Mondrian: Composition with Blue and Yellow (1935)
You stand above the city streets swaying to Big Band music playing in the distance. The girders of this high rise banish your fear of heights. Sunlight and water, structure and space find their balance. You say you could paint this? Look again. Simplicity this good is complicated. Pull out a single line and play Pick Up Sticks. Add one: the domino tilts and topples the stack. Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia in the first class admitting women. She became fascinated by fine art at an early age, even though she had to go to the World Book Encyclopedia to find it. Today she visits museums everywhere she travels and spends time at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, where her husband is a volunteer guide. Alarie’s poetry book, Running Counterclockwise, contains many ekphrastic poems. Please visit her at alariepoet.com.
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Splintered
I am the girl spinning in her own shadow, hands spread, forehead to feet toxic. Where could I grow in the company of others? Coal in my chest, coal down my legs. Some may see light behind me, but when I spin, I fracture light and cover it with my coal dust. If someone steps toward me, I spin faster. Proximity invites tenderness, curiosity. I turn both into disaster. Sometimes other children approach. Sometimes grown-ups. Sometimes they cover me with more coal dust. Instantly I demand flight, but I want them to stay. When they obey and leave, I believe they know me. Sometimes I believe they don’t know me. I want them to sit next to me so I can stop spinning. I want to hear stories or feel the quiet of their bodies, which helps me breathe. The coal dust may have been inside me when I was born or it may have found me when I sat in my crib looking through the bars, watching the leaves and birds on the tree outside the window. The window heard me then. It may have opened itself so I could listen to the singing. Maybe that’s when the coal slipped in, or maybe it moved through the crack between the shut door and the floor. A bath can’t remove it, but just like the fairy tales I heard when a lady spoke to her baby from the sidewalk beneath the window, a kiss can help it go away. Once I kissed the back of my own hand. That helped. That arm and hand aren’t covered with coal dust anymore. It’s the rest of me that’s a problem. I’m lucky to be alive. I’m lucky to have this dress even though it’s filthy. That’s my fault. Once, it was yellow. If I live alone when I am old enough or if I live in the woods, I could grow up to be a fairy tale with birds and leaves and trees around me singing. They wouldn’t sing to me, but they wouldn’t mind my spinning. I might become part of the woods then or a forest, like a family. The birds and leaves might not come near me but they could live nearby. Then I could be still sometimes and rest. Jan Freeman Jan Freeman is author of Hyena, Simon Says (nominated for the NBCC Award in poetry), and Autumn Sequence. Her new collection Blue Structure is forthcoming with Calypso Editions in June 2016. Her chapbook “Silence” was semifinalist for the Tupelo, the Tupelo/Sunken Garden, and the Black Lawrence competitions. Poems are forthcoming in The Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently in The Academy of American Poets Poem a Day and in The Naugatuck River Review. She lives in Western Massachusetts, and directs Paris Press, which she founded in 1995. Surrounded by Monet’s Water Lilies
Salle 1, L’Orangerie, Paris (in italics: quotes by Monet) I would like to paint the way a bird sings. Seduced by a serenade of light, land, trees, and sky dive deeper, deeper, deeper into the pond. We wobble at the edge, nearly toppling in after them. The subject…is the light. Lily pads link mirror worlds. Lavender peace. We still our sway, mooring ourselves to a bench while other pilgrims orbit us. …appearance changes at any moment Visitors hush to whispers, suspended in the moment paint touched canvas, even as we swim in the light of a full day, hours shuffled by art. It’s terrible how the light runs out. We understand why sunset tosses its last gold coins, trying to buy off the night. Alarie Tennille Alarie Tennille was born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia in the first class admitting women. She became fascinated by fine art at an early age, even though she had to go to the World Book Encyclopedia to find it. Today she visits museums everywhere she travels and spends time at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, where her husband is a volunteer guide. Alarie’s poetry book, Running Counterclockwise, contains many ekphrastic poems. Please visit her at alariepoet.com. This poem was first published in the I-70 Review. Hey, Venus
I’m watching my husband watch the PBS cameraman, who’s watching and recording Kilauea’s underwater flow, and he’s not comprehending at all why he can’t look away, the attraction’s so primal, hardwired into him, he doesn’t recognize it for what it is: a peep show, Earth’s tabasco sauce meeting Pacific spume, giving birth to cascading mounds of pillow lava: a new landscape being born right in front of him on the seabed. And I love, too, that he doesn’t know he’s staring at art, at the Venus of Willendorf, unashamed in his lust for her, freed from the herd pressure to prefer the Big Island’s bony palms; unconsciously enjoying my ugli-fruit figure, drawn to the volcano’s magmatic breasts, to her suss-sussing song; seduced once again, like his first time, by the girl who whispers, Skip the condom, in his ear. Maureen Kingston This poem was first published in Gargoyle. Maureen Kingston’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, Gargoyle, Gravel, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Misfitmagazine.net, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, riverbabble, So to Speak, and Stoneboat. A few of her prose pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards. The Quarry
