Essay from Michael Robinson

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The Wall

Michael Robinson (right) and fellow contributor Joan Beebe

Sitting at the nurses station watching as time passes with no where to go. Sitting there watching as the nurses passes out medications to others then me. Pills after pills and blood pressure monitors inflating and deflating with a ding to tell them your pressure is high and then there’s more pills for that. Watching other patients crying and calling for their mothers as themselves are grandmothers and great grandmothers. Reaching in the air as if something is there for some. Quietly they sit hour after hour while trying to communicate to someone to touch someone to know that they are still a part of the world. Others, sit in their wheelchairs moving along the railing slowly they move down the hall. One foot in front of the other they too are watching as others with different physical limitations. Some have had strokes while others their bodies are just tired after a life of many years. In their 70s, 80s, and some as old as 100 years old. Looking not in the air they are moving towards something. Something that inspires them to keep going no matter what the outward conditions or the frailness of their bodies.

I also sit at the wall waiting and watching listening to the blood pressure monitor beep on my arm. swallowing pill after pill while thinking what makes me continue a sometimes difficult life. A life of suicidal thoughts that have long been forgot. A life with disappointments and turmoil and that too has been forgot. All that seems to be left is the wall at the nurses station. Still, there’s something unique about the wall. It as if nothing is taken for granted nothing is what it seems to be as patient after patient deal with their own reality of life. A life that has come to them sitting at the wall or walking with walkers or wheelchairs as the gasp the railings with one foot in foot of the other. Life has come to feel like it has a different meaning. Time seems to move moment by moment. Each moment is not taken for granted. Life is something to be continued as something to be understood not avoided. Avoided like I have done for 60 years sitting there looking into the air gasping at life.

Life now have meaning some kind of purpose sitting at the wall moving down the hall in the wheelchair or walker. God seems to be in the midst of it all. Seeing something that is not seen by the physical eye. The body isn’t the reality of life or the finality. There seems to be something that allows one to continue in this situation. Wearing briefs, being struck in a wheelchair for long hours of the day gasping at the air and calling for mother. Time seems to mean something to not be avoided. Death is near but somehow life seems to be more meaningful. There’s an understanding of life sitting at the wall. One does not complain about life unfairness only that they are in the wheel chair trying to stand and being told not too so for hour after hour with nothing to do but gasp at the air for something. Life has a different meaning sitting at the wall not being able to communicate the use to be no matter what it was good, bad, difficult, or tragic.  to life that one does not seem to understand in their younger years of complaining about the unfairness of life. No voice can be heard from many of the patients, while other patients cry and mumble in an a useless attempt to communicate.

God what has been my purpose? I have to ask sitting at the wall. Finally, I feel that I understand life and there’s a feeling of resolve about it all. A resolve for the minutes that turned into hours and hours in days and days into months and finally  into years. Before you know it you sitting at the wall at the nurses station crying calling for mother and wearing briefs and being feed by someone. Perhaps, it’s not age that have brought to this place. Maybe it was a mini stroke like the one I had. My ability to feed myself and clean myself returned; however, I have no promise that I too will have to sit and watch minutes turn into hours. Hoping and wishing for the clock to slow down unlike in my younger years when I wanted the day to end. Now sitting here I have all the time in the world and nothing to do but watch the nurses and other patients gasp at the air waiting for my turn to gasp at something that isn’t there.

Poetry from Mark Young

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This / isolation is / subsequently followed by

 

Galleries are no longer

free which is a drain on

spatial navigation. What

kind of aggressive tech-

niques are used to ensure

they did not die in vain?

I have antiquated some

of the bulk purchasing for

 

schools — let’s see if that

does the trick. You can tell

the love hotels by their

bright-lit neon signs with

funny names. It’s a favorable

plan for natural regeneration.

 

 

decidedly unglamorous

 

I load webrat & machinist. This
newer work seems cheapened.
Has changed color to an impure
red. Had I been here, I would
have been stoned with insertive
knockers & small advertisements
that are called namako, or sea
mice. Networks are lacking. An

allergy may be the cause. The state
of the sewage disposal system is a
physical reminder of their strong
connection to the alcohol industry.
Magnetic resonance imaging is used
as the theme of the anime series.

