Photos from Channie Greenberg
Category Archives: CHAOS
Poetry from Alan Catlin
At the first meeting of a fiction workshop with Lydia Davis, one of the students asked her if she believed a short story could consist of three sentences or fewer. Lydia said, “Yes, I do.” He nodded, stood up and without a word walked out of the classroom and never came back. We all wondered if something happened to him. Fact or fiction? Dark comes early in the mountains. They were climbing up there, bushwhacking as they went. Their headlamps cutting zig zag patterns into the night. Gladys gave me a corkscrew once. She insisted, “You never know when you might need of those. Tonight, was one of those nights. In the wake of the storm, the night was charged by downed electrical wires. The streets sparked and the few remaining trees ignited shooting fingers of flame along the branches. The air smelled wet and feral, alive like an animal no one had known of before. 536- Tour Concentration Camp Erased I have carried The United States the gas chambers of Auschwitz A splendid visit small white- wood oblong mausoleum white oven knobs switched off lights. Darkness killed as much as the gas. I went in Right away I Attempted to escape Hid in a niche I veered the crowd climbed , doubly mourning yesterday’s anguish everyone joined in a sad funereal picnic Helene Cixous 538- Random. Boring Post Cards. Phaidon. Atomic Post Cards. The Lochgelly Centre Complex or SAC Headquarters Offert Air Force Base. White Rock Los Alamos County or Actual Pictures of Dreaded Bomb Blasts. Frenchman’s Flats, Nevada. Convalescent Home Broadstairs. Looking Across Solway Firth, Silloth (With coffee ring stain) The City of the Atomic Bomb: Cedar Hill Elementary School Oak Ridge Tennessee. Dead Men Reading Post Cards. 558- Dream on with Joseph Cornell The Parkway Dream. Utopia that is. Film strips. And air guitars. Monsters in a Box. Neither black nor white. Gray. Domestic tableau. Not an American Tragedy. My Brother’s Keeper. Dreams of old toys. Broken music boxes. Jack (s) in. Scrapbooks. Vandalized, 1906 Sears Catalog. When is a Franklin Stove not a Franklin Stove. When the canary from the coal mine escapes. Sings. Like a jailbird. Vonnegut. Shoeless Joe. All those boxes filled. Many times, over. 561- Back List Book Titles Arranged: a found poem If Night Is Falling. The Moon Rises in the Rattlesnake’s Mouth. Night Farming in Bosnia. Weightless Earth. Carbon Dating Hunger. Infinite Days Teaching Bones to Fly. Travel Over Water. The Sky’s Dustbin. Light from a Small Brown Bird. Blue Swan, Black Swan. Kissing the Bee. Painting the Egret’s Echo. Reembrace of Water. Ancient Maps and a Tarot Pack. All the Beautiful Dead. Bitter Oleander. 562- The perfect fiction is reality. (Life). Gilbert Sorrentino asserted. In a book of poems. A day book. Of sorts. Perfect fictions. All. A deck of 52 involved. Not necessarily playing Cards. Weeks. Are. Not in an Orangery for sure. That book with the word orange embedded within. Not a rhyming Simon, he. El Gilberto. Le gran orange. Trusty Rusty. Not the poet. The ball player, “Everything invented is real.” Flaubert.
Photos from R.W. Stephens
Poetry from Kathleen Denizard
My Cultivated Garden I fell into a dream stepping across a path of fragrant jasmine and hibiscus And lay above a cushion of roses It was a curious time to indulge in the plantings of my garden Poppies embraced me in a frenzy of aromas That quickened my retreat from a world of overwhelming matters, A world often perturbing in its synthetic quality I slept in the lovely presence of pixie-like daisies Warming me in a shawl of petals Soothing my feet in a coverlet of ferns A flutter of birds came to light in the shelter of fruit trees Away from weather and intruders I imagined them enjoying the raspberries that stained their bills Until splashed by the fresh spray of a water fountain I dreamed as the day waned and the buzz of wee insects stirred my senses Wondering what breeze drifted tiny white blossoms through my hair I awakened to feel the gentle sway of wisteria Pleased with the way I cultivated my garden
Poetry from Sayani Mukherjee
Beam By Sayani Mukherjee Pyre of hollow embers Burns purged insecurities; Ravishing coiling serpant machinery Jokes and trickstars of naysayers, Of caging the free spirited Moksha Dreams of mana, Himalayan bluebirds The flappy wings of fancy somantic fury Only tune of one song. Loud enough to burst forth Material orders hierarchies Ashes of power game Caged and bonded Flattering cynismcism a cyclical tornado Only the blue bird sings It knows the one tune I'm an om An autumnal seasonal flashback. Draping warm leaves around my sweet neck Honeybees and nectar of sooth Sayers fuzz My veins a musing, jumping, free spirited laboratory- Made of Streaming stars and faith and woolen love I, a Bluebird sing of mana Airy floaty elfish vain Titular rambunctious whole of a new realm I am a power of my life force Watery windy fiery fiesty road Akashic magic burning sages Rosemary incensed fume I swallow pyres Burning up eights lusts heads I twinkle and beam.
