Seven Poems From Sundin Richards

The Helper Years

Be
wildered
by loco
motives
the little
town fumes
in a cradle

It’s the sound
noticed first
full reassuring
threat on skin

         blooms into a
         love of animals
         and small things
         under wheels

Ghetto in the eye
blink of nowhere
the bow
the rifle
the shitpile
and the dog

         The Royal Order
         of the Queen’s
         guts is given
         braving spiders

And if this aint
the end of the world
you sure can see it
from here

Firedamp is feared
up and down the line
and are those your teeth
over there?

         Even for us that’s
         a lot of mountain

Sugar from plastic
was goddamn grace
on credit

Glow yon
searchlight
aimed at the library
or honkeytonk
counted as the
same well

         Why punch the hero?
         The bucket drops in
         a gurgle night


Teratologia

Where is the smoke
filled room? I’ve got
my ticket somewhere.

Here is this enough to
cover it? Sorry about
the curtains.

How do you figure he
did that? I mean the
whole thing is torn.

Can you believe this
rain? We’ll be trout
fishing on Main.

I’m telling you now
ok? Plain as the
nose on your face.

The thing looks like
ten miles of bad road
and smells worse.

Let loose of it. Just put
it down and look at it
a second.


Away The Vapour Flew

I have a background
in reality but I’m
willing to learn

Shock of sleep
for sight

I drop my brains
along the trail

To find my
way home

When light is
diversion enough

Gems crowd
almagests

And you’re a pretty
little thing

What’s your
name

When it’s drastic
everybody matters

It’s always
drastic

That you’re
a favorite

In the deadening
reddening running night


Train Smoke

Guard it
like a one
armed convict

Reset the
chemicals
to balderdash

When the
climate
climbs

To rest
no rest

Champion
voodoo
among rocks

The Good Humor
man got drafted

Then it was
up to us

Soaking the
organism in

Snake oil


Some Ease

Picked up a
mournful thirst

By the slap of
an Aldis lamp

That we lose some
thing by proportion

Clinging to ciphers
or a shared cup

The engagement
is wholly local

Penumbra pierced
straight away

Seen behind
rocks

Roll up
rightly

The wagons
are uncircled

So let’s
go


Mjollinar And Me

Heroes remake
statures

Even in
fated air

But catch
it

They’re always
deaf and dead

Though you
shine

I see the red
the forward

And glow
on my eyes

When open
when shut

Sauce me
no sauce

Oh embrasure
assure aesthesia

The little
sickle moon

Cut into
the face

Of the
door


Loving The Insane

is a thing to do
after losing the
orders by Dillinger’s
Lake all at sunrise

Falling snow girl gets
said but I think Mithras
with a dash of Hermes

The cradle is cold at
ten thousand feet and
god I love your face
happy or otherwise

Swill leads me
chaldean along but
combat interuptus
for the lights

My head rings
from an accident and
hemorrhage-a-mundo says
the power plug

Dictionaries are a story
are a window are a full
feathered secret

Wolf cry you useless
glissando through rain
or a glow that looks red
but isn’t


Serious Fun

My brain
smooth as
an egg

Walking
the shiner
off

The last
of the morning
in green glass

Fine fortunes
in the general
crack-up

So a quota gets
filled and we’re off
to the Hesperides

Filled with fun
by the very blade
of the sun

I locate
sacrifice
by feel

Pretty well
my anointed
splash splash

The ultimate
slash letting
light in

My creature
you just barely
got fed

Thus you are my
personal interfer
on

The first rule of
living is don’t
die

The rest is play
and sport

Sleeping in
ditches in
church clothes

So it’s palin
genesis from
here on out

I keep trading
cows for
magic beans

And last
election I came
in dead first


Sundin Richards' poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, Girls With Insurance, Colorado Review, Interim, Zone, Volt, Cricket Online Review, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, and Western Humanities Review, where he took first place in the 1999 Utah Writers' Contest.

Footage of him reading at the Cabaret Voltage reading series is available here. An interview with Richards appeared earlier this month in Zone. Richards' book, The Hurricane Lamp, is forthcoming from ONLS Press. He lives in Salt Lake City.

An Interview With Sundin Richards

Sundin Richards in San Francisco in 1993. Photo by Andrea Perkins.

