Typoetic.us: Issue 3 by Typoetic.us

Issue 3

The literary journal that explores poetry and all its faces. Ty(poe:tic)us explores everything that is poetry. From featuring poems from emerging and experienced poets, to hearing stories and theories about poetry and the life of a poet, typoetic.us aims to show the world how important poetry is to not only its participants, but also its spectators. The idea of typoetic.us is messy, unintentional, and as beautiful as a flower. It stands out for its beauty and for the close relationship it has with the poet. It is everything that poetry is and isn’t (though the “isn’t” is not necessarily incorrect). It’s a typo waiting to happen. Editors Christina Rodriguez Corey Klinzing Christine Coonrod Ahmani DoDoo

info@typoetic.us

COPYRIGHT © 2015 Ty(poe:tic)us. All Rights Reserved No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever (beyond copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the United States Copyright Law) without permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note Dear Readers, Welcome to the greatly anticipated third issue of Typoetic.us! First of all, thank you to all of our contributors and readers who have been patiently waiting for this issue to come to life. We ran into our share of scheduling conflicts and catching up on submissions thanks to the pursuit of higher education, the arrival of a new editor, and unfortunate sad times, but we are back and ready to share this wonderful group of poets and poems with you! We would like to welcome our newest editor, Corey Klinzing, to the Typoetic.us family. She is a MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago who is a current editor for Goreyesque, the former editor-in-chief for Furrow, and was an editorial intern for Blood Bound Books. Corey is working on her first novel, in between school, editing, and doing things that writers do (mysterious things with pens and tons of coffee). In this issue, in addition to great poetry, we have interviews with Mariah E. Wilson, author of We Walk Alone (Writers AMuse Me Publishing, 2014) and Laura Madeline Wiseman, author of Drink (BlazeVOX, 2015) as well as a review of Drink. We would like to thank our contributors for being a part of this issue. With you, there is no us so thank you, especially for your patience. We are working on bringing you a lot more with Typoetic.us. We are sharing prompts for National Poetry Month on our Facebook. Everyday you have the chance to write a poem! If you come across our prompts and use them, let us know! Tag #NAPOTYPO on social media so we can find you. Thank you to my editors who always do a wonderful job. I hope you enjoy and share the issue! -Christina Rodriguez

III | Ty(poe:TiC)US Issue 3

Contents Naked Christopher Grillo

twelve hour seed Samantha Elizabeth Vacca Sunset on Bigelow Sara Emily Kuntz Refugees Pia Taavila-Borsheim

Eve, at the End of the Day John Thornburg

Almost Nightly Sarah B. Boyle

13.

Ante Meridiem Gary Glauber

14.

Splintered Ballad Hugo Q.

15..

Substances Laura Madeline Wiseman

Economy Jack Freedman

There is no God except Me Serkan Ergin

Summer Sarah B. Boyle

The Hive is Shaped Like a Casket Mary Ellen Talley Daytime Emmy Runner Up John Thornburg

Afternoon at Planned Parenthood Sara Emily Kuntz You’re a horrible child Mary Stein

Interview with Mariah E. WIlson

Promises Pia Taavila-Borsheim

. 27

Hard Candy Brianna Pike

Low Budget Holiday Gary Glauber Appetite Jack Freedman Maternal Line Angela La Voie

29 30

IV | Ty(poe:TiC)Us ISSUE 3

Imagist Socialist Poetry & Objective Reality Serkan Ergin Letter to a Poet Sarah B. Boyle

. 36

Reading Our Sister ’s Diary Laura Madeline Wiseman Interview with Laura Madeline Wiseman Deluminate Gary Glauber

41..

G Point of the Night Serkan Ergin

38 41

42.

Review of Drink - Christina Rodriguez

Poet’s Corner

32 34

You Took Your Time John Thornburg Holds Bar Sara Emily Kuntz

45.

43 45

ty (poe:tic) us

itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a typo waiting to happen

Issue 3

www.typoetic.us facebook.com/typoetic.us twitter.com/typoetic_us ty-poetic-us.tumblr.com

Design & Layout: Ahmani DoDoo

Watch this, Frank says, holding court with the seniors in the gang shower. He pulls the tape from the melted ice bag strapped to his knee and dumps the freezing water over the private stall on bashful, second string quarterback, Steve Nichols. There’s a yelp from behind the curtain and Frankie cackles. Steve appears more frustrated than usual. Today he took all of Frankie’s practice reps, while QB one drank water and talked shit. What’s worse, he knows he won’t get any burn, this Friday or any other. It’s lonely Saturday mornings with the Junior Varsity for Steve.

Naked

Christopher Grillo

He stands, soaking wet boxer shorts dripping into his tong sandals.

What you hiding under there, Nichols, Frankie says and slaps a shampoo bottle at the sophomore’s crotch. Young Steven, with balls like kettle bells, rears back and swings with all his might. He slips and barely catches Frankie on the chin. For a second we are all stunned, and seventeen running showers sound like rapids in the silence, but the awe is broken when Frankie retaliates, at first just once, knocking Nichols to the floor, and then again, holding his head up by the hair, and again, following through his cheek bone,

and again, and again, till blood circles the shower room floor, pitched towards the drain in the center.

a cowardly twelve-hour seed lingers,

though misled.

avowedly, the sour need discharges overhead.

twelve hour seed

open open open wideâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Samantha Elizabeth Vacca

gilded shrouds of papal thread i cannot cut nor stich, nor sew; these fingers barely

batter bread.

spare

me from

the flour-feedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the sun fills me instead.

Sunset on Bigelow by

Sara Emily Kuntz

I stand naked in the bathtub and look for a while at my torso in the age-spotted mirror dissected by the edges of the glass â&#x20AC;&#x201C; pale breasts, a mole on the diaphragm, hips curving out of frame. I can hear them talking in the next room, and smell tendrils of their nag champa. Laughter in this cheap third floor apartment. To my right, sky floods the bare window with violet, and the air around me is dense, still slightly steeped in lavender. Steam rising, dissipating, I cross my arms and lift my leg high over the chipped enamel edge into the spreading chill.

