July 2016 | poetry
N 42°25’32.5″ W 103°43’58.5″
“…when they would talk among themselves he (Red Cloud) would call out to them to keep still as he wanted to hear what his wife or father or mother were saying to him.”
— Letter from Kate Cook to her sister Clara, 1908
A year before he died, Chief Red Cloud had gone blind
yet he could see, told friends he was now “so nearly dead”
he could once again see his dead wife, beckoning.
Your dying father, too, spoke with long-dead parents,
and in vivid dreams retraced younger maps,
hiking again that thin trail to the Little Huron where
he emerged from dark woods to find an Anishnaabe
encampment at the river’s mouth, as in ancient days.
He sat with the men all night, and listened.
No one knew it would be the last Encampment.
*
On the Great Plains, the Lakota build wooden scaffolds
for their dead, or placed them high in tree branches
where the coyotes could not fight over them.
What a blessing, when the sacred Eagle descends!
Sometimes the bones are found perfectly intact, the skeleton
composed. It is easy, then, to imagine some flash flood beginning
upstream, a wall of mud and water that will find mammals of the Eocene
unprepared as day-hikers in some sunny slot-canyon
outfitted with handheld GPS and two hundred dollar boots
about to be swept away by a gully-buster fifty miles west.
Isn’t that what happened to the Sioux? Wasn’t it
just a trickle at first, wasn’t the sun still shining
when the geologists and bone hunting expeditions arrived?
Didn’t a wall of “consumption” and “smallpox” and “Manifest Destiny”
roll in from the East, where they’d turned to see the Dawn?
The journals of early explorers describe a biblical plain
of milk and honey free for the taking, as soon as bison
were exterminated and sod which held the whole fabric in place
furrowed, and turned to dust —
*
In Westerns, there’d be an Indian Guide right about here,
a human segue saying “Since Then, Many Moons Have Passed.”
We’ve learned to lecture passionately, and write in verse.
We take classes in healing and empathetic listening,
regret the cavalry, and the dust bowl, for which we now atone
by washing plastic bags a dozen times, writing Senators
denouncing pipelines, composting vegetable scraps, managing herds with PhDs
because there are no wolves or nomads to control the bison numbers.
*
There’ve always been plagues of locusts, but don’t they eat everything
and move on?
The wind howls and booms and kicks like a mustang against our square walls.
In the Badlands, you’ll come upon a single fossil bone resting
like a lost war-club on the surface of a Chadron mud-mound
itself no larger than a sacred drum — all that remains of a great mountain of mud!
*
What force in this world makes things dwindle?
Your father, startled from a vivid daydream, looked wildly around the room
and said, “where did he go, that fellow who was just here?”
When tourists drive the Loop Road through the Badlands
with their air-conditioner running, sun-roofs open, windows down,
their music reverberates for miles, all different drumbeats
echoing against the stone.
It makes it hard to hear what the dead are trying to say.
*
Wrapped in his scarlet blanket of wind, Red Cloud keeps saying “hush.”
He asks that we please go back where we came from
or at least learn to be still.
by Kathleen M. Heideman
Kathleen M. Heideman is a writer, artist and environmental activist working in Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula. She’s completed a dozen artist residencies with watersheds, scientific research stations, private foundations, the National Park Service, and the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. A curious woman.
July 2016 | poetry
The round and flat disc
Became a glowing orb again
In earnest today.
The static landscape
Awoke into a fierce self-
Conducting opus.
A hunched man clutching
Bamboo unruffled his cloak
To show the graceful,
Smiling waterfall
Of Loshan his two grandkids
Love-leeching frail hips.
A wood-paneled floor
Opened its stoic lacquer
To permeation
To welcome my tear-
Soaked cheek and then to comfort.
That, your intention?
by Griff Foxley
Griff holds a bachelor of arts in English literature from Vassar College where he studied with Eamon Grennan, and an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. He is a member of the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective, and is currently attending the Jack Grapes’ Method Writing Workshop. A New York City native, he has been a Los Angeles resident for the past ten years, and works as a food business entrepreneur, social justice activist, and writer. He enjoys listening to music, bike riding through the city, and spending time with his wife and two toddlers.
