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From a Prison Notebook
Words won’t hurt you? These laser-guided missiles are locked on. Whaam! You’re gone. Mantz Yorke This poem was also inspired by Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England. He is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in a number of print magazines, anthologies and e-magazines in the UK, Ireland, Israel, Canada, the US and Hong Kong. Unpainted Pictures
Here he sits at a table in the kitchen, a vase of poppies set just so, and on his palette water mixed with tinctures he’s hidden in canisters, colors brought out against orders. Is a flower’s soul always innocent? Perhaps a bit of carmine, and stems of grenadine. These he renders on letter paper taken from the office upstairs. Verboten, the act of painting this degenerate modernism that spilled from his oils before the regime gave its orders. And he a former sympathizer. Maybe a flower becomes a soldier, the shoulders overbearing above slender legs walking all night in the snow. Does the tulip bleed into its neighbour, and, if a cloud comes to the window, might it blot out the sun almost completely? These shapes, a bouquet unfettered above turquoise, a garden fragrant with peonies and lilac blended such that there is no ground upon which to grow. Sometimes the sea threatens to inhale him, just as it has his work--verboten-- the next wave coming on violet seas with its undertow, undiluted white set to drown his own brooding maze of moods from the once-upon-a-yellow-sky. Judith Skillman Judith Skillman’s recent book is Kafka’s Shadow, Deerbrook Editions. Her work has appeared in LitMag, Shenandoah, Zyzzyva, FIELD, and elsewhere. Awards include an Eric Mathieu King Fund grant from the Academy of American Poets. She is a faculty member at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Washington. Visit www.judithskillman.com Arch of Hysteria
The man who hangs from the rooftree is wrenched back into an arc his bronze skin glints where it catches the light his fingertips might touch his heels were it not for the spine's resistance the thrum of his mind might rest if he could arc into a circle if heels and fingertips could meet. Sharon Phillips Sharon is a retired college principal, who lives on the Isle of Portland, England. She spends her time cooking, reading and writing poems, some of which have been published or are forthcoming in Algebra of Owls, Ink Sweat and Tears, Picaroon and Three Drops from a Cauldron. Frida Explains Herself
Because I held that crescent child, sliver of a life, but could not keep him. Tried to memorize his silent mouth, trace the blue waters through his parchment skin. Because I smelled Diego on my sister’s neck, so familiar yet unplaceable for a moment: our blankets, peppery scent of his hair, the paint under his fingernails. Because I have dug into my lovers, a robber sifting dirt of their stories, collecting artifacts from their rawest places. Because I have been asked for so much of my blood. I did not know myself until I found us there on canvas. Broken. Together. A map I had not seen, yet knew to be my way home. Stacy Boe Miller Stacy Boe Miller is an artist, mother, and second year poetry candidate in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Idaho. Her most recent work can be found in Mary Jane's Farm Magazine, The Pacific Northwest Inlander, and Mothers Always Write, where an essay of hers was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. On the Shore of a Woman A red-headed man in his late thirties collapses onto farmland from a bullet in his side. Anvers, France, 1890. I am ever on the shore of a woman. Lap upon her sand, then withdraw. Wet salt bristles my nostrils. In boggy regions fish die and I chew her salty bread. Pores appear on her moss-slick skin, but I see them only as stars faraway. My pulse swells and breaks like surf. Her heart foghorns across the blackness. In pools I near her grace, then ebb. Her undulating body pulls then repels. Compressed air belches and grit grinds between us. I squeeze into her mud. She opens and then me. I am milk-white. She is liquid eyes. However deep I wash into her, more of me remains outside. I come from inside a woman and try always to return. I began in the black womb but found no black in nature. Not in the beginning—my stillborn brother in the grave outside the family home, my name upon his cross—nor at the end, my sky clotted with ravens. Sunlight dances into my wound. Zinc yellow glints off the bullet and sparkles my red lakes. Aquamarine and vermillion skitter about distant silver hills. Cerulean sky rushes forward. I open into mother earth. My blood, darkening to carmine, mingles with this soil a breathing colour, tinting torso and limbs in arc and sinew. Like a woman divulging herself at the moment of climax or a teardrop turning out its salt. Never has pigment been more true. The freshly turned, sweet earth blossoms her fragrance to me while I soak into her dark, forgiving soil and pass through her muscles and her sighs. No, I found no wife. But I have mated: the involuntary trembling, the opening, the emptying, and then the cooling blood, peace in the limbs, the dissolving across the earth. To the women I found: Cousin K., how I still hear your, “No, never, never,” as you ran from my proposal. Was my love frightening? Its vessel horrid? And to Sien, the same storm that cast you onto my shore in one wave reclaimed you in the next. What worth my arms not strong enough to save you from the streets? Lastly Rachel, you thought it mad but I cut for you the lobe of flesh I tread to the truth in me. Now I lay open the whole of my body. I slough in the sun, expose the genuine, strip the profane. Cocoon-like, I writhe