Refugees

Pia Taavila-Borsheim

I brought in the stray. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been mewling on my front stoop, shivering in the rain. Then one more and another, until my entire life was a collection of lost souls, an assortment of the weary, the lonely, the hungry for food. You might say I was a female St. Francis, extending my hands in a Christ-like pose, the very vines of Buddha climbing my frame. You might say it is I who was the wandering Jew, a victim of my own desires. And yet, there was purpose and gain, such as we mortals measure them. I laughed, didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t I? I danced in the kitchen, even as the shift change brought in another drifter. Even as you roll your eyes, I loved them all, every last one.

where there is need for fire, next there will be ash I am a pilgrim in a landscape of warped mirrors my distorted frame, caked eyelashes, the blue bronze of my fingernails leaving scars on your knees seven hundred miles. one hundred more, daylight scalded us awake in bald hotel rooms of the interstate, snaking through valleys, stalking the rivers like prey. I lacked the resolve to drown myself in the True Mirror of Lake Michigan. Never knew I’d prefer the way light caresses those funhouse surfaces, careens down pillowed corridors of tents and the floor of calm, sparse grass. Never guessed there’d be no truth but truth in death. Another birthday, another twitching pulse. I left my lover for the scent of Lysol and a pint of Southern Cross. I lost it all. Searing seatbelts leave a flat red brand across my lily cheeks where there is need for iron soon there will be rust her iron sleep next to me like an ambivalent dance floor move the banquet tables, or don’t, or do.

Eve, at the End of the Day by

John Thornburg

Almost nightly Sarah B. Boyle

I press the phone against my ear try to make some sense of the words that break through his sleep offer to read aloud to him, to keep him just a minute more. The yearning ache of loneliness and love in Neruda’s “Song of Despair” echoes in my voice, but I tell you, he doesn’t hear the open and bitter well, the deserted one who insists: he’ll never belong to you. Now it is that lurking hour of departures. I hear him fall asleep there alone. It’s not his fault—but of course it is—so I blame this hour, this night, this sickly, yellow love. This weakness. And still I listen for a moan, a word that sounds, maybe, like my name.

The maelstrom of an early morning, particularly on a cold and damp Monday rages wild and unforgiving. When the sins of the weekend are visited upon the venal one, when excesses are brought to the fore and the stomach churns in anticipation of busy workday ahead, no worms caught seem worth the earliness of the struggle. The hours of sleep no longer seem sufficient, as the body fights against the indignities of encroaching age and the taxing ravages of time. While some do relish these hours and magically awaken with a ready perkiness and energy that defies logic and the natural order, most would rather ignore the annoyance of the alarumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blare and turn over, pillow in hand, to defy, even momentarily, the necessity to rise and shine.

Ante Meridiem by

Gary Glauber

This is what itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s come to: stories in exotic locales, forehead kisses by windows overlooking the bay, with nights arriving promptly to fill in the diminishing light. You thoroughly romanced my ears with your halfbroken Spanish, extinguished my habits of nursing

Splintered Ballad by

Hugo Q.

tragedies into passion, and left a sweet sounding echo whirling in my 4 chambered heart. We leave: handsome names ascribed on ordinary occasions, conversations lingering over blueberry pies, abrupt endings at exactly the right location, and a bittersweet ballad splintering into forgetfulness.

She always lit one before the TV, her body tuned to the drama, to whomever was favored that day, to the bowl of tar, resin, heat, and smoke, muffling the room in a haze that softened the edges of what or who sat with her. It’s not addicting, she told us, this inhaling, holding, and then exhaling a plume of blackness to fan away— No one robs banks. No one murders. She filled the hours with it, hits and ounces. She paid with her welfare check, child support, tax refund, gifts, clouds of smoke dissipating at parties, with friends. Many days she drank alone. We studied in our bedrooms or watched TV inside the burning haze layering the apartment. We didn’t think to ask about moderation, to sustain a favored mood by pace until work. We learned by example, to do it or not to do it, to avoid ocean current

or drown. Everything written must be burned. Goodbye: California, surf, places where all men are assholes, and all women are fish, siren, whore. She taught us the liquid diet, beauty by what you won’t swallow and what you will. We accepted this as the way the world worked. We knew we had to take the bottle from her and swallow or we had to go.

Substances

Laura Madeline Wiseman

In this free market we are merely mammals looking for a common commodity to trade Our standards must not be poor Put no stock in greed, let avarice plummet We have the goods to offer each other We make our sharing valuable For when the cooperative organizing of affection eventually becomes traded and goes public we know the wealth incorporated will be paid in a lump sum Gratitude tipping the scales as we delve into what was once a petty cache filled with resentment once traded and spent to the point where our personal accounts are now bankrupt But they leave room for bonds guaranteed to mature to a full potential accruing a currency symbolized solely by a heart

Economy

Jack Freedman

Kiss me or shoot from my impish verses opening from yesterday to the far future. Shoot my hopes escaping from my words. I am the revenge of all despised ones in whole continents. I am an exclamation mark in front of the current Paradigm.

There is no God except Labour, my darling! Be the mother of the sparrows flapping in my sorrowful rib cage. I have been destroyed from my childhood to Eternity with the lava days of my broken history.

There is no God except Love, my darling! Breed me to yourself from the clouds of the sky of your face. I have been created from the letters of Pain of all oppressed ones in the world. Never mind the flying balloons escaping from my short-length modest dreams.

There is no God except me

There is no God except Me, my darling! Occupy my whole soul and skin with the vandal armies of your hands I am already drunk because of the dancing daisies at your voice Already reborn from your lips to the spring pages of the near future

There is no God except You, my darling! Kiss me or shoot from the wings of my mute memories telling themselves into the Darkness. Shoot my fads reducing me from the mountains of our Struggle.

There is no God except Ourselves, my darling!