The house of the sculptress stood in the middle of an abandoned quarry where limestone had been carved away, to leave a powdery grey, almost surreal landscape. She had chosen this site purposely, believing correctly that the starkness might force her imagination into blossom. There were times in the night, when she heard the wind and the cries of coyotes, she felt she was in the desert. Yet the house was only a short distance from Taxco, the silver mine town, near enough to send her gardener Ramon for food and supplies when needed. Now as she lay awake she felt something akin to doubt, or was it expectation? The moon full, it glowed with chalky light and made her bed effervescent. Moonlight played in her studio as well, making shadows on the walls and on her newly completed sculpture. Moonlight danced on the figure of the Mexican girl still emerging from stone, so much like Michelangelo’s captives from the Boboli Gardens. She turned on her side, her insomnia gaining on her. She decided she did not feel fear. She had lived alone so long she feared nothing. No, if she felt anything in her bed in the gleaming quarry, it was regret. But she had made the right decision, to fire Ramon. But she knew that, after nearly a quarter of a century, Ramon was the only family she had, perhaps ever had. She had always felt distant from her own people, even as she lived among them. They thought her mad, or at least unbalanced. Now an occasional relative would come from Boston or Baltimore to visit her, the eccentric Margaret. They would return to the East and make a full report to the rest of the family. The last visitor had been a niece, Gloria, recently graduated from college. Her graduation gift was a trip to visit Margaret in Taxco. While Gloria enjoyed the train ride through the South, crossing the border at Laredo, she disliked Mexico immediately. She found the house in the quarry forbidding, even with the lovely garden surrounding it. “Aunt Margaret, how can you live in such desolation? There’s no one to talk to, and hardly anything to listen for,” she had complained. They had sat on the veranda overlooking the garden. Ramon was there, as he always was, watering or clearing weeds. Ramon knew the garden as well as he knew himself, as well as his family he saw only at night when he work was completed. “I find there is much to hear,” Margaret told her niece. ”After all, we hear what we want to. Silence is good. Here I hear only peace, something I never heard back home.” It was this peace that brought Margaret to this place so many years before. Even then she was certain the quarry stirred with life. In Boston she sculpted in a rented loft off the Commons. But after spending countless hours starting and stopping, then staring while waiting for inspiration, she realized that time was flaking away as quickly as the clay drying on the table. It was then that she made her decision, one she never regretted, to move to Taxco. As she lay awake in the moon white stillness of the room, she remembered discovering Ramon. He watched her through the studio window as she stood before the nearly completed sculpture of the Mexican girl. She had pretended not to see him. Ramon studied Margaret’s rapt attention to detail as she worked on the sculpture. He was mesmerized by the angelic face of the girl coming into being, emerging from stone. One foot already stepped free of the limestone block. In another week the girl would be completely free. She would no longer have to depend on Margaret’s deftness with a chisel, with whims of her wrist in combat with stone. Ramon, a voyeur in the open window, watched and learned. Behind him the hills rose like heavy clouds in the afternoon sky. Margaret wondered how the girl’s hands should be shaped. Would they be delicate with the fragility of youth, or would they be coarse from a hard peasant life? There was still time to go either way. The look in the girl’s eyes was a distant gaze. She would never be the kind to stay in one place. Instead she would wander, always anxious to know what was beyond the next hill, or what happens at horizon’s end. She would be enamored of rainbows, Margaret thought. Then, without looking his way, Margaret could sense Ramon moving away, returning to the garden. Then Ramon began showing up late for work, and when he finally appeared he was drunk. His work suffered, but Margaret decided to over look it. After so many years she would give him the benefit of the doubt. But she wondered what it was that made him drink. Probably family problems, she decided. But it continued, and it was the garden that suffered. Margaret was unsure what to do. When she took her afternoon walks she came across butchered hedges and flowerbeds choked with weeds. She found carelessness with every step. “Ramon, what has happened?” she asked him finally. “The garden is ruined.” He apologized and promised it would not happen again. But Margaret was unsure