I cross the crowded streets, my mind congested with thoughts, get startled by myriads of complacent looks that are painted on faces like gilded books.
The topography of miens remains intact. An imbecile look adheres like a mask, unruffled by grief, privations, and crime.
A smile trickles from each flaccid mouth, too sugary for viewers with embittered hearts who lost their wholeness to a ravishing war.
Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in multiple venues including Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.
My
name is Jull Soares and I am a bastard. This is not a particular
opinion that I, or anyone else that I’m aware of, has placed on me.
It is objective truth. My mother was an unlicensed sex worker and
neither she or I have any inkling of who fathered me, although a
couple of gringos are among the suspects.
There
is nothing more painful than longing for things that never were. Many
of my friends grew up with fathers and when I was young, I was very
jealous. However, based on what I’ve witnessed in films and in real
life, it doesn’t seem that I missed out on much. If you are
loved—it doesn’t matter by whom or how many—you’ll be fine as
long as you feel worthy of being loved.
I am old now, but I do not think that I fear death. Sometimes I get upset that while I am rotting in the dirt others will be drinking beer and dancing, or lying on a beach with closed eyes, caressed by the sun. My love of history has been an enormous help in smothering my panic of not being alive.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve adored hearing city elders tell stories about Cartagena. How my ancestors fought and killed the Spanish invader Juan de la Cosa when he tried to steal a 132 pound golden porcupine from our Sinu temple. And how we citizens repelled an attack of the English Armada that included George Washington’s half brother Lawrence. Or when the great North American female matador, Patricia McCormick, one of the finest bullfighters of her time, slew a bull at the beloved Circo Teatro. Streaked in blood, she knelt by the animal she just killed and stroked its head while screaming out, “I love this brave bull!”
I
can accept and enjoy that all these events took place without my
being alive to witness them, so why should I regret events I will be
unable to experience after I die? I have come to believe that when we
die, we return to wherever we were the year before our birth. As I
was born in 1959, I will simply return to whatever I was doing in
1958 and that’s where I will be for eternity. There seems to be
very few second chances in life and I suspect the same will be true
in death.
I
like lying on this ledge, becoming part of this glorious mural. I
feel as if I’m a horizontal recruiter enlisting pedestrians to take
some time outs during the day and not to fear exposing themself in
public. Often kids, mostly teenagers, come over and tease me that I
look dead when they shake or kick me into awakening. I can appreciate
their concern or forgive their mockery, but I don’t like it when
they pee in a wine bottle and try to force me to drink. Or pour it
over me while I sleep.
Sleeping in public can give you interesting insights into human nature. It’s been my experience that the good are pretty evenly matched with the bad, although it does tip a bit more in favour of the positive. Many people think I’m just a homeless misfit and don’t realize I’m actually giving them a chance to join me in creating a temporary public family. Compassion and cruelty is what I frequently dream about while I sleep on this beautiful ledge, and is what I often wake up to.
Since
I was a child, I’ve always hated shoes. Most men like to appear
tough. If a person really wants to be tough it must start with their
feet. Our ancestors probably went tens of thousands of years
travelling in their bare feet—tough, grizzled, calloused—but not
indifferent. Growing up without family except for my mother, I don’t
think of being shoeless as a sign of poverty. I am walking in the
footsteps of my ancestors where each step I take is headed in the
direction of a family reunion. The soles of my naked feet scrape
along the same paths where the souls of my forebears once walked.
Please forgive my clumsy attempt at poetic wordplay, but it is a holy
trail.
A human head should always be cradled. That is why I always carry a pillow in my pouch. A good pillow allows you to dream in colour. My pillow is very old and even when I wash it has a distinctly peculiar smell to it. That’s because of the many beautiful dreams and disturbing nightmares burrowed inside it. My sweat and tears puddle into the stains of my life. A kind European visitor once told me I should consider my pillow as a work of textile art. I’m not sure what that means, but I like how it sounds.
It is a pillow almost as old as me. My mother made it for me when I was still “shitting yellow” as she used to like to say in her colourful way of labelling me a baby. Each day I ensconce myself into this bright yellow mural, beneath a stunning young woman with legs spread, as if birthing me onto this ledge.
Freedom
is isolation. Slavery is the obliteration of isolation. I abhor
flophouses, government housing and charitable hostels. Once you lose
your ability to desire isolation, you become a slave. Creativity can
only flourish in silence and solitude. If I was in some kind of
forced shelter do you think I would be writing in this notebook and
accompanying these words with images torn from magazines, newspapers
and catalogues? The European woman who told me my pillow was textile
art also said that I have a collagist mentality when I showed her a
few of my notebooks.
Do not pity me as homeless. Celebrate me as one who possesses the special gift of being able to live alone. Sometimes I am forced to enter the dark doors of slavery, but I maintain the wherewithal to escape back into freedom and return to this colourful ledge.
