January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Standing As Instructed
My mother still
under her sky-blue shroud,
with her head turned to the side.
I lie down beside her.
With my face close to hers,
hers unstirring,
I take her face in my hands.
Her cheeks, two peaches
left on the ground
after the frost,
grow warm and her eyes
open—her blue-green eyes
so rich with enigma.
She smiles
and the dew
of her single breath
awakens the closeness
we never had
and that I find
only in a poem.
My mother still
under her sky-blue shroud.
I stand
ten feet away,
as the funeral director
has instructed,
for reasons of sanitation.
Summer Vacation In Europe
Light glints off
my father’s ivory suit
in pointed rays like swords
that outshine even
the intense summer sun.
Thus armed, he orders
the day’s essentials
from restaurants, hotels.
I long for his gleam.
My mother’s is hazy,
dustier,
as she explicates
walls of paintings and frescoes
in every museum and church.
I linger behind,
a reluctant tourist
in the dappled region
of age fourteen,
where, as in the arched womb
of a huge cathedral,
the perpetual dawn or twilight
smells of stone and mystery,
and glimmers flutter
high above
like white birds
caught under the ceiling.
by Betsy Martin
Betsy Martin works at Skinner House Books in Boston. She studied at Harvard University, where she earned an AB in English and American literature; the Pushkin Institute in Moscow and the Middlebury Russian School, where she graduated with an MA in Russian language; and Brown University, where she received an MA in Russian literature. When Betsy happens by a window in her busy schedule, she enjoys bird watching with her husband and playing the piano. Betsy’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alembic, Assisi Journal, Barely South Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly (Best of the Net nomination), Existere, Front Range Review, Gemini Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Helix, Limestone Journal, Louisville Review, Magnapoets, Minetta Review, Organs of Vision and Speech, Pirene’s Fountain, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, and Weber—The Contemporary West.
January 2015 | back-issues, fiction
He had only caught you a few times, sneaking up from behind, each step as stealth as a tiptoeing cat, shattering the silence with a WHAT ARE YOU DOING that booms in your brain but, in reality, is barely above what school teachers call your “inside voice.”
You do not answer and he does not need you to answer because he saw. On the edge of the bed—your side of the bed, not his, you remind him—you are hunched over, your back curved like a crescent moon or maybe a crescent roll with your feet dangling a foot above the floor, clipping your toe nails not into the trashcan, like he asks, but onto the carpet where your feet, not his, you remind him, step each morning and each night.
It’s what you do in the dark, you tell him.
The lights are all on, he says.
I can bring you a trashcan, he says.
That’s not the point but you let him anyway. You feign laziness. When he leaves, you return to clipping your nails over the carpet until they align perfectly with the edge of your fingertips. When you are done, you look down at the chipped nail polish-adorned toenail clippings—sharp confetti. Spreading them evenly across the carpet before you, your toes run through the razor sharp blades that will disappear when you vacuum on Sundays, only to be replaced by a fresh brood days later—virgins filed in millimeter-sized rows across your toes, steadily progressing towards execution.
by Melissa Darcey
Melissa Darcey is a writer based in San Diego, CA. She has a soft spot for Jane Eyre, coffee, and her orange cat, Milo. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Gravel, Extract(s), Litro, Black Heart, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Abaddon
“You wouldn’t abandon ship in a storm
just because you couldn’t control the winds.”
— Thomas More, Utopia.
Last call for the patriots,
last stop for all apostates;
the last train to freedom is
now boarding from Abaddon.
Every time it rains
the fixtures blinker out;
no coincidence, this:
the governance installed the sky.
There’s rows of voices
over all the houses;
advances in bipartisanation
amplifies people’s dependence.
No, this isn’t really hell,
they got it wrong, it’s overdone;
hell is a better composition,
its design is still untried.
If you read the manifestos,
it’s evident life’s counterfeit;
unknown ideals speak truth to practice,
panacea, comrade, can be obtained.
Now, this “perdition” is a travesty,
it’s ersatz, faux and fraudulent;
real hell’s supposed to purify,
not profit small-time bureaucrats.
They got their knobs, test-tubes and dials,
vast screens to engineer nightmares;
these are cheap tricks, mere brummagem,
effects lacking organic woe.
I want a hell that’s fair and square,
where punishment’s unbigoted;
I have it here, inerrable,
in documents, with principles.
If people would just cogitate
and sublimate their fallacies,
then they’d see this nether world
an apotheosis to behold!
Last call for provocateurs,
last stop for all demagogues;
the last train crash to eidolon
is boarding now from Abaddon.
Permanent Austerity
“These are the waning days
of aristocratic socialism,”
she lamented with a shrug.
“We heard the speeches
as the ice cubes melted
and I fear our marching orders
won’t resemble plangent posters.”
’Twas then the scullery maids and
stable hands dismantled chandeliers.
“I’m inclined to agree, dialectic theory
has devolved into a grotesquery
of polity,” I assented with a survey
from my broken monocle.
“We all embraced the slogans,
shibboleths as well as anthems
but, in practice, I concede, the enemy is us.”
