Unshod Quills

Amy Sewart Ford on the topic of beasts.

Becoming Human

Forgetting the presence of the elders
Cursing, they fetched me to the old shark
All legs and teeth
My cousins held a leg apiece
I stared, defiant;
Whispers, then cries
“Look at the pretty bird!”
My middle, bared
The downward slash
Conciliatory, knowing smiles;
More than a ritual
The commencement of death.

ASF

Author Biography

Amy is a southern girl and a member of the Unshod Quills Writers Collective.

A Collaboration between Curtis and Dena

Two poets, both members of the Unshod Quills Writers Collective, with one having been Nevada’s last Green Party gubernatorial candidate, and the other being the chick who bailed on the sinking state, attempt to hold an electronic conversation and create something like a poem, instead.

1972 Volkswagen Bus – needs work

– Transportation

Dena – that’s my year and so do I

Dena – also I am part German

Curtis – which part(s)?

Curtis – I’ve owned two of them

Dena – Two of my parts? You have not!

Curtis – Yep, back in Columbus, I have pictures

Dena –I have never been to Columbus!

Curtis – Buses, silly

Dena – HAHA I love VW buses. I’ve never owned one but every time I get into one it breaks down.

Curtis – that’s the best part, the breaking down

Dena – that’s my German part – the part that keeps breaking down.

Curtis – my German parts are the literalism and the dictatorial part

Curtis – and I have a strange craving to ravage Poland

Curtis – but just the supermodel parts

Author Biographies are here and here.

A poem from a top tier Pacific Northwest writer.

MARE’S NEST

– on mirrors

Gulp down those little pills to dull the ache,
drink until you blur that face in the mirror,
drowse and forget you’re ever an artist.

Hear the snap of crow wing in ghostlit mist
which frames gauze-filtered the gaunt shambling mare
who can’t tell if you’re dreaming or awake.

Author Biography

Sigerson lives in the Seattle area.

The most original offering made to Unshod Quills for this issue comes from a team working at a turtle cognition library in Hillsboro, Oregon. The poems that follow were written for the theme of mirrors. Each are written from the perspective of the turtles the writers study. The photo is of two of the turtle subjects. 

Quake Climbs Away - photo by Rosemary Lombard on the theme When We Two Parted

PEACE

Sphere where the Ring swayed for its mastery
of the rest of Middle Earth,
Learn love.

Dear Bilbo regretted their wars,
teaching it’s book that sings,
Mirror of the way sight understands friend.

Few would work for that, that sway to peace.
Be remembering I turtle am peaceful.

—Spin Lombard

MIRROR TALK

The mirror I move by faces me with me.
Face to glass face.
Mouth to that glass mouth.
Scale to glass scale.

I decide who I am,
present my mirror self,
performing my truth game
by me.

—Scuter Tornieri

POEM WALKING

Poem alone walks away by being not read.
Mirrored by readers’ dreams,
the poem lives.

—Dittow Tornieri

Authors Biographies

Dittow and Scuter Tornieri, sisters, and Spin and Rosemary Lombard work at the Chelonian Connection turtle cognition laboratory in Hillsboro, Oregon. They like to write in the voice of a turtle crying into the wilderness of the human world. Dittow also enjoys creating line drawings. Scuter’s poem “Mirror Talk” reflects the work of the lab in mirror self-recognition. Spin’s poetry appears in Thresholds Literary Journal and Four and Twenty. You can learn more about Chelonian Connection here.

Gregory Crosby, formerly of Las Vegas and presently of New York, on beasts, lipstick and transportation.

B.

– on beasts

Beauty still kills me; what can I say?
You die from a fall only the once.
They say I have no concept of time,
but I can count the lengths I’ve gone to:
five fingers, twenty-thousand fathoms.
I’m the one God forgot to invent,
so you had to do the dirty work.
I am heavier than any chain,
& I’m still slouching, but not toward
anyplace except the hollow heart
of grief, the original House of Pain.
They say she was sorry, that she loved
me, in her way. You could hear it in her
scream, I guess. Love can make a Beast of a man.
Of a beast, love can only make sense:
a mind, clear, above a wounded yowl.

GC

Lipstick Traces

-on lipstick

Whenever I think of lipstick, I think
of Marlene Dietrich, shot in the back,
at the end of Destry Rides Again,
& falling forward into Jimmy’s Stewart’s
embrace, she wipes the red from her mouth
with the back of her hand & dies into
one, pure, unpainted kiss. I always wish
he would grab her wrist, & fasten his
mouth against her scarlet (even in black
& white, Marlene’s lips burn redder
than all the memories of roses)
& smear her all over his decency,
his cheeks, flushed with it, kissing her as if
her blood soaked his sleeves, the bullet hole
black beneath her heart; not just the powder,
the echo, of a blank from a prop pistol,
somewhere in Hollywood, 1939.

