January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Damp
Those little dream brothers were made of chicken feathers,
and I had to blow their dream parts forcefully from my nose.
I was lobbing bottles of vitamin water at their cute little feet.
You’ll need help to rise now and
some dreams won’t take you back,
as if there were something determined in their breath.
We were after love that night, but wet and mysterious was close enough.
You carried several husbands in your peekaboo pants, and
This just pisses me off, I admitted loudly,
but you were also the ocean with everyone
coming down to you to watch you breathe,
and you will not have to pretend you know this.
Deep in the night when the night’s closer, someone thinks
you might understand I always wanted to help you,
and I always wanted to be you helping me,
and suddenly it’s dusk with candelabras of birdsong
lighting my ears, and it’s best to tell them everything because
you’ll feel better, and the wandering brothers won’t listen anyway.
Confessions of a Delinquent Narrative
Of course, the surprise ending knows I will arrive,
but the beginning doesn’t know where I’ve gone,
thinks I might start again. And I might, but not
to set up house and drink endless tea.
Sometimes I do feel as if I know where I’m going
though I cannot take you there through
the door I’m still building, and I can’t stay
here any longer without erasing myself.
Sometimes I open what’s not even there.
It could be a deeply questionable freedom I live in,
beneath the could of it. I’m suffering from
a surprisingly difficult stroll, and the color
of little bird panic in the wings of my heart
won’t bleed a seductive smile made of merely
smoke and daisies. Let not the unbound be fenceless,
shedding their dark beneath the breath of progress.
Tonight I want yogurt blossoms and imbeciles in
the dark trees as happy as tongue depressors. I’ve already
lost a couple of porches and reasoned with absentee clouds.
I’ve an unreasonable love of falling leaves and wet hair.
I’ve decided the Italians must once have thought
“modern dress” meant “attached to sullen hillsides,”
and I’ve decided I’m a territory unexplored by innocence,
unexpected beauty, toast, or a fresh glass of water.
Still, I might be less literal than I thought. I might be
raining beachballs containing ideas for new machines.
I might be plucking eyelids from the blind parents of
dirt-bikes and chastising the unplanned fun that bled us.
I might be joined to the confused by the undecided and,
if it’s not a part of the plot, each pound for an ounce
of thought, I might contain a warm milking stool with
ambitions to speech, and I might walk away from myself
out onto the road of participation and complicity
in a rage of taking back, of feet, of direction,
as if I might have been the goal and not
merely the forgotten territory of progress.
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
A line outside the liberty bell,
bars you can still smoke in,
cyclists covered in tattoos; my five-foot-one sister playing
dress-up in her brand-new, oversized Albert Einstein Hospital coat.
Everyone gone, to the shore.
(Fourth of July weekend.)
Gray, cobblestone streets nearly empty, melting before dusk.
It’s my last day here. A crowd gathering for the presidential motorcade
Jolts me out of sleep.
Kids laughing on the sidewalk below, the day disappearing.
Love’s at the door, with lightly freckled cheeks and a guitar case on the floor.
Muscular arms bursting out of a gray v-neck, a smile like the best meal of your life.
No place I’d rather be than in a room where he is singing.
Orange lights pouring in from the street, a breeze, a voice–what a voice.
Promises I’ve made –No More Musicians! – want to fall into the sky.
Quitting would mean I learn from my mistakes.
Reason never wins; look at the divorce rates. But,
Spring has come and gone and
Timing is everything. Maybe I should have owned a clock all these years.
Usually, I can read them like paperbacks, but those eyes—museums should keep them
Vaulted in a glass case.
Where they can be studied,
X-rayed.
Years will go by and I’ll still remember them, under the awning, rain falling around us.
Zippers staying zipped, a long embrace that felt like home—a home I can’t afford yet.
—Zhanna Vaynberg
ZHANNA VAYNBERG was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine and moved to the Midwest in 1991. She graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing in 2008, and will be receiving a master’s degree in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University in March 2012. She recently won an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s August 2011 Short Story Award for New Writers for a piece of flash fiction entitled “Things You Should Never Tell Your Mother,” and her first published story, “Do Not Leave Chicago,” will be coming out in Euphony Journal’s winter issue in January 2012.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Frankie bites a peach, axks what’s gonna be on the test.
Here sit our vessels, dressed up in sound,
shrouded in the rattle of bone & the tap of Celeste’s pencil
as she copies questions onto the surface of the desk:
How can we cut
the carotid artery,
and how will the heart,
that is no longer beating,
respond?
In which chamber
will the attack
be the end of us,
and which will just make us
very lucky,
an avoider of the salt shaker,
fierce embracer of children?
“We went over this last week”, Ms. Moon says.
All these things have passed,
are passing.
“We’ve got to move on”, she says.
Last week’s answers, they were that
The wall of the heart has three layers and that
the Indians, they drum.
They form circles and they drum.
They drum past the time that it gets dark and their hands are tired,
they keen and cut to bleed, hoping that their time is never.
