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13 MILES FROM CLEVELAND
Volume 3, Number 1 2010
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Joseph Stanton
LIBRARIAN OF THE NIGHT
for Loren Eiseley
The light of day is a habit
the mind puts on
and tries to believe in,
reading volumes and velocities
of every bird in flight,
trajectories of all the flowers
that have changed the world.
But always, always
we are groping for a way
into the darkness:
a hole in the hedge
that leads to impossible truths,
where reasonable madness schemes
in the attic of the heart
known as the head,
making unimaginable lightnings
crackle blue-white
across the middle of the night.
Eiseley says
that the searches of science
must be sad autumnal magic:
that sedate, white stepping stones
must become pathways wild
and haunted by the moon.
Seeking, he says, the secrets there,
we must become all eye,
a pharos light, a beacon,
searching
by turn and turn about
in the hollow of the skull,
where the world takes place
and does not take place,
knowing that the dark
is teeming with stars
that live by burning
out.
Joseph Stanton is a Professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where he teaches art history and American studies.
His work has appeared in such publications as New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Abraxas, and Harvard Review.
He lives in 'Aiea, Hawai'i.
Richard Wazejewski
Daniel and the Desert
Richard Wazejewski is an artist of Polish/Austrian descent. His work is mainly influenced by the surrealist movement
and he is motivated by the desire to liberate the workings of the subconscious mind, disrupting conscious thought
processes by irrationality and enigma. He lives in the United Kingdom.
Kyle Hemmings
THE SKY IS NOT SHELTERING
I followed you across an ocean and a childhood
from Bristol to Rabat to the desert
where you walk unknowingly over the bones
of Berbers, Barbary pirates, Almoravid princes,
who died in the fiery glory of their treason.
The sand leaves no scars, no signature of eternity
no stretch marks from the half-born.
I’m the man you hide in your closet.
On
the streets I follow you, close and long
as a shadow at noon. And here it is always
hot as the noon before and the noon before that.
I am part daddy, part-you and the you
you wish to throw to the beggars, the thieves
silent as knives, the women selling porecelain jugs,
their faces as firm as the last layer of glaze
the outcasts carrying secrets inside a carafe.
I’m the man you hide in your closet.
I know what you hunger for as I watch,
sneaking between the corners of a Mosque.
You, selling your stories to a young boy
who can only half-understand your language
but can fully comprehend your intent.
You, selling your stories to a lover
with a potential of dust, phosphate in his veins.
You want him rootless, ruthless, ruinous.
I’m the man you hide in your closet.
DRIVING LIZ TAYLOR
Driving Liz Taylor past city districts
of cracking concrete, the closed eyes of shops,
under the canopy of night, plexus of stars,
the contrast in old black and white films
that left no room for grey thoughts
the flaking of tea room dialogue,
crumbs for the terminally disenchanted.
"Hurry," says Liz from the backseat,
before I grow too old to ever be young
and they will perform another
useless tracheotomy that will leave
me speechless, deprive me
of mustang logic."
They're showing a restored version
of National Velvet, private screening.
Like that disabled jockey,
I'm the driver who can neither walk or run
but on a horse,
I remember who I once was
and Liz is all smiles
still the velvet lining of beauty
wearing that dream of red ribbons
dresses below the unblemished knee,
riding past chaste trees
jumping over white washed fences
that are not marred by age
or what life has done to the survivors
of a thousand surgeries,
waking up in cold aseptic rooms
men in masks hovering above us
giving us new names and histories,
Will we ever shake off the amnesia?
Tonight,
that brilliant glittering horse
is something Liz and I
will both claim as ours
in the clear endless pasture
of a film that is spliced
reel too real.
Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. His work has appeared in such publications as Neon Literary Magazine,
Literary Tonic, Unlikely 2.0., and Why Vandalism?
Peter Ciccariello
Poor Yorick,-remembering,-preparing
Peter Ciccariello is an artist, poet, and photographer. His work has appeared in such places as MOCA The Museum of Computer Art,
Oregon Literary Review, The Long Island Quarterly, and Otoliths. His book Imaginal Landscapes, an experiment with the poem in
landscape as it relates to poetic geography was published by Xexoxial Editions. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Tim Kahl
ISHI'S BRAIN
Ishi’s long-lost brain was finally found still floating
in its own private bath of formaldehyde. After all
those years, anthropologists have yet to determine
its intentions. Does it want to stay unnoticed or
be counted as one of the lucky to be found?
The anthropologists are divided on whether
Ishi’s brain would want to participate in a survey
to measure the states of mind in humans.