Poetry from Adepoju Timileyin
Before I Was Born the night before I was born cloudy night sent me tons of muse n' caged me on sit the night before I was born my life became the only image my eyelid pledged patriotism the night before I was born nightmare became my company while I'm paranoid by unknown guilt the night before I was born I became friend to my future while my past shallowed tunnel of memory the night before I was born I had this writing as prophecy and for I couldn't wait to write it's end, I'm here to attest the living.
Poetry from James Whitehead
Socrates You -- god of something we want & we lack – Sacrificed to a life of questioning & Generations before the Lord took His own Life for some odd strange answers. Look: What the hell do you see now, looking back? Thousands of academics answering Counter-arguments at symposiums, A talk . . . on an essay . . . about a book. The Forgiving God deals with all those Hymns Sung by all those armed, those willing to fight. But you deal with people equally right: Know-it-alls all full of propositions. People like you have started Religions. Not you. You just died to ask us questions. Snakes & Snails & Puppy Dog Tails Ignorance is not knowing anything & being attracted to the good. Innocence is knowing everything & still being attracted to the good. – Clarissa Pinkola-Estes. All this reminds me of innocent things made up of the pure Then of memory . . . a fish with a hook stuck in its gullet & frogs tied up to a bicycled string, a dog wanting, & waiting for a sign of the bone in my behind-the-back hand, only long enough for a feigned toss, & that dog chasing empty expectancy. “I was a little world made cunningly.” I feel younger, not un-knowing again, but the pain in the heart of attraction. Like innocent desire compels it. These thoughts are caught in a throat that is mine. & I recall that fish flopping madly. Sit on the barstool next to mine 2 seats down she removes the clams from their shells, 1 at a time, then tosses the clicking casings into the bowl. You watch her suck the linguine into her jowls. What breaks you down so much these days? It’s not the relentless February storms, dark mornings or icy nights, or 28 days that seem to go on relentlessly longer than May’s 31. What drains you so much these days is not persistent fatigue, insomnia or illness; it is not 4 sweating hours each night, the cigarettes, the beers, or sinusitis. It isn’t depression, your diet, or exercise, although your body never lies except when collapsing limply late at night. What drains it all from you these days is not the labor law autopsy photo, proving more than the other attorney’s drone as you listen to her on the speaker phone, & ponder the relatives of the anonymous one who fell head first into the wood chipper, now one-half biped, without chest or head. No. It’s much more simple, more right than any of these basic, tragic recurrences. It is something once rare, now become common. Hard working friends, like love alone did, are dying. 2 seats down she removes the clams from their shells, then tosses the clicking casings into the bowl. You watch her suck the linguine into her jowls, jealous. She is beautiful, you are alone, & you want to say: Please sit on the barstool next to mine . . . I want to see living . . . Available Space 9 planets – & not an Eros or Cupid among them. But we’ve still found 2 homes for Mars. Acquisitions The red-faced neo-conservative political pundit, a total hog, a local celebrity from public tv, walked into the liquor store, my liquor store, where I worked, & he asked for “good Scotch.” “I don’t know Scotch,” I said . . . honestly. “It’s an acquired taste,” he said . . . with a smile. I said nothing, but I certainly thought about acquired tastes. I thought a taste for love must be acquired, since one must acquire a lover. One can read the works of love, I thought, read special guides from the East, or one can simply listen . . . to one’s lover . . . & then act. One can acquire an equally inexpensive taste for books, for knowledge, using the library, & one can acquire a taste for poetry, or prose, learning the greats, or just learning the adequate, even, without ever dropping a taxable dime, or spending one’s Scotch-drinking time, learning, or even listening to the words of some other. One can love & love words. Is this acquired? Can one acquire a taste for generosity? I wondered, say, float some money to a friend, but later give one’s time to the holiday soup line, having grown into it? Is that . . . acquired ? Later, I imagined my customer, the fat-faced hog he is, with money, hating taxes, drinking Scotch. I imagined him finishing his bottle of top-shelf liquor, as I finish my own cheap beer, given my acquired taste for cheap beer. I imagined him later, red-faced, kneeling before the toilet bowl, throwing up a soul, tasting like top-shelf Scotch, unlike language, or love, but still, an acquired taste.