Unshod Quills

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.

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.

A 2010 Collaboration Between Poet and Artist:

The Poetry of Dena Rash Guzman and the Collage Art of Anthony Bondi

As Leda Lay

– on Beasts

Please click the image to view in larger size, and click once more to view in full resolution.

"As Leda Lay," on Beasts - Anthony Bondi, collage; Dena Rash Guzman, text

Artist Biography

Anthony Bondi’s full biography can be read here.

Author Biography

Dena Rash Guzman is a Las Vegas born writer, poet and visual artist. Contributor to several journals and anthologies, she and artist Viv G also recently co-wrote a play that was presented in Shanghai, China by the Shanghai Repertory Theater in 2011. She works as Managing Director North America for the Shanghai based independent English language press HAL Publishing, and appeared in their 2010 anthology, Party Like It’s 1984 – Short Stories From the People’s Republic of – available worldwide through Powell’s Books. She lives on a farm outside Portland, Oregon and is the editor and founder of Unshod Quills. Her second chapbook, “Love of Godzilla,” is pending release in July 2011 by the brand new Old Heavy Press.

A Sampling of Literary Collage From Portland Writer Kevin Sampsell

– excerpts from a larger project

Kevin Sampsell on transportation

Kevin Sampsell on "When We Two Parted"

Kevin Sampsell on sonnets

Kevin Sampsell on mirrors

Kevin Sampsell on beasts

Author Biography

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.

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).

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.

Fiction on the theme of beasts from Shanghai based American author Renee Reynolds.

Watercolor, "Turtles," by Renee Reynolds, on the theme of beasts

A Man Called G.

Based on a story that was inspired by a true one

It continues to baffle G., the turns that life can take. He had graduated from a top US MBA program and moved to Shanghai for a high-salaried management position.

Career and life remained lucrative, and so in China, he too remained. By twenty-eight he’d bought a penthouse and by thirty he’d married his Chinese language instructor.

Promotions, bonuses and travel were frequent. There was a mistress in Wenzhou, and then one in Chengdu, and then there were the occasional xiao jie-flecked business weekends.

One day he went to the doctor because he wasn’t feeling well. Nothing conclusive but he was ordered to rest. The hiatus from the office and time home revealed what a shambles his marriage had become.

The divorce got nasty and then it got expensive. Quite fortunately, he’d had his fingers in a big fat Shanghai pie before this domestic unraveling started, and his cut of it came through just in time to help him jump ship all the faster. From then on, he disputed nothing and the ‘I do’ became an ‘I don’t’ just like that.

Back to work he went — a bachelor once again with the spirit of business as usual.

Shortly thereafter, a batch of high-grade lanolin landed in Hamburg to be spread across Europe via various cosmetics by multiple high-profile brands; the shipping end of that lucrative pie that G. had since spent his cut of. Turns out, it was tainted. So toxic that it caused copious cases of blistering rashes; pie in the face.

The probe linked G.’s company to the scandal. His team had overseen the deal between the German-based buyer and the Chinese manufacturer. Bribery, forgery, buck-passing…all standard practice until exposed; rotten pie in the face.

The press would need a monster to behead as soon as possible.

The company offered G. double severance plus a non-taxed informal sum as compensation to be that monster. He agreed.

Time in prison or have the face of his severed head published anywhere G. was spared of. But, his name and career as he’d built them, would henceforth be sunk: his passport was stamped ‘Criminal’ and he’d need to be on the next plane to the US, unavoidable conditions of the secret ‘reprieve’.

Urgings from his mother to stay in the US were followed by a series of job offers from various family members. None would keep him. Four months in the basement of his brother’s Chicago home later, he returned to Shanghai with a new identity. By the end of the following year, G. along with two former colleagues had started their own Quality Assurance operation. Slowly, he rebuilt his life one client at a time. Then he got the lump.

Where his hair ended and his cervical spine began; a tiny nodule of mystery on the back of his neck swelled. It could have been a bug bite, a skin irritation, a small cyst, maybe. It was not.

The first doctor found nothing in the biopsy and sent him home with antifungal cream. A few days later, it was a patch of leathery skin with a small crack at the apex of the lump. He went to see a dermatologist. Another lotion. Before application, G. read the tiny print on the metal tube: “…aloe, vitamin E, arnica, lanolin. Made in the USA.”

One week later, the crack was a scab but the pain in the neck had grown worse. ‘The ache is deep now, in the bone,’ he said. The dermatologist recommended an orthopedic specialist.

Again, nothing conclusive. G. was sent home with painkillers, more lotions, and the card of a therapist specializing in mysophobia (aka germophobia), hypochondria, and other related psychoses common among laowai.

In the therapist’s waiting room, G. read about turtles in last month’s issue of Natural Wonders.

Dr. Lane Fairwell, tells NW how studying turtles has provided new pieces of the evolutionary puzzle.  

