put his foot down on that. And he said no on football because of those awful, crushing jumbles of bodies in games that threw a wrench into that selection." And when she was asked about hockey, she said, "Did you ever smell the inside of a hockey player's bag? It's an absolute horror show, like a slaughter house must smell late on a Saturday night and his boys were getting no part of that experience. Good dress, classic dress, impeccable dress was the answer for them. And they've made a lot of money doing it and are still at it, like hand over fist, both of them."

She was, in the matter of words, a proud mother ... but seemed somewhat short

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on being a proud wife, although she never mentioned once to anybody anything about pleats and folds and seams galore.

Mirabel told another confidant, one not so closed mouth either, that Harry had told her a few months past that he was "going to see a few ball games one Saturday after another day of paint-patch," as he called it, "covering over the smirches on the house, done by passing birds in flights off the river."

"Supposedly," he said, "because I want to see what my boys missed in their youth and what amends I could make for them." This was all cover-up. In reality he had gone, not to a ball park, but to New Hampshire to buy fireworks. When he came home late that night, he drove the car right into his garage and unloaded his purchases, putting them out of Mirabel's sight. It turned out that he was really heated enough about the birds splattering his house that he was going to get even. So the next evening, just at dusk hunkering down in its way, shadows dark in areas, sights dimmed all along the river, no damned bird watchers up and about, that he placed an iron pipe into a rocky wall, propped it tightly with two bricks, slipped a July 4th rocket into the pipe practically on a level with the surface of the river at mid-tide and fired the rocket. A couple of folks on the higher street, sitting on their porch, sipping tea or swigging beer, take your choice, swear the rocket came down the river from an unknown source and exploded in a school, gaggle, skein or siege of birds, knocking the hell out of the bunch of them and killing some.

Like Harry was the Forward Observer of a rocket outfit, its target selector, and dead-on with his calculations.

There was a bit of noise about that rocket thing, some questions asked because the Fourth of July was weeks away, until it all quieted down, and that's when Harry started making model boats and sailing them down the river, using the flow and tide. He was pretty good at it, and it seemed it would turn his life around, not being so blue all the time. His art of construction was finesse itself, as you can well imagine, purest art in the hands of a new master born for perfection.

So you know what happened next when Harry's house was doused again by an overhead flight of ducks who let go one fell swoop of their unnecessary weight and the poop hit Harry's house like the Forward Observer was again dead-on target.

The trouble with that came, insurmountably it seemed, with Harry's sense of neatness, now in a state of hopelessness, making him plan the ultimate attack ... and it made clear the purpose of his model boat building.

Mirabel, according to her big mouth confidant, had become suspicious about Harry's dark secrets of life, his cover-up trips, the odd packages she dared not open that were hidden away in the garage, his constant, unintelligible murmuring of getting even with every rotten bird in the town. She kept thinking he had mortal enemies that she could not do anything about. She had even asked the boys to help and they each replied that they were too busy, making too much money, to take the time for a trip home. "As long as his pants are pressed, Mom, he'll be okay."

And they added, "And his shirts, too. They count as much as his pants."

"Watch his ties, too, Mom," Jules had said in tempered addition, "because they're like his Merit Badges."

There seemed to be no animosity in his words, yet a close listener could taste the obvious.

But Harry, being the man he was, had another ace up his iron-pressed sleeve. One of his model boats had

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made a most successful trip each time he placed it on the river surface beside his house ... only after looking at his daily updated charts on tide times, moon phases, the exact hours of useful twilight or darkness, including all his duck, geese, egret, tern, torn and rip, (with a built-in self laugh that appeared as minor relief), etc., activities. His humor, he must have figured, kept him sane. And so it was that it brought him to a dark alley in Boston a few weeks later where he purchased two old hand grenades promised to be in good order.

Harry, as some of us with a keen sense of irony might imagine, had no idea that his automobile's number plate was photographed by the seller when Harry departed the area. That bold step of course, one of deepest irony, put him in the bold grip of unlikely individuals who had nothing against birds, them being old jail birds themselves.

Where the Saugus River turned near his home, the ducks, the geese, the ganders and quackers bothered Harry the most, and with all the mathematics brought to the decimal point, all possible errors detected and phased out, on the best appointed night he attached one grenade to "my best little boat," connected the pin-release gizmo he had created, and set sailing the armed craft out upon the river. He'd show the birds of the river and the birds of the air, who was boss! That his house would evermore be the sharpest, cleanest, bluest in the whole town, a house without a smirch.

