22 | turtleisland

TURTLE ISLAND QUARTERLY 22

2022

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featured poet: Peter Grandbois ( 3 poems),

with special feature:

Ukraniane poet Lyudmyla Diadchenko/ translated by Padma Thornlyre,

2 poems by Joan Mazza, poem by Lorrie Ness, poem by Sara Backer,

poem by Elisabeth Harrahy, 2 poems by Tamara Kaye Sellman,

poem by Leonore Wilson, poem by Mary Beth Hines, poem by Michael Spring, poem by Robert Beveridge, 2 poems by Charles Rossiter,

and another special feature: 3 poems by contributing editor Jared Smith

featured poet: Peter Grandbois ( 3 poems)

The cottage

I have been alone a long time

this moment

I haven’t heard my voice in weeks

today

If time is not a line, perhaps

It is an ocean

In which we attempt to swim

Or a cold wind

Blowing through us

Here we are, together

In this ocean

Riding this wind

We’ve been here before

I see your face

As if from the other side,

Shining

Along the shore, two sandpipers

Hurry back and forth

I step closer

That’s me

It’s my face I see

Kneeling in the cottage

Praying to the dying light

I cannot find the morning

Beneath the black ice from last night’s rain.

The wind cries like a drunk through the trembling

Pane, and the man I am becomes a tree again

Silence rooting itself in the tide of breath

Cold rolling through half-heard seasons

As we drink deep of this river Lethe

Reciting our own prayers of reason

So many ways of searching for the hole

In the belly of this half-forgotten world,

Where fog falls like a roll-call of ghosts

Lost in the ebb and flow of anger’s whorl

I’ll never understand what keeps you there

Naked in memory’s mended light

So let me point to the tear in my heart

And let’s simply forget about who is right

The fairy tales warn you

Do not shuttered walk

Through ink-dark woods

Breath shuddered beneath

Stuttering leaves

Suffer not blind earth’s

Tongueless murmurs that

Speak only of heart’s husk

With voice of stung regret

No grace falls weeping

Here in sweep between

Seeping lake and grievings

Sieved from muddy dusk

No end to ache welling

Through wake of moon’s

Un-sung eclipse, the

Bitter pluck of world-string

From night’s long ellipse

The choice is yours, the

Trees are asking, the grass

Begging with blood of

Blackberry

The thorn has always been

inside

The thistle still wrapped tight

about

This cup of emptiness—

spill wide

and

open

Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books. His work has appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.

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Special feature:

Ukraniane poet Lyudmyla Diadchenko/

translated into English by Padma Thornlyre

Намацуючи себе…така жінка: та мерланові коси

очі аріїв тобто морської хвилі кольору і глибини

ніс рахилі вдача її. надто коли ті що не просиш

вчити приходять казати що думають і чого не думають вони

нижче дідові руки: тобто хазяйські . дід би радів та не застав

вся ця порода:переконують а ти своєї : мовчки і струнко

треба було взяти живучість прабабці : хоча би до ста

нащупую себе…така дівчина. панна. пустунка

не пішла у бабусю ту що малює квітки

не пішла в тих що покірні були іванам кирилам їм тьма

граючись. боліючи пізнавати крізь супротив себе ж таки

така жінка така дівка. таке дитя

Lyudmyla Diadchenko

∞

Groping to find myself … I am a woman of Tamerlane’s hair,

Scythian eyes — sea-waves in hue and depth,

And Rachel’s nose, especially her countenance when uninvited strangers

Come to proselytize their beliefs and disbeliefs.

Beneath Grandfather’s ghostly hand, I see him smile:

When missionaries preach, his progeny stands silent and slender.

I want Great Grandmother’s vitality, even at a century.

Groping to find myself … I’m such a girl. A maiden. Mischievous.

I do not resemble my Babusyu,* who paints flowers.

I do not resemble those who submitted to John Cyril† and his ilk.

Playing, aching to know myself by resisting these self-contradictions:

Such a woman, such a girl. Such a child.

Translated by Padma Thronlyre

Grandmother.

† John Cyril, true to Ukrainian tradition, is a deliberate conflation of the Apostle John, who is credited for writing Revelations, and St. Cyril (826-869 CE), credited with evangelizing the Slavic peoples and inventing the Cyrillic alphabet.