GC

The Greatest Journey Begins With the Smallest Misstep

– on transportation

The iceberg just couldn’t wait to meet us.
Oh the humanity, that quavering voice
as hydrogen blossomed bouquets of ash.
The guardrail, twisted, a toothless grin
in a flash. Cartoon plume of smoke, midair,
as the engine sang tra la, the bridge is out.
Wings afire, like a little prayer
to Icarus. Head over handlebars
for your love, we barely cleared the fountain.
Soon we’ll writhe as our atoms scatter:
yet another transporter malfunction.
Somewhere in time, someone still stands above
a dying horse, gun out. It’s true, you know:
getting there is half the fun. So start walking.

GC

Author Biography

Gregory Crosby’s work has previously appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, Rattle, Ophelia Street, Poem, Jacket, Pearl,  and The South Carolina Review, among others. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. Prior to that, he was an art critic in Las Vegas, Nevada (which still works as an icebreaker at parties).

The poetry and photography of Fork Burke, an American in Switzerland.

"Masquerade", Fork Burke, on the theme of mirrors

Union Square

– on when we two parted

Lips travel – being more than here to there

Like Eos

…replace the K with C

her lips

Where is she – where is Easter

…and literature

such as influenced

evolving desire

organized with for instance

soundings – this geometry of sound

signs found in books

meaning collapses

The purpose of focus

on an abstract specific

message

not easlily

wrapped around

ressurection

a good cry

talk it to death

Is isolation = meaning =

leaving the wolf

question

not just how

“to be”

came to an

…end

your map to this place

your words

without your language

your silence

forever passive

silence is a word

her lips – two

parting

FB

Third Body Parts – cut up

– on transportation

I can see him leaving in a minute – luckily the past I remember – tense up in the dream – for sometime he

touched his forehead – come under forever raised – they could walk with their heads high – Originally

my land was red – the only thing left standing then – who is stretched out sky

I AM HERE

Anyone no one to resemble I am without secrets – I sacrifice marvelous yet tragic not signs of life

wealth a man

memory chile – what I saw is false sense of history – goes on in my head – the round mirror

I never thought of going – of a son or daughter – I am understood by him – I could have heard my voice

and a paternal language – of a common noun into my legend

I did kick loud – Granny – come in Granny – human the caption –she smiles – I drank it in

smack German don`t find out – and not mystery mysterious – It said put wings that’s what

sadness there and delay time – his body remains his forehead his eyes my father – nay horizon

and stockings for little legs – original structure – frequency they fall on me my phrase is gone

rivers of distance of my body – sitting in the sun – a fine film of amber – a distant pleasure

our very eyes – open sesame – that land – way sesame – soil down – there are birds that dive

down – there are birds that go up and opposite of chance are reflected – I understood it – get down

so great is our joy at de ask me if I like – we shall use today – I climbed mountains – we are sitting on

beginning push back of our mothers source – to the point I resemble angels eyes – recognize this music

our transport our motor nerves which will strike no ground – suddenly the earth is immense – continues to move

if need be eternally and lawlessness

FB

HEELS

– on lipstick

This Dream

Where you are

me – you – and – I are hair

elegant gloved hand

preference the fall

fair complexion of garlic – promises honey

incentive to – eat it – red

we must see the mouth – notice

safe – longing – distance

I HEAR WOMEN SINGING AGAIN

GRACE – YOUR BODY

DREAM – I AM

TWO TYPES CASTED – desire

CENTER

ATTENTION

DREAM

EACH NIGHT – MEMORY BECOMES FICTION

REFERENCE – wardrobe – NO REFERENCE

continue – ear up – the kiss departs

heels – red

FB

Author Biography

Fork Burke`s poems have appeared in Hoezo Lepels?, PRAXILLA, Lyre Lyre, and Maintenant.   Licking Glass published a book of poems, poetic essays and other images in 2010 .  Recordings include “Fork Remixed.”  She received her BA in Creative Writing in 2008 from The New School and currently lives and writes in Switzerland.

A quartet of poems by  an emerging poet to watch: UQ’s first featured writer is Pennsylvania poet Wendy Ellis.