The launch was perfect, the daylight fading, the river quiet at the turn except for a few coalitions of enemy birds floating in place, those which would otherwise surely be aiming at his house on take-off. Minutes after the craft set-sail, a harrowing time for him, a blast the town had never heard, tore apart the floating bird formations, brought fire engines to several points along the river road, showed later that minor debris had been collected ... and no suspects in custody.

Of course, Harry's model boats came into light discussion and disappeared in the vapor of guesswork, some influence of the river itself.

Six months went by and the only thing keeping Harry from painting the house again was the merciless weather. Smack in the middle of the blizzard, months after the mysterious blast had occurred on the river, the police received a tip from an old acquaintance that the owner of the car in the attached photo had purchased two WW II class grenades, one of which should be highly suspected as being exploded for unknown purposes months earlier on the river not too far from the police station.

When the police car drove into the driveway, Mirabel dropped her hot iron directly to the floor and screamed for Harry who thought he could not be bothered by histrionics ... he had enough on his mind waiting for good weather. The police found

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nothing to pin anything on Harry Guahagan, not pursuing the lead with intensity, whom they correctly figured was the type who'd never leave anything undone.

But ensuing attacks on Harry Guahagan 's home, highly-arched and deadly of aim in subsequent months were, most agree, generated and directed by one of the Gods or Goddesses of birds from a point of command unseen and undetected by local warning systems. There are a host of Gods and Goddesses involved with birds and with water (streams, rivers, seas) that one can call on from out the hierarchy, Tuatha de Danaan, ( "kings, queens and heroes from far in the past who had supernatural powers and had ruled Ireland for close to 4000 years") and were often called to support either side in dispute, combat or life itself: Boann, Goddess of the River Boyne; Cyhiraeth, Goddess of streams who screams the scream of death and is connected to the Banshee; Llyr, God of water and the sea; Morrigan, who might hide presently as a crow or raven and is a warrior Goddess; Rhiannon, Goddess of Birds; and finally, to Nuada, God of ocean, dogs, poetry, and writing (for God's Sake at this twist!); an army of Gods and Goddesses not mentioned here, all heaven, earth and the universe their backyard.

I prefer to believe they were engineered by Manannán mac Lir, the Seagull God who, for your information, is the guardian of the gateways between the worlds. And I also believe it was in direct response to Harry's rocket attack on river birds and the grenade he floated to the midst of a skein or flock or covey of birds (you can pick what collection or collections they may have been). A note of explanation should be appended here about Manannán or Manann (Old Irish Manandán), also known as Manannán mac Lir; he is a sea deity in Irish mythology out of the Tuatha dé Danann This choice, some say, is preferred over Blodeuwedd, an Owl Goddess, or even Thoth (aka Tehuti) who also comes to those with a deep affinity for writing, neatness not earning any points among the locals when it comes to distribution of birdshit, if you can believe that.

Some say it is very easy to dig up historical data on Manannán mac Lir, especially via computer connections about things like his association with oceans and storms, or his linkage to the Isle of Man. What we're expressing here though, foremost and not as afterthoughts, is about Manannan and who he actually is. Pagans, it is believed , appear to have their good luck by connecting in some manner with their Gods and Goddesses, and while myths are often treated as nothing more than mere poppycock in many quarters, it is a most possible and direct experience shaping our image of any selective deity. People who have connected with Manannan all say the same things about him. Quite often the first thing they mention is he indeed is a funny duck, having a notorious sense of humor, plucking odd streaks, sensations and ideas from his fabulous world and cavorting them into some joker's mind in mad dances or jigs. That all takes some doing, and some acceptance, you have to admit.

We can agree, most of us, that a life lacking humor is partially bare, like meatloaf without mashed potatoes, a grill without flame, a laugh without a magadh or joke spurring it. Manannan, a tricky sort of god, manages to insert absurd ideas into the lives of those who know him, making life's daily grind that much easier to contend with. His wit is infamous, ever amiable, always pulling friendly punches. His association with the ocean and its expanses is best typical of this. Any voyage on a cruise liner is as much fun as it is adventurous; like it's been said, "Manannan's a funny duck on the deck of a ship, especially if he's the captain."

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