 

 

trailed off on both sides of the market

 

Not through reproduction but by a

process of supplemental queries,

the House has signed off on

a $11.9 billion project to enable

a series of intellectual activities

based on “bricolage.” The hypo-

thesis is that they will function

as a playground in which scien-

 

tists can mull over their under-

standing of difficult subjects, taking

their attention away from another

bill providing a $106.5 billion pack-

age for war matériel that is already

earmarked for Senate approval.

 

Are you stressed and lethargic? Caught

inside a perfectly rectangular block?

Under no obligation to obey the laws

of ethics or morality? Born with no

innate or built-in mental content?

Seem to have a limited lifetime? Refer

to landscaping in ways that do not

require supplemental irrigation? Fill

 

the Incense Cup with rice chaff ash

& do not compact? Talk of crystal

chandeliers in a fundamentally diff-

erent way? Use an opposition such

as “nature/culture” as a tool while not

accepting it as philosophical truth?

 

If any response is positive, use the Phase One plan

 Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry for almost sixty years. His most recent books are les échiquiers effrontés, a collection of surrealist visual poems laid out on chessboard grids, published by Luna Bisonte Prods, & The Word Factory: a miscellany, from gradient books of Finland. Due for publication are Residual sonnets from Ma Books, The Perfume of The Abyss from Moria Books, & an e-book, A Vicarious Life — the backing tracks, from otata.

 

 

 

Poetry from Dan Cardoza

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If You Pause

Deer trail crisscross my childhood path in the green hills of California, folding themselves into creases in the front yards of Witchweed and Valley Oak.

In the damp far below, I hear the highway hiss, its glissade slowed by the tug of spring grass.

It slithers on its belly ribs, flicks its tongue, seeks the warmth of prey.

I feel my chest cage tighten, noose.

Things have changed in the adoration of hunt, fill.

French farmers say if you pause in the spring hills of Normandy, the Gold Plated Yarrow will blind you like sun.

 

 

Choices

There are a lot of choices

we make in life, some have reasons.

 

 

 

My Raised Amnesia Garden

I built it out of redwood, hot-dipped

galvanized bolts, half inch washers,

hexed nuts, 4×6 redwood corner posts.

 

I am almost sure it’s just for me, now

that it’s nearly complete.

 

It’s time to compost the raised garden.

Avocado skins, carrot top, forgiveness,

chicken manure, layers of moldy onion skin too.

 

And when the last frost has healed the warm

soil, at the first sign of spring, I’ll plant parsnips,

rows of lettuce, alongside turmeric, basil and a

blueberry bush, good for memory I am told.

 

I’ll sew my favorite, bitter sweet ginger, some

amnesia & avocado in celebration of you.

 

These I intend to harvest each season,

along with carrot, red radish––tomato.

 

 

Weather Report, Chance of Rain

Candy coated cold front, cloudy with a chance of heavy rain from the leaky basements of someone’s storied heaven above.

 

With predictability, the weight of the sky ruptures glass needles full of Lilliputian thorns, hook sharp for a high.

 

All of the sudden, your baby isn’t the same no more, the other side wanted him––got his address, his mail, mailbox too.

You say he was a good baby. No fault, not true. Blame the spoon, tin foil, a cigarette lighter or two.

 

Its late winter, in an empty park full of green swings & chipped picked nicked tables.  In a swollen rain sick stream his coffin gonna swim, like a wood thatched tomb with glassy cracked fins.

Today in matters of not, in the valley where nothings grow, the stream fills the River of Doors, continues its flow.

 

Though too late, the weather man forecasts raining brass keys, not knowing he’s done used up all his in and outs.

 

As his coffin enters the expanse of bay, Salacia concedes a psalm of kings just off the rocky shores at Carrickfergus.  Dun stallions dressed in lacquered black hooves fight current, pull him further to sea.

 

And now we can only wish them safe passage to the palace of wings––smooth sailing to Areion’s endless green fields.