And
so here I lay, precariously balanced between moments of exaltation
and the fear of being disturbed. In between those two points lies the
secret to a healthy and productive life. Boredom is not having
nothing to do, but feeling like nothing is worth doing. No one
volunteers to experience life. We don’t have a choice. That is why
anyone who completes this journey without taking short cuts is
heroic.
Can
you spare a few pesos in support of a pilgrim’s progress?
Thank
you.
May you be spared a life of inertia in motion.
Mark Blickley, from New York, is a widely published author of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Scholarship Award for Drama. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center and author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press), Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground (Moira Books). In his 2018 video, Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, was selected to the International Experimental Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain, was an Audie Award Finalist for his contribution to the original audio book, Nonetheless We Persisted, and co-curated the Urban Dialogues art exhibition, Tributaries: Encontro de Rios, in Lisbon, Portugal. His most recent book is the text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, Dream Streams by Clare Songbirds Publishing House.
Katya Shubova is a photographer and former competitive gymnast who grew up in Ukrainian Odessa. Her true passion is dance and she travels internationally to perform tango. Although identifying as a dancer, for the past few years she has studied improvisational performance and sketch comedy at New York City’s Upright Citizens Brigade. She stars in the upcoming short film, Hunger Pains, directed by Iorgo Papoutsas for Wabi Sabi Productions.
and so I spent my 20s trying to write just like him and somehow it got me my first real book-deal, from an editor in America with leanings toward fascism, and in hindsight I suppose I can see why. we’re all too easily taken by the romance of the hard life, working jobs, working women, wandering in a wildness of wine, like butterflies and mad flowers, and he could write a stylish line – that helps.
I think if I could give any advice to someone trying to be a writer it would be eat a few pages of bukowski once and early on and then quickly shit them out and away from your system with dried plums and milk of magnesia.
it was original only when he was doing it, and anyway there’s no romance now in being an original bastard with a bad soul. not when real bastards are so easy to come by.
In college he was a friend of friends— They’d gone to the same boarding school. We were both at Fort Jackson In ’61 on the eve of war. He came to our wedding And has shown up in our lives Now and then over 50 years, A bachelor from the time when That word did not raise eyebrows, Meant only that you would not Commit your life to someone else. His allegiance was to his work And his silver flask, The mathematics of insurance, Probabilities of living, And to his old school, A love his classmates did not share. His doctor tried to prescribe Better choices, Which for a while improved his Probabilities of living. In a dark downward slide He would call late at night And carry on about what good friends We’d always been. Sometimes he would leave a message Which the next day he did not recall.
I keep a moonbeam in each afflicted eye, afflicted with neon and modern modes of light. They gloss my pupils with the sheen of pearls and shield their spheres from the evil spark, a celestial armour.
In my sleep their silver seeps into my mind. It arrays all figures with a cloak of white, subduing vermillion, charcoal, and black.
When people sunbathe to glow golden brown, I bare my bosom to Diana’s darts, each lunar night.
US poet Beth Gordon returned to writing poetry after a significant hiatus in order to process a number of tragic events in her family. In her poetry collection, Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe, she explores grief, loss, mortality, and how we can find moments of beauty through the darkness. Along the way, this poetic journey also follows trails into music, magic, and the ethereal.
Isabelle Kenyon, Managing Director of Fly on the Wall Press, Freelance Editor and Book Marketing Consultant, caught up with Beth Gordon.
Isabelle:
When you write a poem, do images or words come first?
Beth:
I would say most of the time words come first. Poems are like puzzles
to me – I read an article or see a headline and I take that idea,
or several ideas and talk about it with my friend. When I do write,
visual imagery emerges from that conversation.
Isabelle:
How does your environment and your upbringing inform your poetry?
Beth: I was fortunate that my parents thought it was very important we were exposed to books and music. One of my earliest memories was reading Mother Goose; memorising. From the first moment I picked up a pen, I wrote poems. My parents aren’t creative and my mum thinks my commas are in the wrong places! They support me and a big moment was to send them my book. My current environment is a local writers group I go to every Saturday and my network of family and friends – I have now connected the two. I have said, this is how I will be spending my time now. Mostly, they have supported this life change. People have had negative experiences of poetry from school.
Isabelle:
If you had to describe your collection in one sentence, what would it
be?
Beth: A book of poetry about my relationship with death and life.
Isabelle:
Which writers do you admire and does their work influence yours?
Beth: My earliest influences as a female writer would be Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver. Oliver over time became more minimalist and I aspire to this. Sexton and Plath broke down barriers about “appropriate topics” – sex, periods. At the time, that was not what was expected, and I’m grateful to them for that. The current generation of young writers I find so inspiring- it’s easy to hear people my age criticising the millennials but I believe it is called change and revolution. The strong stance they take on inclusivity, even if it is just on social media, is fantastic. The abundance of literary journals is wonderful. I don’t think I could be writing what I am without them. When I got my MFA, doors were closed, and they have kicked them down.
Isabelle:
What is the worst writing advice you have ever received and the best?
