Count down the fall
Falling There lurks still fall---fall!
And—it keep on to where it stops.
Out fr’ dunder-dee clouditry.
Really? How come?
whack
D’ deh kwyte vertrical roarozontinal fast falling nature of these spouse’s present.
whack
( ) whoooooooooo down past—Top-mayor there?
Where it folds under itself down as far as it can and because’s where you’re fell to.
137 {milliseconds into the fall} nd down in this here clear air no don’t look down ( ) the wind 133 {seconds into the fall} past—log pole’s t-phone factory? Scrappo’s? Did’st thou say—Skrappo’? ( ) of the earsplitting kind? pantography Human nature to just keep on same but; all’d gone and all fall. 128 125 {milliseconds into the fall} Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Bac—
Wow!
Isn’t this game great, great fun?
Yes it’s fun!
—k! Catch! Squeak! St—! Fl’ g’ y’ ss’ is’s—the end—the end—could the end be—really really near? Hot hickory [pillo] Hot hickory [pillo] 105 100 {milliseconds into the fall} there be pillows arranged all out for the falling? There be pillows arranged for the out falling out? [pillo] It bends under its ‘neath and all’s gone and all fall. All stop looking ahead. Human nature. 95 93 91 89 80 {milliseconds into the fall} I trust them they got brains they won’t let that ug uckily happen where on Earth are we destined for That is what happened to this town you know. 75 69 60 {milliseconds into the fall} [pillo] stormbushery’s roll’d over after all floods Pop Cubanore? This that b’ Pop Cubanore? 45 40 {milliseconds into the fall} hast not never seen my Pop Cubanore to dis day [pillo] why you do dis to me Gimi [why you do dis {pillo} to me] eh? Why shmush up me birdhouse, Gimi? Cab Krackelefish’d fer tunas just like deep down off that picture see Gimi just like deep down off that * esh?* This council. whack where on Earth are we destined for b b b where on Earth are we destined for That’s you. 35 22 22 {milliseconds into the fall} Pop Cubanore? This that b’ Pop Cubanore? upcmpashoosh this here tablesplat so; prepare 20 17 15 Why shmush up me nice l’il birdhouse Gimi? Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Back! Catch! Squeak! Step! Fling! Fly! Pop! Bac—
Wow!
Isn’t this game great, great fun?
Yes it’s fun!
—k! Catch! Squeak! St—! Fl’ g’ y’ ss’ please promptly prepare thy d-d-daily 10’s, {milliseconds into the fall} 8’s, {milliseconds into the fall} 7’s, {milliseconds into the fall} and 5’s {milliseconds into the fall} “suh”, prepare thy whatever soooooooo splat hast not never seen my Pop Cubanore to dis day whack whack whack
You stopped watching what’s coming.
SPLAT! SPLATTER
Speakers in S. Rupsha Mitra’s Smoked Frames submerge themselves into intense experiences, questing to understand their true selves beneath waves of devotion.
The collection begins with journeys into the physical and emotional self, where we “dream the fetish, to be wholesome, to grasp things together, piecemeal, not smitten by delirium or defences” (Self-Portrait As Navigating Consciousness). Others among the first few pieces explore the heady energy of youth (Springs) and the awkwardness we often feel within our physical bodies (Alien Skin). Mitra finds a sense of peace within her body with time, though, comparing the experience to taking comfort from a religious practice. She becomes able to accept and integrate her body into her whole being.
Later, Mitra depicts mermaids as mythologized in various global cultures. Usually half woman and half sea creature, a mermaid straddles (or swims across) the two worlds, and so to be at home in and proud of one’s mermaid existence means being content as a hybrid who defies easy categorization. And Mitra’s mermaids are strong, lively, and confident: Suvanamachha, the Asian Mermaid enjoys pure love with the god Hanuman and blesses the entire world, while Melusine, the European Medieval Mermaid has “free pinions of pride” and “breathes of emancipation.”
