Guyasdom's D'Sonoqua by Emily Carr, 1930 “She seemed to be part of the tree itself, as if she had grown there at its heart, and the carver had only chipped away the outer wood. So you could see her.” Emily Carr, Klee Wyck Red cedar totem. Dangling breasts, carved as eagle heads. Dark hair matted to her scalp. Face a seizure of circles. Thick, wide brows arch high over sunken eyes, pupils white ringed in black like bullseyes. Cheeks concave discs. Twisted greenery covers a third of her. A toothy alligator suns on a roof, bellows in her left ear. Is she the nourisher, Earth Mother, or the fabled hag who steals children in the forest? I say both—unhinged with grief from how we maul our home. Her arms grasp for us. Lips strain in a perpetually-open O, mouth a grim abyss. Karen George Karen George is author of three poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her short story collection, How We Fracture, which won the Rosemary Daniell Fiction Prize, is forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press in Spring 2023. After 25 years as a computer programmer/analyst, she retired to write full-time. She enjoys photography and visiting museums, cemeteries, historic towns, gardens, and bodies of water. Her website is: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.
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Inspired by Christopher Allwine’s Date Night (Booth 48) It won’t be long now. I hear they’re coming for me. We had a long run. I can’t say exactly how many miles I’ve covered because I’ve outlived my odometer. I’m sixty-two now, not nearly old enough to say goodbye to this world yet I’ve never been one to complain. I no longer have a four-barrel carburetor, but pondering the end does choke me up a bit. There’s still a beauty about me; they say I still have a glow. People walk around me and say kind words. Things like, “Check out that old Chrysler Imperial—they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” They talk about my long lines and elegance and fancy taillights, and “all that chrome! You don’t find it in newer models.” Those were the good old days; six-way power bench seats. V-8 engine, power steering, power brakes, push button this and that. My eerie and modern dashboard lighting that glowed in the dark. I admit I liked my toothy grill; people said I looked as if I were smiling. Cruising down the highway, songs like “Little Deuce Coupe,” “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” and “Drive My Car” playing on the radio. Funny aside: Used to be when you hit the brakes the kids in the back tumbled onto the floor. Seatbelts have their advantages, of course, but they also clutter things up. Now, in my last days, I’ve settled into one of my favourite places: the Starview Drive-in. Automobiles were a novelty when drive-ins began. People loved watching movies in the comfort of their own cars. It was like sitting in their living room. In 1959 when I was born, there were more than 4,000 drive-in theatres around the country. When I think about the old days here at the Starview, I feel happy. I haven’t felt this electrified since I was hotwired back in the ‘70s. Wasn’t so long ago the family crowded in to watch movies: Jaws was a favorite, all the kids screeching and cowering. Why they let the little ones watch the movie is anyone’s guess. They had nightmares for days. The Long Hot Summer, too, with Paul Newman at his finest with Joanne Woodward—that’s when they knew they couldn’t ignore what they felt for each other. Then Belle du Jour, Endless Summer, even Psycho. The kids were asleep for that one. There was Viva Las Vegas, Rebel Without a Cause, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and Mary Poppins. The kids loved Mary Poppins. At intermission the lobby filled up with purchasers of 7-Up and popcorn and milkshakes and fries. I smelled like popcorn into the next day. And Date Night, when the car grew quiet except for the clip-on speakers on the window, broadcasting the film. I saw it all, not all of it good. JFK, protests to the Vietnam War, summer of love that ended with that Manson night of hate. Then the big hair, big collared ‘70s, and the ‘80s when cars shrunk like dried up mushrooms. All that detailing: tail fins segueing into streamlined but nondescript bumpers. It’s fitting the end comes for me here, at the Starview—though it’s not the end end. I hear I’ll be reincarnated. As for the drive-in, the stars may no longer visit the big screen, but they mob the sky like daisies in spring. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is editor of Palm Springs Noir (Akashic, 2021), which she also contributed a story. Her first book, Pen on Fire, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her writing has appeared in Coolest American Stories 2022, USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, Inlandia, Antarctica Journal, Rock and a Hard Place, Crossing Borders, Poets and Writers, and The Dark City Crime & Mystery Magazine. She hosts the podcast, Writers on Writing. More at penonfire.com. Heaven From Here by Robert L. Dean, Jr. (photo: Hinton, West Virginia, by Jason Baldinger) The train arrives, or, not quite, really, still belching, no squeal of iron on iron, no one there to hear it, platform empty, the sign of who we are backwards, perhaps we have been or will be or are passed by, history on display at the Ritz, an audience of ghost chairs, stacking metal and vinyl banquet on mosaic Depression tile, floral pattern long wilted, like us, are we in or out, we