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Carnelian
Think poetry isn't alive and kicking; that it's all paunch and no punch? Well, a few rounds in the ring with this group of poets will dispel that notion in a three-minute hurry. Carnelian's summer issue is here and the muscle tone is in evidence from start to finish. Contemporary poets Michael Burch, Brandon Whitehead, Janet I. Buck and more join forces with W B Yeats and Hart Crane to deliver a few lightning jabs and crushing uppercuts to the doubters—so come on in and enjoy a little powerlifting for the brain!
On the cover: Young Man In A Hat [detail] by Jean-Baptiste Greuze oil on canvas [circa 1750]
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Volume 2 Issue 3
July 2002
TABLE
OF CONTENTS:
The Movies Jack Granath Kansas City, MO Knavery Jeanette Heinrich Kansas City, MO Tasty William Peck Kansas City, MO True Grit Bob Savino Kansas City, MO The Glance Allen Heinrich Kansas City, MO Days Of Summer 1956 Kenneth Wolman Sea Bright, NJ The Rhyming Dervish Taylor Graham Somerset, CA Butterfly Effect Brandon Whitehead Kansas City, MO The Watch Michael Burch Nashville, TN Sing Back To Me Allen Heinrich Kansas City, MO Your Local Radar Brandon Whitehead Kansas City, MO Plastic Fake Serenity Janet I. Buck Medford, OR Poetry All Stars: No Second Troy William Butler Yeats Exile Hart Crane **************************************************************************
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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 articles for On These Premises.
Submissions which
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Send to: carnelian@sidewalkpress.net
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POEMS:
A European, post-punk music scene,
Subterranean and sedative;
A toil of shadows heaving on a screen,
And, somehow, this is what it means to
live.
Off by herself, a woman starts to sway,
Her letting go held-back and angular,
Half dancing and half groping for the
way
Within a world that’s unaware of her.
I’ve often wondered what that moment meant,
It seemed to wink at me, to prove a point,
While dancing through the shadows in my head.
Then one day, just like that, I understood:
Why wonder what it “means” or what it “proves”?
It doesn’t mean, you mixed-up world. It moves.
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Knavery by Jeanette Heinrich To haggard hearts who choose their color trite and day by day peruse clichés of blight; no pardon brings the truth or lack. Don’t fight, it’s hard to sing the blues in black and white. But red, say green. O Boldness! Orange bright, rambunction galore and beguiling might, slanting reason, seducing rhyme. Stop. Now slight ... I like a little wily in the night.
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Tasty by William Peck You chose the music and the night that I played it. I closed in on Desperado, and found the wind like an eagle, and flew. We both knew the destination: a smoky room, a two-seat couch. All my senses became tongue, and I tasted you on my hands, in my ears, in my mouth. All my desires became hunger, and I devoured you in manufactured darkness. I must say, you were such a skillful prey. I woke up alone today with your flavor in my beard. An aroma hung in the mist, clung to the walls of my mind, And I was satisfied.
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True Grit by Bob Savino I'm thinking of kidney stones, snaggy barbed wire, hangnails, fire ants, and tiny baby ticks that burrow under your skin no matter how careful you are. I'm brooding over rusty razors, vicious all-night toothaches, the muffler clamp that squeaks like a deranged canary, and my neighbor's eternally barking dog. I'm ruminating on battery acid, prickly burrs stuck in my socks, bug-eyed insomnia, and those computer-generated phone calls programmed straight from hell. Yes—I'm having a smashingly Bad Hair Day! But I'll get over it. There's a reason for this. Maybe I'm just that indispensable grit burning at the heart of the Pearl...
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The Glance by Allen Heinrich
Maybe this is the way
it was meant to be: you
always a glisten caught
in someone else's eye,
the not-quite memory
of another sky, another
day echoing an untouchable
music, and me— me forever
on the other side of the minute
you walk past; the door
you never open.
Maybe this is how we pay
for the recollected scent of bread
rising from soft hands,
nights along the coast
of a distant time, hours
too sweetly spent. Seeing again
the laughter on a once-familiar face,
or hearing the delicate thunder
of remembered hearts only bends
you further into the shadows of today;
my reaching out
only keeps you penned
within the darkened shape of dreams.
But maybe this is how we say
that what seems past is never ending,
and trusting the bottle of a glance,
we cast ourselves into a colorful
semblance of sea, whispering
I am well
and nothing need be forgotten ...
Maybe this is the way
we were meant to live together always:
sometimes awake, and sometimes
asleep in the iris of another's eye,
waiting for another day,
another sky to come ...
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Days Of Summer 1956 by Kenneth Wolman (after hearing Mark Doty read from a manuscript) At camp in New Jersey, twelve years old, I picked blueberries beneath the hum and snap of power lines, joined faux-nature hikes along a chiggery road to a bar on Route 18, watched Mr. Reinstein our counselor, after slurring "Boys, there's a tree, that's Nature," after four beers stand wobbling like a newborn colt. At night I got beat up because I was proclaimed the bunk's fat summer fruit. And though I wasn't quite, still the other kids were surely onto something, for I was ripe with the arrogance of the Fifties misfit. And if genes outlasted disposition, they could not overcome the shunning of the isolato that I was already who wept for the self-invoked darkness I drew about me like an iron lung, that let me breathe yet froze me where I lay. Paradise, where was it then?—a dream that flickered in my klieg-lit dark stars, indistinct behind a scrim that never rose, a vibrating Tote Stadt in which I lived alone in my opera not quite played but only sensed: the tale of the Enchanted Garden and the boy who walled himself within, sang to his image in the air, and drowned in the face the stars hurled back at him.
