J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the last quarter century, most recently at Under The Bleachers, Misfit Magazine, Horror Sleaze Trash, Raw Dog Press and Red Eft Review. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
————————————————————————————————————————the alcohol works better these days
another rainy afternoon
another shot of bourbon
for the pain
they tell me to stretch, do
a little light exercising, go
for a walk
that always makes me laugh
these “experts” don’t have
a bad back and arthritis
head to toe the alcohol works better
these days
they worry about my liver i don’t i’ve lived over a decade
The
silence seemed delicious. No one would have thought
the
streets could be so still.
The
whiplash hum of the cables,
slapping
and whining in the slots
or
clashing, electrically, above the streets,
the
moaning and whimper of the busses,
the
gnarled complaints of cars,
the
arthritic squeal of a truck,
vanished,
like the crumpled quiet of barroom talk.
The
barroom talk, too, silenced,
with
the garrulous, loud Pandora,
the
restaurant ramage quietened
to a
held breath by the cashiers.
The
tap-tap of a single pedestrian.
The
whisper of the wind in your ear.
The
buzzing of a heavy bumble bee.
The
full-throated aria of a mockingbird,
blithely ignoring
sheltering in place,
singing
his heart out at the top of a tree.
Under
the silence, a trembling,
the
lifting of a finger
turning
in the wind,
like
a cock on a weather vane.
West.
South. East. North. East.
South.
East. South. West. North.
_____
Christopher
Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations
on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His
third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated
to appear later this year.
Eunice
Odio (sculpture by Marisel Jiménez; image from Oregon Arts Watch)
AT JOURNEY’S END
The Fire’s Journey
Part IV: The Return
Eunice Odio
Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P.
Ticas and Mauricio Espinosa
Tavern Books
A review by Christopher Bernard
“2ND
MAN
Where,
where is the house of your words?
ION
Behind your
heart.”
—The
Fire’s Journey, Part IV: The Return
Eunice Odio, considered
by many the greatest Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century, wrote what we
can now see is one of that century’s most remarkable poems – her complex,
elusive, deeply imagined epic of creation, The Fire’s Journey. It has
taken several generations for Anglophones to be introduced to this extraordinary
poem; with the publication of this translation of the epic’s concluding
section, we are finally able to get a sense of the full magnitude of Odio’s
accomplishment.
To briefly recap: the
first three parts of this epic depict, and in some ways enact, the creation of
the world from primordial chaos, and of both the poet narrating the epic
(introduced in part two) and of the world’s poet-creator, Ion, named after a
central character in Plato’s dialogue of the same name in which the philosopher
presents his understanding of poetry as a kind of inspired madness and the role
of the poet as a necromantic artificer and a tutor, wise in his madness and mad
in his wisdom, of the ways of the gods.
The third, hitherto
longest, section depicted the heroic making and remaking by Ion and his
faithful servant, Dedalus, with the help of a host of gods, of a great
cathedral, an edifice against the void that threatens creation at every instant
of its existence.
The fourth part depicts
the return of Ion and Dedalus and the other creator gods and goddesses (Om,
Tiara, Thauma, Efrit, Demon) to the city of humanity to celebrate the creation
of the world after a great victory has been achieved (it is not entirely clear
what this “victory” is of, or against what, though it may be the victory of
creation itself against chaos and nothingess). On their way to the city, they
meet a group of men carrying an angel who seems, somewhat ominously, to have
been killed by the masters of the city. In a Lazarus-like act, or an allusion
to Jesus, they resurrect him:
He is a crippled
angel, he is a man;
not a whole man,
but broken in pieces;
half a man that
rage spun cut by cut,
large in wounds
and small in hope . . .
Ion, returning to his
human form, hopes to be recognized by his mother, his uncle, and his brothers
(curiously, Ion’s father is never referred to directly, though an ultimate
being irregularly appearing, called “The Guardian,” may be him), but even his
family does not see him for what and who he is (the second brother speaks):
You’re
left, mother, with the son
who
disturbs you piece by piece;
you’re
left with your recovered son
in
whom you never rest
the
one you love in secret
without
joy and without pause;
in
whom you whirl, crying in pain.
In consequence, Ion, who,
as a creator of the universe, is also the creator of himself, must now reject his
family:
Mother, . . .
. . .