Serkan Ergin

We watched “Orfeu Negro” one night The fever shut my eyes I heard Orfeu calling out Eurydice— his bossa nova calling down the dreams

Summer Sarah B. Boyle

Then I was in bed dreaming dreaming in circles turning over & over in the July heat The box fan rattled and I knew they were dreams but they pulled me through & into them into the spread of purple-red behind my shut eyes into the bed & into the nightstand drawers & under the lamp shades A constant unconscious recessional Each time I pushed your palm from my body turned away & away wrapped the sheet between my legs again you pressed your stomach cold against my back

You were painful you said in the morning the fever broken Last night you were so hot you hurt to hold

The Hive Is Shaped Like a Casket

Mary Ellen Talley

“The worker bees carry out their dead sisters and drop the bodies some distance from the hive.” - Hubbell, Sue (1988) A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them

The worker bee carries out your dead sister after three days lying silent on her white pillow. She no longer generates heat, the necessary heat that slides honey into what would be sweet crevices of her crenulated tongue where arrows flew from turrets even though pollination wasn’t far behind. Her sleep dies in a dream swarm, humming the song of wide flesh and cold bones found first when her heart burst past a shut door. Memory readies what we say in the telling. Tell us she danced until she stopped singing. Tell us she hummed the song of one last memory to keep the hive temperate. Hers is a stone centigrade where gravity conceals past flights into the cups of filigree asters daisy-spreading their narrow petals. She dipped her tongue from pink peony to California poppy and climbed each salvia stem blossom circus to deftly collect what she considered nectar. I have come to tell you she will rest below the hive, where the queen reassures gravity that with every certain death, flight is merely meant to balance the snug cedar home, even as ochre leaves spiral down in the early dark breeze to cover the hard surface.

when I wake up the pillows smell like your bad breath and the stars haven’t finished fading. The sun is still melting the east clouds, the clock towers, the tarmac barrens, neighborhoods of stripped furniture and streetlamps flickering like my heart after the first cup of coffee, the flirt flourish of a red moon on the lip of the horizon. It’s Tuesday, true love isn’t a topic on radio shows or in conference rooms or staff lounges. It isn’t discussed over mimosas or at the dog park or mentioned in passing on daytime TV you don’t bring it up either, you’re watering the plants, you have a paroxysm of lecherous wit, you’re tying your shoes in the bathroom, I’m tying my shoes by the light of true love. You’re puking. You puke up the dock of the bay. You puke up a Zodiac killer. You puke up Beatles hair-dos, a piece of the Berlin wall, a one ring, a cocktail consisting of one part gin and one part the Mojave desert. You puke up your breakfast. You brush your teeth. You go to work.

Daytime Emmy Runner Up by

John Thornburg

I sit at the table and write poems, each one mentions trees stilted pines, battered oaks, optic aspens, I can’t stop its a compulsion like gambling or weird sex or eating one’s own fingernails. We meet in a forest of dark leaves, bright branches, dark roots. We meet in a forest of ambiguous cosmic destiny, you’re wearing gym shorts you’re wearing tall socks, you’re wearing sneakers you’re wearing jersey #13. We are karaoke kindred and you’re livin’ on a prayer, you’re holding back the years and we built this city on rock and roll. We are TV movies but you’re Molly Ringwald, you’re Michael Douglas you’re a poet, you’re a corpse, you’re Kennedy you’re Oswald, you’re Ruby

The guard behind the bullet-proof glass with a popcorn bowl full of condoms beside him says “No weapons, knives, guns, mace, sharp objects? Go through the metal detector and take the elevator to...” and outside the lone man in a grey trench coat shouts “OVER 2,000 BABIES – KILLED!” In the waiting room I’m done with my forms and awkwardly looking at my phone. At the counter her voice rises and then falls to a soft hush as she says: “Obviously, I’ve never done this before” with a nervous giggle “Floor 4. Great! Thanks!” Her yellow dress and shiny hair flow out behind her as she walks through the double locked security doors and up to the surgery floor. On the radio, a pop station. “Call Me, Maybe” sings the teen sensation and the digital swells of strings make my heart leap as she sings “This is crazy” – I know that feeling.

Afternoon at Planned Parenthood

Sara Emily Kuntz

Mary Stein

You’re a horrible child

I know you came out too quick for pain killers I know You’re a communist I’m a socialist mommy same thing not it’s not be quiet when you learn to add when your father learns to spell when your brother comes back from the dead You’re a horrible child I know

Interview with Mariah E. Wilson Typoetic.us has recently had the pleasure to interview Mariah E. Wilson on her recent collection of poems, We Walk Alone (Writers AMuse Me Publishing, 2014) and her musings of poetics. Mariah E. Wilson is a writer from beautiful British Columbia. She has been published in Thin Air Magazine, Every Day Poets, The Kitchen Poet, Literary Orphans and The Corner Club Press, where she is now the Poetry Editor. Her first poetry collection, We Walk Alone, was published by Writers AMuse Me Publishing. Her debut novel, The Demon in Him, will be released in 2015.

How long have you’ve been writing poetry? Officially, since I was 10. Steadily, since 1998. In 1998 I was fifteen years old. Life is hard for a fifteen year old girl. Emotions, hormones, boys, drama, friendships, no matter who you are, the teen years are tough. Poetry was my outlet.

Can you share your personal favorite poem from the book? Why? The Myth of You. It turned out far better than I ever expected it to. I just love the under current of sadness in it. It surprised me and I take great joy in being able to surprise myself.

In the first few pages of your book, you state “We Walk Alone is a work of fiction.” Where do your poems come from? Life experiences, fiction, or both? I can get inspiration from a soup can if the mood strikes me. Truthfully, I don’t know where most of the inspiration for my poetry comes from. Some, yes, are inspired by real life experiences, but others just fall into my head.

Is there one piece of advice you would like to share with other poets/writers? Write. Write all the time. Write things without planning to show them to people. That is where you will learn the most about yourself and your work and what you want to do. Finish things. There is no greater pleasure than having a finished product to improve upon. There is also no greater discipline than seeing a project through to the end.

What was the inspiration for the title of the book? The inspiration for the title was actually the poem in it titled, We Walk Alone.

