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Carnelian Sometimes working on this magazine reminds me of Geoffrey Rush in Shakespeare In Love, fast-talking his financial backers (while one of them holds a knife to his throat). "It's a mystery", he says, "but somehow it always comes together". I can't always put a finger on why some poems work better than others, so I've had to learn to trust my instincts, accept the mystery and in the end enjoy the magic, because it does all come, somehow, together... Einstein must have had a similar feeling, I think, when he tried to describe quantum effects in physics as 'spooky action at a distance'. Not exactly the kind of talk you'd expect from a certified genius. But the world isn't always reducible to a simple equation. We have a word for that phenomenon here as well: in the superfluid space of words and meaning, we call it poetry... On the cover: Self Portrait (detail) Eugene Delacroix oil on canvas 1837
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Volume 6 Issue 1 January 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
So to Speak Ellaraine Lockie Sunnyvale, CA
Turnstile Jai Britton Calgary, Alberta, Canada
To A Child With A Top Richard Moore Belmont, MA
Mis-remembered Baby Sleeping In The Ground Martha Deed North Tonawanda, NY
On The Destruction Of Barhydt Chapel Rustin Larson Fairfield, IA
Selkie Seánan Forbes London, UK
Cross-Quartered Seánan Forbes London, UK
Edges Patricia Wellingham-Jones Tehama, CA
Promise Of Seven Jennifer Van Buren Baltimore, MD
Boardwalk Taylor Graham Somerset, CA
Awash In The Golden Glow Of Dusk Robert Johnson Herndon, VA
Path Mary Rae Weston, Fl
Poetry All Stars
Insomnia Elizabeth Bishop
Make Big Money At Home! Howard Nemerov
Write Poems In Spare Time!
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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Send 1-3 original poems, any form or style, no longer than 100 lines (per). Author retains all rights. Cut/paste poems into the body of an e-mail, or include as attachments (no links to URLs). Simultaneous subs okay; previously published also okay if you hold copyright; poems accepted/rejected (generally) as is. Include name/city/country; no screen names please (use pseudonyms if you prefer to remain anonymous). No homework assignments or therapy exercises, thank you. Please query concerning poems which exceed 100 lines, or articles for On These Premises.
Submissions which do not conform to these guidelines will be discarded unanswered.
Send to: carnelian@sidewalkpress.net
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POEMS:
So to Speak by Ellaraine Lockie The words won’t come out of my mouth They prefer fingers that grip pens So I buy their favorite brand Uni-Ball medium point black ink by the box The words twist around my fingers Come out in costumes called metaphors, similes sometimes conceits People have to guess even debate their true identities Meanwhile I keep weekly appointments with my Vietnamese manicurist Who also deals through fingers And doesn’t use her mouth much either Except when she calls me honey Or says she loves me like she really means it during her good-bye hug And people think I care what my fingers look like That too is a masquerade
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Turnstile by Jai Britton
We don’t eat our dead—we eat them kicking,
screaming, mewling into darkness. We smile
and teeth glow red, satisfaction licking
lips, the glorious drip. The turnstile
of consumption are we—at first eating
and then being eaten. How I wish the world
were square instead of cyclical! Greetings
meet bloody endings. Devour machine. Chew
this gristle, sinew, bone. Be done. Repair
the unstrung tendon of years. Make old new
again, again. Spiral forth and declare
{the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out} the glue
of us, the human slice, is best served rare.
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To A Child With A Top by Richard Moore Pointing to earth, it stands, plump and erect as you, and with a nervous hum it sings, seeming to sense what's balanced, what's correct. The earth's a top: ask God—He pulled the strings. And when your shrieks of childish revelation unwind into enlightenment and poise, you'll find that the earth spins with all creation on principles you learned from early toys. That's right; and there's a new depth in its hum. The globe flickers, and a quick trembling tells what is missing: equilibrium. Didn't it look so fine, loosed from the string! Watch now: it wobbles, topples from its pivot Its only strength was what your string could give it.
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Mis-remembered Baby Sleeping In The Ground by Martha Deed Even after burial underneath the large dead house the baby of the disliked woman is not itself disliked though dead it looks like the disliked woman its mother’s breasts like apples while the baby in the ground increasingly resembles a prune plucked before its time the baby’s face forgettable to others lives ever deeper in its mother’s memories in her mind she is kind the baby is not dead it plays in her yard
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On The Destruction Of Barhydt Chapel by Rustin Larson The sky echoing. Wordsworth's Prelude. My life. I've never dreamed a darker empty stage. "I am off in search," Wordsworth told his wife, "of a vision." My mind's been lost for ages on boughs of sound. A campus with a chapel I translated into Tintern. It was the place I got my first breath: Romantics, a lit major, a dry urn, the clouds echoing, lines composed, my own life. They'll tear the place down to a month of stones- in sunflower and yarrow and loosestrife- they'll take the months and pile them into zones, chunked-up lots, memory: a church not lost to literature and youth, its Pentecost.
