Unshod Quills

A poem by Dayvid Jann Figler of Las Vegas, Nevada

AT NITE

– on When We Two Parted

Greetings.

It doesn’t matter who I am.
It matters who I was.
Look deeply into my sunken eyes and
Find the sparkle.

There it is.

Now wait for….

The tingle creeping along your spine.

There it is.

Now wait for…
Balmy anticipation.

Damn! You’re awash in it.

Congratulations.
We are now lovers.

I am used to this.
No matter where I am.
This happens if I let you get close.

No one can’t get close these days.

We are in a Dairy Queen.
I ordered a Blizzard (you hear me say… “Blizzard”).

We are giving produce the once over at Safeway.
We reach for the same Fuji apple.

We are at the self car wash.
I am smoking a cigarette like it was the greatest cigarette on Earth.

Want to know a secret?
Of course, you do.

(I abandoned all hope seven seasons ago).

I walked heel-toe on the edge of the grid
into devious convictions
And it suited me fine.

I’m set every 30 days for 10 days.

We shall be wed long before dawn.
Then, you will see my sores in the new daylight.

I predict humiliation.

Don’t worry.

It will be supplanted by glee in exactly 6-8 hours.
But now, you gather your clothes quickly.

The last thing you will see are my leathery lips
Cracked
By your foolish kisses and stained by Trader Joe’s wine.

I wonder if you’ll tell your friends.

No one else will care.

I gave up and I still got you.
My lover, my wife.

We are both richer.

I close my eyes, again.

The last remnants of the day
Sneak through the wood slats
suspending dust in shafts above the couch.

Scatters as I rise.

Author biograpy

Dayvid Jann Figler is firmly entrenched.

The Poetry of Robert Meyer

The Passion of the Barbie

Both Simon Zealot and the Great Houdini
heard boasting. “I can saw a girl in half!”
Her brother stole her toy, said, “I’m no meany,”
then, “oops!” so all the little boys would laugh.

With tears the martyred doll was gently slipped
into a box while Ken fulfilled the suttee,
and in a candle his devotion dripped
at Barbie’s feet, a brownish ball of putty.

A midnight requiem, then they convened
tribunal for injustice to the coven.
His sister fetched his G.I. Joes. The fiend
deserves a cake – the girls turned on the oven.

Ten heads popped for the cake’s decor. They placed
it at his door, a gift in his own taste.

-RM

HE SAID / SHE SAID

If I can’t kiss your face each day, alone
Like this I’ll paint your visage in my room
On walls of memory, your words intone:
Veracious words, entrancing voice. Illume,
Eclipsing nature, even sun at noon.
Your name now makes me weary of my home,
Or rather, frightened, faced with my cocoon.
Unleash me. Love me under heaven’s dome.

Guys try to tame us. Bring me no bouquet
Of poetry, refrains that I’m to feign
An interest in. In vain you strain, take aim
With sonnets praising my black negligee.
Again I play the liar, say, “It’s migraine.”
You only see a trophy, game to claim.

-RM

Orpheus Enters Hades

Mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes
Come to the mirror and go
down beneath the Paris Opera
down, down below the New York subways
down, down, down to the underground lake
smooth as glass, a slothful stream
We came to the river and wept to remember
oracle Apollinaire, bandages on his head
(concealing devices for messages from other worlds)
but Peace brought Death, as passionless as Socrates.
I too had bandages on my head;
I, patron saint of mediocrities!
Reflect on this, did my Muse depart?
or is vers libre really art?
is it the creature that doesn’t exist?
Muses are isomorphic to a random-number generator in the mind of God
the artist is merely an output device.
“I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett”
…grief is passionless…
Go tell the king no prophecies, the water has dried up at last.
When Orpheus was hit crossing the street in his electric wheelchair,
what does his survival mean?
When Eurydice was hit crossing the street with her seeing-eye dog,
what does her death mean?
Just random numbers?
Wie bitter sind der Trennung Leiden!
He had also descended into the lower parts of the earth…
sans hair, sans teeth, sans claws,
…sans mask…
No, I am not Orpheus, but was meant to be.
Grief is Passionless.