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The Rhyming Dervish by Taylor Graham See him in the corner, rhyming himself loud enough for the whole room to hear, rhyming to make us all dizzy. Today when he declaims “despair” he couples it with “open air” and “dappled mare.” “Doubt” becomes a speckled trout. And “fear”? “we’re free and clear!” He’s got the nurses rhyming “take your pills” with “daffodils.” Nobody dares mention death, he’ll stuff your mouth with baby’s- breath. And ancient grief breaks out in – what else? – dogwood leaf; a widow’s sorrow is a field of yarrow. And he’ll be at it again tomorrow, weaving a world of colors swirled by sound and senseless, light spun together till it’s every color, harmless, white.
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Butterfly Effect by Brandon Whitehead
"Never threaten a small man. He'll kill you."
—Chinese Proverb
Ok, folks—
put your money on the table
and get your head out of your ass,
Because we've got yet another
shrill housewife fear to deal with,
More children to help
than we can shake a national safety council
approved stick at—
We've got issues, dammit!
Late-term abortions to protect
with a star wars missle shield,
HIV-infected killer bees
selling smack to midwestern Nazis,
and have yet to get Oprah
to successfully orbit Mars.
So get your emoticons lined up
for the great American
spittin' war of wisdom:
Deepak Chopra and Carlos Castenada
vs.
Bill Cosby and Carrot Top
So self-help yourself along with me
(and use a little K-Y if need be)
as we sing our holiest litany—
"Ode To All That Is Owed Me"
because we're all disenfranchised Blacks,
son of a slave, or son of a people
that doesn't want us back...
No, no—wait, we're all post-holocaust Jews,
Indians who want their lands back.
We're all just gay vegetarian feminists
who love Ani DiFranco
and all forms of hummus.
Or, most pitiful of all,
We are the Promethean white male,
the modern-day Moby Dick
impotent without our bottom-boy Ahab's,
just begging to be speared so we can spout and spray
and indignantly thrash our fat tail—
But always, always,
we are everything you are not,
our division indivisible:
We are an army of one
besieged by nothing.
We are legions hiding from a darkness
that isn't there, building stone walls
with all our enemies already long inside—
Meanwhile, somewhere along the alpine shore
of Tianchi—"Lake of Heaven"
a butterfly tries to take flight—
Not if we can help it.
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Moonlight spills
down vacant sills,
illuminates an empty bed.
Dreams lie in crates.
One hand creates
wan silver circles, left unread
by its companion—unmoved now
by anything that lies ahead.
I watch the minutes
test the limits
of ornamental movement here,
where once another
hand would hover.
Each circuit—incomplete. So dear,
so precious, so precise, the touch
of hands that wait, yet ask so much.
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Sing Back To Me by Allen Heinrich Whatever it is that makes a poem spring from a common string of words, it isn't the simile or the metaphor that brings birds into your heart's hearing, but the notion of someone chirping to you from the nest of their emotions; someone singing from the breast, a devotion dressed in hunger and the need to fly— Words, then, become worms for the why, notes for the music of the cry no metaphor or simile can mask: from the very first, we ask Sing back to me ...
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Your Local Radar by Brandon Whitehead
On channel 23, in between
five-day forecasts and national outlooks,
you can see half the state stretching out
like a black ocean—
spider-blue county lines,
islands of opaque air and water—
moving like butterflies on the plains of Tycho.
This was all once the bottom of a sea—
you can still find clumps of shells, or trilobite fossils
in the middle of a wheat field.
Touching the screen, I cover fifteen miles with one fingertip,
the nail rapping on warm glass without a ripple,
and I'm not there any more—
I'm in El Dorado, the Flint Hills,
an old graveyard near Peck, Kansas,
throwing weigh-stones
towards the forefront of a storm—
Standing in the night lilies,
sailing on moonlight from ten thousand lost seas
to emerge clean on the other side of the world—
still wrapped in the smell of lightning.
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Plastic Fake Serenity by Janet I. Buck "Lord, not another baby shower," my tongue slashes the air like a striking snake I wouldn't go near if given a choice. But this is your joy. Your plump and perfect strawberry moment even in grief I cannot bruise. My duty is to be a plate that doesn't crash when china and parsley meet the floor. The sacred arch of motherhood— a moth that chases burning lights. I'm watching your stomach swell, passing tea on shaking saucers driven by the unmet wish. Inside the closet is dark, but I rummage for ribbons and strangle my dreams for they deserve no oxygen. You ask me when I'll buy a house and have a child, collect bright toys like Staffordshire. Not knowing that a baby's breath is almost mace to wombless flesh. My body strikes me in the mirror as a mannequin on display. A Venus missing more than an arm. My nipples are useless stones.
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No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?
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Exile by Hart Crane My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands,— No,—nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell', And with the day, distance again expands Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell. Yet love endures, though starving and alone. A dove's wings cling about my heart each night With surging gentleness, and the blue stone Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.
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Carnelian V2 Iss3 July, 2002