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Selkie by Seánan Forbes Every morning, she rises, parts the blanket from the sheet, the sheet from her dry skin, feeds the children, cooks recoiling from the hostile element of heat kisses her offspring, watches them, firm feet on solid ground, walking ever and ever away, feels her husband's bristle-compassed mouth claiming her cheek, watches him too walk away feels the absence of her skin the loss of whale song the sundering from ocean deprivation of salt Widowed from her fellows from her clan she watches from the window as blood of her blood goes about human business linking her to a sun-hot arid world. She hears the ocean, but no longer understands the tongues with which it licks the shore.
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Cross-Quartered by Seánan Forbes
How has he come to
have lying
beside him
this salt-licked creature,
sea-soaked, tidal,
lunar, compelling, urgent,
her body ebb and neap
in the window-quartered
moonlight?
Her raiments,
imponderably thin
and flimsy
kelp his once-bachelor abode.
At night, she harbours him
in breath-strewn waters,
her sea-walls tight
around him.
When she sleeps,
his bed is a widow’s walk
where he lies, pacing,
eye-locking
unseeable horizons,
alert, constant, ready
to discover her drowned
in a momentary
loss of his awareness:
evaporated
to a shade salt-
patching his sheet.
It will be brittle,
shallow, drying:
a memory of sand,
ready to
swallow him.
He fears her
staying and her going,
wishes himself surer,
purer,
a sailor or swimmer or seal,
brave to swim into
her willing waters,
wishes he could anchor her
to the substance of his shore.
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Edges by Patricia Wellingham-Jones Comes dreamy knowledge when the veil of sleep floats over a slack face. We talk of the center, finding one’s core yet it’s at the edges, the drift between sleep and waking, the place a window opens between worlds— the blending of art and plants in a sculpture garden, liquid sand where ocean pounds shore, children hugging the fringes of the playground, words a politician doesn’t quite say, the feathered touch of a calloused hand grazing over soft skin.
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Promise Of Seven by Jennifer Van Buren I ride the buzz of the high tension wire transformer hums and sparks in the mmmm moisture of memories re-ignited as you position me three dimensions. chin up shoulders back, yes... a bit to the left like a school photographer who wanted to be so much more. But you do not take my picture baby you take my mouth and I kneel wishing I had two more senses so I could swallow you down seven times. Seven such a holy number you so wholly mine my attention, fully yours. I breathe in the scent of your day fermenting under cotton, see your eyes demanding contact. Pupils drill a pathway deep beyond feeling and into that place between the devil and the deep blue something. Something that is filled under the saline sky that drops its tears, mine, yours, mine yours, shoulders damp with the promise of something beyond seven.
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Boardwalk by Taylor Graham In the wax museum, your cousin swore Napoleon looked just like her ex. Henry the Eighth you recognized as an old lover obsessed with what was wrong with your hair. The two of you moved on then into fresher air, outside. The Army-Navy store spread its surplus over bare boards. "Military millinery," your cousin dubbed it: service-caps from Her Majesty's brigades and the foreign legions, slightly worn, only a buck apiece. For herself she chose a captain's model in royal red with 50-mission crush; and then, on your shorn crown she pressed a squat white pillbox: Limey-hat, she said. Both of you still trying to fit somebody else's head.
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Awash in the Golden Glow of Dusk by Robert Johnson I angle the prow of my aging boat toward the copper setting sun, awash in the golden glow of dusk. Taking on water but floating nicely, she is a bit like her owner, sinking ever so slightly under added weight, sporting sun marks that roughen the skin but spare the hull, two seaworthy vessels Moving as one, angling toward the copper setting sun awash in the golden glow of dusk.
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Path by Mary Rae The path down to the woods is rough and steep and framed by branches in whose lime-green glow birds congregate and some sweet sabbath keep and speak in tongues while humans pass below. Now comes the creek, at last, the long descent rewarded with a rushing melody, with flies and frogs completing summer’s choir. A footstep breaks a branch---but sound’s well-spent, sending squirrels in circles up a tree that pierces heaven like some ancient spire.
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Insomnia by Elizabeth Bishop The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles (and perhaps with pride, at herself, but she never, never smiles) far and away beyond sleep, or perhaps she's a daytime sleeper. By the Universe deserted, she'd tell it to go to hell, and she'd find a body of water, or a mirror, on which to dwell. So wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me.
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Make Big Money At Home! by Howard Nemerov Write Poems In Spare Time! Oliver wanted to write about reality. He sat before a wooden table, He poised his wooden pencil Above his pad of wooden paper, And attempted to think about agony And history, and the meaning of history, And all stuff like that there. Suddenly this wooden thought got in his head: A Tree. That's all, no more than that, Just one tree, not even a note As to whether it was deciduous Or evergreen, or even where it stood. Still, because it came unbidden, It was inspiration, and had to be dealt with. Oliver hoped that this particular tree Would turn out to be fashionable, The axle of the universe, maybe, Or some other mythologically Respectable tree-contraption With dryads, or having to do With the knowledge of Good and Evil and the Fall. "A Tree," he wrote down with his wooden pencil Upon his pad of wooden paper Supported by the wooden table. And while he sat there waiting For what would come next to come next, The whole wooden house began to become Silent, particularly silent, sinisterly so.
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Carnelian V6 Iss1 January,
2006