Unshod Quills

A poem by S.C. Gordon of Shanghai.

The Regiment

– on sonnets

That morning they’d bent to don their black-soled boots
After hours through which none of them had slept.
Bending to tie them, not one thought to refuse
The fate that dogged them even as they crept

Into the trenches; cheerful swipes and looks
To mask the snapping, banging dread
Of their mortality written, poised to hook,
Thinking of nothing but the sweating dread.

Their death pose, now preserved in picture form,
Shows ten brown, soiled skeletons dug out from the pit
Where the part-time sacristan had laid them down
Hands clasped, the line of them unsplit

By years, by decades that have gone:
The regiment of bone-men, boots still on.

Author Biogrpahy

S.C. Gordon was born in the north of England in 1981. She studied poetry at Oxford University. Her poetry collection “Peckham Blue” was published in 2006 by Penned in the Margins press, and charts the discovery of her biological family in south London. Her favorite poets are T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Matthew Sweeney, Sylvia Plath, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Paul Verlaine. In 2008, Gordon moved to Shanghai, where she works as a freelance writer.

Oregon poet Chad Reynolds

photo: Chad Reynolds on "When We Two Parted"

Vegan Warning

– on beasts

Don’t give your heart to a vegetarian. They think meat is gross.

CR

Bellhop For Your Baggage

– on transportation

You begin by holding the handbag
But the luggage multiplies
In your sweaty grasp
Piling upon your shoulders
’til face and knees are sagging
All for the price of shagging,
Degraded from knight to squire
All for dread Desire
But a bell’s hop between
True love and valet
Loaded down with
Purest Samsonite
Unpacking damage
On snake skin scales
A contest of scars
When you could be
Sharing the stars
They carry on
And on and on
Dirty laundry packed away
For ease of burden
Heedless of the things we belong to
Our own faded treasures
Chained to our soul
Cargo of stacked satchels
In a lake of Merlot
Trunks within trunks
Faces in valises
Every love lost
Butchered in my memory
Fine limbs folded
In Louis Vitton
Chunks shopped from the past
Packed for posterity
Patched with everywhere you’ve been
The place where you drag it all out
And put it away
Is the place you call Home

CR

Panning For Gloss

-on lipstick

Fantasy becomes history
Scripting out the history
Technicolor tapestries
Factory made beauty’s mastery
The surface is the max factor
The only honest man an actor
Celluloid mask on our memories
Liquid glass within all mammaries
Mundane superficialities
Dominate our realities
13 channels of shit on the TV
Commercial breaks won’t set us free
Seeking true connections
With electric reflections
We fuck and fight and die
Before a cold glass eye
As absent as the god that made us
Plastic ideals degrade us
No brave new world arises
Another coat of shit on the same old crisis

CR

Author Biography

Chad Reynolds is a cornfed madman with a heart of gold. Born in Kansas and bred in Las Vegas, he currently lives in Salem, Oregon with his cat Lazarus. He has been writing and performing poetry since 1985. Chad is a member of the Unshod Quills Writers Collective.

A poem on beasts from writer, artist and musician
John Emmons

LEAVE AND NEVER LEFT

Today my memory refreshed itself, told me how hard I was…
No, not hard…leathery, yes…dry and leathery.
I slept beside you like this…sometimes so careful not to mar
your warm porcelain fleshiness.
I was never younger than then, could I get younger, and still
quiet and reflective, no…refractive, pruning
callouses and hangnails, sanding my fingers so nothing
would snag on your human fabric. But you said,
“I like the rash, the rugburn of you tearing across
my fertile flatlands.” So yes, I tunneled and trenched
your mountains and strangled your gurgle off
at a mileage marker flashing past.
Yes, I tore your scars open and exorcised them
with my hot salt, leaving tracks acid etched
on the silver plate of your own internal space.

The construction of the space station is nearing
completion, the new wing casually stretching out
for your reservations.

I chew this poem into a spit wad
and blow it down a 600 mph aluminum tube
to you.

ENOUGH, you screamed!
but like a Beast
I jammed my heart down
your throat and reamed
your turning indicator until its red
light exploded sequentially
across the inside of your face.
I looked into your eyes.
I knew it was finally done.
I knew you’d never forget.
I knew what the burn would do to my immortality
Strike again! Scar me to the bone.
Leave and never left.

– Camden 1-15-81

JE

Author Biography

John Emmons: ohn Emmons-poet, artist, musician, dishwasher, cafe closer, bar opener, carpenter, plumber, electrician, mechanic, pool boy, rockstar, unpublished novelist, house painter, sculptor, inventor, dog walker, animator, TV producer, porter, stockboy and part-time mystic. Contact John here.

Jason Mashak, formerly of Portland, Oregon, but currently of Prague, reflects on the theme of “When We Two Parted.”

MEMORY OF THE IMAGINATION

I remember when we used to suck face
Just thinking about it I lit my match
Before taking out a cigarette

You were like one
The way your smell stayed on my fingers
Your taste on my tongue

We sucked face for hours
Sucked away the minutes with our faces
In cafes and stairways, parks, passages, and pubs
Our faces were never unsucked

I remember like it was yesterday
And the day before and the days before that
Even after we parted

It was like our faces went on sucking without us
Sometimes we’d eat, drink, bathe or fuck between sucks
Our tongues part of everything

When the smoke clears, you remain
Nowhere to be found

Author Biography

Jason Mashak (b.1973) is a Michigan native who lived in Georgia, Tennessee, and Oregon before a strategic self-exile to Prague, Czech Republic, in 2006. Father of two small mostly Slovak daughters, he devotes his time to daddyhood and writes primarily during his daily work commute. Haggard & Halloo (Austin, TX) published Mashak’s first book of poems, Salty as a Lip, in 2010 (the 1st edition sold out, an expanded 2nd edition is forthcoming). His writing can be found in numerous journals and anthologies, including a few in Czech translation.

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.

The Poetry of Andrew Hall

Emily Dickinson’s Fanboy Flirtation

– on When We Two Parted

I will tell you how the sun rose
And continued for a spell
Unleashing into sirens–
Softly warning us

Of tornado bombs not distant–
From interspatial strife
The history is resealed
When we unclose our eyes

AH

Johnny Guitar

– on Transportation

There they do a little dance
of evil and good while
the women duke it out for power
same old story we blow each other up
fighting for the crumbs not noticing
the empty space and barriers before us
we could destroy everything in a flourish
& think nothing of it… we could have sweet tea
on the porch while the children
bloody each other up on the field oh lovely
sunshine tell us what to do break out your song
you load yours I load mine
& we shall dance til’ we hit the floor.

AH

Author Biography

Andy Hall is a graduate of UNLV, earned an MA at Northern Arizona University, an MFA at Antioch and is currently working on a PhD in English Studies  at Illinois State University.  He has competed on 3 National Poetry Slam teams, and has performed poetry, stand-up comedy, music and performance art primarily in Las Vegas since 1991. Andrew Hall is a member of the Unshod Quills Writers Collective.