Stay in your place,
Stay there, living, besieged by the dead.
Stay there, kissing me from within.
A new word annihilates me,
another sets me free
another one is born in me, allowing a new birthing;
I am become birth-light once again.
I emerge.
. . .
I keep on until the end,
journeying in rapture.
But on their way to the
city, the creators make a harsh discovery: though those they meet are eagerly
awaiting the coming of the creators to celebrate them and all of creation, Ion
and Dedalus are not recognized; they are spurned, laughed at, denied. They then
discover the harshest reality of all. The city of men where they hoped to
celebrate, and justly be celebrated, has been conquered by an oligarchy of
demons: god of the dead Erebos, three-headed Cerberus, Syriac devil Beherit,
and Hybris, named not coincidentally for the Greek word for the overweening
arrogance that leads to catastrophe. Humanity has been corrupted, and the euphoria
of creation is poisoned by the reign of evil.
Ion and Dedalus are cast
out of the city. After their long labor creating the universe, they are stripped
of joy and pride, mocked, and left destitute in the wilderness:
DEDALUS
Lord,
you are sad. You have nothing left
nothing
but
your solitude.
. . .
ION
You, my populous solitude
my
soul’s pluranimous movement,
the
thirst that sustains me,
mother,
child, my brother pulse,
the
bread’s skeleton,
an
unbroken visitor
. . .
Guarding
keeping
watch
at
the gates of the earth.
“The return” of the title
means different things: Ion’s return to the city of men, his return to human
form from his time as spiritual creator, the return to “reality” from the
inspired insanity of the rhapsode, a return to darkness after the blazing light
of creation. It is also a kind of return
to the primordial questions of existence, to void and chaos confronting the
painful articulations of reality, to the adventure of being that is always
about to begin.
Thanks to Keith Ekiss and
his associates, Anglophone readers now have a chance to be enriched by this strange
and challenging poem, Blakean (as the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz
recognized) in its range and originality, a myth of origin of endlessly
ramifying depth, a spiritual and verbal journey rich with promises of discovery,
and a look into human and ahuman reality depicted in a masterpiece that
deserves a wide readership in any language. One can only wonder why it has
taken so long for us to learn about it. But surely it has been worth the wait,
since the result is this masterly translation.
____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third
collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to
appear later this year.
My spirit have
Asked me questions,
Like a musician
Playing melancholy flute
Life or death?
Wilder wounds always extend
Hope or fortune?
Burning tears and not fallen
Skeleton or flesh?
Autumn cloud raining blood
Hard or warm hearted?
Heartbroken to be heartless
Mirror or shades?
The wind of late hours
Morning or dawn?
Twilight in the dell road
Cured or luck?
The sorrow of demon
Nightingale or nightmare?
Hidden dream of the future
Vampire or empire?
Slaughter sword in the graveyard
Figurine or fame?
The dictator forgives and never forget
Ink or a notepad?
Thoughts that can be judge by God
Sickness or inspiration?
A misery blooming in a colourless rose
Whisper or tears?
Echo of a lost spirit in Baghdad
Hunter or ghost?
Enemy who hates himself mostly
Party or funeral?
Holiday with a bloody screaming
Nest or mysteries?
Burning candle celebrating my lonesome.
Unknown
Path
From the day
I decided to damage
Your life and break
Every beat of my heart
I walked down
The unknown path
I ran into trouble
In the wrong places
I lived a life
Of unborn mind set
Crying in holidays
Gagging in funerals
Your beauty became
The sunshine to my darkness
And I am still avoiding
Missing you on my birthday
I hated me before we met
I loved nobody but the army
That follows the leader of death
Break my legs and let me love you again.
On
The Leaves
On the leaves
Of autumn season,
They are colour
Of your flesh.
On the leaves
Of spring flowers,
They will breathe
Of your perfume.
On the leaves
Of the notebook,
They are lines
With your name.
On the leaves
Of life journey,
Joy and tears
Of one being.
On the leaves
Of poetry book,
Rebound and dark
Are the themes.
On the leaves
Of colorful mirror,
Reflects your smile
Against my request.
On the leaves
Of blind eyed,
Joys arises when
Dreams become hopes.
