Apr 1 2012

Featured Poet: April 2012 Vol. 4 # 6

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Lowell Jaeger:
 
As founding editor of Many Voices Press, Lowell Jaeger compiled Poems Across the Big Sky, an anthology of Montana poets, and  New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from 11 Western states.  His third collection of poems, Suddenly Out of a Long Sleep (Arctos Press) was published in 2009 and was a finalist for the Paterson Award.  His fourth collection, WE, (Main Street Rag Press) was published in 2010.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse. 
 
 
 
       Grandma’s Last Christmas
 
Grandma still lit candles on her Christmas tree
instead of stringing lights, and Dad said we’d better
help her take the damn thing down before
the old homestead burned to the ground.
 
Easter Sunday after church, we drove over
and found Grandma in a chair pulled close
to the soaps flickering on her new TV.
He done it, she said. I seen him.
 
She pointed at the black and white screen,
her house coat buttoned askew,
her thick ankles crushing her fuzzy slippers sideways.
That’s him, she said. He’s the one.
 
We raked buckets of dried needles, scraped lumps
of candle wax off the floor. Dad unscrewed the trunk
from its stand and heaved what was left
out the backdoor, trailing more needles and wax
 
and all us kids sweeping up behind him.
It’s just a show, Dad shouted from across the room.
It’s pretend. Grandma pulled her specks
lower on her nose and smoldered.
 
I know what I seen with my own eyes,
she said. We each had to hug Grandma
before we could go though she never hugged back.
The room felt empty where the tree had stood.
 
Dad bought a round of ice cream cones
at the drive-in on our way home, and we savored
in silence, letting the cold melt on our tongues. Dad stared
ahead, shuddered and mumbled. We didn’t dare ask what.
 
 
 
 
 
       Things Got Worse
 
Things got worse before they got better
after the mill shut for good
a week before Thanksgiving. Dad
was up early with no place to go.
He’d sit with his coffee and stare
straight ahead like a blind man.
We’d come home from school and find him
still there. Then it snowed and snowed;
 
the roads drifted closed, trees snapped
curbside and lay broken like wounded soldiers.
Dad shouldered his shovel door-to-door
asking for work clearing drives and walks.
A nearly grown neighbor boy did the same.
We’d report to Dad whenever we spotted the boy
slinging snow near streets Dad claimed
as his own. He don’t need it bad as I do,
Dad said. He’d pull on his boots and march
off to see what’s what and set the boy right.
 
A week before Christmas Dad took a job
delivering bottle gas, and he let us ride along
to see the Christmas trim on big houses
across town. Or we’d slip and slide
county backroads delivering to farms.
A big man in coveralls loaned us an ax
and we cut a Christmas tree from his woodlot.
 
Not much of a tree. Dad lashed it
to the grille of the truck and pieces flew off
as we sped along, our snow boots caked
with manure, our noses pinched
against outhouse smells in the heat of the cab.
At least we got food on the table, Dad said
whenever Mom looked like she felt sorry.
Or he’d say, There’s hungry people in this world
who get on with a lot less. Which meant
we should eat what Mom dished and not complain.
 
 
 
 
 
 
       Strangers
 
A classmate came knocking
one hot summer afternoon.
He’d hiked clear across town
in a trench coat and sandals
and nothing more. These were days
of Jimmy and Janis, make love
not war. We did crazy things.
 
Mom let him in; I wasn’t home.
Mom worried strangers might be Jesus
in disguise, testing her. I guess
Jesus did crazy things too.
 
He said Mom had served him
milk and cookies. We laughed
and made fun of her. Neither of us
meant it; we were young and hopped-up
on mock and ridicule.
 
Mom said they’d had a nice visit.
He’d talked about dropping out, Mom said,
and she hoped he wouldn’t do that.
He’s a bright boy, Mom said.
His big brown eyes just melted her
heart, she said. And his smile,
so gentle and full of forgiveness.
 