Sundin Richards, whose poems appear in a special double-length feature celebrating Zone's fourth anniversary this month, sat down with Andrew Haley on June 17, 2010 in Salt Lake City. They discussed Richards' penchant for composing on typewriters, bar fights, railroad towns, Walt Whitman's pathological happiness, big shirts, Moby Dick and the poet's first name.


AH: What kind of a name is Sundin?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: It’s a Swedish surname, but I’m not of Swedish derivation. I was born in the early ‘70’s, and my folks were hippies, so I suppose it was their way of being interesting. When I was little, I wanted to be called James T. Kirk, but then, who didn’t?

AH: Where do you come from? How did you get here?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Those are some pretty loaded questions! I was raised in two small towns, here in the Mountain West, and would ride the train between them several times a year, by myself.

First there was Helper, Utah, which is an old railroad town. It once was known as “The wickedest town in Utah.” Butch Cassidy robbed the bank there, and the last brothel closed in 1977. More saloons than churches, that sort of place. Then there was Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a lovely little mountain town where Doc Holladay died. There are two rivers that go through that place. I hitch-hiked from there to Salt Lake City in 1992.

AH: You studied under Donald Revell. Did you learn more from the man or his poetry?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: You know, both his poems as well as his own great self have been enormously instructive. I feel that I am a better person for having known Don. His example gives me a great deal of hope regarding the possibilities of the art, being an artist, and just plain old how to live in the world, and to care about doing so.

AH: Spicer or O’Hara?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Huh. I’m a big fan of both, I must say. I find Spicer to be the more challenging poet, so the pleasure I get from reading him is more cerebral, I suppose, than that which I take from O’Hara. Obviously, I’d like very much to have a Coke with Frank.

AH: Melville or Rimbaud?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Sure. Well, I try and read Moby Dick once a year, and mostly I manage to. It’s an American epic poem. I mean, what can I say that hasn’t already been said, and better, by others? It’s exhilarating and infuriating, divine and profane, visionary and boring. It’s a goddamn masterpiece. In fact, I probably should give this up right now, take up my copy, crawl inside a hollow log and read it! As for Rimbaud, well, just like a lot of folks, I had a steady diet of him from my teens, through my twenties, and even now I still read him frequently. The guy seems human in only a biological sense. Incredible vision and guts. He was steel hardened by genius. Compassionate without sentimentality. He’s just the bratty father of contemporary poetry. The little bastard.

AH: Do you find it at all contradictory to be a hard drinking bar fighter who writes beautiful poetry?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Not in the least. It’s a major branch of the tradition. A rich vein of bad behavior runs through the collective biographies of our kind, starting with Archilochos and going all the way up. There are too many to mention. Besides, I may enjoy a frosty adult beverage now and again, but those wild days are largely behind me. I haven’t been poked in the nose in years.

AH: If the academy opened its doors to you, would you go in?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Sure. I hear a lot of griping from other writers about its evils etc. but sometimes it looks like a pretty sweet gig. I mean, you think about poetry all day anyway, and talk about it sometimes, too, so why not get paid to do exactly that? I don’t have any illusions that it’s some sort of Arcadia, but I think about it quite a little bit during conference calls at my corporate job. And who knows, perhaps I could do some good for the art.

AH: You have been known to dismiss Walt Whitman’s poetry. Do you truly dismiss it?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Nah. It’s not the poems I object to. I recognize and respect their importance and influence. Particularly from a technical standpoint. It’s that carefully cultivated public persona that makes me uncomfortable. I’m just not able to buy that anybody thinks everything is that great without suffering from some pathology. So I guess it seems to me that there’s more than a little bit of the carnival barker in that personae, yawping his own awesomeness. And that makes me uneasy. I know this seems like some pretty heretical stuff, particularly from an American, and I imagine I’ll get some strongly worded letters. Maybe I’m being unfair. I haven’t read him in years, so perhaps I should sit down with him and have another conversation.

AH: Your book, forthcoming from ONLS Press, is called The Hurricane Lamp. Are you the hurricane or the lamp?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: That’s an easy one. The world is the hurricane and the poem is my lamp.

AH: You still write by typewriter. Are you a romantic?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Well, I don’t wander around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid or anything, so no, I’m not a romantic. I’ve been using manual typewriters for 20 years or so, and I like the direct physical cause and effect of the things. Their only function is writing, and I enjoy that simplicity. Obviously I own and use a computer. I just prefer to go through the process of making poems the other way. Plus they’re darn pretty to look at.