The poems following delve within the intricacies of the body and its nervous system, the physical underpinnings of our experience of the world. In "Knowledge of the Body", the speaker reflects that she has wronged her physical self through being overly critical and now wishes to “to strip the skin off the ribs and peer at its striking beginnings” and “flourish in this writhing extravagance.” She later applies this deep curiosity to psychology as well in "The Gestalt of Memory" and in "Defence Mechanisms", where she speculates on the workings of the ego she has sought to transcend.
Within the book’s final section, Mitra’s speakers journey to sites of historical and religious significance in India and engage in more traditional religious practices. We reflect on the goddess of wisdom, Saraswati, during a puja ceremony, and enter the golden temple of Amritsar, shoes off out of respect. Yet this section also includes the speakers’ personal and family memories and heritage. In Lost in Murshidabad, she listens again to her parents’ recounting of their love story: “an unconditional love that embalms us in the midst of history.” In A Return at Saraswati Pujo, she recollects an argument that became very vulgar before apologies and resolution, but her anger dissipates as she observes sunlight and is “forced to admit that the world is very beautiful.”
The titular piece, “Smoked Frames” resides near the end of the collection, among these remembrances of cultural and personal history. It deals with framed photographs, so many and so old that they have been put away in drawers and the exact moment of each scene forgotten. Mitra transcends the personal here and moves to a broader meditation on where and how we will find truth: “would it come as a mystic in orange robes…or as the mad whirlwind of samsara? … or as emancipation from wild enjambments?”
She speculates on the divine being “distant yet so close, quite near, within me, (yet unseen within)” in an echo that calls back to the prior pieces on probing the interior of our bodies and the depths of our feelings and psychology. Once again, she is seeking out her truest fundamental self by embracing and accepting the mystery of everything she sees and experiences.
S.Rupsha Mitra’s Smoked Frames collection offers us heady thoughts and reflections through the elevated languages of science, courtly romance, and spirituality. The poems become meditations on the search for how to love ourselves and each other through seeking out and understanding ourselves.
S. Rupsha Mitra's Smoked Framescan be ordered here.
The Unlucky Sun
Forest bandits weave dreams in the eyes of the river
The noise of civilization robs the fish of sleep The hearts of the far-near roads are wounded
The tree stump is now an ammo
Shadow walks on a bullet-ridden leg
A changing climate attacks the world of clouds
The fetus of poison vapor is in the womb of the sky
Discrepancy of seasonal cycles is on the horizon
The language of blood in the chest of green grass
The Mathematics of Dissatisfaction is on Butterfly Wings
Democracies of defeat in seven days of the rainbow
Inventions in fresh account books kill themselves
Nerve cells in the brain melt in the reproductive system
Vascular blood vessels in clotted lesions
The calendar is defective in the clutter of days
Intellectuals are bought and sold
Sometimes the sun itself seems unlucky .
Neven Dužević
Southwest of the center
Southwest of the center is my neighborhood
I went to school there and had a start
There was also a cinema there
After the second shift
I had time there
He imagined her and me in the last row
All the movie scenes themselves
But those are old days
More or less, only on the same route
Only the Tram knocks
He only hides his name
What was and is no longer
They still walk there
My dream mates
Boys lost in the years
They are looking for Peter Pan
They talk about drinking
Ribicija and black maca
Southwest from the city center
It's Trešnjevka...
Exploring Love, Spirituality and the Black Experience in “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, a Book Review
[Excerpt from Fleury’s book: Chain Letter To America: The One Thing You Can Do To End Racism, A Collection of Essays, Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Multiculturalism]
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all the things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
So begins Zora Neal Hurston’s epic story about an emotional and spiritual journey of self-discovery. Through my incessant study of literature and the craft of writing, I have learned that what grabs a reader right from the onset of a story is by having a fully formed voice and vision that prepares us to go along for the ride; that we will be transported elsewhere to another reality.
In honor of Black History Month, the historical inauguration of America’s first Black President and Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to offer a dichotomous exploration of variant thematic ideologies of love and Black literary contributions to American culture and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” allows me to do just that.
“A graduate of Barnard…, Zora Neal Hurston published seven books—four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography—more than fifty shorter works between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant Black woman writer in the United States. The dark obscurity in which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft and vision,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the afterward to Their Eyes.
