Unshod Quills

On the themes of

THE SEVEN DEADLIEST

i. envy
hey there sugar
envy loves you
envy always loves you
envy never loves me
I am not sweet enough

ii. lust
the lowest common denominator
of the life cycle is thus:
dusk lay down
night fell upon dusk
dawn came
and day was born

iii. pride
you suggested celibacy
as a religious delicacy
i put my bra on backwards
in order to assuage my pride
and also to suggest that I
look as good coming
as I do
going

iv. wrath
my comic book avatar
is coming for you
head on backwards and
ready to kill
these thought bubbles
above my head
are nothing like
what I feel for you

v. sloth
it is 4:20 now
in the a. m.
and I am alone
in my lazy silence
my silence knows
no bounds

vi. gluttony
my silence is sincere
my silence is my epitaph
and my epitaph
is eating me alive

vii. greed
in loving memory
i shall call over-eaters anonymous
and ask them to counsel
my epitaph
because my greed
knows no bounds
and hell is as sweet
as sugar
on the tongue

Artist Biography

Portland resident Amy Temple Harper is the author of Cramped Uptown.

On the themes of Envy, Sugar, and Life Cycle

BLURB

Any reader can tell: this is a very important poem. Not only because the poem is like Keats set to Schubert, but for how the reader can hear their hearts, a sonogram of allotted beats trilling past. So profound, this very important poem opens to us the core of life, so poignant the poet tells us her throat clamped shut as she wrote this undying work in her own hoarse unreliable voice.

Not everyone could have written this very important poem, only those who suffer under pressure like the glaciers, deep suffering, earthy as Ben Franklin’s belly, inevitable as a red light. This polysyllabic name-dropper of a very important poem will release your soul from her cell, let her find peace enough to know your life’s true purpose.

Thanks to this very important poem, we now know, once and for all, what Goethe, even what Hölderlin, were trying to say. The elongated song of their incandescent Empyrean ecstasy becomes simple, even sensible. We sense the poet’s ample supplies of the Good and the Beautiful, as good as a green field of wheat, as beautiful as green parrots’ jaunting tree to tree.

Such subtle craft in this very important poem! Each reading yields layers like prayers, embroidered with sublime chiming:
The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
for you and not for me.
O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,
where is thy victory?

How rare, this silken falling into place.

Just read this very important poem. The next morning you’ll rise at dawn, find a sky clear and breathless as a Sierra lake, heaven and earth mirrored face to face. And you’ll find yourself reciting this very important poem, feel it unfurl like a bird grooming each feather, until each word melts, unfolds mellow in your mouth.

BLOW YOUR MIND

After the ACLU meeting, we dawdled in his dad’s old Volvo. Then, the fuzz:
Buddy, show me your driver’s license. Even in Santa Monica, 1967 cops could be scary.

Chiquita banana stickers on his wallet didn’t look witty now, more of a hex:
drugs were on everyone’s mind, so to speak. Grass. LSD. Mellow Yellow.

Every one of us loved Star Trek, thrilled more to Spock than to Chekhov.
Freedom of speech underground in The Voltaire, our furtive purple mimeo, got the ACLU

gung-ho for us. Our slogan: I will defend to the death your right to say it.
High school principal, former wrestling coach, would have crushed us honor-student editors

if he hadn’t lusted for Samo High to sweep the quiz meet regionals. Our
joint lunges for the buzzer, our hunger to show off and use the IQ,

kept us scoring points at those dinky desks until the district trophy was all sewed up,
letting us lie low by buzzing loud. Now, me, I couldn’t have told pot from oregano.

My squeaky naïveté got me on the masthead, also the invitation,
never mind how, to be local emblem for freedom of the press, for the dream

of a future with eloquent kids all taking chances on causes worth the vitriol
police and the Silent Majority slammed our way. (Little silence, so much squawk.)

Quite a crowd gathered in the park that warm spring night, a SoCal samaj
rallying to the calls: let speech be free, get us out of ‘Nam, make the skirts mini.

Samizdat deserved the risk I took sneaking my way out of family purdah.
That tough-guy cop enjoyed toying with us. We already knew he could bust us. I could just see calling

up my mom from the police station and getting grounded for a year, even if
vile stepfather Jim had been sprung from driving drunk only two weeks before.

Why, you ask, couldn’t I just follow their rules? They treated me like some stoned
XXth Century Fox, long before the Doors went druggy and deep and psychotic.

