Issue #93
Tony Brinkley
In the Presence of My Enemies
There is the grand truth . . . . He says No! in thunder; but the
Devil himself cannot make him say yes.
—Herman Melville, From a letter to Hawthorne
[T]he EVERLASTING NO (das ewige Nein) pealed
authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME;
and then was it that my whole ME stood up . . . borne aloft into
the azure of Eternity. . . . the EVERLASTING YEA. . . .Be no
longer a Chaos, but a World. . . . Whatsoever thy hand findeth to
do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for
the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.
—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Now I don’t need to always say NO anymore.
—From a dream (1930s), dreaming Fascism’s Yes — a
nightmare recorded in The Third Reich of Dreams by Charlotte Beradt
Your eyes in the dark teethe your gaze — I say
No – the spaces echo my word: No! If I could
be less than nothing in your eyes — that’s the
trick — to hide in the things that you see you
don’t see — at random among objects — voids in
the emptiness — or in handfuls of water your
hands can’t take hold of? . . . In hiding — con-
cealed in your sight with no insight — among
things as they are in themselves as is — beyond
grasping when trying to hold what your grasp. . . .
Does No mean Yes if you say, Yes! it does?
Does I-will-not tell you I will? To be dressed
in your eyes I’m undressed in my mind but dis-
guise how undressed I feel. . . . In the dark, this
darkness is not a little dark — it does not wash
out in the wash from the wash — from dresses
an outcry stains. . . . In the dark I say No, and
you say I meant Yes – No is Yes in these circles
of enemies. I am lying, you say, but I’m telling
the truth. . . In the dark, insects listen and hear
the trees cry for the generations of leaves.
While Winds Flock Murders of Ashes
What you don’t see is incredible.
—Jean-Luc Goddard
Every atom in your body spins and dances like a bee around the
queen. . . . Silence is the quiet of God, all else is poor translation.
—Rumi
Turning — everything (everyone) does — the universe turning
like wheels among wheels within wheels (or dancers) — I also —
am also — my turns turn faster and faster — then stop — but the
universe flies past me in diurnal rounds while here for a moment
at a standstill I feel encircled by worlds. . . . My world at present
is only about to be present (presenting a future) — immediate un-
mediated — even recollections come next after next — in their turn —
cellular energies in transit in which I am thought through — thought
as I think (or in spirit). . . In others’ eyes I am only miming myself
(turning myself into Tony) — like a freer radical hung out in awk-
ward postures — playing — at play (or not, or not now, not this time,
not playful) like stuttering on the brink of pleasing — any blessings
metastatic for my singularities — ecstatics beyond stasis — beyond
static – but in times like these will any word become cancerous?
What you can’t see is incredible. Are desolates the future of land-
scapes? If I imagine I hear the leaves cry — or see through facets of
insights in evening’s lights in my eyesight — if I could listen for once
to the inaudible quiet I see but don’t hear — hear with bees’ eyes my
own inarticulate, pervasive acoustic shadowing — pleased with my
life when to me it no longer feels mine — forgiving my trespasses and
other violence (my willed violations of will) — breath nurtured with
leaves’ silent outcries — breathing them out and in — while rivers of
crows (murders of crows) near evening fly past — I might hear them
crowing with the leaves — for the leaves — voicing quiet — taking turns — perhaps at any time anywhere — over barrens burning yesterday that
may also be burning tomorrow — perhaps for any at war — returning
with fire — fields of fire — while winds flock murders of ashes. . . .
TONY BRINKLEY’S poetry and translations have appeared in ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE, BELOIT POETRY JOURNAL, CERISE PRESS, DRUNKEN BOAT, FOUR CENTURIES, HINCHAS DE POESIE, HUNGARIAN REVIEW, MAYDAY, NEW REVIEW OF LITERATURE, PUCKERBRUSH PRESS, POETRY SALZBURG REVIEW, OTOLITHS, SHOFAR, METAMORPHOSIS, BOMBAY LITERARY MAGAZINE, POETRY IN TRANSLATION, WORLD LITERATURE TODAY.
Robert Okaji
Milley-la-Forét, Summer 1963
Sometimes the goat stands in the courtyard
alone, plotting confidently — as all goats
do — escape. Chickens occasionally
join him, but they give no advice,
being content with the expanse of the moment.
But the pig! Ah, the pig in his big-bellied
sway — and all the world his trough — eats
and eats and lounges and eats, savoring each bite,
relishing every swallow, expanding daily with no
thought of crisper days and frost-crusted
nights, of steaming cauldrons and the enduring darkness
once far below, now reaching up so carefully
deliberate, so tender, so near.