AH: What do you love?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Umm… train whistles at midnight, snowfall, good Scotch, good food, fine friends, animals, come on, the list is endless.

AH: What do you hate?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Questions like that.

Happy Birthday

Zone was founded in the dead of Austral winter in a small apartment in Buenos Aires four years ago this month. Its purpose was and remains to create a magazine of poems and short fiction freed from the geographic, economic and linguistic politics that tarnish so much of today's literary syndicates. Zone's founders believe that writers have always crossed borders, whether as immigrants or explorers, for the wild and the uncontained, and that a true servant of poetry helps poems and poets across the divide.

To that end, Zone has always been committed to bringing together writers from a plurality of backgrounds, locations, and languages. The magazine sees itself as a focal point that is no where, a utopian common open to all. Operating on a threadbare budget, with a staff of volunteers operating according to the logic of the cooperative, Zone has published in its first four years 68 poets and writers from nearly 30 countries.

Our New Russian Poetry feature which ran in December 2006 published some of the first English and Spanish translations of Danila Davydov, Julia Idlis and Viktor Ivaniv to appear outside of Russia. Translator and poet Peter Golub, who came to Buenos Aires to unveil his translations of these great contemporary poets, has in the intervening years been widely published to critical and academic acclaim. The extraordinary Australian magazine Jacket commissioned him to edit a special New Russian Poetry feature; he has been accepted to Columbia University's PhD program in Slavic Studies; and his translation of a collection of short fiction by Linor Goralik was awarded a grant from the PEN Translation Fund three weeks ago.

In June 2008, Zone published the first chapter of the then-unpublished English translation of Indian writer Sarojini Sahoo's controversial novel, Gambhiri Ghara (The Dark Abode). The novel was a bestseller in Bangladesh and sparked controversy across India for its explicit treatment of sexual, religious and political themes. Through the story of an adulterous affair between a Hindu house-wife from India and a Muslim painter from Pakistan, Gambhiri Ghara examines the roll of women in contemporary India. Written in Oriya, Gambhiri Ghara has been translated and published in Bengali, Malayalam and English. Mahendra Kumar Dash's English translation, titled The Dark Abode, was published later that year by Indian AGE Communications.

The following April, poems by George Moore forming part of an installation with award-winning Icelandic textile artist Hrafnhildur Sigurðardóttir appeared for the first time in Zone. Sigurðardóttir, whose work has been exhibited internationally, and Moore, whose poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Nimrod and other magazines, collaborated across media to create a site specific installation in the Nes galleries, in Skagaströnd, on Iceland's north coast.

Golub, Sahoo and Moore are only three of the 68 poets, writers and translators who have appeared in our pages during our first four years. Zone maintains a complete archive of everything we have published since our inception. If you browse through our archives you will find a wealth of interesting, new, brushed-off, under appreciated and later lauded work from the 8th through 21st centuries, in languages as diverse as Chinese and Catalan, written in countries, and cultures, as far afield from one another as Nigeria, Siberia, Colorado and The Philippians, some original, some in translation, all of it free, and all of it worth while.

To celebrate our birthday, Zone is featuring a special feature on poet Sundin Richards, whose book of poems The Hurricane Lamp is due out from ONLS Press later this year. A double-length selection of Richard's poetry and an interview will be appearing shortly.

A final word of thanks to our readers, contributors, volunteers, fans and followers: without you Zone would be unable to continue. Thank you for your attention.

-Henri Beauregard

José Saramago

16 November 1922 - 18 June 2010

Andrei Voznesensky

12 May 1933 - 1 June 2010

Peter Orlovsky

8 July 1933 - 30 May 2010

New Poems From Richard Cronshey

Politics

Night sky
you keep
smoking
up your sleeve,

a bad kind
of unearthly;
a burning
worn by air.

...

Conflagration,
our transparent
address.

I bury
my name
to the quick
in your name.

.....

By the embrace
my life disguises,

Cinder and prism
hoodwinked unto death.


Practice

Our Lady of The Razor Wire,
Wounds luring wounds
along the slaggy gallows path.

Our injuries
make us rattle,

like dancing.

Who am I anyway
compared to your heartbreak
That is so big
you have disappeared
altogether in it
and become ransom for specters?


Calamitous shadow
histories
I live out
Invoked by our starved tautology.