Ahmad Al-Khatat was born in Baghdad, Iraq. His work has appeared in print and online journals globally and has poems translated into several languages. He has been nominated for Best of the Net 2018. He is the author of The Bleeding Heart Poet, Love On The War’s Frontline, Gas Chamber, Wounds from Iraq, Roofs of Dreams, and The Grey Revolution. He lives in Montreal, Canada.
‘’here/ where the water breaks/ where the shore lies/where the world opens/ here is the cord/ no backstroke/ here is the blood’’ – Ife Olatona
& there where darkness lies / by the smiles of the doctors/ you’ll know that being born in my country or anywhere nowadays is a sin & i am smiling / the room is filled with some things we sometimes interpret as love their eyes on me made me starved for death / the loss of too /much blood from my mother taught me that this world is a battlefield the time it took / for me my head to be out / made me realize that nothing comes here easily like surviving /i am jealous of babies that die in labor
OdetoTheKitchen&OtherThings
i wrote my first poem in my mother’s kitchen three years ago, frustrated about the clogged sink. i have vowed to worship anything that may sound like our kitchen door after all, a god’s voice is found in everything that moans i have wished so many things like the sound of water flooding the sink, or wet lips of the faucet i have been fattened by the sound & images they create today i will be filled with air like my sister’s balloon
my mother says one day i will get tire of them i have drank her alertness like the last juice left open often i have pleasured myself trying to clog my throat like the kitchen sink that keeps clogging
Jeremy T. Karn
Karn, Jeremy. T Poet / Storyteller Monrovia, Liberia
“Prayer for a blind oak, sleeping woman, a lesson in Naomi Wolf’s promiscuities and an open space where poetry matters”” By Abigail George
Shut the door. Shut out the quiet light. Tell yourself to swim away from the tigers with arms pillars of smoke. One day I will find myself in a forest without men, without huntsmen and warriors, nomads and ghosts that burn all hours of the day and night. One day I will dazzle and fizz like a champagne virgin. I will laugh in all their faces. I will weave and thread stories, braid hair and dwell in possibility. My mother taught me that. White Knight you jewel. The bluish sky falls off you. I prefer the word ‘solitude’ to ‘loneliness’. White Knight you jewel of Hollywood. One day I will shut the door. One day I will shut out the quiet light. One day I will tell myself to swim away from the tigers. My tingling arms pillars of smoke.
What a pale and beautiful creature you are (you once were upon a time now we’re worlds apart) but are you happy? You went on to paradise and wrote and wrote and wrote and won prizes and planted flags. My beautiful creature as cold as some things that come from the life of the sea, lover of love, of pictures of health. I have bits and pieces in memory of you of other peoples’ keepsake stuff. Angelic mouth with eyes like dew. I knew at the end of it you would still have a soul-consciousness to come home to. Alas the same could not be said of me, dude in black, urban-cowboy in black. To yearn for love, to live in that paradise again is a wish granted to a chosen few, the chosen ones and what happens to the others?
Others live to exist for their families, raising their children or for themselves, for their ego. If there is no love, no culture, reality to feed you, nurture you, caress your tired or grief-stricken face at the end of the day then I imagine that there are people out there who sometimes feel as lost as I do. What can loneliness communicate to you? It can also be a lovely feeling. You’re freer in a way than other people are. But who is there for you to talk to at the end of the day? People need companions. People need friends and family, loved ones and acquaintances. People need contact, closure, and relationships. There are people who build empires on these kinds of things. And then there are people who need, want, desire love as wide as rivers. You’re the Pacific.
And then there are people who turn their back on that and embrace a life guided by the pulse that tells them to be brave. And to turn their back on a world that calls them an Outsider, a loner, strange with strange ways of doing things, a strange way of thinking. And you just have to have the courage of your convictions if you are this sort of person. I am this sort of person. So weirdly out of sync with the rhythm of other women my age. So good am I am at this thing, this sly-odd movement that I have won prizes for it. It feels like a bird’s wing in spasm in the air. It feels like a rush of warm, sweet air into the beautiful red ribbons of your heart, a cry in the dark, a promise that you make to meet up with someone at heaven’s gate next to a deathbed.
Someone dear and truly loved who has passed on from this world into the hereafter. What’s eternity anyway? A more novel, adventurous dimension because it becomes lovely when you think of it in that way. Not meeting up with strangers but meeting up with familiar faces. The faces that you knew, loved and cherished since birth. They were people who were always a part of your world in one way or another. So, I say one day we’ll all meet in heaven. We’ll make our way there from all of our other destinations that we ‘lost’ a little self, worth and identity in. Everybody is married in some way to his or her soul and every bit of our soul is intended for and to be hitched, hooked, stitched to God.