if he was sober enough to understand her. She was disappointed. He had never acted this way, not in twenty-five years. One morning she sent Ramon to gather rosewood from a place in the hills not far from the quarry. He left quite early and did not return all day. Margaret busied herself in the studio but she found it hard to concentrate. She knew the rosewood was only an hour away. She imagined he was drinking somewhere. She worried he might end up in jail or worse. Finally, late in the afternoon, as Margaret stood in the garden among the ill-tended beds and dried soil, she heard a car approach in the distance. She followed its progression by a trail of white smoke rising up from the road as the car sped downhill from the main road to the quarry. The car emerged in the clearing and steered wildly into the driveway. Ramon got out with a dazed expression on his face. He was drunk, and as he tried to gather the rosewood from the trunk, the pieces fell from his hands to the ground. Margaret followed him as he staggered to the studio with the rosewood. After he dropped the wood into the bin and turned to leave, she stepped in his path. “Ramon, I can’t overlook your behavior any longer. You’ll have to go. The garden is ruined. I want you to leave, and not come back.” Ramon listened and then slunk off, not making a sound. He walked back up the dusty road he had driven down so wildly. Margaret watched him, a lone figure that seemed to evaporate into the distant hillside, arms at his sides and his shoulders slumped. He walked into the hill like the Mexican girl stepping free from the limestone, Margaret thought. In a few moments he was gone, as if he had vanished into stone. In bed she decided this was what bothered her. It was as though Ramon knew something about the quarry, perhaps that he had discovered one of its qualities. She gave up trying to sleep, her insomnia winning out. She got up, and as the night was chilly she gathered a robe around her. In the kitchen she made jasmine tea. She walked through the shadows to the Mexican girl in the studio. The girl’s eyes were wide open. That makes two of us, Margaret mused. “Soon, dear. Soon you will be on your own,” she whispered to the figure in limestone as she began the final touches on the statue. A week later Margaret was awakened at dawn by the front door bell. She roused herself, put on a smock and rushed to answer it. She so rarely had visitors, she imagined it was bad news from the East. But when she opened the door she saw Ramon standing there, a small cloth sack in his hands. Behind him she could see the rose-tinted limestone coming to life beneath the breaking sky of dawn. “I told you not to come back,” she said. “I’ve no use for a drunk around here.” She was intimidated that he would return so soon. But she could not help feeling sorry for him. He stood before her in his tattered clothes, his dark eyes overflowing with sadness. “I worked in your garden a long time, nearly half my life,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I made something for you,” he said, handing her the cloth sack. “What is it?” she asked, now embarrassed as she took the sack. She opened it and found a carved rosewood figurine of the Mexican girl. Margaret recognized it immediately. But the figurine was unfinished. Margaret then realized that it was at the point of completion her own had been, a week before when she had fired Ramon. She had since finished her own. “I didn’t know how to finish it,” Ramon apologized. “It’s beautiful,” Margaret said, turning it over and over again in her hands, her astonishment growing. Though it was crudely crafted, Ramon had managed to endow the figurine with a primitive beauty. Margaret saw that, even it was a copy of her own work, the style itself belonged to Ramon. “For a long time I couldn’t see your people in the quarry,” he told her, his head downcast. “I drank. I thought something was wrong with me. But when I went to get the rosewood, I finally understood. I knew there were people in the wood trying to get out. I knew I had to help them. But I drank more because I couldn’t accept it. Was it the same way in the quarry?” What Margaret had so vaguely expected was now clear to her. She could see night stars fading in the morning light, but she knew the stars remained., One only has to know where they are, she told herself. In this lonely place she had never felt alone. Now she knew that Ramon understood this as well. There were so many in the quarry waiting to be set free, and so little time. “Come with me, Ramon,” she said. “There is so much more work to do.” Christopher Woods The Quarry previously appeared in Stone Voices. Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Houston and Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published a novel, THE DREAM PATCH, a prose collection, UNDER A RIVERBED SKY, and a book of stage monologues for actors, HEART SPEAK. His work has appeared in THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, NEW ORLEANS REVIEW, COLUMBIA and GLIMMER TRAIN, among others. His photographs can be seen in his gallery -http://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/ He is currently compiling a book of photography prompts for writers, FROM VISION TO TEXT. My Mona Lisa