The left hand undoes
what the right hand is doing.


Swim upriver
away from my eddying heritage
accompanied by nothing
but my own growing strength.


To the victors
go the despoiled.


The world is my dog run.
I shall not want
for exercise.

My bones now hollow and papery as words,
blown as hornets nests.

Earth will return them to me.


Salute

Rescued again, despite my best efforts, by my very uselessness.
The divinities can’t even see me,
those jerk-offs in their boudoir universes,
for whom only you're either a backscratcher or a tambourine.

Free as a parking lot at 3 AM. Here’s my best trick. Look!.
I disappear in the weeds along with the extinct
high desert mining towns whose only surviving acolyte I am;
and the infinitely brittle, star lit thing still living in them,
a creature of whispers and paper-mâché,
half imaginary, too stupid to die; to which I pledge allegiance.


Beware of Poem

What a beating
that poem gave me.

Fed me
in little pieces,
to my wishes.

Night, you look
a lot smaller
on television.

Still, I flourished,
suddenly,
until I didn`t.

Beware of nourishment.
The skinny one
is my co-pilot;
La Flaca, pale hand
where the stars succumb.


I was to be the lungs
in some floundering anatomy.
I thought, "Why not?"

I am, I think,
because of the rustle that hunts me.

Look at us, skeletons
with burning crowns,
kicking up dust
as if we were real.

Go ahead, Poem,
smoke me.
I`m home now.
You know the address.


Blues with a Skeleton Key in its Palm

My eyesight wanders off,
starry revolver, a dog
drawn to your softness.

I stay here waiting
for it to come home,
listening
to the continents drift.

I will miss
your snaggle
toothed sick
room piquancy
the most.

Somedays
you were a roadside grave;
others, you were smoke rising
from behind a hill.

Bête noire
Slaughterhouse,
feeling you still
silverfish
spirochete
limping thing
little fistula
rag doll
on the ash heap--
your history
like grief in me.

No end in sight to this
bag of tricks.
I can just discern
somebody`s death mask
down there circling
mouthing words
I can`t make out.

Widows mite,
It gets passed around,
from hand to hand
growing heavier,
every time,
until we sink.



Richard Cronshey is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Snow and The Snow, forthcoming from ONLS press. His poems have appeared previously in Zone.

Five New Poems From Robert Lietz

                     
IN COURSE

1
                                                                              Not Then

     The music, uncertain after all, unheard
outside

     a mid-spring theater, was it The Nutmegs,
James Brown,

     Ray Charles we missed, in Syracuse,
New Haven,

     at the War Memorial, and at somebody's
instigation,

     where none of us, not then, ever
arrived

     at      the same
moment?

2
                                                                              House Warming

                         Surely

     somebody left charmed, with forever
freshening, whatever

     the losses meant, and not what we thought,
be sure of it, charmed

     by the heart's response, and by the manners
lingering, by

     our inflatable and serial dawns, the feathery
and first drawn greens

     with the year warming to mid-seventies, the plants
where they were last night, set

     close to the outside, brick, back fire-place wall
for house-warmth, and

     on this screened porch safe, from the cloud
-clearing forecast

     and selective frost we well-imagined, with
potting ahead

     for them, prettying the chipmunk-
flash summertime

     we mean --again -- to
celebrate
     together.

3
                                                                              What and When

     What if we never looked like that, not
in a figment, phase

     or entertainment, and what if our morning's
storyline, this

     groundhog say, climbing, sampling, ignoring
the bend, bow,

     to top-most green almost, if that were only
narrative,

     a matter of taste, a wink to the day outdoors,
to the idea

     glossed, rubbed so, wished over, returning
our common

     interest, reminding us what and why, and how
we've rehearsed

     these literacies and contritions, these timely
critiques,

     overheard, as even the morning is, abroad
in its first lingo,

     as the actual day, embraced in course,
whatever

     the language lacked, or the informed
finessed,

     conspired by their own reports
and
     confidence.


HORIZON SLICE

     So the howling's not, days apart are not,
nor the words
     you can no more arm, disarm, than save
by re-combining,
     by their jarring and jarred tones, matters
fit to the day's sprawl,
     neither unspooled nor reconditioned,
beset by caricature.
     But, left to our better selves, so that the days
themselves
     will not appear outdrawn, mis-presented,
there's much to explain,
     exonerate, when too little thought seems all
impulse
     could ever have intended, matched
to our own weak skulls,
     to our hyper-assisted if flawed tunings,
to the approaching
     dark, with its horizon-slice affairs
and its time studies,
     its pearl-seamed blacks
     and indigo.


