Eterna Memoria

In the beginning was the word,
The eternal memoria of our faith,
And not the aria or arioso of music,
For we believe
Through asserting in the spoken voice
And rejoice through music in that belief.

It is one thing to listen to Bach’s
Recitativo accompagnato and
Another to read the Gospel of Matthew
Howsoever we might love
To blur the distinction
Between religion and aesthetics.

Mukesh Williams has been published in Indian, Canadian, Caribbean, and American journals such as Indian Verse, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Muse India, Centrifugal Eye, The Blue Fog Journal of Poetry, Foliate Oak, Plankton, and Best Poem. His poetry possesses a startling mixture of Japanese minimalism and Foucaldian coups and carries with it an uncanny postmodernist signature. His works have been quoted in reputed journals around the world from The Journal of Commonwealth Literature to The Other Voices International Project, and listed in the World Poetry Directory of UNESCO 2008. Williams has published two books of poems, Nakasendo and Other Poems (2006) and Moving Spaces, Changing Places (2007); and is now working on a third book The French Café. His latest co-authored book, Representing India: Politics, Identities, and Literatures (December 2007) has been favorably reviewed in many journals and newspapers. He teaches at Keio University-SFC and Soka University, Japan and can be contacted through his blog site.

*
This plaque and over the fireplace
a waterfall :behind the sky-writing
its banner smoking –everything waves

till all that’s left is the blind spot
a barren ache, an iron gong
though you still heat this room

with marksmanship and armor
with gunpowder whose wings
spread across all wings
–in the distance a door closes.

You knock till your name and rank
and knuckles bleed :so much rust
as if some fossil still flying

will escape, your hands barely visible
still on the controls when it happened.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Rafts (Parsifal Editions) is his most recent collection. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website.

Breaktaking Tips

At noon precisely, they climb
off tops
of roofs for a while
and shift to the shade

Soon is the season of return:
Seventeen-Year Cicada tribes
burrow upwards from
their beds of darkness

Like fetuses, they always sleep
on their right sides

They squirm their way back,
no matter how often
they are repositioned

Opinions: when
to best transplant seedlings
into the real earth

In ultrasound, they coil like snails
their tiny pricks sometimes
misread as thumbs

Wait till it truly warms
All are abuzz with such chat
Even the flies are sniffing

The woodbee grumbles
deeply, lumbering
but harmless

Long in the learning,
tricks for falling asleep:
tune to a background hum,
the faraway train,
and sway of trees

Just before succumbing,
a moment
of conscious choosing

Cascades of faces ensue
Parades of evolving profiles
A bonnet becomes a beard
A seed dissimilar to its final flower

Ann Neuser Lederer’s poems and creative nonfiction are published in her chapbooks Weaning the Babies (Pudding House, 2007), The Undifferentiated (Pudding House, 2003) and Approaching Freeze (Foothills, 2003), in print and online journals such as Wind, Seque, XConnect, Diagram, Brevity, MiPo, Diner, Adirondack Review, Kalliope, and Diner; and in anthologies such as Best of the Net 2007, Bedside Guide (No Tell Motel) and Letters To The World (Red Hen Press). She is employed as a visiting nurse in Kentucky. Samples and links are available on her website.

Mango

The neon on the Tan Dinh restaurant reads OPEN at 9 AM
when she stumbles in. Ho Chi Minh City around her,
the accents of the Mekong, young bulletproof faces, a waiter
steps up, offers beef soup. She hesitates, this woman
who believes she can trespass, who eats too fast. Forty years before
she never paused to wonder how a plastic flame could simmer on the skin,
or smell the mildew, bar-b-que and cannabis, the second language
of marines who came of age too big and sweaty for their war,
that tight squeeze, green shock in the tunnel of their throats.
She didn’t concentrate when her man showed off snapshots
of the enemies he couldn’t tell from friends, their hair blown back,
their tipped up smiles as soldiers chopped away. What he sought

