Volume 1 Number 1

Volume 1, Number 1 2008

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Tony Quagliano

BETWEEN A ROCK AND MAHATMA GANDHI

Between a rock and Mahatma Gandhi
which is better?

                                                                                    a rock is a perfectly fine
                                                                                    aggregation
                                                                                    of sub-atomic particles
                                                                                    Mahatma Gandhi alive is a perfectly
                                                                                    fine aggregation
                                                                                    of sub-atomic particles

a rock has rock sentience
Gandhi has Gandhi sentience

                                                                                    it’s not better to be a rock
                                                                                    or to be Gandhi
                                                                                    if nothing matters

                                                                                    we have powerful personal knowledge
                                                                                    that nothing matters
                                                                                    suicide knows nothing matters
                                                                                    war knows and torture
                                                                                    the tools of the torturer know
                                                                                    extinct species know nothing matters
                                                                                    opium knows
                                                                                    metallic concentrates in the brain
                                                                                    stunned by Alzheimer’s know
                                                                                    your house on fire while you are at the movies
                                                                                    the deepest inner thoughts of your great
                                                                                    grandfather’s great great grandfather know
                                                                                    the room he was born in knows
                                                                                    the biochemistry of a cancer cell knows
                                                                                    the questions asked by Torquemada know
                                                                                    ashes scattered at sea
                                                                                    the digestive tract of the insect
                                                                                    feeding on the conqueror worm knows
                                                                                    the library at Alexandria
                                                                                    self-destructive habits know
                                                                                    an empty tube of spermicidal jelly knows
                                                                                    the temperature of the air in a Siberian prison cell knows
                                                                                    a neutron in an oxygen atom in
                                                                                    the ozone layer knows
                                                                                    the volume of Niagara Falls knows
                                                                                    the last centimeter of the distance between
                                                                                    this page and Alpha Centauri knows
                                                                                    nothing matters across all time and space
                                                                                    nothingness
                                                                                    knows nothing matters
                                                                                    nothingness knows most
                                                                                    nothing matters

                                                                                    though a case can be made
                                                                                    made every day
                                                                                    that something matters
                                                                                    though the proofs don’t overwhelm

                                                                                    if something matters
                                                                                    only if something matters
                                                                                    Mahatma Gandhi is better than a rock.

Tony Quagliano (1941-- 2007) edited Kaimana--Literary Arts Hawai'i. He was published widely in numerous literary journals.

"Between a Rock and Mahatma Gandhi" first appeared in New York Quarterly.

Peter Chamberlain

The Reconfigured Ear Series / wak n' stacks

Peter Chamberlain is a professor in the Expanded Arts Program at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Rob Wilson

TRAVELLING

Travelling out of the body by staying too long in one place,

he entered the room and began travelling. In certain parts of

town, all the villagers held a gun pointed at the head of the

white stranger. Though he used to dwell there long ago, some two

decades ago, they held the guns pointed to his head, just

grinning.

In other neighborhoods, loud laughter was heard as if it were

always Sunday afternoon in summer, and the men did not have to

think about working in the brass mills. He was in the Puerto Rican

part of town, and nobody talked to him, but he wanted to

linger in the tiny bars with small change and much laughter.

In another part of town three and four shopping malls were

going up, but he felt like he had never been there, even when he

was there.

He hid in the cool churches of his childhood, praying. It

seemed to make the day immaculate, like one event might lead to

another, like a friend's unexpected waiting at the airport or a

telephone call from out west summoned by a kindly thought earlier

in the day.

Then the factory whistles were starting to blow, and he

would work in the same shop his whole life, mute and without

travelling, like the men in the town before him. The town was

only in his own head, but he brought it across continents and

oceans, travelling to the same place over and over like the

parched sunset seen ten thousand times from the same dirty

window, without curtains.

Rob Wilson is an English professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Melvin Derwis

Melvin Derwis (1916--2000) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He lived and worked in Cleveland, Ohio.

Joseph Stanton

GROUNDHOG DAY

Some days threaten never to end,

but this one just keeps coming back again.

A song by Sonny and Cher,

a DJ's shouted, "It's cold out there!"

and Phil is off once more--

seeking, he realizes, Rita's love.

but finding only despair,

a February second

repeated ad absurdum,

the fairytale hero here

becoming his own

fairy godfather,

giving himself an offer

he must learn how not to refuse,

remaking himself a prince

with scant help from the kiss

that never entirely arrives,

though he seeks it so desperately.

Phil must make a magic moment

out of an odd redundancy of striving

to be better than he is--

though trapped, he knows,

in the not very original sin

of being a jerk at heart.

For all of us, this is

a transformation devoutly to be wished--

a joking way to say we can

eat our world and have it too,

avoiding our idiocy's

diminishing returns.

VERTIGO

A fear drops a plumb line,

Hitchcock's horrific zoom-in and track-back,

to a depth hope cannot rise above.

