And that’s how she sees the East: The blue hunger where a child fell asleep, A theatre actor drank himself to stupor, maybe death, A teacher misplaced his tablet, mobile and life, A silent man gazed at her through fear and rioting cells - Water, mist, who cares, it happened When she was waiting for light to get a move on And jet her branches, for days to disperse In white hunger or nipped desire - Do come in, please take a seat, Shift branches from the table, Shift fractious lights, I know, it’s the prophet’s fire, Don’t ask ‘Souls get lost in blue, is it fair’, Don’t ask ‘Are mothers risk or Lethe When averse limbs and snowy manes invade’ - Demise, the wind won’t listen if you run Through white pages, through life tearing apart Words, grass - Even the moon halts in a truce wonkier than sunrise, Green hunger where women sport Sharp features or white doughy jowls : Do they look like vipers or pancakes? Whatever - Each sunset deserves a long wild wake.
I said ‘Go, naked soul’
To the night silence fading in blue
Where hunger led her and her likes:
To crave a Cyclops, a freak,
To surprise chimera parties, over there
You can see words, the freaked pedestrians
Opposite traffic lights: waste, loss, demise,
Or dawdlers lost in a maze, the only signs being
Babies ravaging mothers or teats,
Butterflies asking spent flowers for more -
So, did you find them in a junk shop?
Nice, ok, but what are they for,
Look, it wasn’t that bad when I was a child
And stared at them for a long while,
Their eyes swamps of blue tenderness
As they said their name, life or demise?
Whatever, handle with care,
Such bloody high maintenance!
And you don’t fret, soul, if your eyes
Scare the beejeesus out of them,
Stay here and let Cassandra hide -
I know, wasn’t he lucky with such friends
Who tied him up to the mast
While the song went unfazed -
Mind, we are not, too much time on their hands
Those three guys or that light
Doesn’t call it quits, who knows,
More power to her, we’ll make do
With a merry parade of bright-coloured
Bedding and words -
Things changed for worse? Maybe,
But colours we’ve got and a vagrant light:
Enough for a shelter? I dunno -
Oh, so sorry, dear soul.
That sticky love of mothers? Thanks but no thanks, Time kindles himself through his offspring, No one knows his father - A bastard, but stick to him And you’ll dash to death like a child To windswept spring grass - Flowers and butterflies, hopes? No, lest she go wild, Ban out the silence, At best cast some embers - Blessed abundance went missing at last - To think you saw the harshness of flowers As a force, to think you arranged rituals For the goddess of harvest - Look at you now, helpless in a maze Of pomegranates and misleading oaths - Who’s to blame, blue or demise? Nonsense, blue came to help, Stones didn’t sneak off And where’s the point in music, cider, Sweet gifts from your friends - She falls asleep out of the blue: End of books, end of packed rooms As the tangled veins show you Her true gift - Deep silence at night When colours sell themselves cheap, Yet stars insist on a sky blank of zest And blue light says “to every night its moon”, Yes, yes, but get you fruitful, fear, Dig graves, dig words, Forget wintry souls: Even fire skips them when diving Through roads, squares, signs - You’ve given enough - Stop it now.
Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella fell in love with the English language at six, soon after she had started writing poems (in Italian). She has contributed to a number of national and international magazines and anthologies, and is the author of Lo sguardo di Orfeo, L’inverno di vetro, Di altre stelle polari , Casa di erba’, and in English, A Blue Soul and Blue Branches.
(Photo above courtesy of the free digital archives of the New York Public Library, which you can access here. Just enter a search term—like “storm”—or terms, & see what comes up, it’s so fun!)
Good evening, this is guest editor Tony Longshanks LeTigre.
We are all disaster survivors at the moment of one kind or another, it seems. Someone asked once if had PTSD. I replied, “I’m alive, so yes.”
The sense of being caught up in an impending disaster seems common to people all over the world at the moment, & it is reflected in the submissions for Synchronized Chaos for this month. The only sensible thing to do seems to be to declare the theme of August 2016 Storms of Change. (I hope that doesn’t sound too presidential & platitudinous.) Painful storms brewing, evolution facing obstacles, growing unhappiness & backlash against unhappiness from those satisfied with the status quo or desirous of protecting their wealth, & their illth, to use a word suggested by English art critic & social critic John Ruskin. The submissions we’ve received for August are riddled with discontentment, primal screams of anguish & outrage growing louder, pressure building up to a major earthquake, a drumbeat in the distance growing louder, adverse branching futures from which a path will emerge (whether it likes it or not) in time, the sense of homelessness, of belonging nowhere, of being or being treated as an alien legally & otherwise, a eulogy that asks “impossible questions,” nature hallowed & nature besieged (whether we are nature’s besiegers or her fellow sufferers hard to say), our distraught predicament as humans seemingly mirrored by various other creatures across species lines.