Youth gone wild, that was me for sure, typing up sober cries for room to breathe, a bomb
zone riskier to inhabit, a more lasting rebellion, than smoking marijuana.

Abecedarian of the Budgies

A week in Athens for my half-century birthday, sure antidote to Weltschmerz.
Believed Frommer’s: owners parade their budgies in Oneiros park every Sunday.

Could caged canaries be freed? Imagine seeing each avian aviatrix
dance, bound only by cotton strings that would trail daintily below.

(Elastic cord would have launched each bird like Barishnikov,
feverish, entangled like the louche courtship dances of Corfu.)

Greeks lock bumpers, jump from cars, snarl and brawl in traffic, but
Hellenic birds, even on Sundays, must stay separate as dolmades.

Icarus convinced folk you could fly too high. Greeks remember.
Joy-riding birds of Athens, loosed every Sunday from deux à cinq,

kites with tiny minds of their own, would soar while locals nap.
Limp, weepy, off-kilter, sleepy, I was not philosophical like Plato.

My half-century found me so much less settled than even Helen,
noodling my way through midlife, out-of-step and off the rhythm.

Olives of Athena sprouting in every park; now, this mythic marvel:
parakeets uncaged in the polis? What a custom! I was wild to gawk.

Question that I never sent to Arthur Frommer, trusted tourist Raj:
Remind me, who told you this tale of tethered birds? The Oracle of Delphi?

Simple me, I asked the hotel clerk how to find the park. In fine English,
truthful, not at all unkind: Never have I ever heard such a ridiculous thing.

Unstoppered, fabled birds flew away. I felt my whole flock take off,
vanishing back into the naïve guidebook of this faded layered place,

where nods mean no, where one conveys yes by shaking the head.
Xenophile I might be, but that wasn’t enough in Athens. Organic

yoghurt was the only soothing part of entire days I spent silent as a tomb.
Zeno said, Once delayed, you can never catch up. You can bet your last drachma.

Donut Slam

Time to admit: I’ll wear what fits
but I’ve worn out that F-word,
f a t : the insult with a bite,
bound to be the first thing going in my obit.

It’s like this: I am the elephant in this room.
Do I have to get a witness to prove my fitness,
to be permitted to take up space?
I’ll state it for your benefit:
seems I’m unfit, too big to be seen
by long-waisted odalisques,
they who sit easy
knowing they’ll be asked to dance,
not stranded at the edges wondering what it’s like
to be wanted, to be welcomed, not to be a misfit,
not to have to outwit to be partnered at the party
going on in the world. Do I have to throw a fit,
drive a stake to be counted?

It’s like this: it’s a good tight fit
to diet in this rich land,
or you don’t fit, not into the mold,
not into the True Religions.
Just admit: no one knows
what those fittest survivors are fit for.
Grown women in a snit,
cinched in knots, throwing fits
if their number waxes bigger.

It’s like this: if folks don’t see me, I don’t exist.
There’s a hit slams like a fist.
A surfeit of women sit huddled in the sauna,
talking kitchen porn about rich foods forbidden.
You who say sit down, quit dancing
ought to get a retrofit.
Listen: I’m not on the move for your benefit.
Just admit: in the battle of wits,
when they say ‘fat’ it’s over. You lost.
Fat’s the only mortal sin left to commit?
Clearly a sin to finish every bit.
Do you need to see a script to decrypt my story?
Well, it’s like this: I’m not finished, and honey,
I am not done.

Show Time

The band they called the Beatles
needed a bass guitar.
John Lennon wanted me to play
while he took up the drums.
But I can’t I told him,
I’ve never played bass,
I don’t know how.
He looked at me
over those round glasses,
a look that said,
like I know how to play the drums?
And I thought, Who am I
to shrink from sour notes
if he’s willing to sit up there
and whale like a fool.
Actually, he sounded pretty good,
his long hair swinging,
as he worked his shoulders with the beat,
pivoted to bop the high-hat.

Author Biography

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired clinical psychologist, German major, Pushcart nominee and occasional photographer, no longer lives for Art, but still thinks about it a lot. Poems appeared recently in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Bohemia, The Mom Egg, RiverLit, and, qarrtsiluni. “Eggs Satori” was recently selected for Black Lawrence’s forthcoming anthology, FEAST. Centrifugal Eye recently featured her mini-chap, Floating Route. Kattywompus Press just released Burrowing Song, a collection of prose poems. For links to work on-line, go to: www.cloudslikemountains.blogspot.com/.