-RM

Notes: Jean Cocteau’s “Orphee”, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera”, CBS TV series “Beauty & the Beast”, Psalms 137:1, Cocteau’s “Professional Secrets”, Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”, Rainer Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”, Robert Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth B Browning’s “Grief”, the last words of the oracle at Delphi, the death of Debbie Anderson, “Magic Flute”, Ephesians 4:9, “As You Like It”, “B & B” and “Phantom”, TS Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, sonnet “Grief”

Author Biography

Robert Meyer received a BS in Math from UNLV in 1977, enrolling in their Master’s program in the fall.  In May of 1978, during the last week of the school year, he had a brain hemorrhage (left side, affecting speech & right side of body) while lecturing in complex analysis.  He completed work for his  MS in Math in 1981.  He began working for the US Air Force at Nellis AFB  in various computer related jobs (database management, programming, and system administration) in 1982 and retired after 22 years.

Writer Wayne Miller writes on the theme of transportation using only two letter words.

GO

my TV is in NJ
my RV is in PA
im in DC
we go to my RV?
he go to?
ya or no?
he is my EX
is he bi?
he is.
he is so bi
an,
he ax my ma
my ma go to ER
an, pa?
he in, HI
so, no
so, do WE go, or no?
ya.
to my RV!
do we go in?
if we do
we go at it
be in up in
ew
so, do, OM…
up go IQ
ya…
ha ha.

Author Biography

Wayne Miller works as a private chef for a family of five. He currently resides in Easton, Pennsylvania. When not producing art, taking photographs, cooking, or interwebbing for new discoveries, he can be found at work on his first novels, or on Facebook, his equivalent of sitting around the bar all day. His email is waynemodern@gmail.com.

Fiction from Portland’s Tammy Lynne Stoner

Because There Is A Story To Tell

Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. She left Poland to study in Paris, where women of the kind of woman she was could do such things. Later in life, she would watch her husband crumble from exposure to the radiation that they had unlocked.

Marie Curie had shared jokes with Einstein, my mother told me when I was younger. She was a brilliant, fearless scientist. And that, my mother said, is the reason I named you Curie.

Now I – who looks nothing like I think a Curie would – write. Why, you ask? Because there is a story to tell, of course.

This is a story has the smell of salty water and of a too-old onion in a moist container. It is a story with the taste of licorice seeds. It is the story of love.

I crossed that out because really, it is more the story of frogs.

***

Few people connect readily to frogs – perhaps it is because they leave their young before they hatch. We humans always have a hard time connecting with egg-bearing species that leave their young to hatch and fend for themselves: the fly, the fish, the frog.

***

Marie Curie died of long-term radiation exposure in the form of pernicious anemia, with a host of other ailments including cataracts and lung disorders. Her eldest daughter, Irene, had also worked in her mother’s lab with radium – the element Marie and her husband had separated out from uranium ore years before. Irene died of leukemia in her 50s.

Gamma rays come from radium. That was what really did them in – the gamma rays. Gamma rays have the smallest wavelength and the greatest energy of all waves in the electromagnetic spectrum. They are released as radiation in nuclear explosions.

Before their release, gamma rays are forced to move rapidly in order to survive – small, tight, passionate waves living too much life inside small boundaries. In this way, they live the way I live – growing but unable to expand, their energies consolidating under the pressure. Gamma rays create massive worlds in tiny spaces.

I am a short man. Shorter, probably, than most of the men reading this. Shorter, perhaps, than some of the women. And like the gamma rays, this, I believe, has compacted my energies and given me quite a bit more bang for the buck – if I were to charge for it which, excepting that one time in Madrid, I have not.

***

Frogs.

I saw my first three-legged frog on the same day that I saw him – or who I perceived to be a him, before I realized – to my shock – that he was a she. That, I thought at the time, is different, but in some ways much easier.

She was the one to explain to me the importance of the frogs. That their continuance guaranteed the continuation of the human race. She told me this while I looked at her watery green eyes, her body hidden under a huge coat that looked as if it had been felted from lama fur.

Many frogs are infertile now. And infertile frogs, she explained as the air turned salty and somehow onion-y, are forecasting the end of the human race.

Oh, I said, smiling, so how long do we have?

Long enough, she answered quietly – me not knowing if her pause meant I should kiss her then or not.

I stared at her boldly for a moment as the frogs continued making their frog noises in the background.

I am obsessed with infertile frogs, she said, and now maybe, with you too. She continued: the three-legged frogs here have birth defects because of pollution, although I guess we can never be sure if it is only from the pollution.

Then she took off her coat and became a girl.

It is good, I thought, to be with someone who can admit that there is no way of knowing something (or, really, anything). Plus I like her soft-looking breasts stretching against her white shirt.

***

Our brain reacts to thoughts in the same way it reacts to actions – as if they are really happening, even if they aren’t. The same centers of the brain light up when we see something really happen or when we watch it happen on TV. The same blood is delivered. The same emotion is directed.