to free myself. I unfold to a new, beautiful form. Oh, if a woman were to touch her bare love to mine, what suns we would excite. My colleagues, sisters, brothers, have I convinced you of the sinew in nature? Lifeblood courses through her veins. And light. Yes. Light. The sun’s chrome yellow works into the life of a thing, almond leaves, sunflowers, cornfields, all shards of a single mirror. Luminous light. Pregnant hills, sweet orchards, tender meadows—visions to calm the skin. Whorls of starlight in a dark universe spiral beyond like the generation of children to come. I will have no children, but I explored life as a child, like the meadow near my home in Zundert. One day a butterfly, the Apollo, fluttered just above the reach of straw grasses. My eyes traced its bobbing path through the air until it dipped below the horizon where a stream bordered the meadow. When it didn’t arise again I followed. I stood at the stream edge and saw the shapes and oil tints of its wings varying in the sun. Rocks sparkled beside it. It fluttered some seconds below the water. Did I ever paint anything so tender? I sold but one work—to a woman painter. That and praise in Paris embarrasses me after all this time. I did not do enough. Yet I did profit; I tendered everything. The creations I leave behind will also find rest. Dear brother, dear Theo, what was I without you? We will be, as always, side by side. In all history it is couplings that conceive. A handshake in thought. My alizarin blood and the sienna manure couple in this farmland. Here—with my finger draw a line, a curl there, a hard curve, more maroon here. Incline her head look back across into the distance. Hair waving on one, yes, off one shoulder. Yes. Finished. I create my end. Liquid, I return to woman. I return to her at last. I sign my life—Vincent. Hank Lawson A version of this story previously appeared in Art Times. Hank Lawson has written two pre-published novels, short historical fiction published in the Chicago Quarterly Review and Art Times, songs, a range of music, and occasional poetry. Mobiles At the entrance to the Dayton Art Museum, a tall piece of kinetic art guards the doors. On second thought perhaps it is knighting the stream of comers and goers: a shining, polished stainless steel structure, a perpendicular mast (a square-sided pole) 20 feet or so tall, which includes its divergence into a large wye's reaching arms, and at each of their tops, a shining sword-like, tapering, five-foot triangular piece of metal that juts out from the point of attachment near its thicker square end and cuts empty space, slicing around independently at the prodding of invisible currents. I can't see the mechanism that holds these rotating blades in place yet allows their movement. Trying to do so, I stand near the sculpture's base craning my neck and farther off gaining some details in the distance but at the same time of course losing others. This crafts-person's trick in achieving balance is obviously beyond my ken. I can imagine the mind and the limbs creating it, though. They're in a well-lit large warehouse-like room playing with materials that became what I see. Balance seems to be at the centre of this art—maybe it's at the centre of all art. If so, how odd. Some of the most unstable people I know are artists of one sort or another. If this observation is true, then maybe practicing an art based on balance appeals to kinetic artists because they find it hard to achieve balance in their own lives. At any rate, I'm thinking now of their act of creating as performance art, like someone on stage entertaining an audience. To get my drift, go to youtube and view the video of Miyoko Shida Rigolo's performance. You'll have a hard time thinking it's not a trick of video razzmatazz. What she does is totally based on balance. She begins by taking what looks like a large goose feather from the bun in her hair and balancing it upon a slightly longer and what looks like a heavier piece of wood or bamboo, though perhaps it's some lighter material. She holds this second piece at its balancing point, then repeats this procedure with increasingly larger pieces of the same material, slowly balancing one after another beneath the one before it, one hand holding the latest balancing point, the other introducing the newer piece of wood. At the end a large mobile of fourteen pieces slowly circle on her balancing hand and finally upon one last erect piece of wood. All the time during composition, at each stage of construction, you can see the wavering nature of the loose balance as well as the entire piece turning. Then she....well, you need to see the quiet climax, the breathtaking beauty in this finished art, which is mobile even throughout its creation. It's another extension of the mobile idea, which I think must have derived from observing natural phenomena. The leaf or flower on a stem waving as a breeze affects it. The piece of tissue that hangs down tempting prey into deadly range of the angler fish's mouth. The glinting water drops spreading out, sprinkling down onto the ground, creating patterns, dripping from ice as it melts from an eave in bright sunlight several hours during the day. A week of the samaras helicoptering, swirling down from maple trees until gone for another year. The shower of pink crabapple blossoms that I've enjoyed, standing under limbs, immersed in a powerfully rich aroma some springs in my backyard. The more constant example is the night show of stars, which hold such permanent positions that humans have recognized and named the relationship of stars to one another for millennia. A close study of the night sky stimulates wonder of course, and part of that concerns a perception of our own infinitesimal