Pin-ups

– on transportation

it was the worst and weirdest kind of trip
and I do mean trip
tripping
we were tripping
and we were
just a little bit too young
and a little bit too leggy & eager

but we were trying so hard

so we were tripping
and we were in a suburban shopping mall
behind it was a terrible woods
filled with litter and struggling trees

they had this desperate look
helpless and scraggly

our pupils were huge & we were drinking in this
weird landscape

oh to be so young
that young
that huge and so thirsty for everything

I was trying not to hate the woods
but I hated the woods
they were trying too hard
and it was too vulnerable
it made me ache
like the apocalypse

like fire might clean up that damn mess
like I would have to run from the woods
which would be so scary and weird

instead, we went inside this awful little mall
and tried to make sense of
being inside and being so wild inside

my god, we ended up in a movie theater
but only for a few minutes
it was too big
and so loud the sound was pinning us to our seats
we had to run from the noise

we ran laughing, leggy and breathless
into a record store where I bought the first album
I looked at
because I couldn’t stop staring at it

I was trying to hear David Bowie’s
crazy voice through the wrapper
but I kept falling into his uneven eyes
his crazy, painted face

he was from somewhere so far from
this weird mall
the noise
the struggling trees
and the leggy, tripping girl

who had to borrow five dollars
to take David Bowie home with her.

WE

Like A Plum

-on Beasts

My House Mother asked,
‘Do you eat the…will you eat the…’
and she sat there with the word in her mouth.

‘What? What is it?  Is it an animal?’
‘I don’t know. It lives in the mud.’
‘Is it a plant?’
She laughed, the word still inside her like a small plum.

‘I will show you.  Come, it is under the house.
It is in a bucket under the house.’
We bent under the stilts the house stood on.
A white plastic bucket stood in the shade.

And in it, something moving, many things moving.
She reached in & said the word.
It was a dry word, like a cough.
But the thing was wet & slippery,
long & knobbed at one end.
‘Do you eat THIS?’ laughed my House Mother.

She swung it hard against the lip of the bucket,
smashing it so it no longer moved.
‘No.  No, I don’t eat …’ and I said the word.

WE

Here is the Poem

-on lipstick

Here is the poem that has been staggering around in me all week.
I left weird, useless things in my old bag.
Change, crumbs, threads & wrappers.
An earring. A pewter charm.
Three wheat pennies taped to a receipt.

A cheap piece of candy melted through a corner
leaving a greasy smear with a red and chocolate center.

Zippered into a pocket, two lipsticks. Tobacco sticks to old lipstick like
lipstick sticks to the cigarettes I’m chain smoking.

Lipstick leaves a greasy smear on my sleeve as I swear away
tears & snot–swearing & grimacing.

If I were Sarah Bernhardt, I’d have to lie down just about now.
The text would suggest a subtext of such ennui, such sorrow.
The organist would weep with the telling. Her lipstick smeared
on the back of her hand hastily wiping tears so she can follow the notes.
Pipe out the story, larger than life.

WE

She Said

-transportation

She said, “I’ll be late.”
She said, “I’m sorry, my car
is a piece of shit.”

WE

Author Biography

Wendy Giles Ellis
Lancaster County, PA
Reader, writer, backyard muse & eccentric knitter.

Photo: Jianjue bu zou! (We Refuse To Leave!) Bjorn Wahlstrom, on "When We Two Parted."

Poetry and photography by  Shanghai’s Björn Wahlström 

I Look At You Shanghai

– When We Two Parted

Shanghai, April 2011

I look at you Shanghai. I look at you, you look away.

But mind you Shanghai, this is not a love song,
and fuck the broken hearted,
you know what you did to lose what you had,
you all do, as do I.

You gave me everything Shanghai, all you had to offer,
a billion RMB in an LV man-bag, prime real estate in Lujiazui, an uncle in politics,
and a mink mini-skirt on a late night Mint massacre.

That’s right, I know you Shanghai.

I’d race along your gaojia at approaching midnight,
drink and drive from Puxi to Gotham City,
drink and fuck whoever with an ever numbing sense of self-pity,
as M. closes at two,
I’d spend hours on hands and knees by the Jiangpu,
drinking from your veins Shanghai,
as you would want it,
as you demand that I do,
you dirty beautiful whore, you
pulled my head down by the hair, down under the surface,
and refused to let me die.

I look at you Shanghai, and you look away.

In stars and pearls you dress yourself,
my darling mistress of 2008, back when I owned you,
that’s right Shanghai I owned you, I fucking owned you,
and you loved it how i I’d treat you like a slut back then,
I’d do whatever and you’d follow,
I still found the green alleys of the French Concession charming back then,
I’d text you and you’d join, your own plans instantly over board,
summer evening strolls,
no worries, no panties,
always on the first date, and always closing.

Back then I was mean to you Shanghai, and you never said a word. It goes to your credit.

I look at you Shanghai. You look away.

I cry in Jing’an, but I get wasted in the French Concession,
with all the other 10 million homeless people here,
like all the other secretly exiled poor fucks here,
tequila to forget and drugs for the pain,
pints for the wicked and wine bars for the vain,

Shanghai, you keeper of tabs, you high roller; shine you crazy diamond.

Shine.