ALMOST AUDIBLE

     How will you ask this if? What would you call
this almost

     audible sighing but distraction, these dappling,
deepening woods displayed,

     when you looked up from the glass-topped table
and your coffee, into the breeze,

     by then insisting, settling, this cup you've been
sipping cooled, a finger or so

     left to warm again, replenish, so that you must
think this good,

     when the least breath-taking language
wins you over, the light

     turning into light, to this sensible
accounting

     yes, the ghosts around
go on
     repeating.


A KISS STILL WARM

1
                                                                              The First Look

     First, there's Grizz', the critter gitter, with
tales from the Big Horns
and Denali, soaping exposures off, indifferent
to that bee's buzz, but
wary of the tri-foliate green he's barreled out of,
cartoonishly, no doubt, for
our amusement. Then there's that nesting pair
I mean to search out at North Lima,
and this year's tanager, these hues the groundhog
hasn't yet laid claim to,
as if the whole earth were asking me for pictures,
and this Polish jazz, to get
the feel for the moment, these packages addressed
and stacked outside
the front door, where nobody's signed for one,
if nobody's thought to take one
in our absence, a record nicely filed, since the other
doors were optional and sealed,
as even the gas-filled winter panes, warmer
to the hand than plaster
when the winters hit. So much for the field humor,
for the circumspect reports,
the day from its first look see, and wondering
whether a lens is long enough
for eagles, whether he'll be back this afternoon,
once the trapper
and the trapper's crew-mates come to pass,
prepared, as trained, and
more than enough supplied, to seek
and destroy
     what's necessary.

2
                                                                              Needful Times

     No queen, no queen's dresser, and cute's
no salvation,
be assured, whatever the mantra makes of it,
but he'll be back
before nine-thirty I believe, since needful times
require him, a second coffee
under belt, after Grizz and his crew arrive,
set out
their snares, their bait and live-traps, soap off
and snarl
along their ways to the next clients. And
Anastasio, meantime,
recalling the last dusk or just before, remembers
himself a night ago,
well before the occasion to wash could settle him,
remembers
the costs of gardening, the costs
of that first kiss
and next, and the afterglow, on their flushed
tourist cheeks
and bankrolls, once the prankster's
worked up nerve
to improvise, though not the least,
you can
be sure, of his sole
     options.

3
                                                                              Anastasio

     Maybe that shrine was burglarized. Maybe
a man, for now, makes good
with its bare walls and stubby candles, makes do
and must, with
the strays and pups, yipping at the jams and heels
of the prayerful,
even the lesser enthusiasts, he thinks, impressed,
acknowledging the kiss,
and not the burn so much, as they bend and splash
and rinse and bear their faces,
before a mirror seems possible, or this language,
too much like their own
to be mistaken. So what was the day but photographs,
but these young,
the nesting pair away, newcome arrivals
at the heron's
fishing claim, was Anastasio himself, who will not be
heard on it,
recalled by the heat, by the showering and sweat,
was Anastasio
after all, but a handshake yes, but a kiss still warm
with garden earth
and gardening, who could appreciate each theft,
each saint, meanness, each
first well-planted kiss, having housed his implements,
houseled himself, hosed
clean for the post-gardening burritos and cervesas,
for this catching up
he is sure to miss come suppertimes, imagining exits
and escapes,
and that groundhog, that survivor, yes, coursing
the spray-painted green
toward edibles, eyeing that fishing pair, explaining,
as they might, the moonlit foam
and firestones. And where's that trapper after all,
or that hummingbird
I never got around to mentioning, or the heron
now, when signs of trespass
reappear, this courted nightmare the coral bells,
the moon fingered quack-grass
make no room for, a stolen kiss no room,
no hint of the meaner
lusts or treacheries, the sub-surface
tones he'd heard, hears yet,
in alien conversions.