Що торік одягати личило тепер на викид

як морфлот застарілий що сточила іржа

не наслідувати пар одомашнених звиклих

знаєш як неминуче від «люба» доходять до слова «чужа»

будем старатися прикрашати веселкою декольте

фарбувати очі безумством неприховано дуркувати

але час минув. його шкода він і є усе святе

так я знаю тепер коли сходиться осінь із холодом в ніч на п’яте

коли й ти знов не проти зайти де такі гріються

але тепер заняття посилати в дорогу як навчив керуак

виявляється не любити можна. і я вмію це

не любити. не . любити. отак

Lyudmyla Diadchenko

∞

What suited you only a year ago — you now forsake,

Like an outdated, obsolete flotilla corroding to rust.

Refusing to emulate couples with their domesticating habits,

Whomever you call “darling” is inevitably exotic.

We tried to decorate the neckline with a rainbow,

To paint raving eyes, to openly mess around,

But our time ran out. And it’s too bad. All time is holy.

I know now that autumn beds winter on the night of the fifth,

But now, when other men warm to me, you beg to return.

My lesson for you? Hit the road, as Kerouac taught.

Turns out that not loving is possible. That I can master it.

Don’t love. Don’t love. Just like that.

Translated by Padma Thornlyre

Умієш літати? я закохана в горизонти

з ними й живу віддаюсь їм футболю ногами

холодні. прошу їх щороку в листах до санти

і такі здалеку як перегук мугамів

то слонами закидані то голі як жіка після рук

чоловічих. то м’які на око нібито з пластиліну

якби містом була то тільки в якому мардук

ночував обіцявши місту що не покине

горизонтів! де небо у землю аж по торік

що я бачила? що я знала? а невловимим ся тішу

взагалі – якщо летіти – в горизонту має бути інший бік

подзвони: перерви мою – передай свою мені тишу

Lyudmyla Diadchenko

∞

Can you fly? I’m in love with horizons —

I live with them, give myself to them; they are footballs to my feet.

I ask every winter in my letters to Santa

For distant echoes of the mugham,

For horizons strewn with elephants, for naked skies like women in men’s

Hands — soft on the eye, formed from plasticine.

If I were a single city, let it be where Marduk

Spent his nights, pledging never to abandon its ziggurats.

Horizons! Where the sky burned into the Earth, until last year.

What did I see? What did I know? I rejoice in what’s elusive.

Generally — when flying — there must be another side to the horizon.

Call me. Interrupt my silence — and give me your own.

Translated by Padma Thornlyre

Осінь у вікнах гуси в ключах колір розлитий

менша зворотів прикметникових у кожному дні

спрощується мова тож писати про що нам жити

не розумію як правильно зараз мені

довгі описи з однорідними обставинами причини

все ж не пояснюють де ми зробили не так

кожний вечір без тебе нагадує: недовчили

вміти ходити по цвяхах і по дахах

стиснути осінь в обіймах як рідну і любу

загадати дожити удвох принаймні до ста

спрощується моя мова а з твоєю нічого не буде

твій герундій і перфект не зникне на вулицях ні у листах

Lyudmyla Diadchenko

∞

Autumn fills the windows — geese in skeins, colors spilling.

Fewer inverted adjectives every day,

My own language has so eroded that I no longer understand

How to write down what we’ve lived in such a way that’s right for me:

Tedious descriptions of homogeneous circumstances

Still do not explain where we went wrong.

Every night without you reminds me, we never learned

To walk on nails or rooftops,

Or squeeze the autumn as one familiar and beloved,

Living together for one hundred years.

I’ve had to simplify my language, but yours remains intact — your gerunds,

Your perfect tenses, will fade neither from the streets nor from your letters.

