Nicole Saints, The Departed, Gods, And Fetishes
 
Street scene:  Graffiti.
“SAMO for all those who are tired of civilization.”
SEEN and KODAK and MCDONALDS are in the sky.
On the ground Basquiat is holding a spray-can. 
Andy Warhol is in a yellow cab.
Except it is not New York outside. 
The sidewalks are cobblestone, 
ancient, Al-Andalus. 
 
When the full moon comes
I’ll go to Sevilla.
I’ll go to Sevilla.
With neon lightsabers
and a jedi cloak.
Skeletons will wear New York Yankees caps.
I’ll go to Sevilla.
The hip hop will be the same as corporate radio.
Urban art is now a fashion.
And the Christs and Virgins will be tattooed with FIFA, COCA-COLA.
 
When the full moon comes
I’ll go to Sevilla.
The streets will be graffiti.  
 
I’ll go to Sevilla
a virgin will be made of bricks
she will pray over a leaking AGIP oil barrel.
I’ll go to Sevilla
where coexistence is friendship
where culture is creativity
and John the Baptist stands over a Ferrari,
holding a cross.  Except he is not John the Baptist.
He has Darth Maul’s red face, and giant breast implants.
(Only the black christ child looks as we have seen.)
Fortune does not move lineage
and no one is spared from death.
 
It is not New York outside.
The sidewalks are cobblestone,
ancient, Al-Andalus.
The graffiti will say,
“SAMO for all those who are tired of civilization.”

Nicole Henares

Nicole Henares (Aurelia Lorca) is a poet, storyteller, and teacher who lives in San Francisco California.  She has her BA in English from UC Davis, her MFA in Writing and Consciousness from California Institute of Integral Studies, and is an alumna of the Voices of Our Nation Writing Workshops.  Her work has appeared throughout the small press.  She is interested in how Lorca’s duende, the duende of Andalusia and flamenco, is a cross cultural spirit.  
 http://www.aurelialorca.com
 

Editor's note: The Makapansgat pebble, or the pebble of many faces, is a jasperite chunk naturally chipped, resembling  a crude construct of a human face. It was found in a dolerite cave in Limpopo, South Africa, in 1925, far away from any possible natural source. It's considered possible that the australopithecine recognized the symbolic face and thus saved the piece, carrying it back to their camp and treasuring it among their rudimentary possessions. If true, this would mark the earliest known example of symbolic thinking.

The Makapansgat Pebble of Many Faces

Two eyes hollowed out like someone
who has seen too much, drawn
cheeks and a mouth that might scream.
She looks like a toothless old woman still
gathering herself every morning to lift
eggs out of the nests, pull grasses off the plains,
bathe in the light. Or he looks like the king deposed,
the ape defeated, still certain
that his chin juts out. He is the child
we tried to leave behind and couldn't.
We carried him quivering to this cave.
We came upright on slender legs
through the late Pliocene. Our brains almost
the same as your brains. We did not chisel out
these jasperite faces, but art, we found,
we carried with us.

Deborah Bacharach

Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015).  Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Antigonish Review, The Southampton Review, and the Inquisitive Eater amony many others.  Find out more about her at  DeborahBacharach.com.

Rise Up (After Thorma)
 
The old buildings witness the revolution
in the square.
They retain their style, some
pull it tightly around them
for the future.
What of the slush-covered
paving stones which connect them?
Stamped by the angry,
the jubilant, the speech-listeners,
the rabble roused.
 
The old buildings hold aloft
the dignity in remembrance,
in the knowledge that outcomes
are a fair market, unpredictable,
that only time consecrates, and
they hold much of that in their
pockets – basements, foundations,
window frames and the tiles of
canted roofs. So many thick hidden
beams.
 
Their calm is taken as tacit
support. And now the empty
spaces in the square are leaned
upon, and suddenly demand filling,
suddenly demand action. As if
some greatness hidden there. The
majesty transmission of facades,
now intercepted.
 
But the buildings make no loans,
none which can be redeemed.
Politics are borrowed, yes, and lives,
too; steel remelted, scorched crops
become rich, fecund land. Still the hallowed
cannot hallow, that is their grace,
is grace.
 
The commotion below, in the square –
something about motion is juvenile,
moments are distractions, too sweet.
And emotions true, but only to themselves,
and to others of their kind. Yet events
have their queer necessity.
 
The buildings, too, could be known
as risings. Now they witness the rebellion
at their feet, but never pause their
celebration, the long fête of being.
 
The buildings, the old buildings
watch the revolution in the square.

