Issue #61
Frances Klein
The Artist is Tired
“Marina Abramovic falls asleep during restaging of ‘The Artist is Present’”
—Jasmine Liu, Hyperallergic.com
She believes time is a flat circle,
that she will come back around someday
to the red lips and all night of youth,
but this arc seems to bend long
with no curve in sight. She crosses
just before the light changes, has to push
through crowds fawning on the other side.
Is this art they whisper like the shush of traffic.
In her wake Christie’s puts up sawhorses
to protect where she stepped. In the supermarket
she fingers the taut skin of a tomato, samples
one green grape. The face of the produce boy
is unlined as new-stretched canvas.
Watchers are in the wine aisle, peeking
from behind the pinot. Is this art,
they ask the champagne. Sotheby’s
has already sold the tomato for millions,
the memory of the grape for more.
At her doorstep she scrapes her shoes
on the mat. Eyes bloom in the bushes
to each side. She sits on the stoop
to remove her shoes, and one
brave girl breaks away from the pack.
The girl moves like a masterpiece
unyellowed by light from museum windows.
Her arc is yet unbent. Is this art, she asks,
gesturing to the shoe, to the mat,
to the dirt on the mat. Are you art?
Teaching Your Teen to Host
As a rule, there is no magic to hosting
the dead. Who thought a rite of passage
would require advance preparation?
There will be times
when unanticipated problems
set the tone; the calendars of the dead
may be crowded with social events:
Graduation parties
Luncheon or Tea
Picnic or Pool Party
Formal invitations are often best.
Be clear: you expect guests to bring
a complete set of bones.
Out of consideration for others,
expired parts should be wrapped,
congenial, constrained.
Be clear: you expect guests
to relax, to dance to rhythm-and-blues tapes.
Be ready: when your guests begin
to ascend, a good hostess
will be prepared to follow suit.
*All words culled from pages 397-398 of Emily Post’s The Gift of Good Manners by Peggy Post and Cindy Post Senning.
Frances Klein (she/her) is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook New and Permanent (Blanket Sea 2022). Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find more of her work here.
Sally Dunn
Summer Solstice Plus One
You notice the peak
too late.
Still you try to marvel
at these lesser days.
But deep you feel
the blow,
the gnawing certainty
and the fear.
Sally Dunn’s poetry has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal (print, v.51), North Dakota Quarterly,
Ken Anderson
Student Vampire
In a classroom, postures set
like cement, minds stamped
with consensus.
She focuses
beyond the window, descending broken steps
to an overgrown park, taking odd turns
among mossy ruins, guiding the visceral dream
through incandescent lilies, ligustrum strummed
by bees, the orgasmic caw
of a crow.
Life’s spirited off
to an uncharted medulla, strange thoughts
and millefleur afterthoughts. She forgets the hard chair,
the calloused index finger,
nearsighted eyes constantly placing countless alphabets.
At dusk, she hangs upside
down, horizon flipped, pendant
from an id, gravity pulling her
like a pear
from the lush tree
of the ingénue
she mimes.
She drops
into the sleek black wings
of a coat
over shoulders, the skin
of a coed circling a cypress.
Her fingernail can slit your throat.
Her mouth can suck the hot blood straight
from your heart—auricles and ventricles drained
to a dry bouquet.
She is the invocation
of a Gothic moon, the last breath
before death, the first breath
after.
Ken Anderson was finalist in the 2001 Saints and Sinners poetry contest. New Poetry from the Festival (an anthology of 2021/2022 winners and finalists) includes four of his poems. Publications include Angel Rust, Gay and Lesbian Review, The Heart of Pride, Mollyhouse, Otherworlds, Prismatica, Rabid Oak, RFD, Screen Door, Vagabonds.
Ed Coletti
Just Before the Evening’s Fight
This shoddy shebang
a shanty for their wild salad days
two broad beamed railroaders
sweaty drain
four Jasper beers
while
like Sam Patch
the falling sun
turns lager amber
almost time for the skin flint keeper
to be skunked again
by a gandy dancer’s
casually ferocious
sockdolager.
Ed Coletti is a poet widely published internationally and holds Masters Degrees in Creative Writing and in Business Management. Ed also is a painter and middling chess player. He has published a dozen books. Journals include ZYZZYVA, Volt, Spillway, and North American Review. Ed curates the blog “No Money In Poetry.”
Ray Corvi
IN CANDOR
Light gleaming off the pitch-dark crow
As if it were a god unknown
I know it in this bird midflight
This envoy of a grave midnight
As if it were wet it glisters
Light gleaming off its sable feathers
I saw one once on driven snow
Point with the radix of its wings
To the center of all things
Hourly the mournful bells would chime
We had to change the locks every time
[THE SONG-STREWN DAY]
The song-strewn day
Elapséd scherzo-
frenetiquette
Familiar and forlorn
Figured on
Figured out
She said to be careful,
“I only have one feeling
Left to hurt.”
(I saw it as a patch of color.)
“If my soul leaps out,”
She continuared,
“Like a spark shorn out of steel…”
Whilst bineothan her spieling
One bird sings loudly
This cloudy morning
I wonder what it means?
Ray Corvi writes poetry. His work can be found in DASH Literary Journal (May 2022), FRiGG Magazine (forthcoming), OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, The Penmen Review, The Seattle Star, Evening Street Press & Review (forthcoming) and Triggerfish Critical Review (forthcoming).
Donna Pucciani
Little Bird
The chirping ascends
from a rusted pipe protruding
from the clay-tiled roof
over the back garden, chosen
for reasons unknown.
The miniscule hymn unspools
from the beak of a nondescript bird,
perched on a twig of oxidizing iron,
wings still, throat pulsing
with spring music.
This some-kind-of-sparrow
has chosen to praise the dusk,
enthroned on its own bit
of decomposing metal
thrusting from the eaves,
witnessing the power
of littleness,
filling the oncoming night
with something like hope.
Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Verse of Voice Poetry Magazine, Poetry Salzburg, Gradiva, Acumen, ParisLitUp, Mediterranean Poetry, and other journals. Her latest book of poetry is EDGES.
Gregory W. Boller
Untitled by Unknown
When finally at last I cease,
surrendering life’s lease,
will what within my still heart’s keep
on scraps of parchment writ
be ever loved enough to reap
and sow as seems befit?
Below those fading leaves of grass
where lost adventure lays,
regret for if now seems to pass,
supplanting dream-filled days.
What if I sought, perchance instead,
moments felt, and replace
this urgent need to pen ahead
to ‘scape my mortal chase?
Gregory W. Boller is a marketing professor and working actor based in Memphis, TN. His previous work has appeared in Death in a Consumer Culture.
Justin Burnett
Sleeping Pills
Orange
bottle, white childproof
cap, rattling
contents, like broken teeth,
the black,
bold name, the instructions,
warnings,
my own name in a thin text.
Could you imagine
biting the Eucharist,
leaving the minister
to stare at the other half,
as you swilled the wine?
I can’t believe
I used to take so much. Still,
divvying them up in my mouth feels wrong.
They might as well have crosses on them,
these hypotheticals. At night,
I take communion,
full of guilt.
Singly, they promise
sleep; together her
sister. The one subdues me;
the other I have to subdue, and will.
Justin Burnett (they/them) has appeared in Montage, The Boston Compass, and Survivor Lit. A selection of their poetry is featured in the anthology 14 International Younger Poets, edited by Philip Nikolayev.