Carnelian
Millenniae hence, as historians gander over the first half of 21st century publishing, they'll note the remarkable debut of a poetry quarterly that grew into nothing less than a mythology, marvelling at the extraordinary rise and confluence of talent, timing and tenacity that propelled a seemingly earthbound venture into its fiery, stellar future. Or else not. Of course, it won't matter to any of us, long-dead as we'll by then be. Enough that the poetry was good when we came here; that we ate and drank and made merry round ache and sorrow ...
Thanks to all the poets willing to take
a chance on Carnelian, sight unseen. Your publishing histories,
ranging across a wide spectrum of respected poetry venues in both print
and electronica, belie the notion of your being here simply for the exposure.
Carnelian is indebted to the fire of your passions. Thanks
also to those of you who graciously responded to my requests for poems,
and to the editors of other publications and forums whose kind assistance
in contacting poets was invaluable in the process of bringing Carnelian
to life.
On the cover: "The Gust of
Wind" (detail) by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer pastel circa 1896-1898
Grace our mailing list, or request a link exchange: carnelian@sidewalkpress.net
Volume 1 Issue 1
October 2001
TABLE
OF CONTENTS:
Tenebroso
Clay Vaughan
Norfolk, VA
Conversation
Jeanette Heinrich
Kansas City, MO
Doctorow as Mentor
Harvey Stanbrough
Pittsboro, IN
Old Wood
R Gerald Dreesen
Cicero, IN
Penance
John Sokol
Akron, OH
Seven Epigrams: A Metaphysical
Progress
Jack Granath
Kansas City, MO
Conversation
Doug Tanoury
Detroit, MI
Radiance (memento mori)
Clay Vaughan
Norfolk, VA
Cindy & Detroit
Nate Pritts
Lafayette, LA
poem for my mother
Peter Magliocco
Las Vegas, NV
how poetry
D W Bohn
Atherton, CA
The Effects of Memory
Michael R Burch
Nashville, TN
At The Lake
Doug Tanoury
Detroit, MI
Confirmation
Jennifer Lagier
Marina, CA
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POEMS:
Sometimes it is the landscape that is
aging, folding in on itself, a turn, a
touch of
gray has split horizons, and a
darkness spreading as a balanced eye
observes a cleft terrain grown ever colder.
The gray itself is changing, sombering
swart-clouds, cinereous, forbidding all,
what
contact with what space there is, is merging
sight with what is sightless, crowding
out vistas
with its deepest dye, its want
of light, its prospect
fades to black
* while
the darkness of tenebrism has traditionally been interpreted as a metaphor
of evil and ignorance, in contrast to
the divine grace and knowledge
of light … identified intellectual currents in religion, science and alchemy
in Italy c.1600
… suggest that darkness
had a positive value as a state conducive to meditation and transformation.
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Conversation
by Jeanette Heinrich
This sapling skin gives me away
time and again; there’s no concealing
this plant-half, branching out,
digging in. Viridian, olive,
hunter green streaking patterns
across me, this woman:
stalk and leaf, ever-blooming
impatiens-cheeks,
rooting fingers, thorny tongue,
unblinking eyes:
I photosynthesize you,
soak you in through
an elemental twist of chloroplasts;
you fertilize the contrast, energize
the bombast of mitochondria,
converting the whole from carbon
to oxygen, thought to action.
I’m harmonizing sunlight
with your every exhalation.
This green, reaching
skyward on the kiss of our conversation.
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Doctorow
as Mentor
by Harvey Stanbrough
for Lynn
We could begin as Doctorow began,
when writing Ragtime: write the walls
and write
the ceiling and the floor of that one
room
then write the daisies—write how Lynn
never
stenciled them onto the orange floor
for fear the bastard landlord might evict
them both—then we could skew the pen and
write
the piles of dirty dishes write the laundry
write the kitchen and the smoky vent
and books and records shoring up our stern
voyage as we wrote with our heads high
the sixties’ world of parties wine and
grass
the closets and the bathroom and the stench
that crept along the hall. We could expand
into the hallway write the other tenants’
hairy bellies unshaved faces eyes
no longer dreaming yesterdays or love
and we could write the city, write the
cops’
fists batons and gas and protest signs
could write the streets the burning of
LA
could write a kid like us there on those
streets
in uniform a Guardsman with a gun
and how his gun would tremble if he tried
to shoot and how his pen would tremble
too
if he should feel a need to write the truth.
Then we could write the state and write
the nation
forests valleys mountains rivers trees
and write the congress write the president
and we could write our friends away from
home
not write to them but write them as they
were
the jungle canopy the mud the rain
the stench of fear the bugs the blood
and we
could write the oceans of the world could
write
the continents the moon the solar system
the universe we know the universe
we’ve never seen but know it must be there—
as if our writing ever made a difference
or saved the smallest part of anything.
We could begin as Doctorow began
O, we could write — we could say the world.
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In the vacant lot, a pile
of old lumber weathers rain-gray,
covered with sinewed vines
and dead branches.
Chipmunks and a pair of rabbits
live here, a garden snake
with its yellow stripe,
like a length of garden hose.
I can't help wondering what you
would think of it, if you might
find a poem here: this chipmunk
popping its head up through
the farthest hiding place
waiting for my next move.
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Ever since his wife left, he's been throwing
panhandlers fives and tens for their tunes.
He's been giving clothes away, and working
at homeless shelters: handing out spoons;
serving up mashed potatoes and gravy
to his hollow-cheeked "brothers" and "sisters."
He's been delivering food to the needy;
doing what he can to share what he suffers.
Meanwhile, he's trying his best to smother
his pain; to hold on, until tomorrow.
He'll get his clothes back (one way, or
another) --
as well as his fives and tens -- when
sorrow
has vanished, and his penance is served;
when he's sure it isn't so well-deserved
.