Patrick Cole

Patrick Cole: "Poetry of mine has appeared recently in The Heron Tree, Arsenic Lobster and New Verse News. Other of my work has been published in the Writing That Risks anthology (http://amzn.to/18BlCtw), Rivet, Cosmonaut Avenue, and The Conium Review. My work has appeared in numerous other literary journals, including Parcel (a Pushcart Prize nominee), High Plains Literary Review (also a Pushcart Prize nominee), Agni online, Nimrod International, 34th Parallel, and turnrow. A one-act play of mine was a finalist in the Knock International Play Competition and was produced in Seattle."

In Which I Compare My Daughter to Stars

My daughter’s red hair is so startling
strangers stop us
walking home from school,
in the grocery, while she hangs
on my arm in the mall, just to mention
how its colour— like the fresh heat of a protostar--
has affected them.
So, she already knows the power of a stranger’s attention.
I am startled, in front of a painting
that has propelled me light years into the future.
Where a young woman, my daughter
has turned her head toward a man.
Her neck has expanded,
to hold everything I’ve taught her
plus the weight that that comes
with the gravity of growing up.
What does she know now?
Of the man who for hours
stared at what she’s become.
What does he know of her?
How, when she was young enough to hold
her mother sang to her on a porch swing
as the universe swung in unison.
Yes, there is the best mix of blue and grey
to splash the galaxies of her iris.
The skill to draw wire across her frame,
so she may hang on a gallery wall.
Here, years from now
strangers see her elbow point west
toward a source of dim light,
her hair—hot red, the core of the sun--
and again feel compelled to stare
and say something.

Noah Renn
 
Noah Renn is writer and teacher living in Norfolk, Virginia. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Virginian-Pilot, The Quotable, Princess Anne Independent News, Full Grown People, and Whurk, among other journals. He is a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee. He teaches composition and literature at Old Dominion University, and leads a poetry workshop at the nonprofit organization, The Muse Writers Center.

Stereoptical Study XX: For Susan Howe
 
 
The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards’ listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving.  Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding.
    - Susan Howe
 

1
 
In some world beneath the surface, the actor becomes the acted-upon.  One possible solution here - the universe of gray, green, and black gradually overcome by the onslaught of red, blue, and white.  The imagination must make the leap, must see one coloured plane completing the painting in the other.  In a hot enough fire the iron in the hammer melts while pounding the red-lit horseshoe, and sparks fly!  Gray of iron; red of flames; chaque pìece de bois knows the sand that petrifies it, each color works its way into another, the insect in the amber, the seashell in the desert rocks.  There is movement among the colors and movement is change, animal to mineral, eukaryotic cells to sandstone.
 
once upon a time
on LSD I understood
the trees.  Saw myself
looking back from the surface
of a shiny, mica stone
 
all our messages
fragment that way. The sender
and the sent cohere
along invisible lines
boundaries separating
 
I objectify
myself, ruminate on how
I, me and myself
are simply one, examined
from fluid perspective
 
 
2
 
When I look at this painting I see movement and transformation, the right side resisting the encroachments of the left, the darker side.  But, in one place near the bottom the wall has been breached, but not as I expected.  It’s the lighter side, the word-literate side that has broken through. The torn and smudged notebook page over the menacing green orb. O optimism!  O hope! Bought at the price of blood!
 
no easier word
to say than understanding
long as it’s feeling
we’re talking about and not
candid verification
 
you might see it as
subject and definition
then we understand
the need for a line between
and different complexions
 
paradox reveals
our hunger to understand
even at the price
of cool rationality
violating truth to know
 
 
3
 
Constable clouds and a sailboat on a liverish and blood-red sea (on the right side), and on the left, dark subterranean burrowing, something organic that has rotted.  A Manichean fantasy, the struggle for the world personified and dramatized.  We like to think this way, to see evil as real and still remain phlegmatic.  The more precarious our passage, the greater it is, more piquant and lively.
 
there remains a law
in our logic that maintains
that something and its
opposite cannot exist
wholly in the single breath
 
you hear something strange
then peel ordinary things
away, hoping to find
some deeper truths, exposing
rather, the bleeding tissues
 
its probably better
to stay on the surface
note colours and shapes
accept impenetrable
reality, there’s nothing

Charles D. Tarlton

Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International.

Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California.  Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com.).

 

My Son the Artist
 
He draws a Crayola thorn bush
on a make believe
Paper landscape
A child’s simple brush strokes
invented in the brain.
 
He creates inept characters
False faced grotesqueries
Biomorphic shapes of Miro vintage
 
His imagination like a straw house
of feathers and
Discarded string.
 
Like a rag picker paint picking
at the bones of flowers
 
His objets trouvees
are always ordained
with human attribution.
 
He already knows the secret to
the spider web alphabet.
 
Denis Robillard

Denis Robillard has had more than 200 poems published across Canada, The USA and Europe since 2005.