I know why the grays & greens / the saltpan pallor / the venereal backdrop / your portrait’s a study of the eternal female glaze / the pewter putty we women apply to conceal our hot hurt-blush / our coralline scars lapidé / your word for yourself / your autonym / a child bride of stoning / like Jane Eyre though more chic & more pissed at the maman who starved you & kicked you to the curb / worse off than any orphan when a mother lives but doesn’t want you chère Romaine / your portrait’s a landscape of all women ever abandoned by their mothers / & though you cloak your sorrow in male drag / no corporeal man could ever rescue you from this mother of all primal wounds the trauma of it mildews your complexion / drains the red from your lips / & no matter where we stand in the gallery your spectral face demands we stop & bear witness to the death of mythic tendresse Maureen Kingston Maureen Kingston’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, Gargoyle, Gravel, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Misfitmagazine.net, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, riverbabble, So to Speak, and Stoneboat. A few of her prose pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards. Farewell, Farewell shouts ring out from inside the caboose unseen children calling she wants to go with them but wait one more moment she says waves spiritedly golden hair tousled by a sweet breeze farewell farewell family dear tethered in time riveted in space various angles of lean returning reflected waves the physics of love farewell farewell anonymous sky bleak land bright & dark orange & blue confusing the eye old gnarled oak tree anchors the panel keeps the instant of illusion alive is there a future when comes a fall does the family awaken unlock themselves from frozen angles give their thin arms respite trudge back home flat painting pretending to be three-dimensional a sham insert makes loss less painful what is reality the philosopher asks at the subatomic level the substance of the material world falls away like a panel crashing in the forest leaving only grief to hear Linda Stryker Linda Stryker lives in Phoenix, but sometimes in her head; her cat and piano are in there, too. She is a poet, teacher, radio reader, and tennis player. Her work has been appeared in several journals and anthologies including New Millennium Writings, Highlights for Children, ditch poetry, and The Speculative Edge, among others. Blue Structure
You are no longer outside even when you stand close to the blue string which represents the wall even when you stand close enough so that you do not see the string still you are inside you are not outside The string surrounds you on three sides From some vantage points you may appear to be standing beside a blue stick in a field but the string is there and you are not outside you are inside even if everyone cannot see that you are in and when you stand close to the string so that in some places it disappears entirely from your line of vision you are still inside It may comfort you to think you are not inside but you are standing in the structure whether or not you forget it’s there whether or not anyone else notices You can leave the structure The string is only on three sides You can leave when you want to leave but so often you forget that you are inside or inside you only see the string and the field seems separate and too difficult to reach You need to turn around you need to walk out of the open arms as if you are walking away from the field but that is the only way into it If you cut the string which you think about sometimes or if you climb under it or even manage to climb over it you are still inside because threads of the string stick to you and wherever the string is you are inside and beyond the string is always outside The only way out is through the open space where the string stops tied to two blue sticks in the ground away from the field toward the brambles that line the field which seem more confining than the string but they are a fence like the string but a fence in the world a fence along every side of the field Inside the structure it seems you are free because you can see so much on the other side The string hardly seems there It does not seem to be as close to your head as your own hands but it is and even when you imagine that you live without it or there is no way to live without it or there is no way to live with it there is always that space that requires several steps backwards and one step out It is so hard to imagine that living without the soft movement of the string will be any different from living with it but the structure always requires in even though there are no signs no contracts and no locks there is nothing keeping you inside except what you imagine it would be to live outside in the field where blue is not sticks and string Blue is above your head and you cannot touch it though it is almost always there Jan Freeman This is the title poem from Jan Freeman's forthcoming collection of poems, Blue Structure (Calypso Editions, 2016). Jan Freeman is author of Hyena, Simon Says (nominated for the NBCC Award in poetry), and Autumn Sequence. Her new collection Blue Structure is forthcoming with Calypso Editions in June 2016. Her chapbook “Silence” was semifinalist for the Tupelo, the Tupelo/Sunken Garden, and the Black Lawrence competitions. Poems are forthcoming in The Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently in The Academy of American Poets Poem a Day and in The Naugatuck River Review. She lives in Western Massachusetts, and directs Paris Press, which she founded in 1995. |
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