Issue #46
Royal Rhodes
The Ravished Library
In reading I become a bookish stranger,
as every line is black and beautiful,
a beauty that seduces me with danger.
The stamp of strangeness on the printed page —
my sighing echoing the page’s sighing,
embodies calm or burns with silent rage.
We see that growing from a mildewed spine
tiny sprigs of life seek out the light
and with the broken binding intertwine.
Lines of letters in italic print
compel me to fill up the empty margins
with secrets or with words that give a hint
of fires I forgot, that burn and blaze,
the naked curves the opened text exposed,
drew me in a longing, speechless gaze.
And caught between the pinching printing presses
I can trace a spider’s ghostly shape
beside its victim, drawn by its caresses.
Just as now my hand your hand will seize
and hold in need, as on my lap this book
is shaking, like the leaves on distant trees.
Inventory
“…your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave…”
(Paul Celan, Death Fugue)
The items tossed here have no names attached.
Their countless owners simply disappeared,
not by rapture but a choking smoke,
so often pictured like a movie set.
This is real. No cinema has matched
the smell and sights that history has seared
into memory that trembled, broke,
and seeps from ponds of ashes, black and wet.
Conservators unbraid a ton of hair,
a hundred thousand pairs of useless shoes,
wooden legs and orthopedic braces
and pound by pound of sightless pairs of glasses
that reflect the light and stare and stare,
brushes meant for teeth no one will use,
cans of Zyklon-B with poison traces,
dumped in chambers meant to cleanse these masses.
We tremble to remember, but the task
is now amidst this rubble to preserve
the bricks, the uniforms, the shawls for prayer
that shielded no one from the showerhead,
the hygiene records, documents that ask
the dead to blueprint master plans to serve
the restoration efforts, while with care
a rubber stamp re-inks the forms in red.
One worker cleaned the sandal of a child,
one that showed a footprint left inside.
The numbers fade. The real is what is weighed,
a measured, clear vitrine — with golden hair.
The names on yellow lists are neatly filed,
evidence that someone there had died.
Over time the hair discolored, greyed,
and best left now to vanish in the air.
Royal Rhodes is a retired teacher of global religions, religion & the arts, and death & dying. His poems have appeared in various online journals and in art/poetry collaborations with The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina. His most recent project was another collaboration on church interiors in Italy.
KC Bailey
Shipwrecked
I had, alas! no divine knowledge. What I had received by the good
instruction of my father was then worn out by an uninterrupted series,
for eight years, of seafaring wickedness, and a constant conversation
with none but such as were, like myself, wicked and profane to the last
degree. I do not remember that I had, in all that time, one thought
that so much as tended either to looking upwards towards God, or
inwards towards a reflection upon my own ways; but a certain stupidity
of soul, without desire of good, or conscience of evil, had entirely
overwhelmed me; and I was all that the most hardened, unthinking,
wicked creature among our common sailors can be supposed to be; not
having the least sense, either of the fear of God in danger, or of
thankfulness to God in deliverance.
In the relating what is already past of my story, this will be the more
easily believed when I shall add, that through all the variety of
miseries that had to this day befallen me, I never had so much as one
thought of it being the hand of God, or that it was a just punishment
for my sin—my rebellious behaviour against my father—or my present
sins, which were great—or so much as a punishment for the general
course of my wicked life. When I was on the desperate expedition on the
desert shores of Africa, I never had so much as one thought of what
would become of me, or one wish to God to direct me whither I should
go, or to keep me from the danger which apparently surrounded me, as
well from voracious creatures as cruel savages. But I was merely
thoughtless of a God or a Providence, acted like a mere brute, from the
principles of nature, and by the dictates of common sense only, and,
indeed, hardly that. When I was delivered and taken up at sea by the
Portugal captain, well used, and dealt justly and honourably with, as
well as charitably, I had not the least thankfulness in my thoughts.
When, again, I was shipwrecked, ruined, and in danger of drowning on
this island, I was as far from remorse, or looking on it as a judgment.
I only said to myself often, that I was an unfortunate dog, and born to
be always miserable.
[from ‘The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’, by Daniel Defoe – Chapter VI. Ill
and Conscience-stricken]
ed. note – click+drag to highlight and read unaltered text. recommended to appreciate author’s choices in erasure.
KC Bailey’s poems reside in The Hellebore, Black Bough Poetry (p.38), The Tide Rises Fevers of the Mind, The Daily Drunk, TunaFish Journal, Crow & Cross Keys, Amethyst Review, & elsewhere. She practices Tai Chi and drinks Earl Grey tea, though hasn’t yet mastered the art of doing both simultaneously (Twitter: @KCBailey_Writer).
Lisa Molina
Ample
an Emily Dickinson Golden Shovel
When I have pangs of guilt for the ample
life I don’t deserve, I make
believe it’s all a dream; This
husband, children, home, bed
of warm wet whispers that make
me feel almost whole. And this
freedom to go to bed
at 7:00, if I so choose, with
no one but me, and the awe
I feel with the book of poems in
my hands, as I read and inhale it.
Oh, how I wish not to wait
to fulfill my dream of writing until
it’s too late, even though judgment
haunts me; since I wish for a break
away from those whose excellent
love and care and trust and
devotion depend on me to be fair.