At least, that’s what I see. Maybe I’m just being a paranoid drama queen or something.
Prerna Bakshi, an Indian writer, poet and activist based in Macao, sends us three poems pertaining to the partition of India / Punjab. “I belong to the family of refugees and have been deeply moved by what’s taking place in the world at the moment.”
Redolent with sadness is Christopher Bernard’s eulogy for Adelle Foley, a writer married to an accomplished poet. “At times like this / I ask impossible questions.” Bernard reviewed Adelle’s husband’s chapbook Eyes for Synchronized Chaos back in December 2013.
Developing the catastrophic theme, Hanoch Guy treats us to several poems about a series of natural disasters, including the tragicomic image, “A glacier sails away carrying a family of polar bears.”
Next we have a poem from Colin McCandless in alliterative / Beowulfian style about the “balancing act” between prey & predator.
We are always happy to have submissions from Jaylan Salah. This month she gives us an edifying interview with up-&-coming Australian actor Jackson Gallagher. “The Man Who Roamed the World.”
Yours truly offers an excerpt representing the first chapter of a new novel-in-progress, & a long, excellent review of a long, excellent book, Douglas Hofstadter’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize winner, Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Donal Mahoney has been asked by non-writers many times, “Why Did You Write That?” That forms the title of his essay in which he describes his habit of accumulating words until he has enough for a poem. “Next I try to determine what the poem, if anything, is trying to say. And that’s not always easy.”
Like determining the theme of Synchronized Chaos!
Michael Robinson offers a timely reminder that black lives matter with a series of short essays or prose poems. No shield exists here between the reader & savage realities of life as an oppressed person in a warlike scenario of feeling under attack at all times. “Have you witnessed the pain and heartbreak of black mothers when they learned that their son has been killed in the streets?” he asks, & cries out, “I don’t want to end up like Emmett Till,” an African-American teenager who was lynched on suspicion of flirting with a white woman in Mississippi just 61 years ago.
A trio of poems from returning contributor Joan Beebe find solace & nourishment in the sun, & bewilderment in those “times when life seems to overwhelm us” with a broken heart. She wakes up to a new day & faces the question, “Where is the joy that should be part of this day?”
I. W. Rollins sends poetry describing “a timid shrimp of a
middle aged man,” a young who “eats this love he doesn’t deserve,” & his memory of getting drunk for the first time, when “the bottle’s kiss was a kiss / the other boys couldn’t have, / it was all my own / just like my sadness.” He closes with a poem about being trapped by capitalism into a kind of pleasant slavery.
And we have poems from J. K. Durick examining that possibility “that Under all / this fuss and noise we live through, we walk around with, / We dedicate our days to, there may be nothing at all.”
Good luck weathering the storm, my literary comrades & fellow human beings.
Tony “LongShanks” LeTigre Portland, OR, USA August 2016
Confused, I respond by telling him
the names of my grandfather’s and grandmother’s village.
He interjects, her’s not necessary. Your belonging, your identity, your pind is traced through the pind of your father and his father and so on, you see.
I say nothing, and just nod.In the blink of an eye, my grandmother’s history was deemed irrelevant. Erased.
History belongs to victors, they say.
Clearly, she had lost.
Her past, torn
like it was an unwanted page from the book of history.
Her clung together memories
got flushed down the toilet like a clump of hair stuck in the comb.
What is her pind, then?
What is her home country?
Or is she a traveling soul?
A wandering Sufi?
An escaped soldier?
An absconded convict?
A fugitive?
A refugee?
If she had no home to claim as her own,
which borders did she cross then?
To what extent did she even cross any, if at all?
What was her supposed ‘home’?
A stealthy stalker stops and stares, still life
Before it’s prudent prey, poised to pounce
The hunted, hunched down and hovering low the hunter
Is waiting and weighing, wired in and watching
Crouching and creeping, crawling ever closer
Tiptoeing toward the tantalizing target
Leaping and launching, letting loose a lethal
Attack that achieves an aim and addresses a balance
Colin McCandless lives in Charleston, South Carolina where he works as a PR/Marketing Director for a nonprofit that serves youth in foster care. In his spare time he enjoys reading, writing poetry and traveling the world.