in the jungle, he kept to himself. She never bit a mango,
never begged him to confess. He brought her home a dragon, taught her silence
in the morning, how to bolt her food with chopsticks, told her not to ask.
Some stories, he says, soldiers never tell. She says, you’re not the same.
He says, shut up! so he can listen for the hissing
from the tunnels, for the soft pad-pad of sandals, so he can croon
Da Nang, Ke Sanh, Hue, Tet, Tet, Tet, Saigon, those charms
he used to soothe himself. She never heard the red noise
he heard all around the bed; she never questioned how they all squeezed in-
the soldiers, women, children, the old men who smelled of soài-
until today. She reaches out to take the soup that she will hardly taste, a bowl
that she will hurry through, that she will surely spill.

soài-mango

Wendy Taylor Carlisle is an accidental Texan. Her second book of poems, Discount Fireworks, winner of the Blackgrove Award, is forthcoming from Jacaranda Press. Most recently read her poems on-line at Salt River Review, Ghoti Magazine  and Arkansas Literary Forum.

Harpooning the Whale

He came to the poetry reading
in the town library in Homer

a tall burly man with long hair and a beard,
wearing a necklace of bear claws and a polar bear tooth

a thousand years old, an amulet
an Eskimo medicine man had given him.

He roamed the bush for twenty years, he said,
and I am always on the move, I said,

and we had the same look in us then, our eyes nomadic,
knowing we knew about things too sacred to say.

Homer, in Alaska, I was there

visiting a school and Tommy was the boy
who loved poetry and this was

Tommy’s father. He had his own poetry in him
or perhaps his life was a poem, in the lyrical strides he took

through the wilderness, or the epic tale
of his time on Saint Lawrence Island

when he harpooned with the Yupik tribe, out at sea whaling
in the original way, the way of

connecting first with the mind
of the whale that presents itself, sacrificially.

Eye of the whale and the eye of man,
a certain reverence occurs

just like Tommy’s father and me
how our souls peered out from our bodies

and we knew we were shades of each other, wanderers
of different lands, but carrying the same furtive beliefs.

Of the whale, the whale too, was a poem ─

when it danced before the old boat,
how willingly it dipped and surfaced and blew

before the arrows pierced the long, holy length of its body
and still it gave of itself,

calmly above water it stayed and it stayed
held by the spears, whose ends tied

to the bladder bags of the seal, puffed with air,
to keep it afloat.

And this, a poem, in the way the whale was buoyant for days,
blood-letting, like the very words which surface

from within the salty sea of our bodies,
the thoughts which slowly drain from us

before we tow them in, before we write them out,
blessing our beasts as they come ashore.

Therese Halscheid’s poetry and prose has appeared in many literary journals. She is author of 3 poetry collections, Powertalk, Without Home and Uncommon Geography - which recieved a Finalist Award for the Paterson Poetry Prize. She also received a Greatest Hits chapbook award from Pudding House Press. She won a Fellowship for Poetry from NJ State Council on the Arts as well as a Dodge Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center. She is a visiting writer in schools and teaches for Atlantic Cape Community College.

Under an Incredible Blue Sky

An insubstantial country road
bends back on itself like
any number of heartbreaks,
should inspire caution, not
an eager foot on the gas,
a flirtation with steep sided
ditches awash in wild
sweet peas, translucent
heaps a person could
sleep calmly under until
a heavy dew soaks an open
collar, an unbuttoned cuff.

Sunk to the axles in
a dissolute rhubarb bed,
a ‘71 Cadillac fills with
bees. Waxy honeycombs
stretch along interstates,
spill over state lines on
misfolded road maps shoved
under the front seat, the bees’
steady absentminded hum
the sweet perfection of
a just tuned engine.

Tiny soft gray birds at
the road edge twitch up
smudges of dust with
their rumpled wings,
chitter at each other, at
the dust, the stunted
wild carrot. There
is so much to say.

Marianna Hofer works out of Studio 13 in Findlay, Ohio, where she writes and works on her black & white film photography. She has published in a variety of little magazines, and her photography has hung in various exhibits and eateries.