But living alone so long in a jar with one’s beliefs,
Ishi’s brain realizes every opportunity to
contribute is important. So the brain of the last wild
man on the continent is ready to become part of a
sample study. Its beliefs are ready to be counted among
the anxieties of the obese, the anguish of asthma-sufferers,
the dread of the chronically fatigued, the rapt
attention of the kids on lithium. The first question is
whether it considers itself luckier than, say,
the brain of Amelia Earhart, lost at sea
in cold water, moving fast within the deep
currents among all the primitive creatures.
Ishi’s brain floats, undead, in the quiet formaldehyde,
poised for its adventure going back to California.
Ishi’s brain wills itself to non sequitur.
All those years it has thought about all kinds of
unrelated things while it sat isolated from the life
swirling around it in the scattered pockets of light.
It sat, feeding on its own beliefs, one by one, in
no particular order. Now one more day passes.
The clouds pass over the Pit River Reservation.
The tribe believes rain is coming, and the thunder
won’t make sense. It won’t make sense at all,
after stopping to hover over Kansas
in a cloud ready to burst above the prairie.
They believe it was luck that brought the rain, but it is
the will to go unnoticed that makes it soak into the ground.
MARCH
March in Ohio. Spring arrived carefully.
The new growth on the elms was still a rumor.
The ice on the water in the ditches was thawing.
Roads were muddy. Railroads shut down,
and strikers back east silenced the factories.
The grackles were complaining to each other that
there hadn’t been enough to eat during winter.
The winter had been brutal. Thirty-five days from
Tuscarawas St. to Washington with his blond daughter
on horseback leading the way, Jacob Coxey
led a march of hungry men from Massillon to
demand relief from the federal government.
They left on Easter Day in 1894,
a year after the depression, with his wife and
infant son named Legal Tender packed into
a touring carriage. They rode barges across
the Chesapeake, camped on the north edge of
the city as they waited for their comrades to
arrive from Philadelphia and San Francisco.
They were led by reporters on bicycles to
the steps of the Capitol, carrying placards
that openly displayed their mock irony:
Help the Poor Plutocrats, Help a Poor Coal Baron
Help the Feeble Steel Industry. Coxey read
his formal protest, and after he was hauled away,
the ragtag group of protesters pressed forward.
The ranks of the police on horseback
left them scattered, and a week later Coxey
was fined and imprisoned for walking on
the grass and spoiling the Capitol shrubbery.
The threat of Coxey’s Army was over,
and the editors of the big city newspapers
on the East Coast laughed uneasily.
Their prestige was still intact, safe from
the wild yelps of the hinterlands.
Ohio would have to mature in the shadows
where forgotten protests lie, where resentment
festers, where spring arrives carefully
to preside over all of its grackles,
those despised but diligent birds.
Tim Kahl lives in Elk Grove, California. His work has appeared in such publications as Berkeley Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner,
Indiana Review, South Dakota Quarterly, and The Texas Review. He is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009).
He grew up in Massillon, Ohio.
John M. Bennett
Maya Heads
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John M. Bennett has been published extensively and has exhibited and performed his word art in numerous venues.
He is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
William Doreski
SUBTLE WEATHER
A big cold moon in zero sky.
Driving home after dinner
I feel the distance rehearse
deaths that will dimple the new year
with evasions and downcast smiles.
Two friends with cancer will deploy
themselves in the ether. Someone
will crash into a tree and crush
organs he’d pretended to respect.
Someone else will hang or poison
himself to evade a suspicion
that he wasn’t really himself.
No mortician will close these wounds
tightly enough to prevent
ghosts from roaming the village.
No one will recite Boethius,
or Emerson on the Oversoul.
No sky god will descend to press
our hands and weep and console us
and claim life is for the living.
I peer at the shoulder for deer.
Headlights sometimes catch their eyes
unblinking as holes in the world.
They want to leap into my path
and fulfill some obscure desire,
but on the straight high-speed stretch
between Dublin and Peterborough
I gaze so hard at the snowbanks
that my eyes rattle like bearings
gone dry. The moon looks guilty,
dangling over the Pack Monadnocks,
framed by a patch of indigo sky.
Driving safely as half a bottle
of Chianti allows, I enter
the village with headlights probing
like feelers, alert to nuances
of pale television glow and lava
lamps in upstairs rooms, hoping
to spite this subtle weather
with some ordinary human touch.
William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared
in such publications as Massachusetts Review, Antioch Review, New England Quarterly, and Modern Philology.
He lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Gabriel A. Levicky
Scream
Gabriel A. Levicky is a writer and artist who is originally from the former Czechoslovakia. He calls his collage work
"gablevages." He lives in New York, New York. "Scream" is from a series entitled The Nice History of Mirrors.