’Twas then the valets and chauffeurs
voted themselves out of existence.
“It’s curious to note, if not
a little indiscreet,
Lenin in the Kremlin
has domestics and a chef,”
she said with minor malice
and a misanthropic laugh.
“The fastest telegraph in this umbrageous
Soviet transmits from servants quarters
of the General Secretary.”
“Marat, too, had his housekeeper,”
I noted cynically, “and why would we expect
dictatorship without starched collars
for a bureaucratic caste
‘engineering social progress’?
Sooner the state withers away,” I chuckled,
“the better chances for shareholders.”
’Twas then the doorman and au pair
quit their posts, with ready rifles.
Anatomy of a Catastrophe
“These are barbaric days,” she said,
pointing to the effigies
and criminals in the stockades
whose crimes were but a lack of rent.
“Tight credit is the cause of this,”
I interjected sententiously,
observing all the foreclosures
which turned the commons into sludge.
I shuddered at investments lost.
“I, for one, blame the court
for lavish wars which made a sport
of brinkmanship over rare gems
not worth their weight in guts,”
she said, and not without embarrassment.
“Yes, it’s true, diplomacy
has been misused by bunglers
who curdled treasuries in vain,”
I did rejoin, most ruefully.
“The problem, as I see it,” she continued,
“is this culture of ineptitude,
rewarding hordes of savages
who disrespect propriety.”
“Ah,” I nodded fatalistically,
“here is where I disagree:
the issue of the state’s decline
owes to factors of finance;
morality is petty cash.”
“This is where sexes diverge,”
she added with a mild reproach;
“business aims the industry
of state conquests, I will concede,
but first and foremost, I aver,
psychology directs commerce
and dominance is revenue.
Patrician excess, nonetheless
has made a botch of chancery.”
And so we stood, near pillories
where internees moan for reprieve
as soot enveloped villages
once renowned for piety.
These are dark days, and the malaise
owes to the government the most
we did agree, while neither side of the
debate could quite admit, the evil was
democracy.
by Craig Kurtz
Craig Kurtz resides at Twin Oaks Intentional Community where he writes poetry while simultaneously surviving the dream. Recent work has appeared in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Conclave: A Journal of Character, Danse Macabre, Drunk Monkeys, East Jasmine Review, The Kitchen Poet, The Literati Quarterly, Maudlin House, The Recusant, Teeth Dreams, Three and a Half Point 9, Tower Journal, Veil: Journal of Darker Musings and Zouch Magazine.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
the clear blue sky a hovering Narcissus
sets cerulean shapes undulating the whole estero
winking the sun seducing my eyes sweet waters from the land
pulsing into salt ocean slipping its way onto the land I sit on one bank
looking across wobbling yellow slits tight to this shore reflect cliffs
behind me opposite shade shines down liquid black sandy shore and open
water giving way to dazzling light in action
dark underwater blues deeper browns to fertile marsh
brown pelicans fly low fall in akimbo tripping over feet out taut
large floating group some drop half-folded wings loose skin cups air against
water not piston-swimming white pelicans herding fish this a rhythmic applause
varied, playful stops for silence fellow pelicans take up a new patterned patter
making a community music none feed, listening to each other’s versions—plaintive cry
a gull’s—pierces a long pelican pause leaving rings of room around its sound
more pelicans splash in, their own are clapping back more gulls kee-een into the
next rest pelicans wait and syncopate clap-cuba-tap-africa gulls scree-ee
each species receives the other’s new offering never in my thirty years here
over the minutes, the hour the numbers and sound expand birds
hundreds, a thousand their mass louder penetrating gull chorus shrieking
pelicans slapping raucous cacophony pushing out all silence,
enveloping me unease replaces my relaxed wonder mind
taken from me I turn my body away
a skinned stick rosy hint of sunset dancing on it
bright towers waver from now golden
cliffs on the other side about my time
to leave I notice from the quiet
time has moved on so have
the pelicans and gulls I am
only soft again a fresh-
feathered first-year curlew
in the landscape a
waterborne gull makes
wake swimming toward me
winds and currents push west
toward the sea, the sun at the end of day
massed wavelets bunch higher shift shadows, turn darker
I look back to the east the water is calmer oddly more filled with light farther
from the sun. a distant invisible fountain pouring upward tiny scintillations
here the sun is closer streaming directly at me begins to look night
all around a paralyzing beam’s dark halo the known world so
close and closing only the tkk’ings of a bushbird a bee
bumbling for gold come across on the still air
by Jen Sharda
Jen Sharda lives in the San Francisco Bay Area—its fine community of poets, easy access to nature, and liveliness in the arts nourishes her writing. Her work is forthcoming in Forge, Marin Poetry Center Anthology and Spillway. She attended Squaw Valley Community of Writer’s in 2014 and has attended the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference since 2010, working with Jane Hirshfield, Major Jackson, and twice with Arthur Sze. Jen joined David St. John’s Cloud View Poets classes in 2013. Jay Leeming and Carolyn Miller were early teachers.