Can you describe the moment you realized that writing poetry was something that you had to do? I was ten. It was the fourth grade and for the first time ever I was assigned a creative writing project. I had to write a poem in rhyming couplets. It was then that I knew I wanted to be an author. I truthfully thought I would write novels first, but those came second.

Could you tell us about the creative process you use to write your poems? Some days it’s easy. Some days poems just trip and fall at my feet and I dust them off and give them a new life. Other days I stare into the void and bang my head against the wall willing just two lines to spring forth. Mostly though, they come to me when I’m not thinking about poetry. I’ll be doing the dishes and lines of verse will just come at me.

Who are some of your favorite poets? Why? And what/who are you reading right now? I love Robert Service. I grew up listening to my mother read him to me. I can still recite the opening lines of The Cremation of Sam McGee. I also love Keats, Poe and Tennyson. But, my favourite poet is Shane Koyczan. I really admire what he can do with words.

Have you ever been unable to write, out of fear or just writer’s block? How do you overcome those moments? I used to suffer from writers block. Then I discovered that the only cure for writers block is to write. That’s all there is too it. If you can’t think of something, hop on google and grab a prompt.

In your book, there’s a poem entitled “Not for Sale”. What was your inspiration for that poem? What were you trying to achieve with that poem? Not For Sale was a lot of fun. I set out to write two poems in one and I wanted each poem to say basically the opposite of what the other said. I think I achieved this rather well, maybe too well for I haven’t had the guts to try another one like it since. Call it beginners luck.

There are a lot of vivid images in your poems, specifically, Dandelion Daydreams. How did you conjure those images? How important do you feel imagery is to a poem? Why? Oh, I have no idea how I conjured those images, which is a shame, because I think imagery is important to a poem. The reader needs something, an emotion, a feeling, an image, something tangible to latch onto, to connect with.

You experiment a lot with form, structure and spacing in your poems (i.e. Conversations in the Rain, Holding It In, We Walk Alone, The Volume of Silence, Tongue Tied to name a few). What were you trying to evoke by doing this? How important do you feel form and structure is to poetry? Sometimes I just like the way it looks on the page, to be honest. But mostly I like to create a dramatic pause, and what better way to do that in poetry than with some blank space or an adjusted alignment. I like the way it moves, the way it can make a poem come to life. I enjoy the way it can make you read a poem entirely different than you normally would. What might inspire you to write a poem? An image, idea, form? Anything. My first poem was about a failed nun who went to the bar. Somehow Al Capone got involved. Anything can inspire a poem. A person. A thought. A memory. A commercial. A song. I’ve been inspired by sitting on a swing. Inspiration is everywhere, you just have to open yourself up to it.

Why is poetry important? Poetry is important because in as little as three lines you can convey a feeling to someone, you can connect with them and sometimes that’s all a person needs; a little glimmer that somewhere on this crazy planet there is at least one person who thinks kind of like you think, or has felt some of the feelings you’ve felt. There is nothing greater in this world than reading a poem and feeling like you’re reading about a piece of your own life.

What’s next for Mariah E. Wilson? I’m working on two poetry collections. The first of which is Lost in Translation. It is a fourty poem collection. All the poems are based off words from other languages that have no English translations. The second collection is my Tumblr collection. All the poems in the Tumblr collection are based off usernames and stuff that I’ve seen on Tumblr. It’s seventy poems long right now, but I’d really like it to be one hundred, so I have a bit more work ahead.

I also have a novel coming out this year. It’s a contemporary romance, though, I’d argue that it’s a bit on the dark side. It’s called The Demon in Him and it’s being published by the same awesome company that published We Walk Alone.

Promises

Pia Taavila-Borsheim

His words hung like fruit

dangling from persimmon trees,

bruised and out of reach.

Hard Candy

Brianna Pike

Swirled peppermints, butterscotch wrapped in golden cellophane and hot cinnamon, the color of blood drop between the seats of my grandfather’s SUV. The quick suck, crunch and crack of hard candy it’s own medicine for a lifelong diabetic who sits beneath his big oak tree, clasps two hands on top of his wooden cane, whispers: I can’t see. My grandmother at his elbow, guiding him, pressing half a peanut butter cup in his mouth, soft chocolate smearing her fingers as we remain silent, watchful, until my mother calls for my father, who rises pulls car keys from his pocket. And we are left to linger, hold vigil, cradling lukewarm bottles of beer around a table scattered with empty candy wrappers.

Trouble becomes the grace of God, a chemical reaction, a reduction, concentrated, protracted and bitter. It’s a statement of stalemate, an allocated guess. The woman says her name is Clara. Other than that, she doesn’t speak. Perhaps she hides a sensitive lisp or a headful of embarrassing notions. Anything is a safe guess.

Low Budget Holiday by

Gary Glauber

In the end, she is no magician. The proof: you request a body pillow for the fifth straight night and nothing happens. In the end, it’s all in the details. It’s everything essential. Checkout is at 11.

Satisfying the appetite As a bomb explodes. The people drop to their knees. Mass casualties afoot. As a bomb explodes, Two hands extend. Mass casualties afoot As fingers interlock. Two hands extend. Legendary islands appear As fingers interlock, Forming a bridge. Legendary islands appear. Born from martyrs. Forming a bridge Of lives yet to exist.

Appetite by

Jack Freedman

Born from martyrs Are sanctioned lovers Of lives yet to exist Within an ancient vendetta. Are sanctioned lovers Doomed to suicide Within an ancient vendetta? Elimination of hubris needed. Doomed to suicide From holy trees. Elimination of hubris needed. Myths of war lynched. From holy trees, We feel velvet embraces. Myths of war lynched. Buried underground. We feel velvet embraces Radiating from the prism Buried underground, The rainbow emanates. Radiating from the prism, A quartet of harmony sings as The rainbow emanates Into hearts draped in solitude.

A quartet of harmony sings as The people drop to their knees Into hearts draped in solitude, Satisfying the appetite.