 

First Maps

When we first met, we would camp in the Sierras, Point Reyes, or at the Mendocino Headlands.  By the light of stars & fire, we read maps, some with missing pages. We said topographies are luxuries, and not all destinations are essential.

Cartographers off ramps, tourist traps, and gas stops, simple there’s, pulp, ink.  We concurred that our maps were not always accurate, some worn, torn, others with abandoned pages. We laughed that at least the missing pages had their own directions, unlike us.

And yet we are compelled to wander lost at times, our thoughts & dreams somehow detoured, together or apart.

Prehistoric maps were unfeigned, scribed in the dirt by the dead, with sharp rocks, fire sticks & finger bone, all manifest etchings, here, there’s.

Daily our maps grow more complex, even those patiently waiting in the bookshelf at home for our trips. They know what we fear, that the lost pages, the incomplete directions won’t tell us which way to go, or direct us to who we are, guide us on how to live or die, or point our way there.

 

Dan A. Cardoza

email:  dancardoza@hotmail.com

Twitter: @Cardozabig

 

 

Poem from J.D. DeHart

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 2018

Gains and losses, this moment
of looking backward, worried
that, like Lot’s wife, I will be made
salt in a moment.

A cold snap, the feeling of new
travels.  Yesterday is as one hundred
years ago,

each year, something peels away,
replacing past harms with divine
trust.  We move forward, press on,

through mud and through grief,
through the disappointments of others
we thought we knew and the victory
of knowing ourselves a little better.

Dear one, we had to say goodbye
last year, a farewell that led to some
new greetings.  Is the loss of a family
pet enough to inspire a verse?

Apparently.

And what then of the new year,
where we will uncover more, shedding
the children we were, putting
on new faces — no, we will only know
more details about the features

we already possess, the path,
our plans, our present reborn hope.

Idiomatic
I could carry a torch for you,
but that would be arson.  I am
afraid such a blaze would only
create distance between us.
Love is made difficult by
incarceration.
Sick as a dog, I searched for your
muzzle, offered to let you outside,
thought of a treat and reward system,
but these efforts were in vain.
When you told me you were on
the fence, I looked for you next to
the blackbirds that visit every morning,
but you were missing in their song.
Instead, I found you clipping toenails
in the sink.  Next time you could at least
offer a bath there so that the metaphor
means more.
Finally, you said after while, crocodile,
and I checked myself for rows of teeth,
looked about, and understood when I
saw the swamp I was creating,
a neurotic miasma that surely
must have seemed as rough as a reptile’s
unwelcoming hide.
Loud Music
first appeared at Jellyfish Whispers
 
thumps of vandal music
fade as we rise
around the hill,
a lake finding us,
a water fall discovering us
and our escape
right before our eyes.
Toading
first appeared at Pyrokinection
Let’s go toading, someone
suggests, which I believe
is a game that involves
spotting the people in British
films that will turn out to be
lecherous heart-breakers.
Of course, I’m talking about
the polite productions
that draw on tattered novels.
I have grown in appreciation
for the British classics, with
their ever-present awareness
of the importance of manners
and wedding dresses.
Bald Eagle
first appeared at Pyrokinection
Must be some kind
of heroic creature beneath
the hairless form in front
of me.  Which reminds me
of my brother losing his hair
and what may soon be
my fate.  So I should focus
on the salad bar, the static
television across the room,
rather than noting the aquiline
nature of the man sitting
opposite me, who one day
may be me looking back.
Real Looker
first appeared at Pyrokinection
 