Whether you want to believe that or not is entirely up to you but to me it makes sense. I love the useful wonder in thinking that. And then there are those fuzzy and lukewarm questions that tug at the puppet strings of the heart. Not floating, suspended by nothing but an existential breeze in the air, not drowning, just there, behaving mysteriously as if they had all the right in the universe to be there. When I was in love, I wanted to know everything about him and nothing at the same time. Falling in love, head over heels, sweeping flaws under the carpet did not come with instructions. I did not know how to correct something I did wrong. Everything was new and pretty. To love someone since you were a child is a very long time.
Illusions, they do not come with flaws and they cannot love. They’re too much in love with themselves. People do not ask, ‘What were you like in the womb?’ Men do not say with a great amount of insight, ‘You seem to have been a fish with the spirit of a lioness even then.’ They’re answers for the volcano dreamer. The last battle won for me was ‘keeping in touch’. My sister and I had a conversation and it went something like this. We ended up not really saying anything at all like most of our conversations these days.
God can keep your soul. Let me bury you there in paradise. In no particular place in paradise. In your claustrophobic world where you were so cold. You, white knight death cutie on parade. It’s the little deaths in pixels from childhood that is as nutritious and forgetful as dreaming. These days everything is crisper. Images are sharper and brighter. The ‘less is more’ syndrome is in a minority. Even refugees and the Masai seem to agree with me with their toothpick limbs and the wounded sensibility they look at me with. ‘I am not responsible I want to say,’ but I want to say something, anything really to make this dark, dark feeling go away when I see these scenes. It’s just not fair and then the world seems to agree with me but not enough.
(And now what about the men). Of course, the men are in secret code so they can never be discovered out. In a mirror I see a wife (always a fretful wife with screaming, crying babies). ‘Poor babies,’ I enjoyed saying and why didn’t he love his beautiful wife more and why was I the chosen one. I couldn’t really see why inexperience was so sexy. There is nothing barren about this man’s ego. But his hands always felt cold. He had dark, dark hands; skin like velvet and even his eyes were dark. They were always so full of concern for me. I pretended it was wonder. Living your life and moving forward is the easy part. It is the forgetting that is the hardest. I can put a face to a name, city, and occupation. I remember. It is all in the details.
I don’t want to meet these men in heaven or in any place else. The men with all that sadness, rage and perfect-wonder in their eyes. All their faces look the same to me and after all this time I did not step back from the picture and say I forgive this and I forget that. They look at me and as if to say, ‘You too had a role in this. A part to play in all that drama.’ The drama felt quite useless to me on the one hand and like banana jazz in my head on the other. ‘You’re quite mad, you know.’ One man told me but he couldn’t exactly look me in the eye. So, I bravely posed in mask after mask after mask. Another man preferred ‘the girl’. Well, that was his thing. He didn’t want educated, intelligent or smart. He didn’t want cute. He wanted ‘the girl’.
He wanted a pure, angelic face in tight jeans. He wanted obedience. He wanted to be put on a pedestal and worshiped. And so, I did all that. I couldn’t quite understand why because I could make conversation but he never wanted to talk and understand how claustrophobic I felt sometimes just being in his presence. It felt completely otherworldly to me. This thing called love or rather, ‘the affair’. It didn’t exactly feel like romance to me. No, there was nothing romantic about it. I feel a great deal of shame because I did not listen to my heart. A heart that was telling me his wife meant a great deal more to him than I did and even on a certain primeval level his wife’s body meant a great deal more to him. She had given him children.
Any woman who can do that is a queen. Queens do not keep secret diaries and Croxley black notebooks with red spines detailing seductions and dalliances with the opposite sex. Sometimes I love those notebooks. I have them. I have kept something back, a part of their spirit and their joy for living and maybe they kept a part of my spirit too (oh, I know that is wishful thinking). And this is what a female writer, any female writer does. Ah, she thinks too much for her own good. She has memories to write up into stories, laughter that she has kept spirited away for far too long because no one has been there to make her laugh and there’s poetry too. Perhaps not easy on the eye because it is meant for people who actually enjoy reading sonnets out loud for fun? What are memories for if not for assassinations, pretend?