But a falling can also be

into the madness that is love,

a vortex spinning down a mind,

whose bottom line

might be terrible to consider.

A portrait of Carlotta,

the beautiful Carlotta,

the sad, the mad Carlotta

could be a portal to the past

or a bad dream

of an old house on the corner of Eddy and Gough,

a grave at the Mission Delores with Carlotta's name on it,

a leap into the Bay at Old Fort Point out at the Presidio,

a fatal bell tower at San Juan Bautista,

a hundred miles down the coast.

But that peculiar bunch of flowers,

the twist to the hair, and the simple gray suit

are as real as the beautiful city of San Francisco

and the two cars, one white the other green,

that swing left, then right, then left,

pursuing each other for miles of film,

somehow always downhill,

the way everything must go,

it seems,

when desire overwhelms almost everything,

except for death itself,

viewed from the highest vantage,

vertigo overcome at last,

as Midge's dearest Johnny-O stands above,

finally fearless,

out on the ledge of the world,

with no one left to save,

no one left to love.

Joseph Stanton is widely published as a poet and scholar. He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Kathy Ireland Smith

OK Afterbirth

Kathy Ireland Smith is a writer and artist from Cleveland, Ohio. She is currently traveling the world and is presently living in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Brian Fugett

PERISTALSIS IN THE BOWELS OF DOWNTOWN

all up & down

5th street there are

peep shows

coffee shops

liquor stores

& fresh tattoos that glow

on the pale

february bleached flesh

of girls

& all the skinny caramel lattes

are clutched too tight

even though they are hotter than

the august pavement

& everywhere you go

along east 3rd street

the cell phones are screaming

to be released from

all of the pockets

purses

& glove compartment coffins

while a roving pack of mimes

stalk the corner of 4th & main

peddling

thespian nightmares

in a symphony of silence

so loud

it sounds like propaganda

& all the yellow

slowly leaks

from the sun

as i sit in the cafe'

across the street

murdering myself

one cigarette

at a time.

Brian Fugett lives in Kettering, Ohio. He is the editor of Zygote in my Coffee.

John M. Bennett

John M. Bennett is a poet and artist who has been published widely. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Mera Moore

THAT LAST DRIVE

Snow pelted asphalt like heavy rain

whipped into chalky mounds.

I even passed the rumbling trucks

cascading the yellow Pinto ash-white

flashing brightness against their gray steel.

The Beatles' Christmas Song crackled

rang in on every station as we smashed

the slush at sixty-five. He slept

shoulder of his Armani jacket arched

daring me to drown the car in choking smoke.

So I turned into the truck joint--neon

Santa swinging in the bitter winds--

slammed down two cups of blackened water,

sucked deeply the two lone cigs until Philly,

tried to smile at the pockmarked bartender.

Suburbs, curve of an intersection, familiar

poles of wires and trolley tracks:

I held them, snowballs freezing my bare

mind--and I was ten again, riding, looking out--

but driving now and squinting for the street signs.

And you, my love, shone before the wreathed door

one wool-wrapped arm stretching golden

folding me in from the panes of frost

taking even his cool hand against your bent fingers.

Grandmom, you easily sloped the coats

from our backs, soaked us with two Buds apiece.

Your green-gold davenport took my weight,

and the perfume--those old lilacs--

I breathe it in tonight, driving by another neon Santa.

Mera Moore is an instructor of Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & John M. Bennett

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen is from Finland. His work has appeared in numerous publications.

John M. Bennett is a poet and artist who has been published widely. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Steven B. Smith

Inspected

Steven B. Smith is a writer and artist from Cleveland, Ohio. His work has been published and exhibited extensively.

Robert Lietz

WHEN SHIPS COME IN

It wasn't the place so much / the oeuvre--

brew-pubs / the eclectic musks

mauve smears of sympathy --the reasons

to quit / aspiring instead

and --maybe to bless the air --and

wasn't the backyard clippings

veining your dewy boots --the ochred

and pop-scored studio --and there--

these new and these more natural embraces--

this minded green --these lingering

still / insisting and reductive medleys.

Everyone's felt the weight

and the exclusions by cabal --discovered

the winter's shag --feeling--

amourously resigned --the pricks and stings

in mis-related fields --entered the miles

between / the dueling wattages --exposing

luxury --gone into the rooms

where love's been auctioned otherwise. So

your teeth conduct the music round about--

and your whole skull --tingling --conducts--

feeling the rhythms lapse --revisiting

the light / green light attaining amplitudes--

until the light makes / the diamond-cut

conditionals / dawns with their talking trout--

about as wishful as days get --make

the air your own --measuring the dream-lives

out --the air your own / alone--

and these vendors hurrying the light in

on their handtrucks --making this one thing

of themselves --and of the mis-lettered

foregrounds --lost to trial runs --nothing

but sprung love --said of the dream life

and performance --but this precocious

dawn --these landings --and these streets

made dear for all their boxing parodies--

boxing the wolved years / the receptions

as imagined --the daybright avenues

with hired ships scaled in.

