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Debbie Strange is a widely published Canadian short form poet, haiga artist and photographer. Her books include the full-length poetry collection, Warp and Weft: Tanka Threads (Keibooks 2015), and the haiku chapbook, A Year Unfolding (Folded Word 2017). She invites you to visit her archive at debbiemstrange.blogspot.ca.
usual questions
at reunion dinner
taking the broccoli
for another spin
around the plate
—
Christina Sng is a poet, writer, and artist. She is the author of two haiku collections, A Constellation of Songs (Origami Poems Project, 2016) and Catku (Allegra Press, 2016). In the moments in between, she finds joy in tending to her herb and bonsai garden. Visit her at christinasng.com.
heel cups
scars from my grandfather’s walker
on the carpet
—
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco’s chapbook, Various Lies, is available from Finishing Line Press. She co-edits One Sentence Poems.
And with help we loaded the pickup
with all the other things that no longer functioned.
Washing machine that shook itself to death.
Ancient computer, dirty face like city ice.
One stained mattress, upon which no children
were conceived. And so forth. Drove
somewhere. Nothing grew there but hills
someone had burned with cigarettes.
Thorns survived. And kudzu. There was a ditch
where an old Chevrolet dammed the runoff
and buried itself in red mud. There we did
our unloading. Appliances rolled downhill
like snake eyes. Newspaper bundles and slick
magazines fell like bad cards. Sliding down,
the mattress ripped some kudzu cover away,
exposed layers of garbage. Households like ours.
A daughter’s bicycle with glossy mylar streamers
looked to have been almost new, but vines
threaded its spokes and frame,
stitched it to the earth like Frida Kahlo.
We have returned our portion.
—
Barbara Young hasn’t been writing much this year. East Nashville got too popular, so she and Jim packed up the cats and moved out to White Bluff. A grocery, two hardware stores, and a bakery that only makes doughnuts. Change is interesting. Because writing prompts can be easier than poems, Barbara sometimes becomes “Miz Quickly.”
While everyone slept
I set up all of the mirrors
to face against the walls
& I couldn’t be sadder
that nobody realized
& nobody thought
that this was strange.
Come to think of it,
when was the last time
I saw what I look like?
I have pictures of myself.
I was a pretty man.
—
Darren C. Demaree’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including the South Dakota Review, Meridian, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (2016, 8th House Publishing) and is the managing editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He currently lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
This is the spoilt season, the dying land.
Here are weeds and crows and graves.
Trucks growl up our street all night
and in the morning we pull our shades
against another day of rain and tears.
Here are angry men wading icy streams.
Here is their music of broken drums.
Here are drugs and beds with their sheets
torn up, and dust on the nightstand, dust
on the walls and floor. Someone lived
here once, in wind and fading light,
when the kitchen hummed, and the scent
of soup went everywhere. She lived
in a body, painted her image on glass
where it shone in the dark, another star
made of desire, kissing the brow of sky.
—
Steve Klepetar has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, including four in 2016. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems (both from Flutter Press). Family Reunion (Big Table) and A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press) were released in January, 2017.
—
Olivier Schopfer lives in Geneva, Switzerland. He likes to capture the moment in haiku and photography. His work has appeared in The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2014 & 2016, as well as in numerous online and print journals. He also writes articles in French about etymology and everyday expressions at Olivier Schopfer raconte les mots.
In the breathless way that only five-year-olds have, she explains to me the importance of each of the rocks in her box of precious things, held inviolable in the secret spot in the top drawer under all the socks. Since I well recall the totemic power of sea-glass and flat, smooth river stones for warding off evil and standing as sigils of fate’s approval of my existence, I listen to her recitation of each stone’s biography in the absent-but-present way that loving uncles have about them.
Her words wash over me, tumbling from her in little bursts of enthusiasm, rife with wandering asides, non sequiturs, and sighs of frustration at her own inability to articulate the ocean of meaning inside her. To the casual listener, it sounds like a grocery-list of items being ticked off in a sing-song litany. It sounds like that to me, too, except that I love her. So I listen past the tuneless song of “…and then…and then…and then” until I don’t hear it anymore, and I can actually listen instead.
