Blue Five Notebook (April 2012 / 12.7)

Blue Five Notebook – (April 2012 / 12.7)

Knotted by Sheri L. Wright

Artist, Sheri L. Wright: Sheri L. Wright’s visual work can be seen or is forthcoming in Blood Orange Review, The Single Hound, THIS Literary Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Blood Lotus Journal, and Subliminal Interiors. More examples of her work can be viewed here. With Ms. Wright’s consent, all work is available for publication, unless otherwise noted.

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Clare L. Martin

Seeing Through

after the photograph Looking Through by Zeralda La Grange

Take me deeply, other.
I am frantic with life—

I see you through the doorway
as you enter sunlight.

You expand into light,
touching the edge of the forest.

Your shape embosses
the far line of the horizon.

I would follow you to places
with forgotten names.

I have followed you here
to the precipice of being.

You are all to me.

Without you I would become
blood-thin, full of grief—

laden with omens
of one remembered kiss.

I see you at the crossing
as shadow embraces you.

Shadow rims your hazy visage;
shadow like moss or coal-smoke.

Take me deeply, other.
I am frantic with life.

Clare L. Martin’s debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, will be published fall 2012 by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Selection. Martin’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies both online and in print. She is a graduate of University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is a Teaching Artist through the Acadiana Center for the Arts.

~

Linda Simoni-Wastila

Mama Loves Birds

Mama loves birds but is afraid to fly. She rests now, secure with her crooked smile, the whorls of her thumb print, her cigarettes and Pep-O-Mint lifesavers, quilts and romances, morphine and x-rays, her hollowed bones. The pilot swoops closer to the leaping waves. The wind shifts, and she takes wing, fire-polished ash.

Linda Simoni-Wastila lives and loves in Baltimore, a town where her Northern birthright and Southern breeding comfortably comingle. Her poems and stories are published or forthcoming in The 2013 Poet’s Market, MiCrow, A Baker’s Dozen, The Sun, Thunderclap!, Monkeybicycle, Eclectic Flash, Nanoism, Camroc Press Review, Every Day Fiction, Every Day Poetry, BluePrint Review, Istanbul Literary Review, The Shine Journal, and Boston Literary Magazine. Read more about her online at LeftBrainWrite.

~

Dennis Mahagin

Alford’s Plea

He would love nothing more
and it might serve them right
for a cataract called insight
has blown shut the back door.
He would stop taking care
and play dead on the freeway,
a Belushi in his underwear
reposed for helicopter dee jays.
Out of his way, to hold real still
as a molecule in heat shimmer
or shark fin, oblivious of swimmer.
Yet fully believing that real life will
not acquit, he itches for a sentence:
Sonofabitch. Non compos mentis.

Dennis Mahagin’s poems and stories have appeared in 3 A.M., 42opus, Exquisite Corpse, Juked, Absinthe Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Stirring, Arsenic Lobster, Metazen, PANK, Night Train, Thieves Jargon, and Keyhole. Mahagin is also an editor at FRiGG. A chapbook of his poems, entitled Fare, is available from Redneck Press, in conjunction with the website, Fried Chicken and Coffee.

~

Rachel Fenton

Rogue Trading

The first time it happened there was a magpie trying to get in at the window. They steal other birds’ babies – macabre rogues. I’ve seen them: raiding the nests, gouging the little ones out of the guttering while the mothers shriek to the clouds and perform a death spiral like suicidal paragliders. This one took mine. When it happened again, and again, I said it was the magpies that had taken them. It made more sense than admitting I had indirectly murdered them through a starving adolescence. Everyone said I was just unlucky but mad to think so superstitiously. And then, when you were born, I knew it was true: three for a girl. They let me keep you.

Born in Yorkshire, currently in Auckland, Rachel J Fenton has work in Horizon Review, Otoliths, Blackmail Press, Brief, Monkey Bicycle, Flash Frontier, and others. Shortlisted for the “Fish One Page Prize,” “Binnacle Ultra Short Competition,” and longlisted for the “Sean O’ Faolain International Short Story Prize” and “Kathleen Grattan Award,” she won the 2012 “AUT Creative Writing Prize” for her graphic story “Alchemy Hour“. She was Guest Editor for The Aotearoa Affair “Past Myths, Present Legends” Blog Carnival.  As Rae Joyce, she writes an epic graphic poem about stuttering and migration, Escape Behaviours. She blogs at Snow Like Thought.

~

Robert Lietz

Photograph 1919

Think how a morning begins and ends with coveting.
Stopping to do the math, think hard.
But this is Sebring, you can tell, and Christmas in some places,
our tree still lit, dressed, and reasonably ours
until the weekend, the start of another story-line, with its own
riffs and intimations, only now imagined,
and the words picked up, by that mike nested among the scraps
at the bottom of a trash can, when the songs were ours,
no less our own than the bedroom fears and zealotry, than hungers
were, than history. Whatever the wars or futures seemed, in
bones and blood and fiber, or pan-European syntheses, we trusted
in reflexes, inversions, and in the readings then, waking
to clothes we wake into in a new century, imagining the sacrifices
kids would understand or exorcise, explaining the smoke,
the syncopation and the dances, the bars where neighbors, dreaming
of ships, held tight, where we would ask and go our own ways
in our bodies, with no claims, no offers, no efforts at confession,
but giving the hour back to them, so long as the bardolino, beer
and the bar-logic were convincing, offered to us as sips, bon mots,
in a lingua franca rusts could just accommodate.
So here’s this new river, and this new river architecture. And here’s
this bench, in the loneliest corner of the capital, where
you can watch the cabbies, parked, watching the sun collaborate
with river wash and cobbles, thinking who knows what of it,
except to offer the sun a lift and introduction to their music, plastic
as you suppose and perilous. What comes, what comes,
if not this jazz accompanying the pure light over water? Imagine
the gloss, the shutter, capturing depth, and that damn fast lens
an early century adapter might desire, meaning a sporting chance
and skills matched to expenses, 1919 say, bright as the light is
on the French doors and continental influences, with the taxis idling,
bringing you back entirely, to fill in an old man’s words
and pause and take the muzzle off creation, off the life refigured
now, in an old round’s reiterations. Let the smeared frock
speak for another day of labor, and the tubes of color tell, the clouds
of fabric, yard and bolt, clipped polygons of light, with more
to say about themselves, and these two posed, just as they seemed
when you arrived, catching their intent, for the first sitting,
the point of this mess two leave to gather or divine by, better
or less to fit, a scatter of private stuff they’d saved to serve
the leprechauns or gleaners, the vandals, again and everywhere,
come in as the rooms sway, emptying, as the grandmother
you’d stayed with often once would not have told you.

Robert Lietz is the author of eight published collections of poems, including Running in Place, At Park and East Division, The Lindbergh Half-century (all three with L’Epervier Press,) The Inheritance (Sandhills Press), and Storm Service (Basfal Books). Basfal also published After Business in the West: New and Selected Poems.