Unshod Quills

Vuluture - Holly Hinkle on Dancing About Architecture

Spiked Fence
(enough rope)

Survival. We talked of little else.

In a book, you read how to jump a spiked fence

so you could camp in a church corridor.

You told me how you scaled it twice a day,

sometimes more, having spent the last

of your money on good rope.

I would give up everything to walk beside you.

Traffic’s taillights cast red in our hair,

our packs rising off the down of our jackets.

I wouldn’t last. I know.

I listen to the black and neon rush

of street noise through the phone.

__________

Topanga Canyon Road
(love)

In the cold pressed, gray light of the basement,

where you discovered the photo album from 1910, the green hurricane lamp,

the great iron-banded trunk you wanted to drag up for me,

I find you packed to leave the boardwalk.

Wet tarmac smell. Black as the night is long.

The road is folded down inside the trunk,

we can open the heavy lid together.

I will help clothe you in that hard, moonlit coat.

__________

Venice Beach
(love)

My sister was at work and I was away that early spring,

when our brother packed one bag for the streets.

The first night: steady rain and his drawing paper wrinkled.

It was cold. I don’t think he ate. My stomach empty that week.

I dreamt my sister and I were a part of the day he left,

of saying goodbye to him on the outskirts of Venice Beach.

From there we could see the boardwalk, smell its salt

and perfumed oils, dyed cotton and clove cigarettes.

We were not there the day he left. It is a loneliness,

knowing that he always walked on after we stopped

at the front steps of home. No memory of when he followed us inside.

He walked down a road we could not follow,

that tore like a frail map. The pieces turned into leaves.

Author and Artist Biography

Holly Hinkle has been creating collage and mixed-media artwork since 2008. With found objects and small antiques as a backdrop, she is always thinking about ways she might create exceptional beauty from unrefined objects that once had a very simple purpose. Her poetry has appeared in Poems and Plays and The Arsenic Lobster. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Beginning this month, she is Arts Editor for Unshod Quills.

on the theme of David Bowie

Artist - Jason Herzog

Artist Biography

Jason W. Herzog
jzog.com

Samples of the work of Spanish poet and artist
Yolanda Mora

Yolanda Mora on Lipstick

Notes on Sonnets

I can roleplay a sonnet with syllables
That fit in boxes, mujer acurrucada en una caja,
Highjacking me, kidnapping me –
Too many mirrors make beautiful green egg-face,
And green is for hope,
The size is important, the syllables, and numbers, numbers.
I hide myself inside onion peels blankets,
May Day is your day.
I studied Spanish sonnets with their own rules, I think, I think.
I remember
Shakespeare, translated, so no rhymes or sounds or.
Everything.
Missed.
So
I try to make a sonnet out of this school storage:
First, I’ll read Shakespeare and count, count
the boxes, the pace, rhymes and all.
Fit into it, fit, fit, like Tori Amos did
when best seller was punk rock´n´roll.
So
my lover came by with blood roses
Or
the blood rose was mine, I am mean,
I am mean.
A hypocrite, unbalanced young lady
of a Shakespearean age of gold.
I fit in my bed, rough orange peel my sheets
and blankets: I sleep all day and
in the night you are all bright sun.
Art is a mirror, a Francesca Woodman photograph
so
you see your own faces, your sonnets; out of this,
a transformation like a fairy tale
and delightful to watch others’ horror.

YM

The Box

-on sonnets

I can role play a sonnet under the sheets,
Green egg-faced woman to be in boxes –
May Day is your day, like orange peels.
I hide inside these blankets, woman, missed,
Can’t deny the syllables, hopeless.
So, a Francesca Woodman photograph,
Art is a mirror and I am mean,
I scared people with my pace, my face
Best-seller rock´n´roll, as Tori did;
you can´t fit into this box, like a lover.
Trespassing , spazzing, god I am fat,
Fancioulla, green mirror for hope, my base,
If you all see your image, my Art’s hoses –
I fail all the time, like a falling star.

Yolanda Mora on Lipstick

Author Biography

Mark Brunke, "Sideways" on Transportation

 Art and Poetry of Seattle’s Mark Brunke

“Border-Captain, I am determined to make you Duke of Lithuania.”

– on Lipstick

Put some sugar on your knife Potemkin, I’m watching you drown in a song.
I equally dismiss empirical
Atheists and mental Christians;
I prefer the misery in mere
Carrots and of love’s first glimpse.
I remember a time before lipstick
and it stays within my nails,
Where all beings clothed in vapor auger in
To a moment of desire’s nothingness,
Where the center of verse
Was godless among us.
Oxygen separated, in midnight’s cruel
Skin, a day’s hunger younger than us,
Oxygen deprived, moonless magic in animal
Skin, laying tasted, in a candy cane dress,
stained with sausage oil and mustard seed.
“S’il n’y avait pas de Pologne il n’y aurait pas de Polonais!” A. Jarry, Ubu Roi

MB

Recursion Problem, these

– on Mirrors

Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

America sends its regrets
as an advance on its rejections,
an historical imperative where
soldiers die for an after death.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

Terrorists we call them, cave
artists painting their
violetless particles in the last waves
of a grayscale ocean.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

Soldier’s epsom salt of slow incentives
priced in a sickbay decay, the dirt water
smell in the declination of a fading
Earth, drown in a curtain, bathe with a Cross.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

The crickets in the field, in the green
grey waltz-twisting body, the pitch on the death of
Mars lays low in bloodrose and disintigration;

lamb mouth. I
do not need to ask how I got to this, the river
Where I am childlike and charred, mirror of war.

MB

Mark Brunke, "Hotel Ceiling," on Mirrors

Author and Artist Biography

Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington.