Douglas Cole, Featured Author

October 2015 | back-issues, poetry

Joe

 

Joe lived in a cabin

outside of Mount Vernon, Washington,

a place his uncle built for hunting.

I visited him there once or twice,

on my way somewhere else.

There was no water, no electricity,

just a woodstove and black windows,

and his things: a suit of armor

into which  he had pounded hundreds of nails,

a jar with a cat skull and cat bones

that he had labeled with a strip of tape

like the old-world naturalists—

FELUNUS EXTINCTUS.

He had a few books on chemistry,

medieval history, alchemy,

a biography of Alistair Crowley.

And he had a little wooden statue

of the weeping Buddha.

 

It was such a forlorn place to live,

dark, in the woods, off the road on a dirt drive—

he said, “I don’t fit with people.”

And it’s true, he never did.

Even as a kid he was wild,

eyes on fire with something—

up in his attic room one time,

he and his brother, Jerry, and I

were hanging out doing nothing

on a rainy Sunday, parents away

downstairs somewhere, and Joe ran out

and came back with his father’s shotgun,

loaded, and pointed it at Jerry’s head,

pulled back the hammer—

Jerry just sat there, smiling, a kid

maybe four years old, unknowing,

and then Joe pulled the trigger—

click, and nothing happened.

It was a miracle, really.

We were in slow motion, then,

blue gun barrel, warped windows,

then came back up to speed—

Jerry was crying, and the parents appeared,

my mother grabbed me by the arm

and swept me away.

 

I ran into Joe years later.

He’d just gotten out of the Navy.

He’d had a good run, he said:

a small ship, hosting dignitaries, parties,

and all the drugs he took, he said,

should have killed him, he should be dead.

But the angels came down and said,

enough…you’ve done enough,

and we can’t protect you from here—

“The rest,” he said, “I can’t tell you.

I don’t want to scare you.”

He drifted back to the northwest,

took some classes at the college,

and began living alone in his cabin there

under the big trees

with his armor and his cat and his Buddha.

 

The last time I saw him, he said,

“Hey, man, can you help me?

I sort of banged up my truck.

It’s just down the road, there

could you could give me a lift

so I can get my tool box

and tie a rope around it

so kids won’t mess around with it?”

I drove him down the road,

and we came to his truck at a curve,

and what I saw—

the front end was smashed in,

the steering wheel was punched back

through the driver’s seat,

the battery in the passenger seat,

broken glass, buckled doors—

I looked at him and said,

“How did you survive this?”

There wasn’t a scratch on him.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “Just lucky, I guess.”

We got his tool box,

tied a rope around the truck,

and I took him back to his cabin,

dropped him off, and drove away.

I avoided him after that

because I could see he was lucky, sure,

but guys with luck like that come out clean,

and leave wreckage as they go,

and it’s not their fault,

they’re just always in the eye of a storm,

so you have to beware—the force of nature.

 

 

The Hearers

they hear it constantly

a low rumbling

like a truck going by

and it drives them mad

no answer to what it is

industry     electromagnetic pulse

plates of the earth grinding away

and she hears it too

I hear it

can’t you hear it?

it won’t stop

it’s like a nightmare

and we can’t wake up

she says it’s making her crazy

can’t wake up

can’t wake up

I say

look at your hands

 

 

Thoughts of a Hanged Man

 

I’ll never be cold again

I’ll never feel hate again

I’ll never be hungry again

I’ll never feel fear again

I’ll never know pain again

I’ll never have nightmares again

I’ll never experience shame again

I’ll never regret again

I’ll never choose badly again

I’ll never wait in line again

I’ll never

 

 

The Grave

 

Raymond Carver has a beautiful grave

with a big granite stone with his words on it.

That’s pretty solid, man—

your words etched in stone.

And he’s got a granite bench you can sit on

and look at his grave and his words

or out over the graveyard at the sea.

Actually it’s the Straight of Juan de Fuca,

which I think of as his

because he wrote about it in his poetry.

I picked out where I’d like to be buried—

Lake View Cemetary

between Denise Levertov and Bruce Lee.

That’s how you’d find me—

someone would say, yeah, he’s right over there

between the poet and the philosopher.

And someone might ask, so what was he?

There probably won’t be a bench.

You’ll just have to stand there

or sit on the ground.  Come on, get real close.

Maybe there will be words on the stone.

I don’t know, and maybe when you look up

you’ll see something you’d say is mine

because I wrote about it and claimed it with words.

Maybe not.  It’s not really up to me to decide.

 

by Douglas Cole

 

Douglas Cole has had work in The Chicago Quarterly Review, Red Rock Review, and Midwest Quarterly. More work is available online in The Adirondack Review, Salt River Review, and Avatar Review, as well as recorded stories in Bound Off and The Baltimore Review. He has published two collections of poetry, “Western Dream,” through Finishing Line Press, “Interstate,” through Night Ballet Press, as well as a novella, “Ghost,” through Blue Cubicle Press. He received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry; the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House; and First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway. He was recently the featured poet in Poetry Quarterly. He is currently faculty at Seattle Central College.