can’t make up our minds, maybe we’ll turn left, maybe right, one arrow pointing us toward the train, the other in the direction it is headed, or was headed, or we remember it being headed, or would remember, if we were still here, still performing, still listening for the whistle of time rolling in, the drum-drum heartbeat of shako-plumed youth celebrating whatever it is we used to celebrate, lamp-post flags waving once again in the breeze that is surely locomoting in on the dark underbelly of sky, one lone tourist trying to capture us, ghost that he is and always will be. The Hang Up by Robert L. Dean, Jr. (photo: Walkersville, West Virginia, by Jason Baldinger) They hear it in Ohio, Pennsylvania, the cotton fields of the Llano Estacado, the gator lands of south Florida, the bottom of Crater Lake. Tsunami warnings siren across the Pacific. Three mountains in the Hindu Kush implode. Blood stains your connection to civilization. You didn’t know Bakelite could cut so deep. It’s 1983 and she’s told you don’t call her again, no matter if you’re lost in the woods in Hicksville, or wherever, falling off a cliff. Sinking in quicksand, goodbye, good riddance, good God. Hasn’t she had enough. Haven’t you. And here you are, four decades, three divorces, two heart attacks, six grandkids later, a middle of nowhere return, sanity hanging by a thread, you wish you could pick it up, put it back together, punch the right numbers, say I’m sorry, wondering, isn’t life funny, how you found it again, how this thing is still here, your anger, your hang up, if only you’d known. Leaves rustle. Wind blusters in the open window. You start the car, head for the Interstate, that lunatic asylum you saw in Weston. Shuttered now, tourists and ghost hunters only, poems of the lost tattooed on therapy room walls. You happen to have a crayon on you. In the rear view, the phone rings. Robert L. Dean, Jr Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s poetry collections are Pulp (Finishing Line Press 2022); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018). A multiple Best of the Net nominee and a Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in many literary journals. Dean is a member of the Kansas Authors Club and The Writers Place. He has been a professional musician, and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capital of the World and the Flint Hills. Recalled to Life for my husband, upon his receiving first dose of experimental drug Today you and I venture from our cocoon near the medical center to the fine arts museum about a block away to enjoy a few hours of the respite for which art and verse are made. The paintings speak as never before-- Heda’s Banquet Piece with its crumpled linens, overturned silver goblets, half-peeled citrus, and bread and oysters strewn across table; van Dijk’s 1600s painting of Elisha’s meeting with the Shunammite and her son, her only son, having just returned to his mother in the land of the living. And here we are, this April day, ourselves a part of the canvases—we, the figures in Heda’s painting, having hurriedly exited the dinner table, the ghosts in van Dijk’s masterpiece awaiting the call to new life. Jo Taylor This poem was first published in Georgia Poetry Society’s Reach of Song, Spring, 2022. Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. Her favourite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it. In 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire. She enjoys morning walks, playing with her two grandsons, ages four and seven, and collecting and reading cookbooks. Sleepy Freeway A San Francisco Bay area sunset inspired French designer Pierrick Gaumé’s painting Sleepy Freeway (2008). Facing the viewer, atop the magenta sunset hills rests a bald sleeping figure of a hillside, head on hands, eyes closed. Stylized magenta and gold-outlined cars zoom left and right in the foreground. In as little as a decade, scenes like this one–even a super bloom of poppies, lupines, and golden mustard that colour hills as if lit by sunset–might morph into more sinister visions when fire seasons approach sooner and more quickly. Once we could celebrate untroubled the brilliant reds, magentas, and oranges of the Bay Area sunset. Now those colours are the scale of fire danger alerts, nightmares of fire tornados, vision of an elderly couple in the in-ground swimming pool while the fire rages above them, the burnt paint odor of a white pickup toasted like a marshmallow as it escaped the Camp Fire. Paradise in ashes. Sleepy Freeway is no longer able to drowse undisturbed. It must be ever watchful, like the fire watchers on duty, ready to tweet calls to CalFire and all who keep their bug-out bags at the ready. Jeanne Blum Lesinski Jeanne Blum Lesinski is a long-time amateur of French culture and first met the artist of Sleepy Freeway when she was an exchange student in France and Pierrick Gaumé a school boy drawing cars. Years later the two reconnected. She still loves French culture and the car culture, this time the California car culture that jumps from the canvas in brilliant colour. In 2008 when Gaumé painted Sleepy Freeway, the dangers of climate-change induced wildfires were not on our minds the way they are today, demonstrating how viewers’ interactions with artwork evolve as the world changes. Read Jeanne's poem, World in Motion, in response to artist Joseph Cornell. Jeanne's poem, Embroidery, Lily Yeats, was a finalist in our Women Artists contest. |
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