 
 
 
 
 
       LSD
 
We tied twisted plastic wrappers
to the rafters. Lit them one by one,
awed by the dripping flames hissing
and sizzling in the dirt. Dozen guys,
half as many chicks, huddled
in a picnic shelter, Iron Butterfly
drumming a war dance on the eight-track.
 
The molten globs of plastic shrieked
when they let go and whistled
like bombs. Last year of high school,
first frost on the meadow, full moon.
Faces flashed bright in the flames,
then black. Faces flashed
bright in the flames, then black.
 
Across the world an orange robe
doused in gasoline set itself ablaze
on a busy intersection, broad daylight.
One of us made noise like gun-fire.
Don’t do that, one of the girls said.
Something moved in the shadows,
something in the dark crept closer.
 
Napalm them jungle niggers, someone said.
We laughed and dared the dangerous
big world out there
to dare us back.
 
 
 
 
 
 
       Action
 
Action speaks louder than words, Lenny
reminded us. We’d just walked home to the dorm
from a rally on the commons,
spitting bullets at Nixon and his war.
We huddled and passed a pipe. Lit candles and aimed
a black-light at Hendrix ghosting on the wall.
 
Don’t you just want to trash something?
Right-on, Ted said and raised a clenched fist:
Smash the state! Right-on, Man. The rest of us
agreed. It’s revolution, Man. Love Generation rules.
We passed the pipe again and chased it
 
with a bottle of Boone’s Farm. Larry
went teary-eyed. Think of it, he said,
it’s up to us. We’re like what’s-his-name Jefferson,
Abe Lincoln, Man. We’re . . . like
making history, Man. Let’s do it, Lenny
shouted and jumped up on his chair. Do it, Man!
“Something’s happening here”—we sang along
 
with the stereo. We’re like a movement, Man. We’re like . . .
a tidal wave, Ted said. We’re like . . . .
Someone had sent ‘round a few crumbs of hashish
smoldering on a tinfoil wrapper. We’re like . . .
but he coughed and coughed and couldn’t force
another word. You’re like wasted, Man, Larry said.
 
It’s cosmic, Man, Lenny said. Don’t you see?
It’s all atoms. Everything. All made up of atoms.
All we need is . . . like . . . unlocking that atom, Man.
Ted snored. Larry rolled himself up in a rug,
knocking an empty, spinning. The needle on the LP blipped
on the last groove over and over. Ticking like a bomb.
No, ticking like a countdown. No, ticking like a clock.
 
 

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Mar 15 2012

Featured Artist: March 2012 Vol. 4 # 5

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Richard Santiago II
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Email: rsantiagoii@yahoo.com
Website: Richard Santiago Online

Richard Santiago II is a Hispanic artist originally from the Bronx in New York City. His work reflects modern pop culture and a twist to comic book illustration. His early beginnings in art start from street art, everything from legal graffiti art to logo designs. Santiago's work deals with a somewhat surreal content to his comic book illustrations. He is able to achieve this surreal effect by using pencils, pen and ink, water colors, and air-brush in his illustrations. He currently resides in Atlanta Georgia – USA and is constantly striving to excel in the field of art and design.

(Click Image Below to Enter Gallery)

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Mar 1 2012

Featured Poet: March 2012 Vol. 4 # 5

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Kevin Boyle
 
 
 
Kevin Boyle grew up in Philadelphia and now lives in Burlington, North Carolina. His book of poems, A HOME FOR WAYWARD GIRLS, won the New Issues Poetry Prize in 2004, and his chapbook, THE LULLABY OF HISTORY, won the Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Publication Award in 2002. His poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Virginia Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry East, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Colorado Review and Antioch Review.
 
