Lightning

My museum bird pauses in the wise hypervigilance of birds, on the sculpt of a flayed arm. The arm poses, hyperrealistic, in Second Position, stretched horizontal from the missing body, hand curving down from the wrist, à la Michelangelo’s Adam, the thumbnail a postmortem lilac. Bright muscle strands shade from brick red to terra cotta to clean egg-shell tendon. Oil paint on clay, the placard says. The arm’s slick shine is that of a rubber anatomical model on a stainless steel countertop in a windowless examination room.

He builds an impossible scaffolding of reasons to forgive her. He was always feeble in self-defense. Her knives were painted with butterflies. Now the world is a wall of thorns. 

The bird’s feet: anisodactylie—3 toes fore, 1 aft—lizard feet evolved into dainty twigs. Note: a bird is incapable of sin. No hands, no sin.

He talks to birds, sucks cherry cough drops by the bag. He retreats into the softness of animals, nestles into the fur of their bellies.

The arm and its bird make three shadows on the blank museum wall. The smooth-feathered flank almost breathes, the neck nearly twitches and turns, the eyes of oily black glass glisten with benevolence.

He watches lightning from the rooftops, and has taken to eating sawdust in the evenings. He is the town snake-cuddler.

In the long emptiness of the day he dreams he will be carried away, over fallen-down neighbourhoods, into far green fields strewn with skeletons.

Ryan O’Connell

Ryan O’Connell is a retired U.S. Army warrant officer, undergraduate student and apprentice writer at Portland State University. He is writing a nonfiction account of his experiences as a medevac helicopter pilot in Afghanistan.

West Wind

I.
She’s a smudge, although she doesn’t know it; doesn’t see enough of her surroundings to know she blends in to them: sage and brush brown, her skin obscured, eyes dim from the cold. If she knew, she would paint herself red in heather berries, soak her clothes in mulberry dye, dip her arms in up to the elbow before she went out into the world on the edge of a storm. She doesn’t know. Why would she need to be seen?

II.
It’s the height that she doesn’t understand, the rain only baffles her as it comes on sideways and sharp. And the purple above the cloudline twists her stomach, so she doesn’t look up. She would worship older gods if it weren’t too late. She would become them in one motion, like the grasses and the buffeted flaps of her clothing. She would become. If only she knew how to.

III.
A woman carries a basket of berries across the heather, looking out at the roaring maw of the sky in apprehension. She must remind me of cave drawings, the way I am drawn to her, sculptures that were brown-wood and womanhood, carved by men in their free time, unaware that years later it would be art, and they would be artists; years later and the sepia of her common dress (and arm and hat and basket) would remind me of them. That their art had become self-aware.

IV.
She would bleed into the sky if I let her, her pigment twisted by wind shown only by brushstrokes, her definition lost, her gale-swept outline now infinite, growing. Become cloud, become rain, become wind, become the colors of the heavens before a storm: purple, grey, sepia.

V.
Does she know she’s on the edge of the world? Does she know that the sky might be white or blue or midnight green somewhere else? Like when yesterday on the bus I complained about the darkness of early afternoon in winter, and Sarah told me all the places it was early morning at that exact moment, which helped. Therapy is imagining the theoretical and accepting it as reality. Therapy is standing in the sun on purpose, or searching out all the non-existent colours in the sky, or looking at brushstrokes that trick the mind into imagining the concept of wind. ​

Norah Brady

Norah Brady is a fifteen year old poet, actor, and wanna-be author. She’s most at home anywhere she can write, preferably with two cats and quite a few books. You can find her work in Rookie magazine, The Blue Marble Review, and Write the World’s 2017 collection: Young Voices Across the Globe.

Go Back to Finger Painting
 
Remember the smeary freedom and tactile bliss? How you could fill the page as it curled with fire and became uniquely yours, yellow never just yellow and red never lonely red.