A High-Toned Old Christian Wiman

Poetry is the supreme magazine, sir.
Take the inheritance law and make a knave from it
And let the knave rent high-rise offices. Thus,
Fortune is converted into poems,
In a windy city hankering after honor.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
Up quantum physics and make a partial style,
And from the partial style project a mask
Of uncertainty. Thus, postmodernism,
Purged of essence, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into poems,
Loitering like limousines. And poem for poem,
Sir, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the quantum physics scene
Your most affected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Snacking hors d’oeurves at conference and retreat,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such drink and drank and drunk-a-drunk-drunk,
May, merely may, sir, flip for themselves
In jovial hullabaloo among their peers.
This will make people wince. But foundations
Wink as they will. Wink most when people wince.

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and his poems have not been published in Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker.

from Thane Dimatims, a Novel in Verse

“C’est l’Ennui!”
–Baudelaire

“The problem with long poems is always
That nobody reads them”. Declarations
Of this kind kept Thane searching for new ways
To keep his epic fresh; he had patience
(At times) and felt it better to abstain
From stooping to the public taste. “Against the grain”

Was his motto, and like his hero Des
Essientes (we read about him pages hence)
His mind had become something of a mess
And was incapable of self-defense
Against the demons that assailed it from
All angles: love, alcohol, prostitutes, the sum

Of pleasure fallen into decadence.
Like Cleland’s heroine, he didn’t know
Which way to turn, and so began to dance
On dynamite. He wrote, “The time is now”
In huge black letters over the headboard
Of his unused bed–forcing himself, word by word

To pull his poem up from disrepair
Until it scaled the heights of Pushkin, Blake,
His hero Byron (of whom he made fair
Copies in high school; something of a fake,
Thane loved to play little practical jokes
And fool his professors who weren’t “in their books”)

Not to mention Ariosto, Tasso,
Goethe, Gòngora, Pound (whom he despised
Yet read with curiosity, like so
Many; he thought the Cantos were “outsized”)
The Wasteland, “exactly the kind of thing
I wish to avoid-it’s just so goddamn boring…”

Marc Alan Di Martino is a poet, journalist and translator. He is the editor of American Poets Abroad, a blog/journal of contemporary poetry. He lives and works in Rome, Italy. His work has been published in BigCityLit, The American, Pivot, and Martha’s Version (under the pen name Marc Alan Coen). He is trying to find a publisher for his satiric novel-in-verse. He can be contacted at marc1dimartino@gmail.com.

Man in the Park

A man washes himself in the public fountain.
First his feet, then his arms,
Finally he lathers his wide hands
And scrubs down his face.

Again and again he returns to the fountain
With empty bottles and with plates
An entire inventory of objects
Stored in some half-hidden corner
Beyond the hedge.

A cat threads in and out between his legs
As he walks, his mind consumed
By this passion for hygiene.

He inspects every piece of garbage
With a jeweler’s eye
Holding it up to the light
Assessing its utility as worth.

Satisfied with his bounty
He tucks the rest of his small life away
In a pocket deep with longing
And lights a half-smoked cigarette.

Marc Alan Di Martino is a poet, journalist and translator. He is the editor of American Poets Abroad, a blog/journal of contemporary poetry. He lives and works in Rome, Italy. His work has been published in BigCityLit, The American, Pivot, and Martha’s Version (under the pen name Marc Alan Coen). He is trying to find a publisher for his satiric novel-in-verse. He can be contacted at marc1dimartino@gmail.com.

The Fetal Position (and how to pass it on to others)

We clench our fists
and hide our lifelines,

ball ourselves up
into the first positions we knew.

We sleep under blankets
with knees to our chests

and unravel only
at the threat of exposure.

But in our most vulnurable minute
we are spread open

as if the fortune is written
on the inside of our thighs.

As if this surrender
is our most honest moment.

Lauren LoNigro is twenty years old.  She lives in Holbrook, NY.