“Avoidance,” Fairwell explained, “is the most common form of defense in reptiles. With turtles, however, the development of the neck enabled them to turn toward the origin of their fears, thus expanding memory and awareness, changing the pattern of all life-forms to follow.” 

G. imagined a turtle waiting to tell a fish about his problems. Then he tucked the magazine under his arm and went for a massage, opting instead for a regimen of hard work, painkillers, whiskey and one-night stands. He was pretty content with this executive decision until a morning somewhere in the third week. He woke flat on his back with unbearable pain and a neck stiff as a board. He reached back with searching fingers to find a tooth-sized thing poking out from the bottom of his skull.

He dropped a handful of painkillers in like peanuts, sucked them down with a swig of whiskey and waited. Once the pain subsided, he pried himself up slowly and with the mirror of a left-behind make-up case, examined his neck in the bathroom. “What the devil…?” It had broken the skin and grown in an upward curve — a tiny, pale-brown horn.

Internet investigations offered a cornucopia of plausible culprits: a bone growth, cancer, soul possession, meningitis, a witches curse, a nightmare or an incredible hallucination…

Again, nothing conclusive.

The pill and whiskey consumption grew almost as fast as the horn. A madness followed; mania. G. surged with an energy that turned him into a dynamo in his three favorite activities: work, sex and ping pong. Satisfied women and a newfound exhilaration greeted him each morning. And business had never been better – rain money it did.

Within a year, the sharp tip of the horn was in-line with the crown of his head. He was like a rhino walking backward. The best tailor in Shanghai fashioned him with fine shirts and suits, each collar with a giant buttonhole. Photographers and journalists came calling. City Holiday, This is Shanghai, Time In…all the local rags wanted a piece of him; pie redefined.

G.’d reached local celebritydom and the top of his game — but it got lonely up there. For the first time, he suddenly wanted his old life back. He considered going back to the US — at the very least, for a visit, to be with mom and the fam.

He had an X-ray just to see. And then he asked about it just to know…could it…could he have it…can it be…removed?

The doctor pinned up the X-ray but G. could already smell the answer, see it too. His spine was fused with it; one could say, it was the top of it, the biggest part of it. Removal would kill him. Second and third opinions said the same.

G. visited family anyway but the description was not enough to prepare them. He had downplayed it. Sure, moments of familial history would be revisited, aspects of the G. they all knew and loved would surface here and there, but this new appendage he wielded with a foreign beastly gait, no one, not even his own mother, could come to accept. Not ever.

G. returned to Shanghai crushed. After swallowing and snorting a plethora of drugs delivered by displaced citizens from nations in upheaval, G. teetered out of his window with nothing, really, to live for. He held out his arm, dropped the bottle of whiskey and decided to follow it.

Headfirst, down, down, down he went, toward the bottom, toward the concrete, toward the blackness of pain’s end.

The weight of the horn pulled him faster into Earth’s core, pushing everything back. G. became a bullet, cutting through the night air as a space-diver falls across galaxies. His head would have crushed upon the pavement if not for the flagpole jetting out of the building; a massive red flag flapping at the end of it.

The horn hooked the pole and swung G. back up into his own window.

With mouth agape and limbs loose as cooked noodles, he slumped there in his box and rested on his horn.

Author Biography

Renée Reynolds grew up in Chicago and Los Angeles. She writes short fiction and paints long pictures. When the voices come, she transcribes as much as possible in case its important but it usually results in a first-person narrative. There are regulars and ones who seem to be just passing through. She is currently writing a novella based on the life of an American business man  in Shanghai.   She works as a freelance writer and has lived in Shanghai since 2007. This is the first time she has written about herself in the third-person.

The video art, music, direction and lyrics of  Portland artist Posie Currin.

On Transportation – “Looking Out.” 

Tunnel vision – from Currin’s Hand Cave series, a cave of a hand is fixed over the lens, and the viewer is brought along on a brightly lit trip along roads and highways unlike any others. A journey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s322T93EZLk&feature=related

On Beasts – “Walking Moon”

An exploration of the archetypal. Future fraction. Woman as god type, and  in the afterlife, traversing a landscape – umbrella, cape, cloak; all tools brought from the mortal world and put to brilliant new uses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGXhcHnB8Rc&feature=related

On Sonnets – “Four Signature Movements”

A piece centered on working with Gurdjieff dance  movement, the Afghan dance  lends itself to the introspection of being covered and moving in ancient forms without the luxury of familiarity of environment. Made with Portland artist Rebecca Steele.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-E7OLyM1-Q&feature=related

Artist Biography

Posie Currin is a Portland based artist who received her MFA at Portland State. Her work includes film, sound, photography, installation and social sculpture. Currin’s methodology in her current work takes liberties with chance and embarks on a kind of journey that has the potential to create new perspectives and understandings both mentally, physically and physiologically.  In her current work, Currin is investigating and questioning the balance and tension of things in and of themselves using dance, video and sculpture. www.posiecurrin.com