Translated by Padma Thornlyre

BIOS. FOR LYUDMYLA DIADCHENKO AND PADMA THORNLYRE

Lyudmyla Diadchenko was born in the village of Kyrylivka, also the birthplace of Ukraine's national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861 CE). Fittingly, she attended Kyiv's Taras Shevchenko National University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Literary Theory. She is Vice President of the Ukrainian Writers Association, and her three books (to date) include 2017's A Hen for the Turkish Man, named among the 10 best books published in the Ukrainian language that year. She and her American translator, Padma Thornlyre, have recently accepted an invitation from Portland, Oregon's No Reply Press to publish an exquisite, fine-press, 400-copy limited edition of 24 poems, Magnetic Storms, which will be presented in the original Ukrainian side-by-side with the English translation, in letterpress on handmade paper and cover stock that will also be hand-bound. Lyudmyla and Padma are now working on a manuscript of poems not included in Magnetic Storms, currently under the working title, Interrupt My Silence. As of this date, Dr. Diadchenko remains in Ukraine, where she is in hiding. Although she unintentionally left a large body of her poetry in her Kyiv apartment after the shelling began, she recently rescued them, and is shaken by what she saw.

Padma Thornlyre is a Colorado native who relocated to Raton, New Mexico in 2018. He holds his B.A. in English from Coe College and has published nine volumes of poetry, most recently The Anxiety Quartet (2020-2021), all from small presses. Of Ukrainian (Jew) and Scottish descent, Padma took a deep-dive into Ukrainian literature (especially the women) more than a decade ago, thanks to the catalog of Canada's Language Lantern Publications, and consequently brings an understanding of Ukrainian cultural and literary distinctiveness to the table. Although he does not know the Ukrainian language, he employs an online Ukrainian-English dictionary for his initial, word-by-word translations of Diadchenko's poetry, which he then reworks into contemporary American English. He is especially grateful for his cordial relationship with the Ukrainian poet herself, who helps guide him in hammering out her vision. Padma is the creator of Mad Blood, which has since 1990 provided (often private) venues for literary, visual and performing artists to present their work, and is about to reemerge as a literary/arts/cultural magazine after a 16-year absence. He is also the founder of the poetry co-op, Turkey Buzzard Press, about to release its 34th title, poet Michael Adams' posthumous Dancing at the Crossroads. 

Lyudmyla Diadchenko are selections from My Silence (working title)

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2 poems by Joan Mazza

Anxiety Rising

Blame the weight of headlines

that press down to smother with news

of glaciers melting, repeated wildfires,

locusts devouring the food supply.

Fear makes me want to return to old

remedies and rituals of rosaries, prayers,

that TM mantra I purchased in 1991. I’m

searching for a proper labyrinth among

my wooded paths where ghost pipes

grow in secret, obliged to sing the thirty

calls of the Carolina wren. My life is beans

and rice, bread and almonds, poems read

aloud by people dead for fifty years.

Despair is like drowning, the scent

of inhaled seawater blue and gold. Remind

me I know how to swim, won’t go over

the edge. I thrive and live out my years,

as did all those in my lineage. Every plant

and animal I see has endured, victors

in this struggle for survival amid food

shortages, droughts, and war. My ancestors

didn’t die in the Black Death, didn’t succumb

to cancer or heart failure until long after

they passed their genes to me. Life is a maze

of valleys and obstacles, a puzzle we solve piece

by jagged piece. Durable in all weather,

I’m stone and lichen, filled with other

organisms like any handful of black soil.

Grateful for Distractions

I wake and say thank you to stacks

of books around my bed, long stories

I can fall into and forget deaths added

to the climbing daily toll. Cookbooks,

genetics, paleontology, history.

Stored in boxes, music on cassettes

I haven’t heard in years. Old photos

still not scanned that will surely spark

another poem. Art supplies special

ordered still wait in new packaging call

my name. Without news on the radio,

I hear crows on the kitchen scraps

on the edge of dense woods, even with

the house closed against July’s record

breaking heat. I resurrect the big book

of sewing designs by Simplicity to page

through while I discern their paper patterns.

Now I bake Bundt cakes, madeleines,

cornbread shaped like corn in special pans

I bought and used only once. On the coffee

table, a crate waits filled with books

of writing prompts I promised to peruse

when I said I’d write one every day

for long months of quarantine.

The days run into one another, each one

a month, like the summers of my youth

except I know better than to sit out

in direct sun. In my silent house, I hear

my thoughts leap though their predictable

gymnastic phase at 3 AM. I’m normal,

not going crazy or believing in aliens

or conspiracies. Another 1200 dead.

Oh, look! I could draw from photos in my

field guide collection. Because it’s too hot

outside and the woods are full of ticks,

I’ll copy frogs and mushrooms, graduate

to birds and bees and butterflies.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Slipstream, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.