The fluidity of identities, a meld of hues and primaries, of places, lands and waters crossed, capsized emotions. Light and its absence, the greatest sorrows, fragmented and unpredictable. By the time you finger your colour it’s already changed.

Take Klee whose watercolours shift according to your gaze. His Architecture of the Plain depends on conjecture. Some days deliver its pleasing synchronicity – darker blues and greens defining margins left and right – and the coloured rectangles overlap, now raspberry, now vermillion. Fleeting moments pass and all you see is collision, hear a noisy argument, colours clamouring for space.

Klee knew what he was doing – flat as a checked shirt pressed on an ironing board, yet there’s such depth to the painting, you want to put your hand through the paper and feel around, you want to wear your shades, tag your name graffiti-style to the lowest rainbow stripe.

This is a multicoloured manifesto of love. Darkness and light in perfect Greek proportionality, an artful construction based on math and spontaneity where form is all there without being too visible.
Look carefully: the ratio of the smaller part (the yellows, say) to the larger part (the reds) equals the ratio of the larger part to the entirety (the painting). Even your fleeting childhood, even your fingers painting reflect a perfect symmetry where
     
​     yellow is to red
     equals red is to (yellow plus red).

See what I mean?

The painting is greater than the sum of its brushstrokes.

​Cora Siré

​Cora Siré is the author of three books. Her latest novel, Behold Things Beautiful, was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2017. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Arc Poetry, Literary Review of Canada, Geist, The Puritan, carte blanche and Montreal Serai. Based in Montréal, she often writes of elsewheres drawing on her encounters in faraway places and her family’s history of displacement. For details, please visit her website, www.quena.ca.

   
Millennia Insecta
       
I have known the eons-long longing of insects gone to stone, the empty wishes of disjointed plates no longer encasing throbbing thorax, fecund abdomen, the despondency of coxae that once cupped flexing femurs, the weariness of wings become limestone lithographs, the layered years hardened against weather: sturdy siltstone, kiln-baked mudstone that hold the compressed millennia of wisps of beings that whisked the air mere days, then died. 

And I have seen a day pass from horizon to horizon in the instant I looked up from stone to sky, the split second I became aware of buzzing and flapping around me, the flicking wings, the whirring flags of chitin and scales, the jumping, hopping, stalking, searching, pulsating life arisen from these very foundations of their world.

Roy J. Beckemeyer

Roy J. Beckemeyer is a retired engineer and scientific journal editor who lives in Wichita, Kansas. He currently studies the Paleozoic insect fossils of Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and writes poetry. His poems have appeared in half a dozen anthologies as well as in many print and on-line literary journals. His first book of poetry, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, Lawrence, KS, 2014) was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He won the Beecher’s Magazine poetry contest in 2014, and the Kansas Voices poetry award in 2016. He recently co-edited (with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg) Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, Pittsburg, KS, 2017).

Girl on the Beach, 1957

            You can’t judge sugar by looking at the cane — Willie Dixon

When the canvas was white before its “pristine surface was besmirched,” the artist must have imagined he lived in an occupied country run by a puppet government. Centuries after Vermeer took a boat ride from Delft to Leyden, picturing not a secular madonna but the narrative possibilities in a woman crying by the river, Diebenkorn painted a figure into the layered impasto of sand—transformed it into Girl on the Beach. 

I wonder that she’s so far from the centre. I’d guess she’s half a mile from the almost black Pacific, thin ribbon below broader ribboned blue-cracked sky.

Strangely, I’ve always been attracted by the centre. Something about its vocabulary, how it offers a canopy to the surrounding architecture. The girl, who simultaneously appears both defiant and buoyant, reminds me of mating elephant seals drawing blood in Drake’s Bay or the wary Tule elk of Tomales Point. Thick strokes conjure orchid petals. One or more of her parents must be multi-floral. The painting’s odour is tropical, the smell of an epiphyte after blooming.

It’s more than fifty years and she’s reading the same hardcover book. Twenty years from now I fear I’ll still be trying to describe her.