4
                                                                        The Cousin Source

     Where's that crow, that, their jay-mocking
ins and outs,
claim-jumping feeders the bunting plays beneath,
sampling crow-spill,
as, a small man, Anastasio rinses clean, dreams
honestly, himself
the cousin source of tourist horrors, tourist smiles,
from the first handshakes,
first pecks, no more deterred than the crows seem,
by tourist gear or pedigree,
by how they hurry to wash their fallen faces
when he's finished, about the time
when pups have had their day of nipping heels, and
the candles, sputtering, add
their own notes to the angling ends of afternoons,
done with the newsmaking
and tell-alls, suited now to plans he's all but reinvented,
for the dusk ahead, for the dark
and weight of a new century made public, but only
the least, we guess, of Anastasio's desires
and disguises, though nobody's asked, you bet, and
nobody's kept track, kept count,
whatever the losses were or substitutions, considering
his fix on tones and off-season prices,
on his own, we think, and presumable advantage,
though he might call that
something else, something to drink or plant or plant
his kisses on, to bear away
from shrine or sanctuary, complementary, if you will,
and all-inclusive, according
to the lingo of arrival? Surely you see resemblances
among the current crop of players,
who would have eaten the same stuff once, and left
all that behind as true believers,
equating experience with preference, inspiration
with emblems, and, inspired
merely, attitudes, when another season calls for
punishment, with the air itself
trembling under them, because their playing
asks for it, whatever
the shrine-going masks of the old
shrines
     and summertimes.


RECORD HEAT

     Even the spider plant, you think, must feel it,
moved, a few inches
     now, to make room for the low metal table
and sub-woofer,
     for the ipod, satellites, and this sovereign jazz
they may have
     heard among the Keys, heard in Puget Sound,
drawn themselves outdoors,
     as this water is, to freshen the boxed flats,
planters, and potting earth
     you've seasoned, while the plumbing throbs, and
each light-bleached page
     I think could lie here through forever,
conceded
     to record heat, unreadable. There will be wine
tonight, encompassing
     table talk, this pizza tonight, with repeatable
humor under stars,
     these due-processed ends of school-years
tonight, and
     a summer begun you cannot buy anywhere,
sentence
     by sentence piqued, in the botched
luxurious
     stories we come back to, as if
we had
     never had such fun.



Robert Lietz is the author of eight published collections of poems, including The Lindbergh Half-century, Storm Service, and After Business in the West. Nearly six hundred of his poems have been published in print and on-line journals, including recent publications in Istanbul Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly Online, Avatar, Contrary, Terrain, Valparaiso Review, Salt River Review, Lily and previously in Zone. Several unpublished collections are currently finished and ready for publication, including West of Luna Pier, Spooking in the Ruins, Keeping Touch, Character in the Works: Twentieth Century Lives, The Vanishing, and Eating Asiago & Drinking Beer. Meanwhile, he keeps active writing and exploring his interest in digital photography and image processing and their relationship to the development of his poetry.

                     

Four Poems From Ruth Bavetta

Luftwaffe

The storm
         comes for the throat,

a sidewinder in darkness.
         Wind works its mutinies

in storm-snarled trees. Water
         hammers houses from their roots,

a bus shoots under a bridge.
         A man in a tattered T-shirt

floats downriver like a page
         torn from a book.


Foundation Work

They arrive early,
         before he’s ready, go on
with what they have to do.

He pulls his shirt over his head,
         discovers a hole. They’re all around
the house now, shouting.

He puts on the pants he wore yesterday,
         before he knew, goes into the kitchen
(the sunny yellow walls have faded),
         fills the kettle, sets it on the burner.

Today, a scan will probe
         his body for cells gone wild.
Outside, they’re probing,
         seeking solid ground.

The sky’s already bleached with heat. If
         they find competent ground.
they can shore up the foundation.

The kettle shrieks to a boil.


Remember This

She’s used to them now,
the spectators who sidle
small and soft
under the old and fading moon,
a shambling column,
that casts no shadows. In a dark corner
of the garden, where
there’s no more time
for lilacs, they wait for her


Imagine

walking up forty-two stairs,
the smell of a rubber ball, your arm
brushing against a stucco wall,
the prick of a pin in the tip
of your right index finger.

There was a clock you once knew,
draw its tick inside your body.
There was a bicycle on a dirt road
the summer you fell in love,
balance on its handlebars.

Enter a room you have forgotten.
Walk through midnight
carrying a make-believe lantern.
Stretch out your hand,
touch the horizon.