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poem by Lorrie Ness

Atonement

We were on the water the first time

I formed a loop and cut it through with my knife.

Blue and white plastic, suddenly unspun,

pulled apart the way orange roe swells to fill split skin

in the wake of a blade across the belly. He showed me how to cope

with a frayed end. With the flick of a Zippo

singed strands of nylon drooped before he crushed them

together between his thumb and finger.

Offshore again and neon rope dangling from my fist cuts

the grey haze, coils against the hull.

Its suppleness betrays

the tension required for strength. He sits on the bow

one foot sprawled on the railing, another curled behind.

His movements are practiced. Fishing

inside his breast pocket. Tapping the cellophane end

until a Marlboro shimmies out.

There is the pucker. A calloused hand concealing

an open flame, and then the draw.

Without even looking, he passes the lighter over his shoulder,

pulls the cigarette away from his lips.

I think of the first day he handed me the club,

silver eyes open the whole time

as I swung it down. Scales splattered my bibs

while he looked on, taking drag after drag.

Today, he’s cut the engines while I tie off buoys,

set pots before slack tide. Today,

my fingers will burn.

Lorrie Ness is a poet writing in a rural corner of Virginia. When she’s not writing, she can be found stomping through the woods, watching birds and playing in the dirt. Her work can be found in numerous journals, including Turtle Island Quarterly, THRUSH, Palette Poetry and Sky Island Journal. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021 and her chapbook, “Anatomy of a Wound” was published by Flowstone Press in July of 2021.

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poem by Sara Backer

As I Turn Off the Light

Oh, Moth, I, too, steer by moonlight.

I never thought the night sky could be rigged

against me. We beat ourselves against glass panes,

confused by lamps. They say we’re in love with light,

but that’s not true—we don’t want to go inside.

We are determined to fly even as we struggle,

weaken, and spiral into hot bright death.

The rest of us, disrupted, disabled, no longer

pollinate or procreate. Fast or slow, death

is contagious. Yours sets the path for ours.

Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck (Flowstone Press 2019) follows two poetry chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus which won the 2015 Turtle Island chapbook award. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art and reads for The Maine Review. Recent and forthcoming publications include Tar River Poetry, Slant, CutBank, Lake Effect, Poetry Northwest, and Kenyon Review.

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poem by Leonore Wilson

Ritual

And the children dabbled their fingers

in the ruse

of brook water;

and sometimes

one boy would tug

the hook out of the gills

of a wild trout

like pulling

spirit from matter;

and beauty was a little boat,

a lolling fawn of shyness

and surrendered

repentance,

as if the world

settled down to slumber;

and the mist rose quietly

and spread

too softly to hear exactly

what secret it shared,

and sometimes

we would all plunge together at last

in the abraded tongues

of rivulets while now and then

a yellow warbler

swept down

the branch of the wild

lilac,

or low on the osier dogwood

and into the untame

hillocks that lifted once

from the skin of earth,

and so which gods

had surrendered themselves

to the milk snake of hours

which gods, whose strong

chords

of hands were afraid

of nothing,

and what did they teach us

but that we were as feral

as each rifted mammal,

as the porphyry

of bones buried in bedrock,

the pine siskin

with its lip of longing

like hope that pins itself to desire;

and didn’t we feel

the soul

lies in the body fragile

as the early mothers

who bonded

with sons

and would never

again know that curious

hallowed sense

of containment

Leonore Wilson is a professor of English and creative writing. Her work has been in such magazines as Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Terrain, Rattle, Third Coast, Madison Review, etc. Her historic ranch and house burned down recently in the LNU wildfire of Napa Valley.