Is she flat like drizzle falling on the beach is flat 
or is there depth to her like the beach has depth? 
Is it raining? She hasn’t ears, 
they’re hidden by pasted down hair (from the rain?)

For weeks a castoff sofa has lain on Industrial Drive’s blind corner by the sheet metal works. I saw a couple standing behind it, embracing. I’m sure the woman was weeping even though I couldn’t see her face. There were tremors of reconciliation like the convulsions of a sobbing child finally done crying, gasping for air. With Girl on the Beach, I’m looking straight at her and can’t tell if she’s white, black, dead, alive. It’s the oval face of a mannequin, of a harlequin, the face of the American brushing her teeth in the horror film when her cheeks flake off in her hands. 

She has her own weather.
Smudge of burnt ochre is her neck.
She hasn’t a mouth.
Not one gull flaps through her space.
                                                 
I can’t discern what she’s wearing—striped skirt or is it a towel across her legs? Or is a towel draped about her arms? Covering her chest could be a white blouse beneath a grayish top. Her left leg, bent, a mass of pigment looking like a drumstick torn from the slaughtered bird. Her right leg: shapely, supple, finely contoured. But nothing else has definition.  
                                      
There’s a beach chair but she’s sitting on the sand, maybe on a blanket or a sheet, one sandal visible beyond her feet, crooked elbow of right arm resting on the chair. Her centrality is off. Her eyes lack pupils. Light without sun. Sun without heat. She’s neither inside nor out. 

Though here she is, coming at you, sitting there reading, 
Girl on the Beach.

Howard Faerstein

Howard Faerstein’s full-length book of poetry, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, was published in 2013 by Press 53. A second book, Googootz and Other Poems is forthcoming from Press 53. His work can be found in numerous journals including Great River Review, Nimrod, CutThroat, Off the Coast, Rattle, upstreet, Mudfish and on-line in Gris-Gris, and Connotation. He is Associate Poetry Editor of CutThroat,A Journal of the Arts, and lives in Florence, Massachusetts.

The Garden (a story puzzle)
Who am I in “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch?

Nine…eight…seven…six ringing in the darkness. I have to get away, there’s danger back there, they’re going to cut my heart out. I flap my wings smoothly, silently in the night sky, turn, then glide as if gravity didn’t exist and hope they can’t follow me. I coast over a burning city, buildings silhouetted by flames. I bank and dive, see a red sail on a lake and a multitude of humanity, like lice, swarming out of it. Farther away I see ghostly figures lining up at a glowing gate as if there’s some escape, and that’s just the beginning—a tiny part of this vast senseless landscape—so beautiful it must be hell.

As I fly lower, soot starts to burn my nostrils and a cacophony of horns, crackling fire, and cries of agony fill my head. 

I fly over a razor-sharp knife slicing apart two monumental ears, which almost stops my heart. I can almost feel it, that knife cutting me—a long slice under my breast feathers—sudden pain, a feeling of life hanging in the balance, of illusion upon illusion, of moments frozen in oil and pigment.

I fly as fast as I can, past a house made of bone held up by bone tree-trunks, a platypus monk, until I reach The-Land-of-Tortured-Musicians. There’s a guy strung up on a harp, one tied to a lute, and one squashed under it with a musical score painted on his bare ass. Some guy’s pointing at it, seems to think it’s hilarious. What did they do to deserve this? Off-key recitals? Derivative compositions?

Nearby I see a lizard wielding a sword which has a heart impaled on it and there’s a man with a hypodermic needle stabbed right through his hand.

Out of nowhere comes the drone of a buzz-saw getting louder and louder. I have to get out of here before it cuts me open. This place is boxed in by wooden columns which, for some reason, I can’t see around. I fly at a column, sink my talons in, flap my wings to get balanced, work my way around and look over it. What I see is an abyss, a plane of non-existence. But I know there are other worlds. I’m the symbol of divine wisdom after all.