Maternal Line

after Lucille Clifton

Angela La Voie

You were the girl, fourteen, became the family breadwinner, worked as a maid, washed peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s laundry to survive the Great Depression, the weight of history. Your parents, peasant farmers, new arrivals, worked to buy land until the stock market fell and they crashed, too. But then you all survived the Great Depression, made your way in a new country, mud-jacked the house from its dirt floor, built a second story beneath the old house, showed the impossible in reach after all. You married, your parents built you a house next to theirs. White Cape Cod. In view of the chicken coop, you made a family, backdrop for fairytales. Became a baseball fan, watching games while your husband worked nights at the plant. Became a matriarch, leading to me. I swung in the same swing my mother did, played beneath the same mulberry and cherry trees, walked beneath the familiar rose arbor. All our hands, they dug the same earth â&#x20AC;&#x201D;daisies, snapdragons, eggplant. Beauty as important as food, gratitude for the beauty in this world its own form of nourishment, its own form of survival. I am Angela, after angels, daughter of Jo Ann, daughter of Esther, first-generation American, daughter of Elizabeth, an orphan who created roots and her own family.

Serkan Ergin

Imagist Socialist Poetry and Objective Reality

Poetry is the organization of poetic images around one or more themes as forming completeness, according to imagist socialist poetry. As understood from this description, the main unit of the poetry is poetic images, because poetry is an autonomous metalanguage developing in natural language. That can be occurred by deforming the syntax consciously and reforming with autonomous system by poetic images. Poetic images convert natural language, enlarge its borders and provide new expression possibilities. A single word of the natural language has a fix, stereotyped reflection at every person who percepts. So, a single word of the natural language does not have the striking association property as a poetic image has. Poetic images are established by making analogy between â&#x20AC;&#x153;at leastâ&#x20AC;? two or more words having semantic distance. The main mission of poetic images is providing a striking expression possibility for transmitting the meaning by association. As poetry is written by poetic images and a single word cannot be a poetic image and a poetic image is established with at least two words, the main unit of the poetry is poetic image, not individual words. So, we can easily say that the poetry is written by poetic images, not individual words. The words are like protons, neutrons, and electrons - if we suppose that the poetic image is an atom. The components of the atom cannot be found individually in the nature. They can only have a functional existence by forming completeness to establish the poetic image. In the same way, the words gain poetic functionality in poetry as being organized to establish the poetic image. A poetic image is the subjective reflection of objective reality at the conscience of the poet esthetically. This artistic reflection is not a one to one reflection as a mirror

reflection, but it is the externalizing of objective reality with perception and then transforming to a new reality by the conscience of the poet.

As the poetic image is externalized by the poet, it is added to objective reality, so poetry and also all art works are an esthetical intervention to the objective reality with created new reality, which can be called as artistic reality. The externalized poetic image reaches to the conscience of the reader as a part of objective reality and it is absorbed by the reader according to his/her conscience and esthetical perception level. So, the poetry is reproduced at the conscience of every reader with differences and this process creates awareness about theme of the poem, refining the esthetical perception of the reader. Then this poem makes a contribution to the personal transformation of the reader and also to other readers. So, that poem made a contribution to the social transformation according to its power. Poetry is an artistic way to change the World step by step as making contribution to bjective reality with artistic reality.

Yesterday I woke up from dreaming you and me, together, gardening. You, your hair in braided pigtails, overalls pocket-stuffed with season’s last mint, and you sang, picking fistfuls of rosehips for tea; I, my fingers digging up carrots, turnips, rutabagas—vegetables for a stew of autumnpale tubers. Let me go back: “how are you” and “hello.” Pretend I started there, though I know already you’ve slept poorly Indian-summer-long. I know because I have too. The kitchen garden’s a barren daughter, just her rosehips bulging in my neglect. Your sweet potato vine is the latest death of summer’s regression. Once our evenings: blooms in your hair like bitter radish flowers garnishing salted brown bread, fantasy of chickens who cackle morning, pinching the summer green beans from their stalks like I pinched the clip-ons from your swollen lobes before bedtime; our polyester coverlet, sharing the one buckwheat hull pillow. When will you come visit me; I can clean the casement windows, settle your phone bill for you, carve you radish roses again. It’s been two falls since the abortion. We can sell the vegetables still growing in deep dirt at the farmer’s arcade on Tenth Street. And the hens I promised you—we’ll make daily egg-salad lunches.

I am well, now writing some poems nightly: I steep tea and wait for the sun to cut out, count the dying petals I clip from house plants, picture you writing.

Letter to a Poet by

Sarah B. Boyle

you were stalked down a crowded street by a man with a gun he picked dandelions in the park he never took his eyes off you later he went to your house and gave the flowers to your mom he sang her a folk song for a forked tongue, he wore blue jeans. later she said that he looked like a race car driver, wrecked in the rain, dead on the tarmac, shiny slick, arc lampâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s burn redirected in the track.

You Took Your Tim e by

John Thornburg

he followed you to work the next morning. sat underneath your desk in your cubicle. he recited erotically charged love poems that made you blush and choke he was made of jazz music and smoke. you took your time, you peeled an orange with a knife you carved into it rivers and tenements and subway stations. the rind fell at his feet, adorned his shadow, his smile, acrid, sweet The letters beaded into words pooled to messages each keystroke shell casing hit the floor with a grim tinkle the auditory equivalent of stars appearing low on the horizon like restraining orders and court dates and custody battles gathering like rain together we must wade into the waters of war ushering in an age of aspartame love measured by the thimbleful distance between your stalkerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shadow and your feet.

Is love less meaningful the more times you say it? No holds bar, I say. No, it’s barred, you correct, and I google it to check:

Oh, it’s a wrestling reference – holds actually being arms and legs wrapped around a body, holding it. I guess I thought maybe there was a holds bar, that without which you’d be free. You say you don’t know how I’m a poet without knowing these things. I don’t know either. ‘Used to’ always looks strange to me, and sometimes I forget how to spell ‘has,’ it just doesn’t seem right. I finally ask if you remember the time I sent you a photo of a whip — we had just started dating, it almost opened up a conversation, but didn’t. Yet it was your hand that showed me the pleasure in pain, months later, after tall beers in your yard, shots at the bar, after you told me all about her, your long distance romance, finally releasing the secret tension, making us closer. Then the drunken I love you’s, sober tears and pledges of distance, drunk-again reunions. Her grandma told her that if you say ‘love’ too often it loses its meaning, loses power. She thinks it is the opposite, says all the time:

I love you all day, but... I still think you could fall in love with me. After you are done with her, after I get myself sorted out. No holds barred. No holds bar.