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poem by Elisabeth Harrahy

The Truth the Birds Know

Watched over by a mob of crows that fuss and call as old crones

the man and the woman stride through the forest on leaves tossed

by gnarled branches of ancient oaks. Leaves like rose petals guide

them to a meadow bright with sunlight and the red, ripe fruit of sumacs

that stand at attention as the two pass through to where the path ends

in a stony slope. The man and the woman descend, find themselves

on the edge of a musky moat, thick with calla lily and alluring

but poisonous nightshade. They pause to look at one another before

joining hands, leaping onto a rotting plank that draws them like a vein

past the stagnant pool, pungent with decay, toward the heart of the bog

and on their way, tufts of cotton from the tussock sedge fly in celebration

and the white flowers of the leatherleaf lift their tiny heads. In the center

of the peatland, showy lady slippers wait beside a bed of sphagnum

that floats precarious over acidic water. Overcome by heat and hunger

the man and the woman undress before sinking into the velvet moss

that undulates in time as they move entwined among the carnivorous

plants sprouting ravenous, their mouths opening to bare pink throats

like pitcher plants seeking to be quenched, their sticky skin glistening

like sundews laid bare, needing to be nourished. The man and the woman

feed on each other in this secret place, secluded by a wall of tamaracks

while a cricket trills a serenade. And the man and the woman are satisfied—

they are fed. A pair of cranes flies overhead.

Elisabeth Harrahy’s poems have appeared in Zone 3, Sky Island Journal, Passengers Journal, The Café Review, Plainsongs, Ghost City Review and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and she received an Editor’s Choice Award in the Paterson Literary Review’s 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. She is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

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2 poems by Tamara Kaye Sellman

QUEETS RIVER INVOCATION

Then came gravel,

came bridges.

Ferns crowding the road.

Dust in pillows behind us.

We were never alone.

Instead, remote. We were there.

Returned.

Our pilgrimage.

Theirs.

Each summer, a divination.
More shadows, mosquitoes.

Bits of robin’s egg blue

broken into triangles

by the shadow canopy,
or else lost inside

Old Man’s beard.

The crucible, barren,

cold upon arrival.

Our circle. Energies.

Hardpan earth tamped.

Layers of needles.

A party of gathered

kindling. Salutations.

The red hand pump cranked.

Buckets of water

dripping many paths.

Then, our fire.

A pot over flame.

One blessing.

Broken bread. Bottles
of red wine passed.

The harmonica bleeds.

Woodsmoke as sacred
perfume. A night cathedral
of fir and larch. Witnesses.

We inscribe regrets,
newsprint fed to this altar,

ashes flushed to the sky

a holy smudge.

Laughter at familiars

lead us midnight blind

to tents trenched inside sigils,

pitched beneath a web

of tarps. High. Expectant.

Then came the morning’s

dewy baptism.

Roosevelt’s tears.

LOVE LETTER TO A GRANDMOTHER

I saw you, the moment you passed, in the gaze of a narwhal

breaching alongside the sinking galleon where friends and I

were playing cards. I’m not sure what caused the capsize.

The hold filled with water on that blustery, white-sunned

March morning, the waves like deep blue bowls lipped in

cream. We were poets, elbow to elbow at the table, out

for a dream’s excursion in Admiralty Inlet. We knew of sails

and salt and spray and wind but not of the horned, barnacle-

crusted whales circling the tilting bow. The boat shuddered.

Jacks and spades and jokers flew like scared birds. We tumbled

from benches, clinging to the mast, the rail, the ancient rudder’s

spindled wheel until the great turning, then plunged into icy

ocean clear as bubbled Spanish glass. You must have known

I still feared deep water then. When your calcified spiral rose,

I wrapped my hands around it, a child clinging to a parent’s

forefinger. You launched me from the freeze; I watched

the skin of seawater drain from your crown. In that ancient,

rheumy eye I recognized your wink, same as that last time

in Sequim when I knew in my marrow I’d never see you again.

When I woke, my stomach was still lost at the bottom of the sea,

sweat cold at my neck, and I shook like I’d been holding on

to life for far too long. When my brother called to say your lungs

had filled with water, I was still in bed, wringing truth from sheets.

I knew then that you’d spent your entire life buoying me to

that next horizon, a link in a chain I’d only ever reserved for you.

Tamara Sellman lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her hybrid collection, INTENTION TREMOR, was released by MoonPath Press in January 2021. Her most recent work has appeared in Verse Daily, Cirque, Gargoyle, Conclave, Burning House Press, Hunnybee, Loud Coffee Press, and Winning Writers. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and has earned other awards. She works as a sleep educator, healthcare writer, and MS advocate/columnist. In her spare time, she's an avid kitchen gardener who camps frequently, often writing new work around the campfire.

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poem by Mary Beth Hines

Ghost Apple

All fall it ripened in gnarled arms, dangled

flush for the pluck and plunder of a hungry

hand, a touch of tongue, but was left behind.