And he had built the house they all lived in (the one, big, happy and boisterous family). But since this is my secret diary it is just between you and me. Nobody else has to know especially my father. I don’t want him to think differently about me and the life I chose give or take a few years ago because I am not that person anymore. And I don’t believe that time heals. When people say that it is as if there’s something specific to time. There’s nothing specific about time and even clarity doesn’t even figure into it. I can ask my ancestors why I’ve never been lucky in love. Why I’ve failed so dismally in that department (much too much of a daddy’s girl)? I can say I will never give my heart way again but I don’t believe that.
I usually fall in love up to three times a day or more. Men move me. Delicate men move me even more. This generation of youth, of women wastes love. They fail to see it as a commodity, as a spiritual property and gift.
In the mornings when I am hungry, I have my breakfast, usually toast spread with margarine. And I make myself some tea. Just toast (brown bread toasted in the oven like in the old days). I smile when I think to myself that I am from the old days now. I wake up earlier and earlier and go to bed later and later. It feels good to be thirty-two. I don’t feel it (old, stale, as if I was coming into a rut, the state of the nation, the world my generation found themselves in) when it was my birthday. Now that the next one is around the corner I am feeling it.
It’s feels like an effort this morning to make a hardboiled egg or one scrambled into bits. I have my toast with jam this morning. I think of him and everyday it doesn’t hurt less, it hurts more. I’ve given up on humanity. What I see on the news or the little I read in the newspapers terrifies me. It scares me half to death. The suffering children in Asia, Africa, (they’re just babies), unemployed youth, strikers protesting, marching. I see the desolation of poverty. How it isolates people from the mainstream of society. What is relevant to me in society is not relevant to the media. They write what sells and it is usually salacious material. Here today, gone tomorrow or the next week until it comes back as an update or haunts you when you least expect it.
It is funny how the mind can play tricks on you especially when you’re over thirty, reaching that point of middle age. The news often pins down the status of refugees, painting the women with their children, food aid flown in from abroad, white tent after white tent in a field of white tents and again there are stories of orphans. It never seems to end. We’re capable of many, many things. God can keep your soul and man will take and take everything else.
Magical Realism, Tough Issues, and the Graphic Novel Form
In
this brief essay, I would like to share about two books that have recently been
published that struck my interest. I love how, in the middle of a perfectly
mundane narrative that initially feels like a typical text, creative authors
and artists interject unexpected characters and moments to take the story to
new places.
One
example of this is the graphic novel, Lizard
in a Zoot Suit, written and illustrated by Marco Finnegan (Graphic
Universe, 2020). The book is set to be released May 5 in the United States and
features a canary yellow motif that carries through its panels. The story is
set in the early 1940s and brings the sense of place to the read, in part by
the way characters are depicted, but also in part by the way language takes
shape around ethnicity. This includes what the author calls “animosity toward
Mexican Americans,” (p. 137). In the midst of this racial tension, a character
enters the scene who serves as a kind of help or guide.
Of
course, given the title of the graphic novel, that character happens to be a
lizard, who is often drawn in a zoot suit. The fanciful addition to the story
helps the author take on a critical topic and do so in way that is illustrative
and unexpected.
Working
in a similar yet different fashion, artist and author David Jesus Vignolli has
recently published the book New World (Archaia,
2019). The color scheme of this book begins in a style that almost resembles parchment
and alludes to a historic time period and realistic figures. When a character
encounters the new world, we see it blazing in green in his eyes in a series of
panels that close in like camera frames.
By
the time we reach the next page, the colors of this new world have exploded in
a rich spread and soon enough we realize that, though the themes of captivity
and imperialism are present in the book, the inclusion of elements like a giant
parrot which the characters can ride on lends a fanciful sense to the text.
Ironically,
both of these books take on issues of tension and racial oppression, and do so
in a way that invites elements that open the reader up to the central message
of depicting a history of ill treatment of groups of people. What is accomplished
with the inclusion of magical realism does not, at least for me, deaden that
message, but rather seems to say:
See what a world this is? See how
people have treated one another, and continue to treat one another? This world
is different, but it is also our own.
It’s
a message that I appreciate in this visual medium, and it is both textually and
ethically compelling.