Robert Okaji has late stage lung cancer. He lives in Indiana with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper—stepson, cat and dog. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, was recently published by 3: A Taos Press, and his poetry may be found in Threepenny Review, Only Poems, Vox Populi and other venues.
Gwen Sayers
Meeting of a Select Committee
Those chosen, hang upside down
from chicken wire, pluck ways around
a point; squawk and squeak eminence.
When their pointed tongues misfire,
they veil squashed faces, flit from
one side of an argument to the other.
Round eyes glare. Clawed fingers clamp
defiance. They cocoon truth in veined silk,
represent rats and fowl. They reek.
Fruit sippers exhale guava rot, blood
dippers, raw metal. They lose their grip.
Slip. Search blindly for anchors. Umbrage
echoes. After a day of fur scratching,
platitudes, and shit-spattered ramblings,
they spread spoked wings, fly to black cabs
that ferry them back to the underworld.
Gwen Sayers is a poet living in London, England. Her chapbook Ghost Sojourn was joint winner in Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2023. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and anthologies in the UK, USA, and Ireland.
Noralee Zwick
sandbox playing
|
That was the August she despised pigeons and adored plums and you didn’t believe there was endlessness in the world. You roadtripped together, once — she dozed sound throughout the desert, her breaths hazy with gold; you woke her only to explore gas station bathrooms, the capital-O Oasis deep in the valley. She hated to sleep in cars, she told you, so you became a tether. You’d press your fingertips to the dip in her shoulders: she’d blink thrice, then stretch against her seatbelt, her hair diamondback-smooth. The sun leaning heavy over your windows. There was no wanting, then, just her mom’s smoker’s rasp of a voice, her laugh shaded all the same hues. Off-colored bronze sharpie. When her mom stops for gas, she sits crosslegged in the backseat and puts her hand to your face, smudging metallic pen in the corner of your eyes. Her mother comes back horrified. That is permanent. Why would you do that — where is your mind. But she’s pretty like this, she insists, just look. You stare so hard at the window that it shatters. In its reflection, her lines are crooked, eyeliner smeared across your cheek, her palms. Like this, she shimmers, we match. |
Noralee Zwick is a student and poet based in the Bay Area, California. A California Arts Scholar and Iowa Young Writers Studio alum, their work can be found in Corvus Magazine, Prairie Home Magazine, and Dishsoap Quarterly, among others. Find them on Instagram at @noraleewrites.
Shangri-La Hou
Aubade
Was it always like this? Emptiness
that rings like a well to be filled. Tilted
on this edge of things I realize I never knew
that birds sang before the light until I did.
I’m blinded. The bright orange of the robins
that three hundred years ago could make an explorer remember
his home—the bright orange of the liquid sun spilling
out the dark, eating it whole and untoothed as a snake’s skin
shiny with spit and yolk. Colors exploding then pulsing
like an uncontrollable chorus, a subway network of pink veins,
a blossoming blueing bruise, a bullet and the afterward
of a bullet. Sliding off the bed in one conservative motion, plunged
into consciousness from the bottom up, I realize my feet are solid
under nothing—how often have I felt like a top and a bottom walking,
making up the middle? I want to point at the sky
and ask if it can see itself, say Look! Your sun is rising
like low laughter, your geese are rising
like plumes are rising
like prayer
from this dilapidated home.
Stephen Kim
July 10, 2024 – Ithaca, NY
In the Wegmans parking lot,
I ignore my phone
vibrating in my pocket
and the feebly wailing sirens
because I am transfixed
by the colossal thundercloud,
dark like ashes or even obsidian,
slowly beginning to turn.
I imagine a self more cautious,
one that heeded the news report
of unprecedented storms.
I would have done the shopping early
and now be huddled in the bathroom,
soothing my frightened cat,
who would hear ominous
rumbling, well before I noticed
the wind rattling the windows.
Stephen K. Kim (he/him) is a queer Korean American writer and educator in upstate New York. He enjoys spending time with his husband and his cat. Recent writing appears in Ghost City Review, the Lit Nerds, AC|DC, wildscape., and elsewhere. He can be found online @skimperil.
