Monthly Archives: May 2016
Poetry from JD DeHart
Poetry from Astra Papachristodoulou
IDLE IDOLS
This camera has an eye that cannot see
the act of toxic scrolling that can be
an agony of the mind that’s driven me
miles from “amour de soi” that’s all I need
to find my peace and spread prosperity
to those who I see and see me as rarity
These lenses can keep flashing filthy BANKNOT£S
for people who hide behind their idle followers
of photographs they’ve taken to promote
their “soulmates” with whom they’re asymptotes
projecting life as seen by the Kardashians
with selfies in a shell that’s rather porcelain
Insta-society needs velvet antidote
to filter trash and help one to self-love
Poetry from Joan Beebe
Night Sounds
Sleeping soundly without a care,
When suddenly I heard a step on the stair
I arose from my bed and tried to be quiet
I was terribly afraid but thought I should try it
To find out what could be that woke me from sleep
So into the hall I did manage to creep
I looked all around but nothing I found.
Suddenly there was music from downstairs,
It sounded like a piano and again I was scared.
I decided I had better take a look and what did I see
But a big old cat running up and down the keys
A window was left open and that’s how he got in
That’s why I heard that terrible din.
So if night sounds disturb you, just think of this.
Those sounds can be funny with such a strange twist!
The Passage of Time
Like the wind blowing here and there
Changing to barely a whisper,
Time eludes us in the passing of days.
We look forward to a lovely spring
After a cold and snowy winter.
Time passes and we awake one morning
To the warming day with its
Promise of blue skies, pretty flowers
The sun in its splendor.
Time passes and soon we hear
Summer rain, thunder and wind.
But when it is over, there is
A beauty to the quiet and stillness we feel.
Again, time passes and the leaves
On the trees start changing color.
We are now in Autumn, a kind of
Magical season with scarecrows, full moons
And children trick or treating.
There is a sunny but cool, crisp air and
You breathe it in because it pleases you.
Finally, time passes and we see snowfalls, enjoying
The first one as it seems to sit on the trees in a dazzling light.
Pine trees are a picture of such natural beauty
Now we watch with smiles as
Families are playing with their children
And building snowmen. Sleds are
Brought out for fun , sliding down hills,
Then rushing back up the hill to
Fly down it again and cheeks
Getting red in the cold.
Christmas brings much joy to the
Family celebrations and there is
A different sense of peace in the world
Our passage of time for this year
Is now complete.
Poetry from Will Somers
Blue-eyed Wraith
I still remember
The helmet of coppery
Hair, shining in the sun.
I can still tell you
About the heat of the
Day, as my class
Stretched our legs
At the World War II Memorial.
I saw her there,
For the first time,
And what I thought would be
The last.
But it wasn’t.
She haunted my dreams
Starting that night.
A blue eyed wraith
Staring me down
Every time I closed my eyes.
I was captivated by her
Proud, defiant eyes.
Her scarlet lips
Always beckoned me closer.
Maybe I should have
Known that I needed
To stay away.
Christopher Bernard reviews San Francisco’s latest Word for Word short story production
TWO STORIES ONSTAGE
Word for Word’s Stories
Emma Donoghue “Night Vision”
Colm Tóibín “Silence”
Z Below
San Francisco
San Francisco’s well-known drama group Word for Word, which for 23 years has been staging short stories with ever-increasing theatrical sophistication, recently brought to the stage two finely wrought tales by Irish writers about Irish writers at SoMa’s Z Below. The results were a pleasure for both lovers of literature and of the stage.
Word for Word’s cunning device is so obvious one wonders why nobody ever thought of it before: take a good short story and stage it as a play, with every word spoken by a character in the story. The opportunities for theatrical magic are patent, and potent, and taken entire advantage of by Word for Word and its talented staff.
Tonight’s embarking (I saw it on April 1st) brought two stories, one by Colm Tóibín, the comfortable, fashionable middle-brow writer (“middle-brow” is sometimes mistakenly taken for a putdown, though it isn’t; a sturdy literary culture needs a strong middle-brow culture to keep the low-brow aspiring and the high-brow honest), based on an anecdote from the notebooks of Henry James. The anecdote was told to him by Isabella August, Lady Gregory—the Lady Gregory—writer, playwright and Irish folklorist, probably most famous in this country for her association with the poet W. B. Yeats and their mutual support of the celebrated Abbey Theater, now the National Theatre of Ireland. Henry James never worked up the anecdote into a story, but Tóibín uses it to draw out a tale about an affair between the unhappy Lady Gregory and the poet and womanizer Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and her long, puzzled savoring of what seems to have been the one great physical passion in her life.
Prose from A. Iwasa
Excerpt from Transcendental Hobo
a memoir by A. Iwasa
Chapter 1?
I often think of September 29th, 2001 as my birthday. It was the first time I marched in Washington, DC, and in many ways was the culmination of a process that started about three years earlier when I found out about the School of the Americas (SOA), a Latin American military officers’ training facility located at Ft. Benning, GA. But that day in DC there were two demonstrations against the impending war in Afghanistan, and I participated in both.
I had been to protests before, but nothing I had experienced in Cleveland, OH (Clevo) prepared me for the tense and sometimes violent Anti-Capitalist Convergence (ACC) march on the World Bank, which ended with hundreds of us getting detained in the plaza in front of the building.
In retrospect, of course, the differences make total sense. What’s demonstrating for the legalization of marijuana with maybe three hundred people mostly too stoned for any sort of serious shenanigans, or participating in a so-called solidarity rally while people on the actual front lines are breaking unjust laws elsewhere?