Portland poet Chris Leja on the topic of rapture.
After The Rapture Had Passed
we drank like beaches
trying to swallow the ocean,
our voices, trapped in bottles
rising with the tide
(there was a message
behind the shouting.)
We made a bonfire in the front yard,
with papers and notebooks for kindling,
left a history of the people we had tried to be
smoldering in a birdbath,
a stone urn collecting the
chronology of unfortunate mentors
and indelicate lessons that had
made us so calloused.
We called it cremation,
and meant rebirth.
When the embers of old promises
suffocated the flames,
we breathed for them, sending
clouds of cinders swirling through the air—
with each exhale, we watched the ashes hover,
before they succumbed to slow descent,
a picturesque blizzard
surrounding some kind of Eden.
When the rain started, it was nothing like a baptism.
It was something holier. We stood like
the lungs of bonfires, reading aloud
whatever the flames left legible
(the words, coarse shadows
on newly golden pages).
We joked about apocalypse,
left the taste of rapture wrapped
around our tongues, as we drank
like saviors and laughed like thunder.
This is what I know of scripture—
sacred is just a word for that which rebirths us
into our bodies. It is not found in bibles,
just the remnants of bonfires
forming a galaxy around us.
When the fire swallowed everything
we’d once called holy,
we started breathing for ourselves again.
I was surprised at how much
it felt like prayer.
Author Biography
Chris Leja is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He has represented LC three times nationally at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational, is a founding member of the Sparrow Ghost Collective in Portland, and just released his first chapbook, A Chronology of Quiet Thefts. He also has an impressive collection of snakeskin shoes and a peculiar affinity for the word “vernacular”. You can contact him at cleja@lclark.edu.
Art and poetry on red shoes and rapture.
Rapture - Mark Brunke
Red Shoes - Mark Brunke
Love and Coffee
on the theme of rapture
I was invited
I remember,
Accepted
Into you again, and
Again, always first
Into your smile,
Then mud-spattered in
Tart tart pale sweet
Watery drags of tired
Love, tiered on down plants,
Down blankets and tear drops
On your June balcony,
Hanging on a telephone
Wire, a memory buzz of
Coffee alone in
A tired scarf while
You turn towards
An intersection,
A receding rail, training
A fading exhaustion.
My fingers, I think,
The left ring finger,
Hurt at the
Distal phalange.
Stiff and bent
For decades.
I was
Thinking of your car,
The pink engine
With its thin chrome
And motherly exhaust. I
Was thinking of your
Lilies, underfed
In their office corner
And I was thinking
Of your brown basket,
A threadbare wicker,
Burning in its hidden
Flourescent shadow.
I was thinking about
Baking in your kitchen,
With its flavored garage
And rising goldfish,
Watching the timer
Expire and listening
To that hideous fountain
Babble
As it packs for winter
Elsewhere.
Author Biography
Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
Joseph Taylor Golding is an American video artist. His recorded images and words, composed of found and original footage and sound, sometimes are like messages from an imagined future long gone cold, but they glimmer lightly with something that smells subtly of hope or perfect summer blackberries. Joseph’s work is a thing of great discovery, beauty and endurance.
Joseph, in his own words:
artist statement for Unshod Quills:
Joseph Taylor Golding is an autistic visual artist living in the pacific northwest. A land of black sunlight. and smiling police men . He composes the moments of poetry in his everyday life With an eye of an angel dragged in hell joseph creates poetry and visual sculptures and short films and feature films in between twin collapsing suns joseph has never called anyone father or mother so he lacks the humanity needed to be a person. in his attempts to communicate via discarded images he feels like the old coins and archeologist finds with the faces of dead kings, their value as forgotten as himself. he places a new value on them. as he does himself. Joseph studied film at Evergreen in Portland and in Paris. Joseph is supported by his imaginary friend pete . joseph’s body is primarily consisting of water, 98.6
We will let Joseph’s work, video poetry on the themes of fire, America, somewhere never traveled, gladly beyond and rapture, speak now. We can’t hold it back any longer. Seldom do I comment on work published by our journal, as I like to allow the art and literature to speak for itself, but I comment now.
Thank you, Joseph. Please continue to do this work.
Anyone who might see this and be interested in learning more about Joseph, or in hearing from him, will please email me at dena @ haliterature dot com.
Dena Rash Guzman
Editor
Unshod Quills
“My Name is Joseph”
on the theme of “Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWKJqaGTnM]
Drunk On Empty Words
on the theme of Fire
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4a-7k-cBh8]
Visual Sculpture – The Sky Was Full of Snakes (part one)
on the theme of Rapture
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38zioorHgVg]
Visual Sculpture – The Sky Was Full of Clockwork Crows (part two)
on the theme of Rapture
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zyK_pcXJrI]
More of Joseph’s work can be found here:
Sacrificial Totem
Look for some great work utilizing the poetry of Richard Brautigan.