Robert Lietz teaches at Ohio Northern University and spends most of his time in Alliance, Ohio, writing and making photographs.

He has appeared in numerous publications such as The Georgia Review, Carolina Quarterly, The North American Review and

The Missouri Review. He is the author of seven collections of poetry.

Doug Sutton-Ramspeck

THE SHAPE OF THINGS

Which is to say that the stirring of damselfly wings,

or the descent on a crow's feather

from the limbs of a black tupelo,

or the alluvium swirling up from the dregs

of the oxbow lake

awaken us for long enough to wonder:

who are you living in these houses

and cabins on the shore, the ones we see

walking

holding hands, or leaning against the knees

of the baldcypresses, or wading

into the muddy shallows where the catfish

hover drowsy in the weeds?

Surely, we tell ourselves, this is the shape

of things:

the other world where incorporeal children

go racing at dusk across the grass, where lights brighten

the curtains after dark, where voices and music

drift as auguries

through screen mesh. These occultations ache to tell us

who we are,

but we exist only in the sudden swooping

of a bat across the waves,

in the white

mouth of a water moccasin swallowing

the pale moon, in the song of the chorus frogs

growing heavy in the fog.

Doug Sutton-Ramspeck directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima.

His work has appeared in such journals as West Branch, Connecticut Review, Nimrod and Seneca Review. His poetry collection,

Black Tupelo Country, was selected for the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and will be published in the fall of 2008.

He lives in Lima, Ohio.

Jonathan Kane

andsuch

Jonathan Kane was born in Miami Beach, Florida. He currently lives in Naples, Florida.

Alexander Long

KISSING LESSON

A flick of the hair and she secures my hand to hers, leans in, backs

away, leans in, no, like this.... So. May God's string of pearls called

stars unravel like a dime-store rosary, like the perfect run-on

sentence slipping through our lips, may her mouth always be mine,

may our wordless, timeless prayer carry out its work in our deeds

all the rest of our days, may this undiscovered cosmos flushed with

breath rise and rise and rise, may we feel an end to nothing.

FOR THE GIRL IN THE SECOND ROW

Like you, I have this image here of my father in front of me, and

every detail matters, swells: the snow gathering lazily, flake-by-

flake, on the mallards' backs, their indifference to it that almost

makes me bitter, younger, revisable, not like my father, who has

become one of the old men I'll never see again on this blue park

bench overlooking a lake, whose name I've always gotten wrong, a

little beard of snow along its muddy edges.

Here is where I no longer believe that time is anything but one long

exhalation.

His stare is a blank of sky reflected in the pond, his eyes distant,

pink dusk, his hands as slow as the icicles above him in the sighing

birches, hands that, Friday nights, would press a double bass to his

chest and thump "A Night in Tunisia" till dawn, bow the dolor

back into "Autumn Leaves," hands that taught me to do the same

so I might hear our name in a clear unchanging voice.

One day, he thought once, he would stop staring and walk into the

lake, slowly, to return to all he was, without choice or chance, born

into becoming.

And this is the day my voice changed.

I first heard it in the way I was reading Stevens to my students.

Instead of praising what had, suddenly, been there all along, how

sun and wave lilted the woman striding there alone, or how the figures

in the street / Become the figures of heaven, it was my father wading

there, then vanishing in my voice inflected by many waves, and ice.

I'm trying to explain. I mean, whatever I had to say about time, my

father, a name, a voice, made a girl in the second row wince as she

fixed her perfect hair. When I looked at her all I could see were

tiaras of snow collecting on the ice of a lake he's walking into until

time, too, loses its breath, a wind barely moving at all.

I see it now, and can you hear it, now? This is my voice.

My student, she was, like me I guess, learning the cold, the light it

drops, how hydrangeas bulge fully blue, how acres of corn sweeten

perfect spines, how this is all decoration for the body turning

toward water.

Anna, may your dream not be the wandering kind of a father

moving through ice and water, gently, humming a tune not yet

thought up, the mallards shaking snow off their green and

gorgeous heads, the birches' icicles extending in their dissolution,

like his image and name are doing just now.

Alexander Long was born and raised in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Vigil, his first book of poems, was released in 2006 from

the New Issues Press Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Prose Poem: an International Journal,

Quarterly West, The Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Beginning fall 2008, he will be an assistant professor of English

at John Jay College in New York City. He plays, travels, and writes with the band Redhead Betty Takeout.

Scott MacLeod

American Pop!

Scott MacLeod is a writer and artist who has published and exhibited his work widely. He lives in Oakland, California.

Volume1, Number 1 2008 (top of page)