Shriveled fruit by February’s seesaw swing

of freeze to thaw, it bittered through two days

of sleet, clenched and clung encased in ice,

slipped skin, seeped through cracks, dawned

to peer through its newfound hull at huddled

hives, rows of bowed, dowager trees.

The grower and his child roamed the grounds,

balloon heads drifting, fretting over wreckage,

halted when they saw it—all exiled glaze, reflection.

The girl reached up, palms arched for embrace.

He pulled her back to snap a proving photo.

Ghost apple, he murmured and swept it

from the orchard across time zones into cell phones

where it hovers swathed in silver on the limb

of letting go into grasping, sprightly fingers.

Mary Beth Hines’s debut poetry collection, Winter at a Summer House, was published by Kelsay Books in November 2021. Her poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction appear or will soon appear in Crab Orchard Review, Tar River Poetry, Turtle Island Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.marybethhines.com.

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poem by Michael Spring

boulder made of sea lions

through the fog, the boulder I want

to climb appears like a conglomeration

of sea lions

because the river is thunderous with snowmelt

I can’t hear my own footsteps

the scramble of river rocks and driftwood

looks like dismembered bones

the boulder

is slumberous and slippery

I climb carefully to the top

the river rages, booms

what would happen if that boulder

were indeed made up of sea lions

and if they woke – flush with new flesh –

would I slip and fall

would their rolling bodies crush me

and pour me like a river into the river with them

no, I could make the jump

to that tree limb

as the river would rush below my dangling feet –

I could then figure out

what I’d do with the rest of my life –

as I would escape that blubbery surge

from pulling me down with them

Michael Spring is the author of five poetry books and one children's book. His most recent book is dentro do som/ inside the sound – a bilingual book (poems translated into Portuguese by Maria Joao Marques) published by Companhio Das Ilhas, Portugal, 2021. His poetry awards include The Turtle Island Poetry Award, runner-up award for the Paris Book Festival, and an honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Other distinctions include a Luso-American Fellowship from DISQUIET International. His poems have appeared in numerous publications; including: Atlanta Review, Crannog, Flyway, Gavea-Brown, Innisfree, The Midwest Quarterly, and Spillway. He is a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Flowstone Press.

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poem by Robert Beveridge

THE LAST TWO POEMS YOU SENT CAME CLOSE

ping-pong balls bob in the pond,

whistle through tiny holes poked

in them by nails. where they entered

I’ve no idea, but they’ve floated

down to this little hollowed-out

place where once, perhaps, kids

dug for minnows. Now, a trio

of them turn, lazy, in a circle,

dodge the first raindrops

of an April storm.

Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in FERAL, Noble/Gas, The Pointed Circle, Neologism, Loch Raven, among others.

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2 poems by Charles Rossiter

Up on Capitol Hill at the Tune Inn I Hear America Singing

Sitting Bull has returned,

he's at the drive-in movies

eating up the big screen

demanding hostages,

but everyone ignores him and

goes out for more popcorn.

They're tired of the wobblies and the KKK

they're tired of Black Lives Matter

they say they're tired of Sitting Bull.

Barracuda singles move among

dark booths looking

for fresh meat, Willie Nelson

on the juke box and

across the street congress

is endlessly debating

while citizens grow increasingly

restless and through it all

I hear America singing

Yes, this is America, pardner,

don't you know a free country when you see one?

Come here, son, have yourself a beer

settle down, relax,

this one's on the house

and there's plenty more where that came from,

on the house, plenty more,

on the house.

Mother Jones turns restless in the earth

Malcolm's old wounds still bleeding

Nam's black wall recalls dead names

Have another beer son,

settle down, this is the voice

of America talking to you,

radio free six pack.

Don't be so serious, son.

It takes a heap of living to make a planet home.

When we push those little old borders around

it's just sort of like rearranging the furniture,

and them nu-clear bombs, hell boy

ain't nobody fool enough to set one of them suckers off,

now is there, boy,

I ask you,

now is there?

On the High Road to Taos

There was the shrine church at Chimayo

with the room of abandoned canes

and crutches, the pool of holy dirt

on the floor, pictures of the sick

and dead, little memory objects.

Higher up, the cemetery

with the motorcycle shrine,

the plank floor church,

the little village just to the side

where we stopped to piss

in the schoolhouse rest room.