July 2016 | poetry
Cast up into heights of liberation
By bleeding air from the big blimp balloon
That had arisen out of stalwart eruptions of emotion
Taking then launching him
Happiness surrendering to hard stares and encroaching staggers of justification
As if laughter mattered in the face off with destiny newly invented
Piling treasure on carpets woven in history
Before you woke up to
The possibilities slumbering in subconscious travel
On to where you’re supposed to be
Believing in whatever could be
Despite it never having been seen
In his lifetime
Yet
There is always room
Somewhere
For change
by Josef Krebs
Josef Krebs has a chapbook published by Etched Press and his poetry also appears in Agenda, the Bicycle Review, Calliope, Mouse Tales Press, The Corner Club Press, The FictionWeek Literary Review, Burningword Literary Journal, The Aurorean, Inscape, Crack the Spine, The Cape Rock, Carcinogenic Poetry, and The Cats Meow. A short story has been published in blazeVOX. He’s written three novels and five screenplays. His film was successfully screened at Santa Cruz and Short Film Corner of Cannes film festivals.
July 2016 | poetry
Between any here or there
is a road or pathway,
a line, a distance,
a fragment of broken space.
Some surfaces have an existence
in themselves and lead out
to celestial spheres, the parallels
and perpendiculars of time, unknowns.
Is there any center that can hold,
a perfect x/y axis, a constant north,
a dimension that emanates and radiates?
Is there an essential place?
Some roads are easy to travel:
prairie grass waves in soft breezes,
the air shines, and soft shadows
dance in the day’s motion.
Trees grow and are cut down,
gravity defied and then realized.
Between beginnings and the end,
our place is a question, a muted wish.
Acceleration against inertial space
leads to this or that party, a smile
and wave. Our own darker moments,
searching for less grievous avenues.
Is there any place, celestial or grounded,
that avoids the closed doors,
cold caves, the hard wood nailed together
spanning all directions?
by Carla Ann McGill
Carla Ann McGill grew up in Southern California and lives there in Rancho Cucamonga with her husband. She has an MA and a PhD from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA from California State University, San Bernardino. She has work published in A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Shark Reef, Crack the Spine, Westview, Common Ground Review, Caveat Lector, and Inland Empire Magazine, and work forthcoming in Vending Machine Press. As a member of the Poetry Society of the Huntington Library from 1991–2012, her poems have appeared in three of the group’s chapbooks: Garden Lyrics, Huntington Lyrics, and California Lyrics. She writes poetry, fiction, and is working on a novel and stage play.
July 2016 | poetry
A Sudden Wind
makes leaves tremble,
bends branches,
lifts my hair, tangles.
Enters my nostrils,
steals my breath.
I turn
against its surge,
look down;
dust whirls upward,
blinds me,
grips my throat.
I taste it.
I am being whittled away
to join its force,
relinquish
resistance.
Guardian of the Night
An asteroid plowed
into Earth, belly-fire
and debris mingled,
coalesced into a sphere,
finding its orbit nearby.
The moon shines silver
or breathes sunlit gold,
peeks through darkness
into windows. Its glow
fills the hollows in my heart,
lights wings of imagination.
Guardian of my night,
continue your journey
an inch plus a year
toward the sun.
by Pamela Hammond
Pamela Hammond was born in Chicago, grew up in Southern California, and now lives in Santa Monica. For more than a decade, she worked as a Los Angeles-based critic for Art News based in New York. Her love of nature has led her to hike, backpack and travel, often to Northern California, and to Alaska, the Southwest, Hawaii, and New Zealand’s South Island, which became her home for almost a year. She completed two chapbooks, Encounters (2011) and Clearing (2012), produced by Red Berry Editions, Fairfax, California. In 2013, her work appeared in Forge, Assisi, Foliate Oak, Broad River Review, and Tulane Review. In 2014, her work appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Crack the Spine, Drunk Monkeys, Whistling Shade, Chaparral, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Westward Quarterly. In 2015, her work is forthcoming in Griffin and The Penmen Review. Her poem “Winter Walk” appeared in Crack the Spine’s Spring 2014 print anthology.
July 2016 | poetry
With only a pursed lip
and tone of crazed despair,
my body constricts itself,
the way a snake takes hold of it’s prey
right before the kill.
And you know the way
your throat closes and reopens
with the tangled sentiment of choked back tears?
No, wait.
That’s me, too.
And then the panic sets in-
the black of eyelids falling privy
to sudden heat, as it inches
as far as my fingertips-
where jagged nails are now
smooth and growing,
like the red dahlia stunted in shadows,
now blooms full with the sun.
I want to feel the freedom
of a criminal.
Send me away…
Anywhere, but here, I cry.
Anywhere,
but
here.
by Hannah Bushman
Self-proclaimed humanitarian, Hannah Bushman, is a lover of literature, music, and peppermint tea. She believes that the right song on a television show can make all the difference in the world. Hannah is a graduate of John Carroll University with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. In addition to poetry, Hannah revels in the creativity of photography and the logistics of psychology.