I look at you Shanghai, I look at you but I have no idea what you are thinking Shanghai, right now in this moment, right here in this forgotten shitty bar on Wuning Lu where I happen to be now in early 2011,
our fling long gone,
dust and dirty tap water,
rust and 9-5 to no good end.

You see I loved you those first years, I did
I just didn’t understand you, I didn’t know how to show it.

Whatever.

You wear a fashionably short evening gown tonight,
and I was the one who helped you with the zipper in the back, Shanghai, only to see that beautiful back walk away.
That sounds sad, but to you it’s just another bottom line.

I look at you Shanghai and I imagine
that your eyes have a secret warmth for me,
black hole suns for the homeless, a tiny bit of
hot burning love for me, “real” feelings for me, ha!

I look at you Shanghai. You look away.

This is not a rant

Shanghai

you crazy bitch, you lovely creature you,

This is a

requiem.

Author Biography

Born sometime in late 70s Stockholm, Sweden, Björn Wahlström  is editor and co-founder of HAL Publications. A sometime writer, he’s a promoter of China based literature, including his own.

After a six year stint in sinologist academia Bjorn became a corporate stooge in 2005, two years after first moving to China. Despite this severe digression, he maintained his interest in the arts and is a passionate patron and promoter of the literary scene in Shanghai, having conceived and founded the city’s most popular English based writers’ group.

His creative writing is colored by a peculiar insight into China, and  by his broad familiarity of Western and Eastern philosophy. Bursts of cynical laowaisims (read: foreignerisms) are tempered with a genuine appreciation and understanding of China, a sane madman in a crazy land. Bjorn is a member of the Unshod Quills Writers Collective.

Three poems on the theme of mirrors, from
Portland’s A. Molotkov.

Face

you know me
you know me well

the face in the mirror is mine
not yours

the face on the dollar bill is mine
not yours

not someone else’s

the face in the mirror is mine

you know me well

AM

Transcendence

silence
measured in centuries
my palm a mirror
my reflection
refusing
to tell the truth

the world shrinks
and things are no longer the same
I am not myself
where I’m going
I can’t take myself
along

AM

The Cure

and then I step out of my mind
and sense the sadness
your lip twitching just so

that translucent crow on my back
begins to sing
to its own definition of music
and the weight of time on my eyes
subsides

I stretch my arms towards you
and in the distance between
I find a mirror
in which our reflections
can laugh at themselves

AM

Author Biography

A. Molotkov is a writer, composer, filmmaker and visual artist, and co-founder of the Inflectionist poetry movement (Inflectionism.com).  Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, he moved to the U.S. in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993.  He is the author of several novels, short story and poetry collections and the winner of the 2010 New Millennium Writings and the 2008 E. M. Koeppel Awards for fiction.  His credits include a Pushcart nomination and several honorable mentions.  Molotkov’s work has appeared in over 40 publications, both in print and online.  He performs often at a variety of Portland venues.  Visit him at www.AMolotkov.com.

Portland poet John Sibley Williams on the themes of mirrors and transportation.

      Photo by John Sibley Williams, on transportation. Vienna, Austria

Portrait(s)

– on Mirrors

I’ve spent so long validating in cloud-shapes
a more intimate portrait of myself

that in the bathroom mirror I now see
an elephant passing into a giraffe
passing into my father.

-JSB

Invitation(s)

– on Mirrors

Slipped beneath my wiper
an invitation to festivities
held in the empty factory
I just left
where once mirrors were assembled.

-JSB

Learning to Swim

– on Mirrors

Consider the sea a skewed mirror
and churning your uncertain limbs through it’s waves
an attempt to untangle light.

The comforting density of bone and future
mean little here.
The world is too light
to trouble with tomorrow,
too buoyant to sink with you.

So bring the background forward.
Kick up ripples and silt through that secret face.
Distort it into accuracy.

Where your faces finally meet
you will float without need for movement,
as in the Dead Sea
but without the need for salt.
Water can be your single taut thread—
reflecting.

Later there will be plenty of time
to learn to walk.

– JSB

Author Biography

John Sibley Williams is a poet and literary publicist residing in Portland, OR. He has a previous MA in Writing and presently studies Book Publishing at Portland State University, where he serves as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and publicist for Three Muses Press. His poetry was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize and won the 2011 Heart Poetry Award. His chapbooks include A Pure River (The Last Automat Press, 2010), Door, Door (Red Ochre Press, 2011), Autobiography of Fever (Bedouin Books, 2011), From Colder Climates (Folded Word, forthcoming), The Longest Compass (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), and The Art of Raining (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, forthcoming). Some of his over 200 previous or upcoming publications include: The Evansville Review, RHINO, Rosebud, Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, and Poetry Quarterly.