Hurston, whose life spanned between the years 1891 and 1960, was a novelist, folklorist and anthropologist. Her fictional and factual writings of Black Heritage remain unparalleled. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is Hurston’s most highly praised novel and is considered a classic among the best of Black literature.
Their Eyes recounts the story of Janie Crawford’s burgeoning selfhood through three marriages with loving empathy and stinging urgency. Janie, who is described as “fair- skinned, long haired and dreamy as a child” advances in years to anticipate better treatment than she actually receives; that is until she has an unexpected encounter with an amusing, smooth and fast talking younger roustabout named Tea Cake, who entices her into an emotional and spiritual journey that will change her life forever. He proffers to her an opportunity to see herself and life through his eyes without being regrettably adorned with the formerly disparaging labels of being “one man’s mule” or another man’s wallflower through her previous two marriages.
Over the course of the story, the character of Janie unfolds, as she will learn that she does not have to succumb to living a life ripe with rife, acrimony or maladroit romantic dreams. Towards the end of the story, the reader will learn in Janie’s words: “two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh go tuh God and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh themselves,” since her character struggles with the incessant panoptic surveillance and potentially spirit crushing criticism of her neighbors.
Every good writer or story-teller has to have motif and Hurston’s Their Eyes is swimming in a crystal clear blue- eyed sea of symbolism. In Their Eyes she uses an overworked, underfed and tormented mule to illustrate the dire living conditions of her main character Janie, what she endures on her way to spiritual, emotional, and physical freedom and awakening. Her depiction of Janie’s life of strife serves not only to demonstrate essentially the mistreatment of Janie as “one man’s mule and another man’s adornment”, it also attests to the meager living conditions of women, that is to say in terms of oppression and maltreatment, during her time period. Since she died right at the cusp of both the Civil Rights and the Women’s Equal Rights Movements, Hurton’s Their Eyes would go on to achieve greater respect and acknowledgement as an indispensable part of Black literature.
Also in Hurston’s novel, I was particularly enthralled by her use of Black vernacular speech (i.e. go tuh God…livin’ fuh theyselves…) to chronicle her Black female characters’ coming to the best of their being or emerging consciousness. In his afterward, Henry Louis Gates offers a keen observation of some of the most indispensible key elements regarding the deceptively simple trajectory of Hurston’s story. He writes that “The Charting of Janie Crawford’s fulfillment as an autonomous imagination, Their Eyes is a lyrical novel that correlates the needs of her first two husbands for ownership of progressively larger physical space (and the gaudy accoutrements of upward mobility) with the suppression of self awareness in their wife. Only with her third and last lover, a roustabout called Tea Cake whose unstructured frolics center around and about the Florida swamps, does Janie at last blooms…”
In other words, towards the end of the story, Janie did not find love and happiness as presumably defined by her first two husbands by the often superficial veneers of status and ownership of fancy property, ironically she found the bond of love, God and community living by a swamp with a mere unrefined and uneducated vagrant whose only means of sustaining Janie was through a daily dosage of love, laughter and whatever he could muster with his bare hands to put food on the table.
Therefore in honor of Black History Month, you will find that in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” concurrent themes of Hope, love, and an affirmation of Black Heritage are enough to make you want to put Their Eyes on your reading list this February.
Jacques Fleury
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc…
He has been published in prestigious publications such as Muddy River Poetry Review, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him here.
La Boheme class signifiers at intermission
she sucks the juice of grapefruit over the kitchen sink
dozing off in tassel rue
the emptiness
of sin
scent of crushed sage through the loophole in the cinder block wall
the evaporating puddle I'm in
by now he's entering the diamond-mansion heart of Saint Teresa
the liquid mercury nail heads on the gray planks at sunset
the fallen arches of the Donegal mussel catcher
sheltering in place on a hairpin of jade
oatmeal cookies for the unsung genius in plumbing supply
the skinflint's only Latin phrase
six realms and I'm dragging my ass in this one
imprisoned by his attention to the insignificant
in physics, he would entertain no more questions about hula dancers in outer space
why do I have to hear about how miserable you would've been
the accuracy of the mad