Ruth Bavetta's poetry has been published in Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Rhino, Rattle, Poetry East, North American Review, Atlanta Review, and Poetry New Zealand, among others, and is included in the anthology Twelve Los Angeles Poets. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California, California State College San Bernardino, and Claremont Graduate School.

Three Poems From Anthony Nannetti

OVER UNDER

You demand more space
with a straight face,
and I see
a dead farmer planted in his own north forty
or an obituary written for an obituary writer.
The end is never easy,
but hope is in the bending tree
whose roots will draw life to it.
So sit awhile, I’ll counsel.
Just be still and stay
until I get away.


LEAGUE STREET

The butcher with a young lamb over his shoulder
dodged church-bound widows in the heavy snow.
Monsignor’s Impala was an unfinished Pieta.
I sold shopping bags by a barrel fire
where my father displayed his martyrs and Marys
around the Infant of Prague on a countertop.
A hard grind for a dollar,
and the saints gave way over time
to ballerinas that twirled on musical platforms
and ceramic puppies with saucer eyes.


TO NINO

It was cheaper to kill you than to have you groomed.
I walked home with your collar and leash in a bag,
convinced that all traces of my past were gone.
How like a foreigner I felt, without my bosom friend ----
without turds to collect when I got back,
the house just as we’d left it.


Anthony Nannetti is an English teacher with the School District of Philadelphia. He lives in the Bella Vista section of the city with his wife and two daughters. Nannetti's poetry has appeared in Guardian Unlimited, PhiladelphiaStories, Ygdrasil, Forge Journal, and Bijou Poetry Review.

Three Poems From Peggy Aylsworth

THE CROWDING THORNS

Reading Lolita, she grew thirsty,
aware she had swallowed
too much sugar.

What surfaced in resistant waves:
desire’s monster. Lollipops
had been too easy.

Sucked into an urge to bite,
she tainted the air with innuendos,
tumbling the woman

from her fragile scaffolding.
Not a plot, but there he was,
ready for her lure

once his wife had crumbled,
a Humpty Dumpty without horses
to refit her pieces.

The prickly vines curl round
and round, sprouting their
contagious blooms,

nightshade, undetected, til
the birds’ song dwindles
in the crowding thorns.


GATHER THE PIECES

Her world grew steadier with lines
and configurations to build safety
out of wood. In the eyes of cows
she found a door, entered their chests.

One day, the pieces fit, broken crockery
not whole, but standing on its own.
Without customary language we rely
on the sound of weather or water

slipping through the hands of children.
In the wilds of Wyoming horses blocked
the road. That night snow shifted the light,
pulling faded shadows out of the cracks.

The woman in the bed refuses to wait
for the cat to jump into her lap. Signals
of life and death travel over wide landscapes,
crows flying, trembling the winter trees.


THE RATTLE OF NO REPLY

The days torn at the edges,
crows unraveling the tapestry.

I slip to the far end of my premise,
pressed by the leftover reckoning .

Each room breaks its windows
from inside. Wind, a false prophet

of weather. Birds spread the air,
a response on the broken wire.

Unwrap. My words tick into time,
hanging themselves, still wet,

on a line too distant. And yes,
the berries are drying to stone.



Peggy Aylsworth's poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, The Emily Dickinson Anthology, Ars Interpres, Poetry New Zealand, and other journals in the US and abroad. She is the author of a collection of poems titled Small Lightning. Additionally, Aylsworth collaborated with her husband Norm Levine on two books of poems from Momentum Press: Letters to the Same Address and Along These Lines. A retired psychotherapist, she lives in Santa Monica, California.

Three Poems From Michael McLane

Exam

age is carefully measured
in valleys of grinding bone
the weight of heaven
on the ankles, knees
and hips.

or within the hairline
cartography of plates
keeping our selves together
in the tumbling china
of our skulls –

this at least is natural.
calibration, smallest line
the vanishing point
the trajectory
in either direction.

harder still is the hole
observatory behind the ear,
perfectly round intrusion
that pulls outside matters in
with it, vacuum of all

concentrated life, in this small
room. a hole behind the ear,
absence of measurement, edge
of parietal, ledge of the table,
frame of the door



Answer Key

(Specimen 10: adult male; age: 20-25; cause of death; gunshot wound to base of parietal lobe; provenance: body recovered from Golan Heights)

                             That is all we know.

the symptom is monument

                             there was a fort here once, now a gift shop

statuary

                             I don’t remember why it is called Armory Hill

Zion has the sound of electricity. Or orbit. Or ejection.