On the theme of Comic Books

SONG FOR AQUAMAN

Fish? I can hear them.
Through the oil-slicked waters
heated to boiling, I can hear
their cries, their panic-whine of need,
not words or thoughts but a hum,
electric, that moves through me
like a lance. Some days it is too much—
you know how water conducts—
and I send out my own signal
so they will shut the hell up.

Above, the light sears,
everything is baking.
Even now, you are withering,
gasping for air, for space,
for a tidal wave of meaning
to come and wash it all away.
I can help, though you never ask.
There is no signal for me, no light
in the night sky calling my name.
Would you prefer a cape?
Could you cup your hands, then,
in pleading, in supplication?
No, it is easier not to be found
wanting, not to find cracks,
to suspect your city full
of aging buildings, ready
to be razed to the ground.

Author Biography

Melissa Reddish graduated with an MFA from American University.  Her work has appeared in decomP, Prick of the Spindle, and Northwind, among others.  She is also the co-faculty editor of Echoes & Visions, the student literary publication of Wor-Wic Community College.

On the theme of Envy

ENVY

Battledress:
blue-rich broads wear black
their handbag dogs wear Prada jackets
(their teeth are porcelain, their square nails glare
exclusive bitches style their hair)
day outfits cling for yoga sans sweat
by night they rustle Thai silk
-envy?

Battlegear:
their skin of boiled milk
they kiss moue-moue with lips that can’t wilt;
(while coffee-hued women from foreign wombs
clean inside their private rooms)
they pick up prurient Porsches as
proof of spousal devotion
-envy?

Battleplan:
cellulite lotion
anti age/ wrinkle/ slippage potion
(bodies gelled and smoothed and lightened and moussed
lifted, sucked-in, whittled and juiced)
priorities: facials, pedicures
from ethnic minorities
-envy?

Battlestrategy:
conserve history
lib with a small “l”, con a small “c”
(at boardrooms, clubrooms and the ivy league
mask all signs of bored fatigue)
and bid at silent auctions for “Good
Causes” so conscience is healed
-envy?

Battleground:
no leveling field
to nurture fertile respect or heal;
(but we know fuckall at best, with our third-
world eyes focused on absurd)
they effervesce in their neat bubbles
as the world turns upside-down
-envy?

they: cappuccino foam
we: coffee grounds.

Author Biography

Born and raised in Africa, kerry rawlinson has been a lifetime student of “the arts,” winning her first contest aged 8. Since emigrating to Canada almost four decades ago, necessity forced her outside Literature and Arts’ embrace. Now retired, every day gives her another hopeful opportunity to cajole/crowbar open its arms. Her first published art and poetry were accepted in a couple of issues of Prospective: A Journal of Speculation.

On the themes of Life Cycle and Envy

Escarabat Tortuga

Aquesta és la historia de l’Escarabat Tortuga:
Va aparèixer fa uns dies a l’ampit de la finestra. Volia conversa.

Avui ha tornat a aparèixer, damunt les banderes tibetanes que ma germana va enviar del Nepal, i m’ha dit que li agrada el vermell.

Després ha fet una demostració d’equilibrismes a la corda al vent.

I llavors ha anat a dormir a l’ombra, no fos cas que es cansés.

Turtle Beetle

This is the story about the Turtle Beetle:
I met it a few days ago on the kitchen widow’s threshold. It was eager to talk.

Today it appeared again, on the Tibetan flags my sister sent from Nepal, and told me red is nice.

Then showed off its equilibrium skills on the rope in the wind.

Finally it went to sleep in the shade, to make sure it wouldn’t exhaust itself.

The Turtle Beetle

Many sisters

Woman,
you’re looking stunning.
Your eyes are green with envy
Your red hair is in flames
The fire of ambition, that burns.

Woman,
you’re very pretty
But you shall never be the prettiest
Your stunning beauty will decay, anyway
will find your heart empty, and you’ll break

Woman,
your tongue is pointed
How can you kiss with this same mouth?
When it sounds, I ache
I cover my ears, and I look away

She could have
many sisters
They wouldn’t feel
so lonely any more.

And she could be
your sister too
but she’s too scared
of your stunning beauty.

Artist Biography

Conceived under the stars in a remote house with no electricity or running water and raised in a mountain village of bourgeois summer villas, Estel expanded away from Paradise into the modern world of hectic dreaming and globalized chaos. Adopted by the maternal city of Shanghai, she started to forgive human destructive mistakes. She is currently trying to perform miracles.