Erica Bernheim
THE HUMILIATION PARADE
on evolution and photography
How brave and dangerous you are
to select this audience, then to suggest
it close its eyes. How beautiful you are
from such a great distance, brandishing
the heretic’s fork, alarming scales
scaling disappointing heights of desire.
Yes, but the water is in you, inflections
of an organist, happy-go-lucky and discreet.
We love people who cannot keep secrets.
We have secrets we make our own, the
language, the percentage, the concern,
the fortress. I have been studying your
secret organisms, piloting your armies,
collecting locusts and oven birds. Each
pain-filled island is filled with its own
closest relatives, with barnacles living
and fossils, tumbler pigeons one step
closer to something that began with E
and ended with you, spinning, directly,
the bottle only pointing at you, warbling
ant bird, monosyllabic and comforting
to some. I have studied the morphology
of your bills, the sample corpses lined up
in immobile panic. Not everything has
been said. We still have creatures who
can swallow us whole. We are ragged
beneath. Stop. I’ll show you a picture.
Erica Bernheim was born in New Jersey and grew up in Ohio and Italy. Her work has appeared in such publications
as Boston Review, The Iowa Review, and Canarium. She lives in Lakeland, Florida.
Walter Bargen
A THOUSAND SILK SUITS
He stood at the sun-scarred,
dune-baked, sweat-maimed border
as the run-down writhing snake of horizon
slithered into night. Windows tinted black,
limo stopped at the checkpoint. Papers checked,
the barbed wire gate swung open. Crossing between
countries, a car door ripped open,
a man dragged from the back seat,
a pistol barrel shoved into his mouth.
Each scream a shudder of delight.
Ask the Russian ballerina.
Ask the pregnant woman.
Ask the French students forced
to perform before a video camera.
At the Olympic finish line, the prison.
The soccer team fed bread, water.
Twenty blows daily to the soles of losing feet.
Amputations at the awards ceremony.
He'll circle his 1,200 luxury cars.
He'll play a shell game. Guess
which one he's driving. He'll hide
on his island in the Tigris,
hope no one remembers how to swim.
He'll wear all of his silk suits at once
and hope that he will never finish
taking them off.
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
Under Piazza Euclid, under paving stones,
under heaped raw earth for founding another Roman
multi-story parking garage. From too far back
in some dimly lit, curtain-shrouded room,
dark alley, away from time’s far fields,
come thumbprints on lead-encased boxes
of wax that protect flour-molded dolls.
Police forensics identify them as a woman’s,
a witch’s magic cast up to the surface again.
From Apuleius’ Metamorphoses comes clear
the deadly apparatus: foul spices, unintelligible metal
plaques, remains of ill-omened birds,
beast-savaged skulls, spike-covered
noses and fingers, charms cast over pulsating
viscera, shrouds of stifling incense.
Ovid worried over secretly skewered livers
affecting his love life. Hidden in the house’s floors
and walls, Tacitus tells us of human body parts,
incantations, lead tablets engraved
with the name Germanicus,
grandson of Augustus, heir of Tiberius,
who died of curses that bind tight.
How could Victoricus the charioteer ever win
the Carthage race if his horses’ clay legs
were bound, their eyes gouged, their soul
and hearts so twisted they couldn’t breathe?
The same spell cast upon the miniature doughy driver.
The once-hidden, buried, nailed-down curse
pulled out of a sandy excavation survives
as the winner did not. Where are the witches,
the diviners, the soothsayers, to cast their apotropaic
spells, to bind us tight, to curse us with peace?
Walter Bargen has published thirteen books of poetry and two chapbooks of poetry. His poems have recently appeared
in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, River Styx, Seattle Review, and New Letters. In 2008, he was appointed to be the
the first poet laureate of Missouri. He lives in Ashland, Missouri.
Mary Ellen Derwis
Rendezvous
Mary Ellen Derwis lives in Brecksville, Ohio. Her work has appeared in such publications as Otoliths, Oregon Literary Review,
Bosphorus Art Project Ouarterly, and Unlikely 2.0.
Jason Floyd Williams
office hours.
The office’s daily drip, drip, drip
drudgery is so anaconda-coiling tight
in stifling any breath, any spark,
any raised hand of
extracurricular creativity.
In fact, because the office
has no windows, & because the office
was built on a landfill—
hints of methane in the air,
traces of blank,
sprinkles of blank,
teaspoons of blank,—
there is a ubiquitous feeling
of being confined:
like a mine-shaft, a coffin,
a tomb, an embalming lecture,
an accompanying taxidermy lab,
a wax-museum.