Frankie sucks a peach pit,
lips wet as a feral cat’s.
Turns and says if he don’t pass this one,
he’ll bust open the head of the angry Moon,
carves an elegy to blood and bone in the stale air behind him.
—Elisa Abatsis
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
LONELY NIGHTS
Against the old oak I cling my cheek
to hear a lost voice inside;
The voice of a lost friend,
the voice of my lost father and mother,
the voice of lost love.
And in this lonely night the voices
inside the old oak are quiet and inaudible,
as if dying along with my spirit.
The night has turned its beautiful lonely face to the sky,
and I,
I call out my own name in this lonely night.
which became perfectly strange to me –
with some desperate hope
that I shall hear the echo of my own spirit.
Wise people say that each spirit is made of memories,
and my memories are dead;
dead like those lost voices inside the old oak,
which, like vampire claws,
raises its old, barren branches towards a black crow,
to steel its voice and to call out into this silent, lonely night,
like the voice of many friends of men,
that someone’s tear sometime dies before it’s born.
Inside me, there is still hope
that someone shall hear my name,
and that it won’t sound as strange
as it does to me.
Slowly and ghastly I tread the shadows
like a sinner treads the skulls in hell,
and I call out with a solitary cry
into this lonely night,
to chase away death, if I can’t chase away solitude.
But what is life worth without voices,
not the ones you can buy,
but voices of conscience,
which are born and eternally live along with human souls.
Against the old oak I cling my cheek,
and I listen in to a thousand souls,
Now I know,
yes, Lord, now I know that someone will call my name as well,
because when you hear the voices of souls
of dear people you’ve lost,
you have the power
to bear memories of yourself in someone else.
THE OLD MAN AND THE BUTTERFLY
How many wishes and hopes pass through a man’s mind?
This is what I am thinking about while looking
into the sad face of an old man
who is motionlessly starring into the distance,
as if down there,
in the blue eye of the dreamy sea
he shall find all the answers.
And while the turquoise hands of the moon drive the shadows
into the old man’s embrace,
a turquoise butterfly merrily flaps its wings
and radiates rays of light
along the dark ridges of this warm summer night
above his trembling tired head.
Perhaps this is the reason why
the old man’s sad face looks up
instead of down,
why the sparkle of life still glows
in his tired eyes.
This butterfly is very young,
but his noble parentage is very old,
and that noble parentage used to spread its turquoise light
in the times of the old man’s parents
and grandparents,
back in the time when hope was born
(and people say that hopes are younger than solitude).
It seems that the old man feels it,
and he raises his tired eyes whenever he hears
the harmonious sound of the butterfly’s turquoise wings,
and death,
like a dark lady,
respectfully waits for its turn,
as if it took pity on the old man’s boyish gaze;
How many wishes and hopes pass through a man’s mind
while he helplessly sits
and waits for death?
I wonder where his thoughts are traveling now
and which soul in heaven do they touch?
His mother’s soul?
His father’s soul?
His brother’s and sister’s souls?
Because souls are like butterflies,
crawling the earth with people,
only to eventually fly up to the sky,
perfectly free and magically bright.
All of this must be passing through the old man’s thoughts
while he looks at the turquoise butterfly
in such a childish and lively manner.
Everything on him is dead,
apart from that childish gaze,
which makes his old man’s thoughts so young
and so full of hope
that his soul might soon enough fly up
like his dear butterfly;
How many wishes and hopes pass through a man’s mind;
yes, Lord, how many wishes and hopes are passing
my old father’s mind now.
YOUR VOICE
Where did your voice disappear, man?
In the demonic fires of passion?
In golden castles of terrible greed?
In the dark gorge of vanity?
You voices wander the golden mirages,
Your tired spirit wanders the golden dusts,
Like a warning for the new age;
When the golden bell rings on Wall Street,
Your voice will be even quieter,
Caught in the silky spider web you look up
To see the reflection of your lost spirit in the heavenly dome;
When the golden bell rings on Wall Street,
You find your limbo in the blue ink!
You are seeking your resurrection in verses!
In which verse do I find your voice?
In Walt Whitman’s verse of freedom?
In Ezra Pound’s tragic verse?
In Robert Frost’s accusing verse?
Your voice is hiding in the column of abandoned shadows,
Escaping the lunatic gazes of golden masks,
In which many inebriated eyes found their home.
Whose eyes are they?
The eyes of maddened street lights?
The eyes of hungry death?
The eyes of a lost man?
The shadows march the streets of funeral processions,
The terrible voice of the golden bell chases the poor into the graves,
Golden masks steal human faces,
The eyes of conscience become blind,
Your voice is ever quieter.
Walter William Safar is the author of a number of a significant number of prose works and novels, including “Leaden Fog”, “Chastity On Sale”, “In The Flames Of Passion”, “The Price Of Life”, “Above The Clouds”, “The Infernal Circle”, “The Scream”, “The Devil’s Architect”, “Queen Elizabeth II”, as well as a book of poems.