Holds Bar by

Sara Emily Kuntz

Before our sister found the charred remains of her teenage journaling, the singed wires of notebooks in the still warm grass, our sister arrived home after school to find doors open and everyone on errands— we think perhaps she thought, as the youngest,

Reading Our Sister’s Diary by

Laura Madeline Wiseman

the one who aided our mother’s searches in the past, she was exempt, but none of us were. Her bedroom’s contents were strewn, sheets yanked, closets emptied, drawers removed from their tracks, furniture pulled from the wall. We can almost hear our sister’s, shit, shit, shit, an elongated susurration of knowledge of private thoughts exposed, read aloud, jeered. Later, our mother and her boyfriend returned with takeout pizza, a case, and an ounce to dine together in their room before the news. I’m the bitch, huh, our mother likely said as she pushed her door shut, the shhhhhh of the carpet followed by the click of the lock— our sister, hysterical, red-faced. We’re sure it was then she smelled the smoke of leaves shaken from trees in the spring thaw, the trash burning, and ran down the basement steps, through the sliding glass door, and across the yard to the patch that smoldered, acrid, burnt, gone.

Interview with Laura Madeline Wiseman Typoetic.us’ contributor Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Drink has been recently published by BlazeVOX Books. We’ve had the honor to read Drink, as well as ask Laura a few questions about the process of writing Drink, the two poems featured in this issue of Typoetic.us, and her general thoughts on writing poetry. Laura Madeline Wiseman is also the author of Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013), Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012), and the collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins, as well as two letterpress books, and eight chapbooks, including Spindrift (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Wiseman has a doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has received an Academy of American Poets Award, the Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Margie, and Feminist Studies.

How long have you’ve been writing? I remember writing my first poem when I was seven—ponytails, freckles, a blue book bag with light bulbs and the phrase Bright Ideas. My mother was just beginning to show. My baby sister would be born that fall. It was the late spring, hot and humid in Ohio, night crawlers stretching out on the pavement after thunderstorms, slugs leaving glittery trails on railroad ties. I spent an afternoon with my sister making a float of our mother’s secondhand blue Lincoln Continental. We picked clover blossoms and dandelions to line the hood’s crevices with their yellow and white blooms. My second grade classmates and I were making books—writing and illustrating them, creating the content each day in class. We wrote poems, stories, drew pictures. As we turned the faded car into a float on our driveway, I composed a poem about defending my mother against kidnappers. A note had gone home in our schoolbag just that week.

Can you share your personal favorite poem from the book? Why?

My favorite poem is the final poem. The book started with a reflection on myths and stories of water—lost planes, drift bottles, mermaids. Previously, I had been given an assignment: write a poem about the painting “Circus” by Jennifer Stufflebeam. It reminded me of the news coverage of a plane disappearance. I wrote several poems in response to the painting and the disappearance. When I began putting Drink together, the final poem transformed the book during one of the revisions. The poem had been a small poem, but it became a big one, much too big for the themes in the book as it stood. The revision suggested I needed another section in the book, something dark. I had a book manuscript I’d put together during a residency, but one that didn’t feel complete. It was too dark. I pulled several poems from it to make the third section of Drink. Books need balance, tension, a movement across the collection. The final poem asked for something else to come before it. It was that section, one that includes the two poems published in Typoetic, for which the book asked.

Tell us more about “Substances” and “Reading Our Sister’s Diary”. “Reading Our Sister’s Diary” took some time to write. I wanted to explore the ways in which an abusive parent might destroy a daughter’s belongings as a form of punishment and how such acts are also a breaking down of the child’s sense of self. Elaine Scarry explores issues of trauma and abuse in The Body in Pain and argues that pain unmakes language. Torture is used to deconstruct the person by pain to a place of pre-creation of language. The room itself becomes a thing that tortures. Spatially, objections and places can become manifestations of trauma and those who have experienced trauma can become triggered when returning to a place or by an object connected to the original trauma. Thus for a child to be abused by a parent and the parent to localize that abuse on the objects the girl-child kept, I wanted a poem that explored the unmaking of her body via the pain of spatial destruction. I edited the anthology Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, an anthology that collects over one hundred American poets who resist gender violence by poems. In the media, domestic violence is often framed by the question, “Why doesn’t she just leave?” I’ve often been puzzled by this refocusing, the movement away from the enactors of violence to the victimized, a refocusing that perpetuates victim-blaming. In my poem “Substances” I wanted to explore one way to understand a causation of such abuse. Substance abuse by a parent doesn’t cause them to abuse a child, but it may change what motivates them to care.

You dive into the form of prose poems heavily throughout the book. Why did you choose this form for the majority of the poems? What do you like about the prose poem form? Is there any advice you can give to poets attempting to write prose poems? I’ve been writing more and more prose poetry since finishing Ph.D. school. In my writing classes, I begin most classes with two or three seven minute poem prompts. We also go on writing field trips to local art museums and history museums. I always write with my students, following the prompts I assign. All writers need to write, to practice writing, to write badly, to write when they’re not feeling like writing, and to write in places and situations that are not ideal for inspiration—it’s also one reason I adore NaPoWriMo and others who generate prompts during National Poetry Month. In the cruelest month, we need a little prompting to write. I often find that some of the rough, seven minute poems that I’ve written with my students are the first drafts of what later becomes solid material. Virtually all of the mermaid poems in Drink I first drafted with my introductory and advanced poetry students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Is there one piece of advice you would like to share with other poets/writers? Practice, practice, practice.

What was the inspiration for the title of the book? In doing research for the book, I learned that the word “drink” was a synonym for ocean. Drink’s other meanings unified the themes within the book.