She’s a real looker,
and you can tell because
all the old men have turned
around.
She’s a real looker,
I hear one of them say,
and I do not bother to turn,
instead imagining Emerson’s
roving eye, a bouncing
ball of observation.
Now that would be a Real
Looker, certainly so.
Caretaker
first appeared at Pyrokinection
Like the image of the old
bound in balms by the young,
the girl in a meadow, just
a painting I glimpse.
She cares for the weeds
the same as the tender floral dots.
Her voice is an uncommon
invitation to the young, and her
eyes float the roof of the world,
considering her next phrase,
or the next petal to drop.
One finger pointing, indicating
someone, something, just
beyond the limits of canvas,
an invitation to jump in, invent
the other face in the portrait.
Sloth’s Sway
first appeared at Pyrokinection
In the considerate movement
of the sloth, I see my own
sanguine approach to this day.
Problems without solutions
gather in my mind like a mob
at bedtime, and so I carry these
voices with me all day, more
worn by the night than I should be,
slowly turning my head, munching
a leaf, preparing to hop down from
my perch, but thinking better of it
in halting concentration.
High-Back Chairs
first appeared at Pyrokinection
Indecorous, the table
belongs in another room.
The wallpaper crisis,
aesthetics peeling in piles.
The high-back chairs join
the wing-backs for a seasonal
migration up the stairs.
I recall pictures of hollowed
out buildings, shavings, rust,
an artist who captured
ruin photographically.
One day my most carefully
preserved art will be nothing
but curls, hardly an insect
preserved in amber.

Poetry from Jonathan Butcher

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Kitchen
The kitchen doors swing open, revealing that darkened
carpet, a comfort we couldn’t afford to tread upon.
The smeared dishes over-pouring from the cracked
sink, the customers’ cries blotted out by the sizzle
of fat and over-heated ovens.
On that tiled floor, the essence of this town passing me
each minute, my fingers sliced by blunt knives that carried
my reflection with each peel and chop. The shredded meats
like torn tree bark, that would cling to each plate like
clotted blood upon neglected scars.
And your face that refused to frown, that smile over your
buckled legs, juggling tea cups and plates stained with
the inconvenience of our presence. Again, those doors
swing open, eating what is left of any will we mustered,
to leave it boiling in those endless pans.

 

Year Cycle
This year scrapes to a halt, grinding against those
curbs and half closed yards. That endless routine
that dragged through seasons now seems a brief
glimmer, like Sunday morning hallucinations.
Those same doors we pass through each week,
through that self inflected haze, now hang from
their hinges. That slight creak signalling a new
beginning for those with the energy left.
As we trade drinks and earnings, to enable
an even flow to each evening. A delusion
of solitude, that expands like spilt wine,
and stains us once more with that repeated
pattern.
To settle now in those darkened afternoons,
impassive faces well and truly camouflaged.
Those puddles that evaporate at the first splash,
but never keep us dry, never any fear of drowning.

 

Contradiction on a Bike.
They turn slowly, their backs torn
from the stability of ideas, that never
held weight with them in the first place.
An easy slogan, that loses meaning as soon
as it escapes their lips. The scarves and thrift-
wear ensure they remain undercover, without
the risk of exposure.
And both sides repel, like dirt stained magnets,
the hands always remain unclean, to utter truths
would destroy those germs they try so hard to
cherish.
Their smugness finally blocks any airways,
leaves them choking on that final ideal, that takes
them full cycle, leading back to slumbering with their
enemies.

—

Jonathan Butcher is a poet based in Sheffield, England. He has had work
appear in various print and online publications including: Plastic Futures, Sick-Lit,
The Transnational, Drunk Monkeys, Mad Swirl, Picaroon Poetry, The Rye Whiskey 
Review and others. His second chapbook ‘Broken Slates’ has been published by 
Flutter Press.

Christopher Bernard reviews Eunice Odio’s new collection The Fire’s Journey Part III: The Cathedral’s Work

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EXPLOSION IN THE CATHEDRAL

 

The Fire’s Journey: Part III: The Cathedral’s Work

By Eunice Odio

Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P. Ticas and Mauricio Espinoza

Tavern Books

 

Eunice Odio

 

A review by Christopher Bernard

 

 

Eunice Odio, considered by many to be Costa Rica’s greatest twentieth-century poet, spent most of her life in Mexico City and published volumes of poetry as well as essays and short fiction; her most important work being El tránsito de fuego, “The Fire’s Journey,” which (and in particular the third part under review) brings to my mind, along with the psychological themes of C.G. Jung, the prophetic books of William Blake, with their wealth of creative mythology, epic dimensions, obscure allusiveness, complex rhetoric and intellectual demands, and even some of their political implications. The poem thus far (the concluding part four is slated for future release) has been brought into frequently brilliant English by Odio’s translator, the poet Keith Ekiss, with help from Sonia P. Ticas and Mauricio Espinoza – we are in their debt for bringing so much of the work of this poet finally to the attention of anglophone readers.