The sounds of the over-worked,
like sizzling well-done burgers,
& the echoed murmurs of fake laughter—
a busted laugh track—
repetitively crawl into the ear,
into the brain, until it’s just
subconsciously accepted.
That’s how it has worked w/ all
the senses.
Smells of burnt coffee, stale air,
an unattended tar kettle;
the soft blue, white & gray blurs
of computer screens,
of the office walls,
of the carpets,
of the Friday dress casual—
heavy laundry-detergent faded
in everything, in demeanor, in desire:
the descendants of annoyed
horse-flies-at-the-picnic school secretaries,
hand veins protruding, like vines
on diseased trees, from carpel tunnel complaints,
then to shoulder & neck complaints, always
pushing that lil stone gray mouse
back & forth, here & there,
a tug-of-war between
water-cooler, thermostatic chats
of too hot/too cold,
The Bear Family’s pie-contest grievances
against Goldilocks as the judge.
There is an entanglement
in doing the same things each day:
making the same calls, answering
the same questions, addressing
the same problems.
The worker’s thoughts—the sane thoughts of
I won’t be here for long,
I don’t want to be like
the others here—
begin to drift
like everything else.
It’s a sleeper-hold—
Superfly Snuka’s headlock.
The vines from the trees wrap
around you, mummy wrappings,
the quicksand of the job cushions
your footing until a couple months
become several years,
your outside goals become
inside aims &
the air, the air, the air.
Jason Floyd Williams lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in such publications as My Favorite Bullet,
The City, Nerve Cowboy, Cherry Bleeds, and Opium 2.0.
Doug Draime
ON BEING TOLD I DON'T QUALIFY FOR A JOB
I'VE BEEN WORKING AT FOR SEVEN YEARS
I use Bukowski as a bookmark
for Mayakovsky. They tell me their
similarities are extremely vague;
but what does the lit crowd know about anything?
Because I am looking
for glues to the madness
of the systems of the world,
which box us in
to qualifications for the
levels of callousness and inhumanity
we are to receive.
I work for the public school system, and it
eats people and shallows them down,
as effortlessly and quickly
as Bukowski did cans of beer;
sheds them as easily
as Mayakovsky, the dandy,
discarded his
clothes. They don’t care if my
coworkers and I
live or die. Its the way of all
systems, all corporations, all governing
bodies; depersonalizing and
soulless as a cockroach
breaking wind.
Doug Draime lives in Oregon. His poetry, short stories, and plays have appeared in numerous publications.
Martin Ott
COLLECTING PEOPLE
He gathered acquaintances like a drill
sergeant rounding up troops for chow.
He dug up the fibulas and shriveled
molars of ancient tribes and stashed
them with his college bong beneath
his spare futon in Atwater Village.
He set his TV to record every shrieker
about collectors who squirreled away
their victims in crawl spaces and nests
beneath concrete hastily poured.
He was a cyber sniper who clipped
virtual friends in staggering numbers.
For every reunion evite and joyless
family get-together he engineered,
there were equal notches in bedposts,
and returned smiles etched into skin,
the itch within him unreachable from
his serious occupation of humanity
quantified. He collected people but
knew few, and forgot himself often.
He clacked his abacus on his stoop,
calculating the zenith of shadowy
lovers crossing beneath porch lights.
Every morning he woke alone,
twisted in paper dolls sliced from sheets,
his collection as incomplete as day
without the comprehension of tomorrow.
Martin Ott is a freelance writer and a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
His poetry and fiction have appeared in such publications as Poetry East, Tampa Review, New Plains Review, The Literary Bohemian,
and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Jonathan Kane
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you died (but my love never will)
Jonathan Kane was born in Miami Beach, Florida. He currently lives in Naples, Florida.
Justin Hyde
on the banana boat
once you've
crossed a certain line
it's hard to be satisfied
with jesus
and the wisdom of middle managers,
nicodemus told me
one night
during a bout of insomnia
at the correctional facility.
he was in for
stealing a little-debbie truck
outside a gas station
while on a whiskey bender.
he never talked about it
but his file
said he was president of a bank
until his wife
drowned their newborn daughter
and hung herself
from an attic rafter
in ninety-seven.
see you
on the banana boat chief,
is what he said to me
the day
he discharged.
that was
a few
months ago.
this morning
my newspaper tells me
he's been shot to death
trying to break into a
drive through pharmacy
with a sledgehammer.
Justin Hyde lives in Des Moines, Iowa. His work has appeared in such publications as Eviscerator Heaven,
New York Quarterly, Poetry Cemetary, and The Iowa Review.