The buzz saw’s closing in. I leap, find myself where nothing exists, not even me, then bam, a wooden column comes flying at me. I sink my talons in and swing around it into The-Land-of-Naked-People. They’re all dancing, swimming, sticking flowers up each other’s asses, and making out in glass globes and giant muscle shells. I alight on the first perch I see, which is atop of a pink scalloped stand with human arms and legs frozen in dance. This place is filled with birdsongs, laughter, and the perfume of flowers and fruit, all the sensual delights. I fluff up my down and settle in.

Then I realize I’m a bit peckish. I swivel my head 180° to the right and see a number of giant berries here and there. The trouble is I’m a carnivore, a predator of the night, and the only small prey I spot is a rat in a glass tube. Then I swivel my head 180° to the left. There I see six naked people picking apples from a tree. One of them is carrying giant strawberry.

“I’m starving!” the strawberry man cries.

“Let’s have a banquet,” one of the women says.

I call out “hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo,” hoping they’ll invite me. But just then a faint voice starts echoing in my head saying, “scissors, clamp.”

“Let’s have roast fowl!” one of the men shouts, then “scalpel!”

Someone hands him a huge knife and he comes running at me.

I take off just as he lops off a few of my wing feathers and fly across this land of many creatures, two lakes, a pond, and constructions made of rose quartz and blue marble. People here seem to do whatever amuses them no matter how senseless, like crowding into a red teepee-tree and doing weird things with giant berries.

Soon I reach another wooden column, sink my talons in and shoot across the plane of non-existence, then grab onto a new column and swing into a much calmer place where there’s hardly a sound.

At the centre of this land God is introducing Eve to Adam, which would explain why there are no other people here.

This place has blue and pink constructions too, as well as a pond and a lake. I alight on the edge of a round hole in the rose quartz central fountain. It seems to be made just for me, so I fluff up my down and get cozy.

The place is conspicuously lacking oversized berries, but it does have a lot of small prey—bunnies, lizards, and a bunch of little buggers I can’t identify. I’d go out and kill something but I’ve totally lost my appetite.

This has to be the dullest land in the world’s I’ve visited. There’s nothing to do but stare at a ocelot tormenting a newt. It’s unbearably quiet too, just the sound of the water trickling from the fountain. I can hear my heart pounding in my ears getting louder and louder. It seems important to listen to it. Suddenly—I suck in a breath—it just stops! All that’s left is a dull ache under my breast feathers.

I don’t know what to do so I just nest here and wait for something to happen. It seems like an eternity. God keeps introducing Eve to Adam. The ocelot continues to torment the newt. It never gets dark.

Finally, I can’t take it anymore. I fly out of my hole and back to the wooden column I crossed over before. I dig my talons in, traverse the plane of non-existence, then I’m back in The-Land-of-Naked-People with all its laughter, chatter, and birdsong and realize this is the only place anyone can possibly exist. It’s so crowded it’s hard to find a bare spot so I alight in a shallow pond and sink into its warm water next to a familiar looking boy.

He’s frowning at me with worry, so I say, “hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo,” and give him a gentle peck on the cheek.

He lights up with joy and puts his arms around me which feels so good my heart starts beating again, then--

My eyes open in a glaring white place full of beeps and drones. Things are foggy. I have a strong urge to pull out a tube that’s lodged down my throat. I try, but my hands are tied down. Then… Oh! Everything comes into focus—the recovery room. I’m a forty-eight-year-old medieval-art-historian heart-transplant-recipient. I notice my wife and son standing there. He has his hand over his mouth and she’s crying, but she’s crying for joy.

Sheila Martin

Sheila Martin: "My first novel, The Coney Island Book of the Dead, An Illustrated Novel, recently won the 2017 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize. In addition I have pieces in the current issues of four literary journals: Ginosko (#19), Earthen Lamp Journal (Volume II, issue 1), The Legendary (#69) and Volume 1, Brooklyn. I also have an unpublished novel that takes place in an art school for  which I am seeking a literary agent."