Still, though, I yearn to be
alone with my head in its
room of its own. But our mattress
holds two; so I look straight
up, and imagine myself to be
sitting at a writing desk, its
poets’ spirits offering me a pillow
for my chair, as my thoughts spin round
and round; and afterwards, let
me lose all track of time. No
life distractions, as the yellow
rays of morning sunrise
appear, with the larks’ beautiful noise.
Nothing allowed to interrupt
the voluminous violet visions that this
sensitive soul sees; rising, lifting off the ground.
Lisa Molina is poet and educator in Austin, Texas. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, singing, playing the piano, and hiking. Her work can be found in numerous literary journals, including Beyond Words Magazine, Trouvaille Review, and The Ekphrastic Review, with poems soon to be featured in Amethyst Review (forthcoming April 2021) and The Peeking Cat (forthcoming August 2021).
Andy Bodinger
Optics
It was some years later in a city
burning with concrete.
I had a job, a commute, and I had hobbies.
As I passed downtown I saw
a familiar face in a college hoodie
mulling over a half-plate of rice noodles, utensils crossed, long shorts
quilting akimbo legs.
In her field of vision I was a molecule
of a crowd passing by her table on the veranda.
She turned and squinted against the sun.
I recalled her drunken question to me
about how to set the brightness of a television screen,
recalled her nabbing a thread of web,
carrying it to a balcony as the spider treadmilled
inches below her fingers.
Our eye contact was as concise
as a fly being slapped. I debated
whether there was recognition in her glance, why
she ever wore contacts that dyed her eyes
blue from hazel, but we were friends
of friends, our lives intersecting only for group watches of bootleg movies
and splashes of fingers over a shared condiment.
Her face turned profile and I returned forward,
our gazes elbowing by
into the blurriness of mirages.
I don’t know why these moments, boomeranging back,
trivialize the ease of casual acquaintances: only together
in the same way that the iris’s beauty is
a projection of the disunity of light.
Andy Bodinger is a fiction writer and graduate student at Oklahoma State University. He is a former ESL teacher and a current associate editor at the Cimarron Review. His work has been published by Lunch Ticket and The Dillydoun Review and is forthcoming in The Stockholm Review of Literature (Issue 33).
Christopher Kuhl
The Laughing River
I sit in a stand of birches,
head thrown back, praying
aloud for the coming of
the wind, and its feel
across my hot body and
soft-skinned throat. In
the distance I hear a
laughing river and a boatman
singing with the joy I seek.
A Thought About Prayer
The distant, hopeless borders
of prayer,
tossed about like a clean
wet sheet pinned to a backyard
clothesline.
The weight of soggy laundry
and ripping winds crack the pins,
and the sheet
falls to the blackened, sodden
ground, among the
futile prayers we recited, trembling,
so long ago.
Christopher Kuhl earned bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and music composition, as well as two masters of music degrees and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts. He taught English at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. He enjoys literature, philosophy, and history. His interests include studying mathematics and classical Greek and Hebrew.
William Greenfield
Drawing Dead
When there were no cards left to improve his hand,
Frank talked about his heart attack like it was a dirty
windshield or a battery needing a trickle charge.
He was ready to play. The odds were in his favor
but all the pussies went home when the snow began to fall.
He could see his future, how he would tousle his child’s
hair and show the money to his Queen of hearts.
He saw his future like the railbird saw the long shot
leading the pack in the stretch at Saratoga.
But he miscalculated the odds, chain smoking Newports
in his F-150 outside Stewarts, scratching off loser after loser.
The wind chill kept him quiet as the nor’easter hunched
his shoulders and the blood tried to find its way.
Someone should have told him that the heavy snow was not
just a forecast; it was a prognosis.
William A. Greenfield is a youth advocate worker in upstate New York. His chapbook “Momma’s Boy Gone Bad” was published in 2017 (Finishing Line Press). His 2nd chapbook “I Should have Asked the Blind Girl to Dance” was published in 2019 (Flutter Press). His collection “The Circadian Fallacy” was published June 2020 (Kelsay Books).
George Bandy
days and ways
days & ways
to go
while racing snow
yet we hold tight
to the thread of wood smoke
whispering its warmth
while rasping wind & ice
carve
into the night
George Bandy’s publications include War, Literature & the Arts (USAF), New Millennium Writings (vol.17, 2008), Subprimal Art Poetry, The Closed Eye Open, Blue Unicorn (forthcoming in print, April 2021), The Saturday Evening Post, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and in The Southern Poetry Anthology: Vol. IX, Virginia (forthcoming Fall 2022). His poem ‘Return from War’ won the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Award and was published in Icon.
Casey Killingsworth
Beads for Manhattan
They call it mitigated land,
a half-assed attempt to give
back what was taken away,
gaining a square of wetland,
losing to the mall and its people
like the beads for Manhattan
or whatever, as if the hole
they dug is a lake,
as if those shrubs will ever
become a forest,
as if the birds
that might return
here could hold back
their laughter,
or tears.
Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His first book, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995 and a new book, A nest blew down, is due in July 2021. Casey has a degree from Reed College.