 

The third part of Odio’s monumental epic of creation of self and world can be read (thanks to the translator’s helpful introduction) without having read the first two, “Integration of the Parents” and “Creation of Myself.” But it would be disingenuous not to recommend doing so; a little homework in this regard can go a long way to warming the reader to the poet’s unique symbolic vocabulary, her rhetorical leaps and rapid shifts, and often elliptical lyrical flights. We enter a forest, with few paths opened for us, and dense with meanings, some of a deceptive clarity and simplicity, many evocatively obscure, under a skyscape of clouds and twilight and peopled by often only half-seen characters, of misty outlines and gigantic presence, forcefully symbolic, willful, fierce, like figures in a dream whose demands leave us unable either to wake up or sleep on.

 

I won’t pretend this part is as easy to take in as the earlier ones. Despite the cascades of brilliant details that illuminate every page, the poem can seem willfully obscure and confusing on first reading, though it unlocks its meanings less reluctantly upon reacquaintance.

 

The epic’s first two parts brought us the chaos and void of the beginning of all things, the cloudy retort of the void and the womb, followed by the creation of the poem’s central character, a poet, god, creator and sufferer named Ion, named after the complex figure from Greek mythology of notoriously ambiguous identity and birth.

 

Part three, “The Cathedral’s Work” (itself divided into three parts: “All Things Created,” “Opposite Dreams” [though “Opposing Dreams” might have made its contents plainer] and “The Cathedral’s Work”) throws us into a world that is in some obscure sense Ion’s responsibility: he partly creates, or at least assembles it, even as he is created by it. He (for Ion is definitely male) is called on by various members of the world to provide them with essential things: a horse, a bird, a stone; from the stone a column, a vault, a wall, an apse; in the end a cathedral.

 

Ion is at once namer of the world (for from his words beings come) and dreamer of the world:

 

4th MAN

Who is the man who sleeps?

 

5th MAN

A vagabond flung on the morning,

who else could he be?

 

6th MAN

Who is this ragged man?

 

7th MAN

I know the one who sleeps

 

3rd MAN

You know the one who lies asleep?

 

7th MAN

He is the maker of all things

 

Ion works in Gemini-like tandem with an older brother figure, introduced in part two, with whom he has a conflicted but essential relationship, Daedalus, named after the Greek inventor and builder of Minos’ famed labyrinth and the wings by which he and his son Icarus flew, escaping Crete – the “patron saint” of technology and distant, troubling father of Silicon Valley.

Various, obscure figures appear throughout the book – appear and usually disappear, never to be heard from again, at least in part three: for example, Gune and Andros (female and male humans) who open this part of the poem by asking Ion to help them, in their endless labor on the earth, by providing them with

 

A beast of uncontainable body—

an animal that’s gentle within

like a tree’s orbit in its shadow

firm outside

fully born in all its extremities

 

ivory hooves, curved and narrow

 

the voice long

 

reaching the pastoral stars without faltering;

hills and laborers hear it up high

 

all throughout

 

our afternoon

 

And Ion sends Daedalus to search and capture a creature that will meet their needs, and Daedalus goes forth and steals a horse:

 

. . . a flash, long as God’s syllables

and strong as day.

 

. . .

 

. . . so male, so transparently young

so exactly the heat of my thought.

 

. . .

 

The horse is truth.

 

There is a companion and helpmate in creation named Arkhos (his name based on the Greek root meaning “in the beginning,” although he appears to be a “son” of Ion).

 

There is Shed – a woman, though something like a female principle, a Jungian “anima” figure, who craves of Ion the knowledge of “what she wants.” There is Nebo the Seer, and a chorus of children, and a group of unnamed men (alluded to above) who demand to see the “bird” Ion has created from the word “bird” (“pajaro” in Spanish), then use the “stone,” which Ion found with Daedalus’s help, to kill it.