What/Who do you consider your greatest influences? The privileged position to have the right and opportunity to earn an education and to continue that education from high school all the way to Ph.D. school. My life is possible because I had the opportunity to learn.

What are you currently working on? I’m too shy to say, but I’m having fun working on it.

How would you describe your work/writing style in 140 characters? Drink explores the shapeshifting tales we tell of water, those connected to plane disappearances, downed ships, lost girls, forgotten lives.

Could you tell us about the creative process you use to write your poems? I’ve found the act of reading poetry often inspires me to write poetry. Other poets I know prefer to lock themselves in a room for several hours and it is that space of being away from the world, knowing they have all that time that unlocks poems for them. For me, I often have a theme or subject in mind—okay, let’s just be honest, I’m often obsessed by a topic—and the act of reading poetry launches me into the creative process of writing poems. I recently interviewed poet Greg Kosmicki and he said of his younger creative process that “my mind was on fire, and I was reading a lot of poems—which I think is essential to do to be a poet—and something about reading poems would touch off a spark. It was like my mind was a forest filled with tinder, awaiting only a careless poet to come along and toss his burning cigarette.” I appreciate that framework, the idea of a poet’s creative process kindled by poems.

Who are some of your favorite poets? Why? And what/who are you reading right now? My favorite poet is Anne Sexton, though I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson more and more recently. Her collected book was the first collected book of poems that I ever owned—a gift from an English teacher. I’m not sure why I was scared of her for so long, but I’m glad I’m now fearlessly reading her poems, even if I sometimes still get scared. My most favorite book of late is Ellen Bass’s Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). I’m also currently reading Joshua Gray’s chapbook Mera Bharat and book Principles of Belonging, both from Red Dashboard, Margo Taft Stever’s chapbook Lunatic Ball (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and Kristina Marie Darling’s books The Artic Circle (BlazeVOX Books, 2015) and Fortress (Sundress Publications, 2014). I’m also reading lots of poems from everywhere because it’s National Poetry Month.

Have you ever been unable to write, out of fear or just writer’s block? How do you overcome those moments?

I’ve never been unable to write, though I’ve certainly felt too busy! Writing with my students, participating in writing challenges, giving myself assignments to write, and having the gift of fellowships and writer’s residencies have all enabled me to find ways to write daily.

Deluminate That hipster nihilism is a false conceit; this is not Paris in the late ‘50s, second-hand typewriters clacking away like air-raid sirens of some precocious world of art, strange aperitifs the bold residuum of late night contemplations turned into philosophic bickering. In those poetic times, spontaneous flashes would masquerade as the offspring of Whitman, and lesser beats provided emotional rants, love songs to the everyday that were labeled profound. Rediscovered Catullus ignited the senses and Kerouac elevated and extended the flow of ordinary conversation to a shimmering reflection of a romantic bay’s city lights. Words were king then, and the frosty old man scoffed at such rule breakers and ne’er –do-wells. Now suave pretenders carry the mantle of trendy toreadors, stomping folk choruses that presage tough times ahead, busking homey messages to charlatans and clowns in disingenuous fashion.

Gary Glauber

The G Point of the Night by

Serkan Ergin

Our skin has touched at the G point of the night. There is a red earthquake at these lonely places of the skin. Desire grows chatty when your breath covers my chest – this breathing prologue to a rain of your movement. I am an explorer in your body’s secret city; my hands travel according to spells through your skin’s white atlas. The wasp’s non-sting of my tongue has settled – as caught in addictive scents of a small poppy field – here, to the South of your face. Oh! my love, subject and object of my life – The Great Wall of China shrinks its span to fit between one of your shoulders and the other; I am the other. Oh! these breasts are as The Dardanelles – no enemy fleet shall pass. There is an absolute hegemony here in your breast, in the night, which casts its spells cross-eyed.

translated from Turkish to English by Serkan Engin with James Pickersgill

Review of Drink - Laura Madeline Wiseman

by Christina Rodriguez

From mermaids to family chaos with language that bops in and out of an ocean of beautiful disarray, Drink by Laura Madeline Wiseman (BlazeVOX, 2015), takes us through a journey of mystic and memory. To this reader, the first half of the book set us up for looking at the rest through the lens of a mermaid who has seen it all, with moments many can relate to that are deeply rooted in the lives of poverty and abuse, turning them into magical nuggets of grace and disaster. Drink brings us a raw depiction of home through the eyes of youth with mermaid wands and head lice, navigating through the shadows through the eyes of a lost girl. Wiseman successfully tackles the prose poem as the chosen form throughout the book, not only impressing readers with language, but with crafts(wo) manship delicate built to bring us these tales of water. Two of the poems from the book have found a home in the pages of Typoetic.us, “Substances” and “Reading Our Sister’s Diary”. We are honor to not only have these poems in our third issue, but were able to get the chance to read Drink and interview this impressive poet who has twenty books and chapbooks in her bibliography (which makes this editor want to quit her current life and run away to write more poetry just like her!). We could go on and on about Drink, but these last lines from the poem “In the Des Moines Public Library” capture the essence of it all:

They swim through paragraphs where drift bottles have been dropped. They deep-sea dive in chapters of yet another ship lost from sky. They lull in the precise lines of poetry books of lost girls. They know their tail, too, is written in water, already gone. Go get your copy of Drink on Amazon! If you have Amazon Prime, you’ll get mermaids and poems within two days after reading this review.

Poetsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Corner

Christopher Grillo Christopher Eugene Grillo is an education professional and recent graduate of Southern Connecticut State University’s MFA program. He has published both fiction and poetry in various national magazines including Extracts, Up the River, Drunk Monkeys, and more. Christopher is Noctua Review’s Connecticut State University’s Poetry Prize runner up, a 2014 Best of Net nominee, and a 2014 Byline nominee. He has two forthcoming chapbooks of poetry, When Rain Fills the Chasm (Finishing Line Press) and The Six-fold Radial Symmetry of Snow (Zoetic Press). He moonlights as a high school football coach at his alma mater, North Haven. He can be found on Facebook.

