Cordelia M. Hanemann

October 2019 | poetry

Double Exposure

Meditation on Summer Day from Edvard Munch’s Linde Frieze

Munch, commissioned to paint

a sweet seascape—sunny

Asgardstrand—to please

the sensibilities of children:

rolling gentle horizons,

measured sweep of kindly sea,

gleaming white triangulations

of brilliant sails, and certainly, no

offensive human actors to clutter up

the scenery—“no lovers kissing…

children know nothing of such things.”

Did the offended artist know

he superimposed a scrim over holiday

and fancy, shattering serenity?

The accidental couple, spectral shapes

seeping through the gouache

of the artist’s eye,

transparent lover binding

his black-eyed bride

to the vertical mast of pine,

its flap of green sails futile

across the windless plane.

Invasive in one corner,

impasto oval blond,

ingenuous, eyeless witness

to predator and purple anguish.

Realities vacillate: beside

beach, sun, sea, and sails,

a cone of faceless girls,

black back of a blank man’s head,

intrusive clutch, or worse,

dark intimacies. The artless veneer

of image defies the eye: which

is surface, which substance?

Palimpsest or leakage?

Madonna

Meditation on Edvard Munch’s Madonna

Madonna of the red halo:

white moon shadows glaze her face,

eyes closed against dark;

lips, crimson as fruit,

sealed against desire;

arms fading into umber haze.

Eve to apple, hallowed fire:

eat of me: ripe woman body,

blood, breasts that suckle

a wolfish world, cryptic

smile barring sin.

Crucifixion:

apple white of ancient moonlight,

arms fastened to a tree,

dogwood, apple, rose, red gall,

pierced, openings

close on intimacy.

Mouths choke on repast,

lips on words:

It is consummated.

Fruit, forbidden in the garden,

ferments into wine, wine

into sacrifice.

Virgin waits: echoes

of the bridegroom

at the closed gate,

walls for the climbing rose;

candles flicker, moonlight

wanes to the hem of dawn.

Cordelia M. Hanemann

Cordelia Hanemann is currently a practicing writer and artist in Raleigh, NC. She has published in numerous journals including Turtle Island Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Dual Coast Magazine, and Laurel Review; anthologies, The Well-Versed Reader, Heron Clan VI and Kakalak 2018 and in her own chapbook, Through a Glass Darkly. Her poem, “photo-op” was a finalist in the Poems of Resistance competition at Sable Press and her poem “Cezanne’s Apples” was nominated for a Pushcart. Recently the featured poet for Negative Capability Press and The Alexandria Quarterly, she is now working on a first novel, about her roots in Cajun Louisiana.

The Delegates are Confused

October 2019 | poetry

I can tell because they spill out from the chain hotel

and stare at my empty storefronts.

Scattered scooters knocked over on sidewalks decorating

my urban decay.

—the convention and visitors bureau is even more confused—

Like an alcoholic, I exaggerate with grandiosity

and defiance, repeating myself about urban emptiness.

Old-timers no longer lecture the new residents. Even

the giddiest of community boosters have quit salvaging

the scooters and scooping up trash, now that the

convention and visitors bureau sells my neighborhood

to meeting planners who prefer their banquet rooms

cheap and their reward points easy.

—you don’t need a scooter to go from the hotel bar

to the board meeting upstairs—

After 30 years in this town, do I continue to tell its story

through my own story? Do I wait for the 12th revitalization?

—or as Cavafy warned—

If I move to another town, will the dead scooters ever rise

from the sidewalk?

Gary Singh

As a working scribe, Gary Singh has published over 1100 works including newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press) and was recently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University.

Action, Reflection.

October 2019 | poetry

East Tennessee, an hour from the mines,

and Tuesdays, at the public clinic, I’m

buckled into full extraction mode.

My knuckles blanch on forceps

dug into blackened stumps

the meth mouth offers me.

Numb, his eyes twitch: More. More

of what collapsed him in the parking lot.

Blood wells up, ligaments let go.

He hardly moves as I bear down

and slowly, slowly turn out teeth like screws.

Off-days, my hands, clammy as a mist, float above

a keyboard: poetry at three removes from urgency.

Imagination is the act of sweeping clouds.

I inject inside a woman’s lip.

She’s reclined, head nearly cradled in my lap.

Her stringy hair droops across my knee.

“Why are your front teeth gone?”

I’m asking quietly.

“My husband caved in my jaw.”

If I lay crisp witness out,

clamber through these gullied woods,

will a mourning dove burst into view?

Who neither hears nor sees the whippoorwill?

A fresh scar rakes another woman,

starting in the scalp, across her eyelid, into

the pucker of a mid-cheek gouge.

To my surprise, her eye’s alive.

“What happened to you?”

“My boyfriend done come home on meth

and put my face through a window.”

Eric Forsbergh

Eric Forsbergh’s poetry has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Neurology, Zeotrope, The Cafe Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and the Northern Virginia Review, which awarded him a Pushcart nomination in 2016. He is a Vietnam veteran.