Curie, she said to me then, laying her coat on the ground for us – and I remember moment this every day, playing it in my mind like a TV episode – Curie, she said, this is a good time to kiss me.

***

Frogs, she told me an hour later, touching my earlobes, lay eggs in clusters. Toads lay eggs in chains. That is one way to tell them apart, she said, but after a while, you get to see the difference straight away. Frogs look more… athletic.

Good swimmers with bad swimmers, I laughed, making a joke about the three-legged frogs and their birth defects.

She moved away for a moment, to let me know how serious she was about frogs.

I’m sorry I made that joke, I said, kissing her straight brown hair that smelled like the ocean.

Some toads, she continued with her watery eyes down, even have live births. . .

***

According to several interpretations, on the day of the Rapture, people will literally disappear. They will be hiking or driving or working or crying or yawning or baking or jogging or having babies and they will simply disappear.

Others think that disappearing might be possible, but for different reasons. They believe that since we were thought into existence, if enough people think the same patterns for long enough, then perhaps certain ones can be simply un-thought. We can un-think ourselves.

Later that night, after we laid a long time in the grass, I looked over at her sleeping and watched as she disappeared.

Stunned, I sat up and looked around – my guts pushing into my chest and my eyes rubbed with sandpaper, as the smoky tendrils of her ghost snapped suddenly like a piece of skin in the wind, and she simply disappeared.

Left behind was the taste of her kiss – like licorice seeds, the frogs that abruptly went silent, and me.

TLS

Author Biography

Tammy Lynne Stoner is the Fiction Editor for Gertrude Press. She is the creator/writer of “Dottie’s Magic Pockets,” which has been in a dozen international film festivals and is in 100+ libraries in the US and Canada.  Her work has been published most recently in Draft and Society (Pale House). Her website: TammyLynneStoner.com.

German Santanilla on sonnets, beasts and When We Two Parted.

El Desdichado
Gérard de Nerval

Translated by German Santanilla

– on When We Two Parted

I am the Shadow-shrouded, widower, disconsolate
Aquitania’s Prince, my Tower ravaged to the root,
Dead is my only Star, and melancholy’s Sun,
Stains with black my starry lute.

Give me back Posillipo and the Italian seas,
If you would console me in my funereal night.
Return to me the Flower that pleased my stricken heart,
And the trellis where the Vine and Rose unite.

Am I Eros or Apollo? Lusignan or Biron?
Still red upon my brow is the Queen’s kiss;
I’ve dreamed of the cave where the Siren swims . . .

And twice victorious I have crossed Acheron
While modulating by turn on Orpheus’ strings
The sighs of the Saint and the Fay’s screams.

GS

Mirror Poem

-on mirrors

You know, I’ve played this game before;
It doesn’t matter if you shadow all my moves.

The echo; your hand reaches one space short,
One beat behind, canon, stretto, fugue.

That threatening line, that symmetry of eyes
Of breasts, of thighs that dance. I follow close.

I’ve crossed. Time turns the light back to its source,
The echo to its fount. The knight moves back

And the lines crab-walk back to their nest
One beat behind, canon, stretto, fugue,

It doesn’t matter where your shadow moves.
I’ve learned your moves by heart, you know.

GS

For the first boy’s first dog, their footprints preserved in Chauvet Cave, France.

-on beasts

Yea, though I walk through the Valley in your shadow
Surely I will not fear you, nor your Number, my rough Beast
For you are mine, and though you slouch on remorseless,
I will run my fingers through your fur. Your great age
Is my comfort. Your shade is my shelter. I will not look
In your eyes. I will not make false promises of protection.
I will search for water in the waste, and share carrion.
You will be my shade in the noonday blaze,
You will be my warmth in the cold wind. Your nightmare
Will be my terror. You will protect me in the dark of the cave.
I will rub your belly, my kind Beast.

GS

Author Biography

German Santanilla is an interpreter, working for the US District Court in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, until his family moved to Las Vegas, where he has lived since he was twelve. He likes dogs.

Poems from Seattle’s Jason Quiggle.

An Expanding Universe

– Transportation

This is going to lock the doors
keeping the showers out
to let us spray each other
It is not all about our broken hearts.

I am Harvey Keitel
and you are Tim Roth
you’re gonna be okay
you’re gonna be okay
sing
song

this is a little steel and glass heaven
crossing over hell fine
features cut our lips

psychopomps  go before us carrying tiny pieces of steel.