                             we hide the syllabics of violence behind hand-carved
                                     names

triptych of dedication, memorial, stone. behind it, a canvas

                             one must show their work. Provenance is often
                                     confused for an exotic locale. it is neither.

meadow. beach. walk. snowfall.

                             do not forget how life echoes through a table




Weather

When I was very young, I loved electrical storms above all else. I would take my blanket and small eyes and lay out at the edge of the garage, trembling. In the place where the world opened out into oblivion. A word I had yet to sputter and stumble over. My mother would pull the blanket back under the eaves, the spiders, the boxes of abandoned clothes and cradles. Or she would drag me to the back patio, where I could see only fingertips of bolts, the slightest hints of strings on the world, where the thunder would rattle the charcoal in the grill or the loose shingles above me. We lived in the desert then, at the foot of mountains that burned even in rain. I asked which of us angered the gods but I did not say it loud enough. They clanged away above me like I did after locking myself out of the house not once, but twice. The day two men tried to steal me away was sunny, but that night it rained hard and no one could catch me. That was the definition of fear, or at least its perimeter. There is nothing to be afraid of, my mother said, pulling me back out of the rain again and again, but you can see everything fine from here. Of course this made no sense, but neither did the smell of the cooling concrete, the heat rising from the ground to complicate the world.



Michael McLane completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Colorado State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Interim, Colorado Review, Salt Flats Journal and Sugar House Review. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Five Juéjù From Li Bai

Yellow Crane Tower:
Farewell to Meng Haoran on his Trip to Guangling

To Yellow Crane Tower and the West you wave goodbye
Under March mist's blossoms you descend towards Yangzhou
Your lone sail vanishes into the shadows of jade mountains
Until all I see is the Yangtze flowing to the edge of the sky


黄鶴樓送孟浩然之廣陵

故人西辭黃鶴樓
煙花三月下揚州
孤帆遠影碧山盡
惟見長江天際流



Visit to Lu Shan: Waterfall

Sun lights the violet mist of Incense Stove Mountain
Far off I see a waterfall hanging above a stream
It flies out spreading down three thousand feet
I think it is the Silver River falling from Seventh Heaven


望廬山瀑布

日照香爐生紫煙
遙看瀑布掛前川
飛流直下三千尺
疑是銀河落九天



Night Thoughts

Across the floor bright moon so bright
I think it is hoarfrost on the fields
I lift my head to gaze at the bright moon
I hang my head thinking of home


夜思

床前明月光
疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月
低頭思故鄉



Descent to Jiangling

Dawn farewell to Baidi among the glowing clouds
Three hundred miles to Jiangling in one day's float
Monkeys howl from both shores without stop
Already my skiff has passed ten thousand rows of mountains


下江陵

朝辭白帝彩雲間
千里江陵一日還
兩岸猿聲啼不住
輕舟已過萬重山



For Wang Lun

Li Po climbs aboard wishing to leave
Suddenly from shore the sound of footfalls and song
Peach Blossom Pool is a thousand feet deep
Doesn't touch how Wang Lun's farewell makes me feel


贈汪倫

李白乘舟將欲行
忽聞岸上踏歌聲
桃花潭水深千尺
不及汪倫送我情



Translated by Andrew Haley


Lǐ Bái (李白), known in the West as Li Po, was born to exiles in present-day Kazakhstan in 701. He spent his youth in Sichuan, near Chengdu, studying Taoism and other subjects. Rather than sit for the civil service exam, Li Bai left Sichuan at the edge of twenty-five, sailing down the Yangtze River. For thirty-five years, he led an itinerant, drunken, profligate and prolific life -- never settling anywhere for long, and writing upwards of a thousand poems which are considered among the apex of Chinese literature. Li Bai drowned in the Yangtze in 762, trying to drunkenly embrace the moon. He was returning to Sichuan after a life of exile.

The poems here are juéjù -- a poetic form popular in the Tang era. They are quatrains with either seven or five syllable lines, an aaba rhyme scheme and a distribution of tones that seeks to give the poems a tonal regularity. Heavily influenced by Taoism and Chán -- a Chinese prototype of Zen that flourished in the Tang dynasty -- juéjù strive to "see the big within the small" (小中見大).