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Seven
Epigrams: A Metaphysical Progress
by Jack Granath
1. How can it be? My soul,
like some lost child,
Quivering in
the uncreated wild,
Looked up and
tossed itself into the world.
2. The world--fangs flush with interbedded
gobs
Of long, gray
schools and longer, grayer jobs--
Sucked the heart
out through my slatted ribs.
3. And once my well-bailed breast
was tinder dry,
Who dropped that
spark from somewhere in the sky?
Dropped it like
a switch knife, and stole away.
4. “Contain the conflagration”--what
a maze
Of slick, dark
meanings in that pompous phrase.
Take it from
one whose conflagration was.
5. Poking through the ashes like
a tramp,
I found an old,
brown snapshot, scorched and damp,
And gave the
last, live coal a vicious stomp.
6. I wound up chasing off the sun,
that fake,
(How many mornings
can it really take?)
And went to sell
my favors to the dark.
7. So here I am, in hiding from the
dawn
And ready, once
these garish dreams have gone,
To find the uncreated
wild, again.
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And somehow there has grown
An icy silence between us
That expands to fill the empty space
Between our words and transform them
Into awkward pauses
And there is a tightness slipping about
us
Like a snake that slowly winds and constricts
With ever increasing pressure
Around its prey cutting off movement
Until neither inhale nor exhale can escape
Our sentences are laborsome
And talk tends to lapse as time goes by
Into periods of nervous quiet
That populate and punctuate the conversations
Of those long parted and seldom seen
And there is graceless effort about us
Like a broken wing bird
Unable to fly
That repeatedly tries but always fails
To get airborne once again
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Radiance
(memento mori)
by Clay Vaughan
She was all her own
like a rare and radiant
disease, corrupt beyond her
radiant flesh, beyond
the soft pocked marrow
of her radiant bone
a beauty too impossible
to please. Beyond the last
contagion that she left me
(when she left me)
was a leper’s dream, my
very own, mine for my own
once rare and wondrous
radiance, deceived.
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Cindy & Detroit
by Nate Pritts
Listening in on their conversation makes
it
clear: these two guys only give proper
names
to cities they used to live in & any
woman
who is long long gone
so Cindy & Detroit
assume equal weight through absence.
Eventually these guys head home, trace
nomad fingers along winding roads
marked on outdated maps that make you
think
anything is just a few inches away.
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poem
for my mother by Peter Magliocco
and the sea crosses the dreaming woman's
back
before she drowns
in interstices of my fantasy,
before I steal her embryonic reliquary
wherein my other life lies
the unborn one conceding
a brotherly & sisterly self
nature miscarried with its zeal
for perverse presentiments
like the musing woman's bare back
turned towards me as she dresses
slowly, deliberately, before the mirror
reflects her cosmetic applications
for the waking ritual of femininity
is hard to perfectly cultivate,
even for her small son's eyes
wondering at her adult largeness
while she swims in our shared narcissism
my eyes become her mercury
prolonging each attention to detail
devouring sweet infinity
as my impatient wisecracking
impells her to angrily grip the hand mirror
before tearfully throwing it my way
& severing the thread of our attachment
no desperate love holds fast
to part this spell's sad longing
imprisoned like animal silence
in our new born breed undying
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in the beginning there's a large collection
of loose lexical particles
each one gently bearing
its slight negative charge
and then all of a sudden
out of this electric lexicon
a nucleus of positive thought emerges
and its invitingly empty orbital shells
attract and capture the most available
words
until their capacity is reached and
everything settles into balance
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The
Effects of Memory by Michael
R Burch
A black ringlet curls to lie
at the nape of her neck,
glistening with sweat
in the evaporate moonlight . . .
This is what I remember
now that I cannot forget.
And tonight,
if I have forgotten her name,
I remember . . .
rigid wire and white lace
half-impressed in her flesh,
our soft cries, like regret,
the enameled white clips
of her bra strap
still inscribe dimpled marks
that my kisses erase . . .
now that I have forgotten her face.
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Down at the lake today
At sunrise
As I watch the light
Reflected on the waves
I hear music
Not a little fugue or cantata
Neither a short prelude
Nor minuet
But a grand polonaise by Chopin
The one in A flat major
Playing in my head
The silver motion
Of water and wind
Choreographed and synchronized
So finely that the notes
That resonate golden and clear
Are the power
Giving rise to each wave
And the force that drives
The giant black hulls
Of the ore freighters
Slowly down the horizon
Where movement is melody
In the swaying elms and willows
Along the shore
And harmony rises
On the wings of geese
And flies graceful like the gulls
Across a summer sky
Above waters graduating
From green to blue to gray
Accompanied by the soft piano
Of a new day
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Confirmation
by Jennifer Lagier
Ironically, it's a nun who
orders mother to purchase
my first pair of high heels,
nylons, the superfluous bra,
rubber straight-jacket girdle.
She tells me the vulnerable priest
needs these reminders to adorn
my pudgy, twelve year old body
so he won't succumb
to overwhelming desire.
I stare at sister's drab habit,
imagine life beneath black cloth,
visualize her spartan cell,
untouched breasts, utilitarian panties.
I sit, listen in confusion,
ponder threats of hell
and her Catholic warnings.
Mother gleefully chooses
my size 15 tent dress:
two tones of heifer plaid
with immense rhinestone buttons.
I redden, sweat toward adulthood
within tight elastic.
When my turn comes to be confirmed,
I stumble forward on command
down the church aisle
dividing our class
into isolate genders.
Trembling and filled
with a devout sense of faith,
I kneel before a man wearing skirts,
feel him slapping my face.
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Carnelian V1 Iss1 October, 2001