She’s too young to affect the rhythms of a story-teller, the body-language, cadence, and intonations. The rise-and-fall, tension-and-resolve musical qualities of a story well-told are beyond her, for now. But the need to convey, to be understood, for her truth to be recognized… these things are well within her grasp, and they animate the story of her stones until it becomes epic. But not if you saw it written down. A transcript of it would be boredom itself, filled with “…and then…and then…and then.”
I’ve grown into the mantel of a storyteller in the midst of a clan of storytellers. To stand out from among the group of Bards and Bullshitters I hail from is a feat unto itself, believe me. So I listen with a different kind of attention to the tale of her sacred stones, hearing the story beats like a drum out of time, implying the shape of truths buried in her. Witnessing her evolution from Sunday to Sunday is something to behold. Soon this little one, with her earnest “…and then…and then…and thens” will be gone, replaced by a big-time first-grader with a grasp of relevant conversational threads, and a developing instinct for the social cues to tell which story, and when. And then her tales will rise to take their place on the long arc of the living narrative made up of every story ever told.
But for now she stumbles forward, leading with intention and meaning in the absence of all the words, as we ever have, as we ever will, for they are the millennial predecessors of syntax and grammar. When our ancestors grunted and gestured with stone knives and bear-skins, their intention and meaning was still plain to each other, and so we arose. As we ever have, as we ever will.
I know well the frustration of words that fail, that cannot contain the life they describe. When my own stories lay flat on an imaginary page, lifeless as a recitation from any randomly chosen page in the phone book, their content as stilted as a grocery-list of unrelated events, strung together by mere grammar and syntax, “…and then…and then…and then.” When all the editorial tricks are just tricks that cannot hope to animate the lifeless heap of characters we made up so we don’t have to grunt anymore. And I stare at them until it seems hopeless, all these meaningless squiggles on an electronic page that doesn’t actually exist outside the uncreated space of charged particles they inhabit. So it is that tens of thousands of words disappear into digital nullification, countless ones and zeroes recycled for better purposes. Delete.
But some days, when I’m lucky, the love comes in.
When it does —when everything seems to shine, and even the wrong words seem to rhyme— and I’m out on the street and the 3/4 time of my steps counterpoints the 7/8 time of my heart, and every dog’s bark and shoddy muffler Dopplering away from me sings a song; the play of light and shadow is a game that the whole world is hoping I’ll notice and join in. I’m like a drop of water having rejoined its vast ocean at last, yet still a drop. The breeze chases my heels along and I am subsumed by a love of every single thing, ever.
Every person on the street, every distant soul in far-away lands, my flesh and blood; my family and friends like a fire in my bones. Even those that have betrayed me, every person that has ever cheated me, every criminal that has ever stolen from me, are separated from me only by their own illusion of “otherness.” And all the heartbreak in the world —even this I love, in the way that you love a willful child who must learn in their own way; regretful that they must, but content to walk alongside while they do.
Then everything unnecessary passes away, and the words that remain —that actually tell the story, that hold the essence of the life they describe— are animated by the love of what I’ve beheld. So the breath of life comes across the dry bones of mere words, anima whetting their marrow, such that they rise up to join the long arc of the living narrative, the one that God Himself is writing about each one of us, and literally everything else. A story of every attosecond of existence, every tear fallen, every dream dreamt; about the orbit of subatomic particles, and the beat of a butterfly’s wing in China.
A brokenhearted story of love and sacred stones.
—
Lawrence Elliott is a retired Journeyman Carpenter of twenty years. He’s enjoying a second act in life in the employ of the University of Oregon. He blogs about autobiographical oddities at Scratched in the Sand
highway dusk
all I wanted to know
in a moment
—
Malintha Perera writes haiku, tanka, micropoetry as well as longer poems. Her first published haiku book, An Unswept Path (2015) is a collection of monastery haiku. She resides in Sri Lanka with her family.
(Watch Misha Penton’s video “Enchant(ed)” on Vimeo)
Artist’s statement: Enchant(ed): an experimental poetry / vocal film, created on a stunning Colorado backroad in the deep winter. The work is a meditation on discovering the unexpected and uncanny, and explores one word, “enchant/ed.”
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Misha Penton is a new music vocal artist, performance creator, and writer. She composes experimental vocal pieces, sings new music and new opera, and invents and performs new solo and collaborative works. Her projects blossom in many forms: live performance, audio projects, video works, and site specific / installation performances. mishapenton.com