 

Anthropology of Me

October 2015 | back-issues, poetry

It should be Margaret Meade

leaving her barely palatable threesome

to figure it all out for me.

I don’t live on the banks of the Orinoco:

these rocks on the bottom are

all paved and worn with ruts.

 

I do want to know why

my brown eyes turned green after

fifty years, why Ancestry DNA needs

my saliva.  Is there really no

First Nation in my children

or Swede in my black hair?

 

Come on, Margaret, crawl out

of that anemic bed and learn

my language, that secret ceremony

that should save me, again, again,

and never does.  Tell me the meaning

of rituals I always answered with yes.

 

Why is time suddenly the last button

on a dress shirt; the half-ripped

left back jean pocket; I’m naked

wading to my waist in muddy

water, leeches threatening.

Just look at me, write it down.

 

by Karen Vande Bossche

 

Karen Vande Bossche has been writing poetry and short stories for decades. Some recent work can be found at Damfino and Damselfly. Karen is a hard core Pacific Northwest inhabitant who believes that sun is best delivered in liquid form.

Steadfast

October 2015 | back-issues, fiction

Wordlessly, she positions him beside her, leaning against the boat’s railing for support. She is now somebody’s wife. She is satisfied with their pose—only slightly more intimate than a prom photograph. Even now, twenty-five years later, I can hear the tension in her mouth. Her gaze is direct, flat. Her thoughts are elsewhere. The photographer fiddles with the aperture, trying not to overexpose the fleshy whiteness of her skin, a princess in her past life.

My father is my mother’s contrast. He is brown and complacent. No matter how many times the photographer counts to three, advances the film, my father’s lips stay a stodgy tan line. His eyes are narrow behind the enormity of his glasses, three years out of style.

I try to imagine the moment my mother has described in detail, the one the photographer captured and my father later destroyed—the only time she ever saw my father cry. The newlyweds drop their arms, turn away. Bride and groom, shoulder to shoulder at the rail, contemplating the churning water below. A cork pops behind them. After a moment, he lifts his hand. He wipes his face. His head dips slightly. Her eyes do not turn to acknowledge his movement. Her hands grip the wood in front of her. A small breeze catches his hair, flutters her veil. They are quiet, their bodies stiff. The boat skips over a wave, lurching like a subway train. They stand together. They do not flinch.

 

by Moriah Howell

Moriah Howell was born and raised in Penns Valley, a rural community outside State College, Pennsylvania. She is currently an MFA student at Temple University, focusing on fiction. She writes poetry and creative nonfiction as well, but feels she was meant to write fiction. Her dream job would be an editor at a publishing house, as well as an author, and she hopes to make those dreams come true.

The Lesson of Pain: Lessen the Pain

October 2015 | back-issues, nonfiction

“The Marrow of Zen,” one of the sutras of Shunryu Suzuki’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, relates zen practitioners to four horses, with the fourth horse responding only after the pain of the whip penetrates to the marrow of its bones. If alcoholics need to hit rock bottom, I have some sense of what that means. I read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind thirty years ago, yet it took the onset of chronic neurological pain in order to commit to something I had only dabbled in for decades.

When looking out became impossible, and I could reflect but not imagine, I retreated within. At times, breathing was the only thing I could manage. What I found looking within was a life thrown out of balance, like a load having shifted in the back of a pick up with nothing securing it to the bed. Having seen myself for so long as a good guy, it was unsettling to realize how vain, shallow and self-indulgent I could be. Meditation became the ropes to re-anchor the load.

Who knew that pain could teach so much? Not me, but I now admit to being a slow learner. Someone might question whether I’m glad for the headaches. Make no mistake, I would like to be free of the symptoms that stifle me and keep me from enjoying all of my days. In fact, my search for a cure continues. Yet, looking back, I don’t think I would have otherwise learned things about my life and I’m glad to have found a teacher who speaks my language.  Pain has finally penetrated so that I know in my bones what once I only thought in my mind.

by Charles Varani

 

Charles lives, writes and teaches in Oregon. He is also a shodan at Open Sky Aikido and rides his bicycle. Like most people in the Willamette Valley, he usually has something fermenting.

 

Smoke Break

October 2015 | back-issues, poetry

I never told anyone but

I’ll tell you.

About the fire

Folding up my tongue,

 

The last counted hour

With my stomach shrinking

Toward my graveyard spine.

My body wanted to be pins

 

And needles,

Balancing voided meals with

Cigarettes. Burn marshmallow

Fat like burning up

 

S’mores,

Campfire chocolate,

Childhood knobbles

In my rounded knees.

 

My body was statistical.

It was burned and tarred

And feathered. Monster me,

An under-the-bed story.

 

Cool dinnertime untruths,

Tamed, lightheaded.

 

Bless

The daily dizzy shrivel, the

Ribby abdomen poke, the

Airbrush collapse. Spark,

Sear, scissor open

The new pack.

 

by Alison Lanier

 

Alison Lanier is a Boston-based writer and graduate of Wellesley College. She recently joined the editorial team at The Critical Flame. Her fiction, reviews, articles, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Atticus Review, Counterpoint Magazine, and The Wellesley Review, where she also served as editor.