Beth:
The worst advice I have ever had was when I was an undergraduate in
psychology and an English professor started a writing workshop, so I
picked up a minor in English just to take the classes. I went to see
an old teacher to say I was going to take an MFA after (he had always
been very supportive) but he said it would be useless and I wouldn’t
learn anything. Thankfully, I ignored him.
The best advice I have ever had was from Henry Taylor, a Pulitzer prize-winner. He said, “the power of your poem cannot be derived from the subject matter alone”. I wrote him a letter after that and sent him some poems. He said I needed to write through my grief and that after that, I would produce new work. In other words, simply writing about the death of a grandchild doesn’t necessarily mean I have refined my craft. Pushing my craft is important to me – to grow and evolve.
Hyena season genesis grasp secret psalm in search of duende… this eventuality’s carnival row exit in memory reclaiming time with unexpected grace notes vagabond of the margins, mantic flame burning up the green guardian assignations crestfallen between music and silence pledge of presence afterfall operative x knocking on the sky- vacillations of xerox and infinity, images in vogue amber soul sieve of moments preserved cascades of desire and nostalgia forming an umbrella of infallible truth new rules incubating in the absolute room in order to break free of the shadows the rupture of word and thing
Rus Khomutoff dreams up the contemporary world into surprisingly familiar cosmic landscapes reminiscent of those suggested by the most idiosyncratic avantgardists—think Artaud, Char, Malraux, Panero, and other moderns unafraid to acknowledge the material quotidianity of mystical experience. Poems in Radia function as un-coders (rather than decoders), allowing the words to shine in their full resplendence while approaching each other artfully, almost naked, in unexpected ways, to take advantage of the oneiric gears hiding everywhere under the apparent simplicity of life – German Sierra
I heard it said trees can commune in an electrochemical style. Their fungal webs are like synapses and neurons, life flashes through this network deep in forest floors.
A bright white and yellow patchwork floor, fingers of fungus that are filaments, carbon, water and nutrient webs, flowing with such fervour flashing through underground rivers of love.
They are the Mother Trees who love with their nurturing neurons and mycelium strands of fungi. They fan out on the forest floor, with their fantastic filaments of food.
They feed the infant trees, with tree food rushing through a galaxy of motherlove down into the astonishing network of a weft of fungal filaments, reaching out beneath their feet.
No milky breasts, but spidery webs for feet, nested deep in the forest bed soaked in a nurturing fervour, and as they feed, they make the branches of the infant trees light up green, as spring shoots through.
When the Mother Tree dies through the ravages of time her wandering fungal webs dry up, they shrivel back, their filaments empty, the infant trees mewl, like abandoned babies, dying and starving.
I walk my dogs, they run sniffing the fields, starving for more rich smells of the rain-fresh grass, their yapping fervour fills the air, as they run through the little wood, with its silent soft floor, and I look for the oak tree with massive feet-like roots.
There, I see the oak tree now with its spiralling roots, and I feel the joy. ‘Why’, I have often thought,’ it’s just a tree.’ Still, it is as though she speaks to me. Suddenly I know, she is the Mother Tree. Her leaves rustle and whisper as she bears witness to my pain in her silent majesty.
at the counter she still gets nervous whenever she has to count someone’s change. the door rings an electric bell and while each customer browses she hopes aloud that they’ll pay by card. it’s easier. and each morning she asks me to do the totals – got in trouble once when it was short all a week and she was accused of scabbing pennies. a meeting with hr, and the eventual threat of retirement. afterward the manager did another account; got a promise from head office that going forward she wouldn’t have to open alone. I got the extra hours. he had justification to fire her if he’d wanted to, and he doesn’t like her much – but instead he kept her on, in this job of ten years part-time, allowing her the chance to mess up the totals each evening, to be snide at repeat customers, to stack the shelves neat at close of business and go home listening to 80s rock cds.
D.S. Maolalai is a graduate of English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and has been nominated for Best of the Web, and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).
Sienna steel slithers and huffs Through snow-dusted cedars and pines, Mumbling, dragging its steel tail behind it. And nestled between serpent and shore, Feigning indifference, a river sleeps Semi-conscious, beneath the frozen tears Of the land. A land that Still feels the incisions Made during the Surgeries that installed first iron Then steel runners on its back. And on The bank of the river three trees turn to
Peer at the young, scaly intruder; a bleak Memory rises from the earth And tells them: this is the interloper who Destroys the cacophony of peace In the forest. On a tight schedule. And behind, in the distance, Mountains who once believed They were immovable Wrap themselves in white Down and ignore the steel Stripling whose hiss they remember All too well; they heard it soon after Explosions removed their immovable Brothers that used to Rule the valley where the steel serpent Now reigns, unchallenged. But the mountains Tell the trees, the trees tell The river, and the river tells The land: be patient; his sovereignty Will not last forever.
Kristal Peace is a lover of words. She loves their puissance; their ability to charm, dazzle, puzzle, stun, comfort, help, heal, inform and transform. In her free time she indulges her love of words and uses those majestic creatures to write stories and poems.