 
 
Approaching Sixty
 
The plaza in sun-stroke, the men tied to palms
Whose branches they lop, he walks through
The dream to her steps and finds her still
In mourning, saying, come back in a year’s time,
My love, then invites him in, touching
His face to find out who he is, a recurring touch
For thirty years, and then gone, not the memory
Exactly, just the dream.  A blessing not to wake
Without her, the black lace, the red in her hair
In her lips as well, the welcoming smile saying
Tengo las cosas muy claras, because everything
Makes sense to her now.  And a blessing
Not to be turned away and find himself lost
In the two-block red light district where dwarves
And the deformed make small talk with
The sex buskers, the women raising their skirts
To show him their black mantillas they lift
To show him their hair, black and pomaded.
The two scenes arm in arm for years until
Finally he realizes he hasn’t dreamt of her,
Of all of them in years.  Even in his dreams
He’s forgetting, leaving the exotic traces behind.
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the Deep Heart’s Core
 
Timmy was too kind to say no, despite the flooding
That winter, as always, the shite the road threw up
Even before it gave up on being a road, the students
Waking from their sleep to yawn and bitch about
The poor conditions of the mud lane, the brambles
And gorse scratching up and into the sides of
Timmy’s coach, even at the windows to frighten
The bejesus out of one slow, deeply hungover waker
As I took the mic to announce we were about to alight
For a view and snap of Yeats’s Inishfree, perhaps even
A class photo, with Inishfree in the distance, our heads
Surrounded by Lough Gill, our feet planted in muck
We’d bring back to Timmy’s coach, if Timmy
Would be so kind.  We saw the island, “kind of puny,”
One student said, and another, “It’s a little fucking nothing,”
And then turned to arrange ourselves for Timmy
Who was still working the coach back and forth
To escape the trap that was the carpark, finally
Emerging in a lather, and though I thought to hand him
My camera for the group shot, all twenty-eight students
Handed him their cameras with quick directions,
And so with a few cameras on the ground, and the rest
Like bangles up and down his sweaty arms, he took
What felt like a thousand wedding photos, all of us
In fine mettle, the students and I smiling immeasurably,
As if at peace, the water birds flying away from us
Out of the rushes, the little bits of trash we dropped
Floating in the wind that put color in our cheeks, forced
The lake water to lap near our feet and take the one
Styrofoam cup someone had accidentally let slip
Out toward the mysteries of heather island.
I sometimes drag the photo out of my iPhoto folder
And realize I can’t remember a single student’s name
Because it was over a dozen years ago and Timmy,
I learned, is long dead, and though I seem to forget
Almost everything, I do remember his prescient words
As we left the lake.  Never again, I’ll never again
Take you eejits down that fucking Yeats lane.
 
 
 
 
 
 
University Dreams
 
When I tell my daughter I only spent one Friday night
on campus when I was in college, she seems so saddened
by my loss I love her even more.  At sixteen, she hates
school and is eager to go to college where she imagines
every Friday night will be filled with ecstasy, not the drug,
just the feeling, and Saturday night as well, perhaps Sunday.
She doesn’t mention Monday through Thursday much.
When I tell her I lived at home and took the bus and el
that left me off six blocks from my first class on Astronomy
taught by a man whose accent was from another galaxy,                   
she asks about Friday nights, Saturday, and I tell her everything
about the supermarket, how there were cash registers
to punch and no scanners, and they hadn’t invented the blood absorber
so all the meats bled as if freshly slaughtered, and how
once, during the five years, the Retail Clerks International
went out on strike, which meant I could be on campus
on a Friday night, even Saturday morning, before I had to return
to picket.   And did you make up for lost time, she asked?
It was so long ago I can’t remember everything, except
that feeling of being alone and walking alone along fraternity row,
all the parties in full bloom, each house surrounded by a moat
of people, smoking and drinking, and then meeting, somehow,
a girl from Astronomy coming back from the library, Jewish,
both parents doctors, from Westchester.  I told her my mother
was from the Bronx and, somehow, she invited me in
for a drink, and then—such a dark horse—to stay the night. 
At that time I believed in half-hearted class war, and so felt
oppositional, and I was terrified of her, her openness,
her license, her black hair.  And by Tuesday we had won
concessions, the strike was over, and I was back standing up
in my apron, blood here and there, kind of comforted
by the inhibitions, the tamping down, knowing that soon
would come the ecstasy, and I wasn’t far from wrong.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
Why Sleepless
 
