In Retrospect A man with no past is a tottering tower with no foundation.
I constantly revisit my past, whose resurrected associations are at times excruciating, but at others quite exhilarating.
I dwell in the past in an array of haunting songs, of unfulfilled dreams and ever-delayed gratification.
I dwell in the past in the day before you came, when my temple was un-trampled upon by your dissonant feet, and every consecrated altar was beyond your reach.
In my childhood
In my childhood I had witnessed the witch hunt for butterflies, though not convicted of witchcraft, but for preservation, which happens to be an art, the crucifixion type.
I had seen troops of ants crushed by people’s feet with glee, and the bagworm that glued itself to our garden wall to shelter its soul have its bag ripped to pieces.
They’ve all become intricately interwoven with all that is obscene in this digital age that has bred Epsteins.
Thomas Hardy
In Westminster Abbey he was laid to rest, but his cut-out heart had chosen Dorset, where Bathsheba rode her horse astride and Tess of the D’Urbervilles had fought with strife.
He tirelessly roamed the streets of London, the ‘monster with four million heads and eight million eyes’, shunning its much-hated crowds.
Reckoning
I hold you accountable for every frozen deer and duck, for erupting waters that instantly gulp cities and hamlets with suffocating mud.
I hold you responsible for turning a blind eye to the laceration of every sky, to the white deaths of adult and child.
DrSusie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a PhD on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.
Susie’s first book (adapted for film), Classic Adaptations, includes Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.
It rained for days. not a storm, just steady enough to fill the cracks in the driveway and make the air smell like endings.
The ink on your note bled through the paper, letters slipping into one another until you’re sorry.’ wasn’t even legible anymore.
I thought the sky might help, that it would take the sharpness of that night and smooth it into something I could walk barefoot across.
But the rain stopped, and the mark your hand left on the windowsill– a faint half-circle of dust– stayed there.
The house feels clean, but the air still holds the word you didn’t say.
While We Wait
Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, I’ll wonder what I did today. Just waited, I guess; for something, or someone, that never came.
The sun went up, the sun went down, and we stayed here, talking about nothing, laughing at small things just to fill the quiet.
Sometimes I think waiting is what life really is: hoping for a change, a sign, a reason.
Maybe what matters isn’t what we wait for, but that we keep waiting– together.
Chipped Cup
The rim is uneven, a bite taken out of porcelain. I drink carefully, lips finding a safe place.
It feels like a shortcut, pretending nothing’s broken because I can still use it.
But it’s also shorthand: the chip tells me that the cup has been dropped, and someone still decided it was worth keeping anyway.
White glaze, rough edge, a little scar I touch every morning, as if to remind myself: fragile things don’t stop holding.
Olivia Koo is a high school student and emerging poet. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading, movies, and music. She is currently putting together her writing portfolio.
I fold and shove the tag back into my sweater Press it flat against the seam It still scratches rough against the back of my neck
I shift my shoulders Pull at the collars Try to ignore forget that it’s there
I laugh with her Sit together for all meals Feel a twist within me An uncertainty I cannot name But she remains my companion And there is nothing to be done
The air is too cold To take off my sweater So the itch stays, rubbing deeper into the hours.
The Cathedral Tapestry
The cathedral tapestry in the twilight labyrinth Breathes dust when I brush my hand against the wall A lanternfly vessel on driftwood at the tide Drums its wings like thin paper, struggling not to drown The compass is a mosaic of the prism and the aurora It’s needle trembling, pointing toward a colder wind Mercury eclipse and sapphire mirage veil the citadel Its windows are flashing on and off The orchard blossom is a fossil of velvet and rust I feel its pulse within me As if something hidden, waiting to open from the inside.
Keys of Black and White
Walking with the crowd, between hurried strangers Keys of black and white, a large piano for the crowd
Gum fossils and oil stains listening below A stitch work sewn from street to street
“I wear thin under the shuffle of those who never look down,” it says In memory, leaping from stripe to stripe, through a big playground
Irene Kim is a high school student who loves visual art and writing. Her work has been recognized in local exhibitions and school publications. When she’s not drawing or writing, she enjoys reading poetry, walking in the rain, and experimenting with collage. Irene hopes to continue creating work that captures both the quiet and the extraordinary.
Despite the moon, nearly full, gliding six inches above the western horizon where that faint line of a Great Lake lies, my couple of cardinals amidst the etched grey of sunrise say it’s morning, and all the little birds believe them.
Despite me, nearing fifty, holding two inches before hitting the midway in a life as long as it ought to be, my tired, allergic eyes below a grey sketch of wild hair see it’s morning, and all the giddy cells believe them.