The kids were outside at recess.

We yelled over to the teacher

who said it was ok to go on in.

At the shop across from

the mission in Las Trampas

we were tempted by a free

half-wolf puppy, but a half-wolf

deserves better than life in a city.

We talked about him

clear across Kansas. His eyes

were an uncanny shade of blue.

Charles Rossiter, NEA Fellowship recipient, hosts the audio website poetrypoetry.com. He has authored numerous books and chapbooks of poetry. He recently edited In The Spirit of T’ao Ch’ien an anthology of American poets who write in the spirit of the ancient Chinese. His work has been featured on NPR and at the Chicago Blues Festival. His latest collection is, Greem Mountain Meditations, (FootHills Publishing, 2019).

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Special feature of our contributing editor Jared Smith (3 poems)

The Everywhere

I have been the wind

have ascended the stairs

danced as water on a silver stream

I have shaken the house

worn the robes of ancient gods

lived long in the light of evening

and learned to sing from shadows

Ohhh these are gone in the mist of time

When you enter the awareness

you touch all things simultaneously

there are no words for going back

When you enter there is no direction

the stars are in your blood

the miles of space that were separation

When you leave you cannot come back

but what you left comes back into you.

You enter the everywhere.

In the Before Light of Morning

In the before light of morning

when water still condenses from thin air

as do shadows that might be animals

forged from the darkness about them and

everything you have dreamed of is still

waiting to take shape in our world

where people have learned to fly

and communicate with the dead

generations that dreamed of us

and wrote epic poems and journeys

that would be melted down from rock,

words that would be carried on ether

condensing in minds before sun rises.

In the before light of morning

all energy comes from the sun but

energy is only the transfer, the flow,

from ungodly heat to ungodly cold,

from lightness to darkness. Without

darkness the before light is nothing.

An ashen figure dropping icicles to the wind

which exists only in a tomb of the mind.

In the before light of morning

grande dames rise on wings of lavender lace,

owls return to their haunted trees

and herons stand silent in the mist,

one foot firm in the mud and one in feather.

These are caverns you cannot rise from.

Their gray walls are ethereal and ghostly

filled with the shadows of spirits

landscaped in the guttural world of oink.

A Deep Wilderness

I walk along a path that shadow animals have made

from one hunting ground to another across stone,

and I reach down to pluck the only sign of life

that is obvious in this harsh setting…a seed

where nothing has yet set down its roots.

I press it to my lips and bite hard into its skin.

Folded inside this hard shell of a seed is a wilderness

seething to escape, but still shielded from the winds

that will brush and whisper among its leaves

and from those leaves lift a song

that carries an army of tumbled branches,

roots reaching out, grasping earth and holding.

All these lives from one seed, wind-pollinated.

The tree will not grow on barren rock.

The leaves lie dormant without rain.

The seed a time capsule cemented in sunlight.

There is a word for this

but it is beyond the range of what is known.

Is it that a word is a seed as well in a wind

that waits for other seeds before it blooms,

sending out an angry army of conflicting thought,

tumbled branches and roots, singing first in monotone.

What would you lay down in print to make meaning

of scattered leaves becoming maple, pine, aspen, oak

tossed by winds they do not have an understanding of?

It is that time of year the sap is rising

and old men have placed tin buckets along dark trunks

watching and waiting to see what secrets drop in,

boiling it all down and hoping for something darker,

sweeter that will melt in the mouth, on the tongue,

and whatever it is they will give it word, a seed

with meaning that will stretch across generations.

In the beginning that is what it was.

If there is one seed then there will be more

and unknown conversations will take place.

From the forest floor detritus fresh soil will appear

and who knows what invasive species will hold

or what breaks down the stone of meanings.

What brings what life to what dark seeds,

whether fire or frost or rain or drought.

In the beginning this is what it was.

Shadows follow shadows that we believe in

but the world and word are what they are.

Jared Smith's 16th book of poetry, A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life, will be released by New York Quarterly Books in the spring of 2022. Jared is a poetry editor of Turtle Island Quarterly, and has served on the editorial boards of Home Planet News, The New York Quarterly, and The Pedestal Magazine, as well as serving on the boards of directors of arts and literary non-profits in New York, Illinois, and Colorado. His work has appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies in this country and abroad, including in translation in Mexico, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.