Stacey C. Johnson
from the waiting season
|
Consider the weight of water after rains against fault lines and the weight of our collected lives, how it takes not so many earthquake memories to learn that it is a matter of time until the next one, but this is the land of billboards training the witness into submission to a hunger that drives on to speed out branching interstate miles into state route highways flying toward the next bite, flesh riding the wind of the last win into the next investment cheered by a chorus calling Act Fast, Act Now, Don’t Miss. Out. It’s coming, they tell us, the screens our suns in constant revolutions, projecting new worlds of pleasure and war. Something rumbles and we catch each other’s eyes, looking up. What is that? one of us asks, and the voice of an invisible speaker says Now. You have to keep imagining layers of stars at night, fold after fold the inverted brain, its witness a single synapse. But then what. Do you do? With these hands but set them over knees to breathe as wave rolls over back. So little returns in time. Cause to wonder which of us is out. But certain patterns predict their own change. Watch the angle. Velocity hinges on this. Admit it now, how often you are carried across sky seeing bodies in it like a child still unable to crawl or follow without the appearance of other hands. The air, its sudden stillness a small voice, and the long watch just above its range and the watcher shrouded in a role too big for such a tight fit. In these clothes, this body their moment. Now the incessant shout of it, ongoing. What is the sound of a call from nowhere and who is this approaching, calling back? |
Stacey C. Johnson writes and teaches in San Diego County. Her work appears in a variety of journals and publications, and her poetry chapbook Flight Songs was released from Finishing Line Press in February 2024. You can find her at staceycjohnson.com and on Twitter @StaceCJohnson.
John Muro
In Search of the River
Seeing how the clouds convulse at first
then delicately unfurl in the manner of
ink taking to water, transforming into
something that has forsaken form and
assumed a second, more exquisite self
while here, closer to ground, I’m following
the long scar of a dry river bed where
the only sound comes from the lament
of birdsong somewhere beyond the
bruised earth and dusty air and the long
pause that follows – not silence exactly
but something approaching an exhaled
breath – is cradled by wind and carried
between this sluice of bedrock and banks
of fern, their golden fronds crinkled by
sun, and the boy inside me is now
guessing at the time when the canvas
of flowing water last gathered and
carried a weightless sky downstream
past the understory of broken branches
and pools of ruffled water and where
a jay would exchange its shock of blue
with heaven and gaunt plumes of milk-
weed would fly apart and scatter in
search of lift like aimless strands of cloud.
A 2023 Grantchester Award recipient, twice a Best of the Net nominee, and thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, John Muro has published two volumes of poems — In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite. His work has appeared in Acumen, Barnstorm, Delmarva, Sky Island, Neologism, Valparaiso Review, and elsewhere.
Matthew Lee
A Chant of Misprision
I am Mayflower tumble
over this virgin land
I seek new vowels
with which to speak
jilted truths that tick
minor preludes and zeugmas
sylvan pleasures
simple measures
what mesalliance!
and that cursed imago
framed with ivory
straddling the escritoire
between the legs of which
I was born and now
I hold to my breast
dying traditions
and forced rhymes
they tremble and choke
a hypoxic poesy
a darkening then
an awakening
back to the present
it must be lived!
the cry of a naif
we the learned
merely weep.
Matthew Lee is a writer living with cancer in Melbourne, Australia. He is a regular contributor to the Farrago Magazine of the University of Melbourne. His work can also be found in publications such as Literally Stories and Five on the Fifth.
Christian Worby
untitled
finally some snow descends, consumes, arises;
plundered world begetting layers, cold abstraction.
flurries swirl the spires a shaken globe in action.
branches—vestige—crack & fall. coyote’s cry says,
“we shall linger. we remain. these games, these prizes.”
oh harsh truth. our lives, molossus. always action.
finally some snow descends, consumes, arises;
plundered world begetting layers, cold abstraction.
what is this? this peaceful pawing, gnawing crisis.
boots slip away. swingsets, sliding, losing traction;
boots slip away. microwaved milk & satisfaction.
cocoa wafts through interlocking limbs’ detritus;
finally some snow descends, consumes, arises.
just call me “chuckles”
throes of ennui, are we, all adrift;
frozen by choices unmanageable.
dishwasher loaded, unloaded, & full
again. panic uncertainly sifts.
peppered with happiness, chemical shifts
only serve to evince the transient, bull-
shit nature of mind. passion invisible;
stagnant & blind & continually miffed.
biopsy bursts onto stage of the internet;
hold the front page! it’s a Diagnosis.
turns out that apathy wasn’t quite concrete yet;
turns out this life is strange-wonderful bliss!
when tumbleweed started to look like a safety net,
turns out your passion was living through this.
Christian Worby grew up in the UK, moved to Japan for a spell, and now lives in Minnesota in the good ol’ US of A. His writing can be found in several well-respected notepads strewn about his home and/or pockets.