Despite this near-miss at late love, that the last quarter-inch could not have slid down like a pane shattering for joy, my old sorrows roll over in their fetching grey failure, sigh, “It’s morning,” and all the silly feelings believe them.
Vast
Just out of Minneapolis-St. Paul we seemed briefly to stall as if to shadow all those wispies drifting below.
The mazes of cul-de-sacs had given way to assorted squares of barren fields, their whiskered homesteads glued
to odd corners like stamps, wide ribbon slipping backward and away, silent terrain under a lazy canoe. Now the sun
has cast a grey ghost of our plane down and to my right, framed it within the awkward porthole, its sliding shade,
an unaccountable halo of rainbow— and this ridiculous filigree of angels, filmy leagues camouflaged in ether,
special recruits that mingle and network like secret agents: the FBI of the sky. But when we soon tilt and ascend
to the high status toward Denver, I know all this silliness will vanish, angels fading, becoming the thin air, and these fields will retreat
to compose vast sheets of stamps, re-impose perspective, that inevitable severance from everything that’s then re-imaginable.
Now
Once upon a then not long ago enough the nows became delicious, and every other then took on its flat feel of “My, how I have wasted…” Yes,
yes, you are who you are because of blah, blah, blah— all that dullness, too, that boredom. But now you can love the nows, love those
who show you, look forward to a better later, even risk missing this now or the next. Today’s faint sun struggles to cast yesterday’s delicate warmth—
but because it is now here’s its half-fazing glow through filtering clouds and its more mottled effect on water and the water’s still
steady sound and this alighting bird who fans the translucent arc of her tail feathers through which you can see the occasion you call now.
Butterfly Solipsism
A butterfly’s flapping over Costa Rica, it’s sometimes considered, could initiate the chain that leads to tornados in Toledo, hopping and ripping the heart from every-other quotidian home.
Or maybe its deft stretch-and-glide could instigate the violent Mississippi’s surprising rise beyond its subtle, stolid realm— the dainty queen behind that vast rebellion.
So I suppose I could blame this monarch that reigns today’s thermals—that just licked six purple puffs in beach grass then juked my breezy mind— for the nicknamed waves of catastrophe soon to sweep a sleeping Gulf, the nightly news even proving it via weather patterns green-screened before the stocks and sports.
But instead I’m turning my grateful face toward the nor’easter just breaching the stony coast of my brain: when it rattles shutter to sash to rafter, I’ll unlatch the deadbolts, throw open the windows, and ready my heart’s musty guest bedroom in welcome.
If Hearts Know Best
Not wanting to disparage your heart (after all, from its involuntary seclusion it pounds out three trillion beats by the time it dies), but at best it boasts only a sixty-percent ejection of fresh blood from its left ventricle, out its aorta, and into that vast vascular network invented to re-oxygenate you.
And not meaning to disparage your sense of what’s acceptable, but this sixty percent is excellent, a D-minus that commends you! Any greater rating and that concavity would collapse, just like a kiddy pool sluiced of too much water, or like when the sails deflate and maroon the little schooner that is you.
What if such barely passing productivity typified a few of our other endeavours, a submediocrity chosen to achieve more than the bleed-out of high achievement? Imagine our ruminations running at only sixty-percent efficiency. Or what about sixty-percent modification to all our manipulations? Over-identifications?
What if our self-doubt and over-reactions were reduced to a measly sixty percent? Or perhaps a forty-percent reduction of our ambition to be liked? (We might become likable!) Likewise, losing forty percent of our judgment of judging, preaching against preaching, desiring the return of our adolescent desire, thinking we know what we think we know?
And what if our love-sickened hearts sort of met each other a little over half-way, almost always gave each other a mere sixty-forty benefit of the doubt, supplied the minor nudge that’d tip our teeter toward the other’s totter to strike the delicate imbalance that’d barely make the difference?
Tracing Your Two Lines
There’s the one that goes round and round with each revolving day, sunset to sunset. For that, your eyes, looking west, would streak the long exposure like faint tail lights arcing away over recurring hills. The other
is different. It doesn’t depend on where you stand, which way you face. No matter, it releases from the daily spin and wanders, a twirling girl’s sparkler in the dark.
Try pointing to any spot on a globe. Make it the capital of any troubled country, and after that miniature world turns your finger in perfect circles, watch your fingertip trace the course it takes as you continue your trail
from here to eternity. You’ll see it zigzags a singular presence over the earth’s assorted surfaces, drawing its own conclusions—
like you in this world, scratching out a meandering, your own universe, your own one-line sketch of this far-fetched existence.
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).
You can find more of D.R.James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