Whiskey is our whore paid not to come,
I stage scenes.

the water is clear that I am the thief,

sympathetic strings
seat
belt and gravity cannot keep us from flying apart.

JQ

I have always been here

– When We Two Parted

You were never here
I have always been touching myself
I still am
over what i have almost forgot from last night
a woman pretending to be a poem
in my hand becoming  a ghost
a ghost
a ghost
ghost ghost
a ghost weeping semen for a sunken mistress

you were never here
i am always touching myself
looking into an empty eye
mistaking the glint of the sun for a hint of  love

JQ

Author Biography

Jason Quiggle was born somewhere in New York, during the blizzard of ’76. He has lived in many places including California, Germany, Texas and Nevada. Folks have put things Jason has written into their publications. The city of Las Vegas etched his words in the cement of a public works project along with other notable Vegas writers. Jason now lives in Seattle, Washington. Contact: jason.quiggle@gmail.com

Las Vegas poet Jeffrey Bennington Grindley on beasts.

Legassa

he had the itch
again he said
rubbed it raw,
infected with worms too.
I saw that the moon was still above the earth, watching.
I think they make a cream for that,
I offered.
skeptical,
avoiding my gaze, he said
it was
mostly just
bad lighting
and askew camera angles
making it seem worse than it was….
quickly
scratching
at something in the air
hissing blankly
through his teeth,
some winged thing.
I suggested we go somewhere calm
to lay low –
they could be looking for you,
understand?
(the clouds covered that cratered demon)
we drove out to my place.
I stuffed him in a broom closet
stopping his
slithering tongue
slumping
doe eyed taking up all the space with beseeching,
he whispered
are you leaving me?
no.
I’m going to steady the camera,
get you some new clothes.
snapping the lock in place
a sound scratched out of his throat
(a desperate hyena, losing traction on the tile of a holly-wood kitchen)
soaking the carpets
salving the mango walls
with quiet petrol
I wound my way backwards
through the maze of cardboard cut outs
made in my likeness.
I lit the match,
closed the door.
stabbing a cough through the cold air
driving into the dark
(moon rusting on the horizon)
to catch what was left of my life
on a television
just north
of here
where his septic tongue
could lick me
no longer.

Author Biography

Jeffrey Bennington Grindley is a 29 year old Las Vegas native still finding his way. Jeff co-hosts a  weekly community poetry event called the Human Experience in his hometown. Its goal is to provide a creative outlet for art, music and poetry, while raising awareness of nonprofit charities and volunteer opportunities. Jeff and his girlfriend run zine workshops and collect zines for of the Las Vegas Zine Library that they founded and maintain. Among other things, he is currently serving on the board for Las Vegas Poets Organization.

Francesca Castaño and Carmen Castaño Mendez of Spain on the themes of transportation and beasts. 

Carmen Castaño Mendez, "A Little Beast," photograph on the theme of beasts

Wheel of Fortune

Thus,
returning home
the last embers of the working week
fade in the hand
that holds
tightly
to the subway strap.
Panting—
but finally free
of the everyday armour
that binds
this life
we live
curling up
in continuous
repetitions—

I come up from
the subterranean swarm
dazzled by the street
clatter of people coming
and going
when a fortune teller
takes my hand
and begins to read
it:
There, you see—
she chatters
as I get lost
in the lines of my palm —
I see you
spinning
circling,
stirring….

Author and Artist Biography

Francesca Castaño lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. She is a Spaniard who writes in English. She loves her man and her son,  poetry and cooking. Her master’s thesis,  “The Limitless Self: Desire and Transgression in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body,” was published by the University of Barcelona, in February 2010. Her poems have appeared in The Bruised Peach Press, and The Internationalwordbank.

Carmen Castaño Mendez, was born in Spain and currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand. She was featured as a finalist in the Auckland Festival of Photography Photo Day for the last 3 years. Her photos have also appeared in The Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, February 2011.

Poetry from writer William Ellis of Chengdu, Sichuan, China.

For What is Left Us

– on When We Two Parted

I still have the fever you gave me: “I tried to be alone” you said, “so I could think of you with nothing to disturb me.  I sat in my son’s bedroom, in his little chair, in the dark.  The other rooms belonged to my husband.  When my son had gone to sleep I closed my eyes: I saw you again and again.”