Rebecca Schumejda
THE CORNER CHOP SHOP
Before chain supermarkets,
women went to The Corner Chop Shop
to select cuts of meat.
With their children in tow,
they flirted
for the juiciest cut;
and smiled, as if they were special
when the Butcher handed over
thin sliced ham
to keep their children quiet.
Pickled pigs feet, eggs,
and homemade beef jerky,
in large glass jars
were simple pleasures.
Willy the Whale
used the walk-in as his office.
He conducted business
in between racks of
hanging carcasses.
He wrapped cash
in butcher paper
and lucky men walked out
with their winnings
under both arms.
Men sat around tables
draped with red and white checkered cloths.
They’d sip espresso and talk about
last night’s game or fight.
Back then, everyone knew each other.
Back then, there were three pool halls
in this town and
the Butcher was a lucky man.
Now there are five supermarkets
and one dying pool hall in this town.
The Butcher shoots pool all afternoon
then heads off to the bars to forget:
his forced retirement, alimony,
and deteriorating heart.
One time, while playing nine-ball
with my husband, the Butcher confessed
that sometimes he walks down meat aisles
just to poke holes in the plastic wrap
that imprisons precut beef.
This is all the energy he has left for revenge.
Rebecca Schumejda lives in New York's Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in such publications as Night Train,
Trailer Park Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, and New York Quarterly.
John Moore Williams
o_i_ll_spill
John Moore Williams is a visual and verbal poet who has published in numerous journals and several anthologies. He is the author
of three chapbooks of lexical poetry and was one third of the trio that created [+!] a full-length collection of words and imagery from
Calliope Nerve. He lives in Oakland, California.
Dennis Mahagin
Bob Ross the PBS Painter Patiently
Walks Us Through The Peace Sign
Well now,
this week I think we’ll start out
swashing our numbered canvas
with an itty bitty burnt umber
stick figure—give him
a smiley sunspot for
a pie hole, red rooster ruff
on beatific brow, just…
so, and next?—heck
why not go ahead and blow off
both his clown feet with a rusty half-moon
Claymore mine swathed in creamy, wavy
Persian sand swale disguise…Okay - Zee- Way – Zee ?
Now, I think we’re ready for the upraised Popeye-
sized evangelistic arms to come clean
detached thanks to shrapnel
tracers from a Jihad dirt clod
IED, until our Matchstick Boy,
he starts duck-walking figure eights,
(you know, at this point in our picture
he sort of reminds me
—just a smidgeon!—of my good and kind
uncle Larry in South Dakota, right before
his awful, awful wheat threshing machine
mishap in ’93) …
Oh, I do think he’s
starting to take shape
—look there!—
now he’s spurting
crimson geysers from a neck that’s lost
its loose-strung head in a cartoon balloon feud
with Connie Chung, over the most arousing, yet
self-effacing way to phrase a Nightly News
body count…
Okay-Zee, we got a little
sidetracked,
but what say
we go ahead and give him
his arms back? That’s certainly the kind
of civic generosity PBS is famous for!
Then, if he hugs himself
real tight, we’ll protract
a perfect circle
’round the Chop-A-Block torso,
and he’ll be
just right for lapel pins, Volvo bumper stickers
and retro black light posters to adorn the bedroom
walls of deeply-troubled adolescent boys.
Dennis Mahagin's poems and stories have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, 3 A.M., 42 Opus, Stirring, Juked, Thieves Jargon,
FRiGG, Unlikely Stories, and Underground Voices, among other publications. He lives and works in Washington State.
Volume 3, Number 1 2010 (top of page)
Volume2, Number 2 2009
Archives
Home Page
13 MILES FROM CLEVELAND
Edited by Joe Balaz
Joe Balaz lives in northeast Ohio in the Greater Cleveland area. He edited Ramrod--A Literary and Art Journal of Hawai'i and was also
the editor of Ho'omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.
All works appearing in 13 Miles from Cleveland are the sole property of their respective authors and artists
and may not be reproduced in any way or form without their permission. © 2010
Volume 3, Number 1 2009 (top of page)
Volume2, Number 2 2009
Archives
Home Page
13 MILES FROM CLEVELAND
Edited by Joe Balaz
Joe Balaz lives in northeast Ohio in the Greater Cleveland area. He edited Ramrod--A Literary and Art Journal of Hawai'i and was also
the editor of Ho'omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.
All works appearing in 13 Miles from Cleveland are the sole property of their respective authors and artists
and may not be reproduced in any way or form without their permission. © 2010