On the theme of Envy

AD BREAK ON THE INDONESIAN NEWS

what is it like to live in a shampoo ad?
flick tug pull at my hair. how it gleams,
how its split ends are healed, how the
instant shiny-haired friends go shopping
with me shiningly and the enemies go
mad with envy. i spend all my time with
accented hairdressers who live in clean
white imaginary worlds full of hair. all
i can think of his hair. do i have the right
shampoo? is it right for my special personal
touch? armageddon at a dandruff flake.
lots of people in this country have no place
to shit.

Artist Biography

Josh Stenberg is a writer and translator, born in Vancouver but living in China. His fiction and poetry have been published in Vancouver Review, FreeFall (upcoming), Kartika Review, The Asia Literary Review as well as in publications in other places he has lived, from Indonesia to Brazil. He also had two poems in the inaugural issue of Unshod Quills.

On the themes of

HOW WE ARE MOLDED

Neither words
nor brush stroke
can capture it;
it’s in the throat,
a dry cough
Some call it divorce
or being motherless;
maybe a soldier
with legs blown off
somewhere
in Afghanistan
Others tell me
it’s what occurs
after sin
or what clay men suffer
before they’re molded

TESS DIED

There is a tiny door
of light by the fence
between the pickets
and the posts
near where Tess died
Mind you,
this was not
a sudden event;
it took a lifetime
to evolve
Death does not
have dimensions,
yet, we struggle
to invent words
to measure it

Author Biography

Tim J Brennan writes from southeastern MN. His poems can be found in The Original VanGogh’s Ear, Talking Stick, and Whispering Shade. His one-act plays have been produced widely, including Chicago, San Diego, Bethesda, and other nice places.

On the themes of Epitaph and Life Cycle

ELEGY FOR AN APRIL MIDNIGHT

In the cut earth that glitters up
the light of pitchfork and spade

in the wind-whipped sheets
of clouds and the smear of red tulips

in the industrious cities of worms:
drunk on camellias, on the smoke

of flagrant weeds under our feet
almost unnoticed whispering

of half-swollen buds – I unearth
your words – that breath whose voice

was cut off. Steps crossed the dark
boundaries, gray curtained gray,

an hour whose name no one
could repeat, however close it came

to the heart. The storm velocities
bore down a mountain of weak

fast-falling light. One thrush calling
far away, not far, close at hand, clear.

BITTEN

So confused by the spiritual turns of the wind
and the light falling in enormous gray patches,

I’d arrange my blood to be open, my wings
to tie themselves like curtains to your windows.

But who could miss the absorbed expression
of clocks wound up to reel the afternoon forward?

Yet there were good days too, that today make me clutch
the pen to my breast and write on the skin of the world

its strangeness. And when the sky walks through the pond’s
green darkness and the fingers of trees lengthen

like embittered saints, I’ll come back to the dawn, its iced
tendrils that in the end dissolve the slow mortar

of the tongue. Though my blood enters like a fire the belly
of another, much remains in the mind’s dark shifting,

where moth-like shadows dart in front of me and
dragonflies strike the surface to drink and not be drowned.

Author Biography

Elizabeth McLagan lives in Portland OR and has a book of poems, In The White Room, just out from CW Books.

On the theme of Life Cycle

OUROBOROS

—bright sight shines
as new love
through the winter:
our fathers’ fortunes
perch rabidly now,
their too-wide smiles
their moldering deity
linen cheeks whose
walls held songs—

on all
errs,
of all
darings,
leak out
to me
the pale
quiet grit
of being—

bright sight shines on all,
as new love errs
through the winter of all
our fathers’ fortunes, darings,
perching rabidly now, leaking out
their too-wide smiles to me,
their moldering deity, my pale
linen cheeks whose quiet grit-
walls held songs of being—

Author Biography

David Wong Hsien Ming was born in Singapore and discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch. He is pursuing honors in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and has read poetry there and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His poetry has appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ceriph, Eye to the Telescope, and earned an Honorable Mention in Singapore’s Golden Point Award 2011.

On the theme of Epitaph

ICEBERG EPITAPH

She would have been comfortable
In the North Atlantic

She gave you that sinking feeling
Just to look at her.

Author Biography

Taylor Ray lives in Seattle and spends most of her time reading, writing, and  painting.