My mother told me not to fall asleep without
saying a decade of the rosary, and her mother
told her not to sleep with flowers in the room,
and a Russian caregiver told my parents to sleep with
the window open an inch or so in winter, and my brother
told me to sleep on my side of the bed or else
the wrath of Cain would come down upon me,
and my dog sleeps in a locked crate, and my mother-in-law
mentions the heat, how she can not sleep with
too much or too little heat since her husband died,
and my wife, when she sleeps, talks in her sleep
about the men who are pursuing her with knives
or with flowers, she’s never sure which, or she’s lost
her leather purse and men she has slept with
find it, dump everything in the grass, and fling
the purse deep within the long woods she can’t even see
for all the brush fires held against her eyes.
 
 
 
 
 
Seems to Teach
 
It is only during the eclipse that the moon takes
A lover, finding some other floating stone to hold
Close to her, some with dimples, some with the pox,
And as the world below her watches the magician’s cape
Cloud her over, the moon is at her antics, making love
Without arms or legs, all brain becoming quickly
All womb or all heart, she tells them.  They’re at it
For an hour or so, having to part only as the sun begins
To light up their edges, the moon waxing poetic
About her moodiness and need again for privacy, solitude.
The rock begins its drift and the moon remains inviolate,
The virgin goddess beloved by all the lonely on the faces
Of the earth.  She knows she is watched, and in the way
Parents teach children how to die, when the time comes, 
She seems to teach the single, the solitary how to endure
With panache, with subtle shifts, the bright white loneliness.
 
 
 
 

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Feb 15 2012

Featured Artist: February 2012 Vol. 4 # 4

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Louise O'Neil
Bisbane, Australia
Email: louise_oneil@hotmail.com
Website: www.louiseoneil.com

 

Louise O’Neil is a Brisbane-based artist from Queensland, Australia. Her newest photographic series, ‘Grit’, was photographed at the old Ipswich powerhouse. The irony of this building as a powerhouse is found in its extreme darkness, with the only available light coming from sun fragments though dirt-encrusted windows. The machinery left in the building, lying lifeless amidst the abandoned chaos, stands as silent witnesses of the energy they once possessed. When struck by the outside light, the dust begins to dance around metal and decay as if there are ghosts in the machines. O’Neil’s work seeks to revive these objects and their place, enhancing the ambience and colour to bring the ghosts to life and restore the power the machines and the building once had.

 

(Click Image to Enter Gallery)

 

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Feb 1 2012

Featured Poet: February 2012 Vol. 4 # 4

 
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Kate Falvey
 
 
Kate Falvey's work has appeared in a number of print and online magazines, including Memoir(and), Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Hoboeye, Umbrella, CRIT, Inscribed, Hearing Voices, OVS, Literary Mama, Women Writers, The Mom Egg, the Aroostook Review, Shot Glass Journal and is forthcoming in Italian Americana. She is on the editorial board of the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center's Bellevue Literary Review and is editor in chief of the 2 Bridges Review. She teaches at New York City College of Technology/CUNY and lives with her daughter in Long Beach, New York.
 
 
 
Spitting Image
 
Fractured, this image of a swan:
early morning, early June,
a slow sun ruffling the clouds
where they tend to their nest of storms.
Egrets watch, aloof familiars, from
the blighted coven of skeletal cedar
and red maple, dead, still reaching,
intricate with power.
And the cygnets rake coils in the green
stillness of the marsh, their mothers prodding
pondweed and stonewort, harrying the tadpoles.
There is a scrim of birch and alder, and more
herons skimming for snakes and fishing-spiders
as light curls and dabs haphazardly.
Lured by the hazy peace, I blunder 
from my clumsy blind and venture
to a translucent verge, too flimsy to bar
my love-sick gazing.
An inch too far and I am beset by
an eruption of  wing and hissing.
The egrets don’t lift a feather to save me.
 