 

And there are many others, some only mentioned, others appearing and speaking: the father of Ion, Odon, as well as other sons of Odon, including Thauma (ancient Greek for marvel or wonder) and Logos (Greek for reason or “the Word,” as it appears in the opening lines of the Gospel According to John).

 

The relationship between Ion and these creatures remains tantalizingly ambiguous: are they separate creations (as it would seem at least some of them must be) or were they in some sense willed into creation by Ion? Ion himself does not seem to know: we may be in the presence of a god whose unconscious is as willful, wayward, yet fruitful, as the unconscious impulses of human beings. He calls himself “pluranimous” and, at one point, “possessed,” as by demons: “The Name of the Word is Legion”: he is single yet plural, one yet many, his many parts in conflict; a crowd of loneliness.

 

The climax of the poem is the creation of the Cathedral – a work of worship, containment and illumination for the spirit – but which is contaminated by a demonic presence (perhaps Ion’s “shadow,” to use the Jungian term) and must be demolished stone by stone, then rebuilt into its intended splendor in part three’s closing pages:

 

The sky pauses when you pass by, pure

unpredictable presence of the air, Cathedral,

capital of the heights, a straight delirious flower.

 

The sky pauses

when you pass by, as you become visible ecstasy

 

. . .

 

Oh, Cathedral, oh palace of flight!

Oh, edifice on its journey through dawn!

 

_____

 

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.

 

Poetry from Ian Copestick

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The Sad Sabbath

Ian Copestick

Whoever was it who invented the Sabbath ?
And I don’t mean Ozzy
They’ve been responsible for ruining
One seventh of my life
I know that it’s nowhere near
As bad as it used to be
But still, they’re a pain
In the arse.
The sheer melancholia
And drabness sinks into
Your bones, leaving you
Depressed and uneasy
No matter what you do.
Of course I remember
When they were a hell of
A lot worse.
When the shops and the pubs
All used to close.
And between 3’O’Clock
And 7 on a Sunday, you
Couldn’t get a drink
For love nor money.
This was a nightmare
At any time, but if you had
Been on a weekend
Long bender and you
Didn’t wake up until
Say, ten to three
Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh !!!
I remember running to
The shop, every step
Agony, stopping to gag
About every five yards.
Then !
The shop is in view
You think that you’ve
Made it !
But as you enter
The place you notice
That the alcohol aisle
Has  ” Wet Floor ” signs
At each end.
The shop is still open
But until 7’O’Clock
The only thing that you
Can’t buy is a drink.
As I say, it’s not as bad
Nowadays. At least
You can buy a drink,
But still the overwhelming
Feelings of sadness has
Always ruined
Sundays for me
Another Day Gone
Half dead hungover
Nicotine stained fingers
Dirty, brown/yellow
Look like my soul feels
Stumbling down the street
Hating everything I see
Drown stuck on my face
Along with stubble, dirty, greasy skin
Light a cigarette
Start to cough, nearly puke
Queueing for a cash machine
” Come on, come on, for fucks sake
Stupid fucking prick. ” I mutter to
Myself, or to the person in front.
I fumble with my card
Put it in the wrong way
Finally manage to sort it out.
Worrying slightly about my
Lack of funds.
” Fuck it ! “
Into the nearest supermarket
The cheapest whiskey
£11:99
Dirty look off the cashier
“Filthy drunk “
I can see it in her eyes
Or is it just my paranoia ?
Either way, I stare her down.
Take my change and out to the street.
Cold, grey, misty morning
Waiting for the bus
To take me back
To a darkened bedroom
Drunkenness and daytime T.V.
Sanctuary.
Ian Lewis Copestick is a 46 year old writer ( I prefer that term to poet ) from Stoke on Trent, England. I spend most of my life sitting,  thinking then sometimes writing. I have been published in Anti Heroin Chic, the Dope Fiend Daily, Outlaw Poetry, Synchronized Chaos, the Rye Whiskey Review, Medusa’s Kitchen and Horror, Sleaze, Trash.