existence in the grandeur of the cosmos. But also, the wonder about what holds the continuing relationship of the things we observe up there in place. Science suggests gravitational pulls, magnetic attractions and repulsions, orbital forces beyond my knowledge but clear enough to me to prompt comparisons. They remind me of the wires and hidden human devices that hold the pieces of popular mobiles in a stable relationship while allowing their movements to occur. In this way I end up also thinking about myself. Human beings are held on our own wires and strings, our invisible emotions and thoughts, the DNA patterns that formulate who we are, the inheritances that go back into humanity's prehistoric origins. Are we not to a large extent mobiles ourselves? And all those supposedly stationary things that we assume are landmarks? The human eye can catch only a limited range of motion. We don't see the tree's slow movement, the erosion of a sandstone crag, or witness very well the hummingbird's flapping wings. If a movement is too slow or too fast, we miss it. Perception also depends on the nature of the moving object's substance and colour. Our eyes have help. Scientists have extended our ability to perceive the otherwise invisible, but we don't have to spend thousands for very complicated machine help. More simply, an album of photographs that show how we looked down through the years back to childhood can shock us and prompt nostalgia. Doesn't it also suggest those hidden wires that connect us all? Making any kind of art employs magic. So does the viewers' appreciation of a piece of art. This kind of rapture lasts for the period during which a creation engages us, when we respond emotionally and intellectually to it. So here I am just outside the Art Museum's front doors, a George Rickey mobile, Two Lines Oblique, prodding me to circle around it in my mind, following the artist's impulses, judgments, and skill, levitating in my imagination at the artist's stimulation. Bill Vernon Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folk dances. Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town, and his poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Almost Enough to Navigate By
He reaches out gently to touch the surface of the universe-- round as it is. The late afternoon sun presses through the leaded glass dividing itself around the books, tapestries, his map of the heavens. His globe has the constellations’ storybook bodies adhered to the night. He measures a theory with his thumb and forefinger-- his hand arced as if cupping his lover’s breast. He has often thought of her body as a map he was unable to read, the reason why she left. The freckles on her shoulder almost Orion’s Belt. The memory of her embrace, the distance between stars. Melanie Figg Melanie Figg is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. Her chapbook, Hurry, Love, was printed in standard and fine art editions with paper artist Doug Abbott (Fuori Editions). She has won many awards for her poetry including grants from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. With an MFA in Poetry, her poems, essays and reviews have been published in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, LIT, Colorado Review and others. She curates Literary Art Tours in DC galleries (aWashington Post Editor’s Pick), and teaches and coaches writers in community art centers and privately. www.melaniefigg.net midnight riders
they ride every night, past midnight, by our sleeping houses up & down the hills while the fat moon glows & the flower petals open with a sigh, the big guy, the little guy & the bird that points the way. this is their time, every night is the day of the dead & they ride like the wind, their bike light beaming in our graffiti dreaming until the morning comes & the funky rooster crows come home! Tricia Marcella Cimera This poem and artwork pairing is a collaboration between writer Tricia Marcella Cimera and tattoo artist and painter at Funky Rooster Tattoo and Art Gallery. It first appeared in The Fox Poetry Box. Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Look for her work in these diverse places (some forthcoming): Anti-Heroin Chic, Buddhist Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Failed Haiku, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Mad Swirl, Silver Birch Press, The Bees are Dead, Wild Plum and elsewhere. She has two micro collections, THE SEA AND A RIVER and BOXBOROUGH POEMS, on the Origami Poems Project website. Tricia believes there’s no place like her own backyard and has traveled the world (including Graceland). She lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois / in a town called St. Charles / by a river named Fox and keeps a Poetry Box in her front yard. Excavation
Once revered, pedestal’d, then pursued, reviled, forsaken: her mound beneath this mound, uncovered. Faceless, she is all pendulous of belly, ponderous of thigh. Her arms drape bursting breasts belonging to no man. Her swollen labia could birth a legion or devour one. We were every one of us Venus, warm in your palm, so easily cradled, so easily discarded. You bury us, abandoned, then excavate, display, catalog our ruin. Once nubile, we now cradle sagging bellies on our laps like the children we lost and bore and lost again. We grieve, rejoice-- grieve. We bleed but do not die. Sometimes we break Kathryn Paul Kathryn Paul has lived in Seattle longer than she has lived anywhere else. She is a survivor of many things, including cancer and downsizing. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Hospital Drive; Ekphrasis; Lunch Ticket; Words Dance; The Fem; and Stirring: A Literary Collection. |
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