 
 
Slipping Down the Mud Bank
 
The spot where the child’s high chair
was up-ended
was bright with ferns and creepers,
wisteria and jewelweed wanton in
a mossy undertow
of run-off from the vague peril of
the listing, storm-addled road.
A slow mist clung like stifled thought
and shaped elfish hints of fear
which I subdued while reaching for
a cloudy-seeming rung as if the chair
were root or reed and would provide
a hand-hold or a stair as the creek bank
dissolved into a sodden, undulating lair.
 
There was a strange animation in the
chipped red of the high chair’s tray,
a ruddy evanescent glow of memory,
perhaps, or wooden dread,
a flash of muted color fixed
inside the diffuse, muddled grey
of drizzle, clay, and sand. I took
 
a stand and melded into mud,
knee and ankle splayed, distended,
the sudden swell more shocking than
predicament or pain. How long
I lay and shivered before shifting, rocking
a hair’s-breadth turn from break to bruise,
I still can’t say, but then, I spied
emerging from the startled ooze,
a silver baby rattle, blackened,
swaddled in bedraggled curls
of goldenrod and bracken.
When lifted free and scraped,
this age-clenched random find exposed
my own initials etched
in murky swirls on the twisted handle.
 
Arms outstretched, I grabbled, rose,
shaken, shaking, to somewhat higher ground.
My proof escaped as I ascended,
rattling down the slippery slope
to where some day, no doubt,
some other wanderer will unearth it
when she stumbles.
“But whose initials will be found?”
I vaguely wondered, hoped,
pushing through veils of fog
into the jolt of a clear and sudden
play of light.
 
 
 
 
Sister Moon
 
I could put you to rights if
you had half a mind.
What I’d tell you is this:
your illness has it right;
nothing is starlit, nothing is over,
nothing is sacred, everything
 is scarred.
 
You insist on your right
to a past of snares and peril,
eyes without mercy, thickets
of giddy abandonments and
relentless disregard,
 boggy distensions where only a small shoe
lies crumpled on the verge.
 
Your vision is complete.
The same images flicker chronically;
the pain mechanical and prescribed.
You’ve never realized it was you
who  told all those ghastly lies.
 
 
 
 
 
Lucky Stiff
 
Cautious, she is, at thirteen,
visiting the Christmas city from the sticks.
She’s heard of tricks the monsters in the dark
are wont to play, scenting for young blood in the
thickets of the Park. She’s smart, but she’s
deliberately afraid.
She’s heard about the killings and the stalkings and
the gangs, the women turned to ashes in their glares.
They mark you unawares, then mutate into vicious
feral things. They catch your shyness in their eyes,
then spring.
Tricked out in its mesmerizing glow, the greens
and silvers smearing filmy ribbons in the snow,
 
the city sings
of winter work and want, wealth, and wry imaginings,
its complications muted in the gold
and dingy red tinged drifts,
the heft of gifts sparkling, crisply earnest, in
the high-strung shopping bags. She
has on her proud glad-rags, her thin-soled sling-back shoes,
like a coy suburban match-girl in the chips. Of course, she slips
into a frosty puddle of a cashmered gent, who drops his
briefcase, guard, and all pretence. Boozily roused
and absurdly unamused, he spits
 something unholy then flips
 this innocent the bird. Or maybe I misheard?
Or rashly misconstrued?
Before I, huffy Auntie Mame, can swing
to ineffectual defense, he murmurs season’s greetings
and slips into the huddling  unreason of the street.



The charming flurry in the lamplight, heckled
by crass, impatient  winds,
winds which, wilding,  push
us indoors where spills of  safe, spectacular
year-round lights dance, dazzling, over dancers –
whose nightly peril is latent in mistiming or missteps.
 
She
is frozen and forlorn, worrying her premonition:
we’ll have to pass the Park again,
there may well be thugs galore in store.
 
I tell her during intermission
that though this is a hungry, brutish world,
the brutes are far between and mostly dormant,
mostly tame.
A million passersby will pass the Park a million times,
will keep their purses, plans, and lives.
The bad that happens mostly doesn’t.
 
Self-satisfied, I think I’ve squared away her fear.
But when we tour the night again, she lags, sits
stiffly by the frozen fountain, demands
a taxi for a present.
 
 




 
 
 
 
 

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