Samantha Elizabeth Vacca Samantha Vacca is a poet and copywriter. Her poetry has been featured in 20 Dissidents, at the Bay Ridge Poets Society, and as a feature at the Poets Settlement. Her storytelling was featured at the How to Build a Fire series. A New York native, she lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, two dogs, and a monster cat. Website: www.samanthavacca.com | Facebook: facebook.com/samantha.vacca

Sara Emily Kuntz Sara Emily Kuntz has a BA in English from the University of Pittsburgh and a MFA in Creative Writing from Carlow University. Sara is a workshop facilitator and committee member for Union Square Slam, a weekly reading series in New York City. She has been published in Rivet, Stone Highway Review, Cabildo Quarterly, Rust + Moth, and Cactus Heart. Sara lives in Brooklyn with a big grey cat named Miso, like the soup. Facebook: facebook.com/saraemilykuntz

Pia Taavila-Borsheim Pia Taavila-Borsheim lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with her husband, David. She is a tenured, full professor and teaches literature and creative writing at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. In 2008, Gallaudet University Press published her collected poems, Moon on the Meadow: Collected Poems 1977-2007; Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Two Winters in 2011. Her poems have appeared in several journals including: The Bear River Review, The Broadkill Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Comstock Review, Barrow Street, Threepenny Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, storySouth, The Asheville Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Measure, Ibbetson Street Review, and The Southern Review. She is a frequent participant at the Bear River, Sewanee and Key West writing conferences. Blog: piataavilaborsheim.wordpress.com

John Thornburg John is a graduate student in Denver, Colorado. When he’s not studying or working you can find him skipping showers, writing poems, tinkering with short stories, and trying to work up the courage to write a novel. Blog: discofiction.tumblr.com

Sarah B. Boyle Sarah B. Boyle is a poet, mother, teacher, and activist. Her chapbook, What’s pink & shiny/ what’s dark & hard, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press. This past year, she edited a series of essays for Delirious Hem on rape culture and alt lit. Find her online at impolitelines.com.

Gary Glauber Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and teacher. He is a champion of the underdog who often composes to an obscure powerpop soundtrack. His first collection, Small Consolations, is due out in Summer 2015 from The Aldrich Press.

Hugo Q. Hugo J. Quizhpi served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, where he received meritorious recognition for services rendered during Operation Iraqi Freedom. His poems emanate from his military experiences and his indigenous Ecuadorian roots. His work has been published in numerous literary journals. He currently lives in Miami. Facebook: facebook.com/Hugo676

Laura Madeline Wiseman Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013), Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012), and the collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins, as well as two letterpress books, and eight chapbooks, including Spindrift (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Wiseman has a doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has received an Academy of American Poets Award, the Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Margie, and Feminist Studies. Website: www.lauramadelinewiseman.com

Jack Freedman Jack M. Freedman is a poet and spoken word artist from Staten Island, NYC. Previously, he was the editor of a Staten Island based anthology, Trails Through the Greenbelt. Currently, he is a student at The New School pursuing a certificate in Creative Arts & Health. You can find his artwork at facebook.com/artbyjmf.

Serkan Ergin A socialist Laz poet-author from Turkey, Serkan Engin was born in 1975 in Izmit, Turkey. He is from “Art of Labour Collective” in Turkey (In Turkish: Emegin Sanati). His poems appear in more than fifty literary journals in Turkey. In 2004, he published a poem manifesto, entitled Imagist Socialist Poetry. His poems have been published in English in The Tower Journal, Poetry’z Own, Belleville Park Pages, Far Enough East, Spilt Infinitive Lit Magazine, Empty Mirror, and countless others. Some of his poems also appeared in the leading Japanese philosophy and poetry journal Shi to Shisou. Blog: paperboatsofpoetry.blogspot.com.tr

Mary Ellen Talley Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have most recently been published in Floating Bridge Review Pontoon, Hospital Drive, and Spillway as well as forthcoming in Quiddity and Kaleidoscope. Her poetry has received a Pushcart nomination. Mary Ellen works with words and children as a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) in Seattle Public Schools. Contact: maryellen.talley@facebook.com

Mariah E. Wilson Mariah E. Wilson is a writer from beautiful British Columbia. She has been published in Thin Air Magazine, Every Day Poets, The Kitchen Poet, Literary Orphans and The Corner Club Press, for which she is also now the Poetry Editor. Her first poetry collection, We Walk Alone, was published by Writers AMuse Me Publishing. Her debut novel, The Demon in Him, will be released in 2015. You can find her at her Website, on Tumblr, Facebook, or Twitter. Her books can be found on Amazon, Goodreads, and Writers Amuse Me.

Mary Stein Mary Stein is an nineteen year old who has yet to decide what she wants to do with her life. Currently her main goal is to get her shit together,and eventually break it to her mother that sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not straight, and actually a communist. Website: theplacewhereiwrite.tumblr.com

Brianna Pike Brianna Pike is an Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. She received her MA from the University of North Texas and her MFA from Murray State University. Her poems have appeared in Glassworks, Gravel, Heron Tree, and Mojave River Review among others. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband. Blog: briannajaepike.wordpress.com

Angela La Voie Angela La Voie is an MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles. In 2013, she was selected as a finalist in the Catharsis Journal memoir competition. Her poetry is included in the Self-Portrait Poetry Collection and Haiku Journal. Poems are forthcoming in Clerestory Poetry Journal and Blue Fifth Review. Website: www.angelalavoie.com | Facebook: facebook.com/angela.k.lavoie Twitter: twitter.com/AbundantWriting

Mary E

Mary S

P i a Ta a Ser

Gary

Sara

Emi

Erg

Briann

rsheim

Angela

Glau

ly Ku

Hugo Q

lley

tein

vila-Bo

kan

l l e n Ta

Sar

B. B

anth

a El

izab

eth

hornbu

Maya H

oyle Lau

Sam

John T

a Pike

L a Vo i e

ber

ntz

Jack ra M

Vac ca

ade

line

Chr

Wis

Free

ema

istop

her

enry

dma

Grill