I see you now, asleep at your son’s side.  In the end your fever was too much: my face grew brighter inside you, then vanished – and the fever passed to me.  Sleepless, I sit in my study, afraid that I shall always see you, afraid that I shall never see you.  I turn on the radio and hear a refrain; a woman sings: “Dors, pour l’amour qu’il nous reste.” “Sleep, for the love that is left us.”

I must be truly stricken to keep rehearsing these words and their simple music.  The rest of the song tells this story: a woman in bed bends over a sleeping man: after long years it is only in sleep, or in watching the other sleep, that they love.  Still I envy them for the time and the nights they have had: I never bent over your sleeping face – your face that keeps coming back.

If I could sleep, I could be free of this fever.  If you are asleep, perhaps something of me left in you will survive.  If I could sleep, I could still hold you in sleep.  I find myself repeating, again and again, for myself, still awake, and for you, at last able to sleep, “Sleep, for the love that is left us”.

WE

The Bedroom Mirror

– on mirrors

Its glass and metal, flecked and tarnished, hold
my privileged memories; its cloudy surface
veils whatever was uncouth and raw.
Tonight, inside its depths, I see white faces
soften as they rise in passion; spasms
melt into a graceful dance; arms flung
at random reappear in sacred gestures –
of those who lived by love, who lived with me,
who still must live somewhere, somehow, but not
as they once were, not as they still remain
here in this mirror, here in my brightening gaze.

WE

Author Biography

William Ellis received his Ph.D in Literature from Boston College, then taught humanities at Vanier College in Montreal.  He is currently the Senior Foreign Expert of the English department at Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan. There, he offers courses in Western Intellectual History, Art History, European Literature, and Canadian Studies. He was awarded the Sichuan Province Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. He is the author of The Theory of the American Romance, an Ideology in American Intellectual History, nominated in 1989 for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. His poetry has been published in Mala, Chengdu Grooves, and now, Unshod Quills.

From the People’s Republic of China: Josh Stenberg offers two poems

untitled

-on When We Two Parted

susana takes

her leave. there is a grim moment

of notice; storage, apartments,

celebratory wines. nothing stops,

nothing knows how, even memorials

stand cringing at their own pretence.

we are people without gravity, cannot

fill occasion with words have no

place to stand in no ceremony

to summon things happen

merely

the contented spend

whorls of surfeited sorrow

on her; the peripatetic pounce on

new plans, ogle itineraries,

bring themselves this once more to

believe in the meaning of

travel of place of shifting

to frantically revisit reacquire exchange

gossip and tidbits of misheard

trivia, the debris of history

of unreal empires in places

undone

the maudlin recount

every parting to themselves

every ungrasping every

fearfulness of finality since the first

tang poet was dispatched to

barbarian posts, they are of

those who miserously exult

whose climaxes are in welters

and washes of sorrow

and for all: it is, it must be

patterned on foibles of

attachments imagined

and built on the assumption

of a present protracted

eternal and lost

but moments

mercifully pass : we are

overgrown

the present

JS

Untitled

-on transportation

of course even just passing
through or on is travel,
and the drift as criminal as the drive;
meanwhile the constant
disjunctions of culture and
nonsense of race and tantalus
of language and faint pines
or palms make remnants
of shadows on plates of
impression; all this is mere
constitution. so ooze or
exude or bind it. live in departing
getting there harbours
piers airports station. the baroque
detritus of mind is always preparing
universal perpetual motion; no one
and nothing stays put. even the lives of
the never-changing are set
against the rolling eye, glimpsed
as we went past, seeming
to move in the abrasive drag the
gasping rush the sick list and tip the engines of
lucre and fear and wonder and
hope. and in attempting
the observation of difference,
risible in our commonality and our commonness,
desire to provoke that
greedy self-mockery which
demands redemptive the
ability to see in our cruelties
and magnanimities always
like a deep flat drone our
sweet and brutal and mutual dumbness.
yes we talk but not with
yes we move but not on
so that every step pas-de-deux
or circling sally seems to occur
at the pole, where all directions
are meaningless, and the primary
concern is where to get warmth.
write me if you discover
where to get warmth.

JS

Author Biography

Josh Stenberg’s fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in Asia Literary Review (HK), Kartika Review (USA), Pograniczcza(Poland), Tissages/Weavings (Canada) and Corrego (Brazil). His translations of Chinese fiction and theatre have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Copper Nickel, Renditions and in two volumes, Madwoman on the Bridge (2008, Black Swan) and Tattoo (2010, MerwinAsia). Born in Canada, he teaches at Nanjing Normal University and conducts research at the Jiangsu Kun Opera Company.