A.K. “Mimi” Allin holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from City College of New York. She produces poetry, journals, questionnaires, visual poetry, text-art and poetry-driven performances for public spaces. She takes the name for her project, Nostalgia, from an Andrei Tarkovsky film [Nostaghia]. It refers to that universal place, that homeland we seek, that place we long to come home to, the human spirit, which is something the poet embodies. Allin is seeking a publisher for her manuscripts, Soviet Poems and Roof of Air. The following poems are featured here with Allin’s permission. All peculiarities of capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. are by the poet’s design.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
–Diane Arbus

and what do i know

images of the world
the ground &the sea
insistence &the resistance
what do i know
my surveillance never sensed
the camera blow
wasn’t even looking no
was focused on the channel
that battery of waves
those lies lives the motion of water
the notion of furor &foam
dominating the beach
that perverse idol work
jetty mine make me a jetty
of equal force &dimension
stour 4space
you don’t say
then you are the prisoner confiding
your face is the only document i need
with that i can hammer down walls
&ceilings rip up carpets &tacks
knock open the sills
mywrists ache4 labor
&myseeing &knowing
&truth &all that means
what do i know
inscriptions of war
philosophies of peace
lights &tunnels
hey you safe seeing suburbia
hey you stencil-a-boat
come on onthespot come
here lies the race
at the beachbreak
for the first time
you respond to the camera
that crashing wave
savoring the unchanging quality of you
like the fabrication of field &house
atop an aircraft hangar
like seeing what isn’t there
&not seeing what is
the cameras do things
like drop bombs &fly
&measure &attach windshields
&pick up &count dots on a die
oh luck &all those people
saying things in seats around you
clearing their throats in growls
like the curl of a surf thudding
some unseen beach

you are a moth&more&more

in all those museums
those miles
those cafés
the reemerging form
i throw myself in
the alley
&then
spillout on a backstreet
the next weeka new work
offers proof
of sunlight &prose
but prose i cannot do
i know that breaks a rulei want too mucha consort
i cannot dew a dropa schaft a ship
the well i’m instop cranking li
someone someday
will raise youwolves
i want to be your friend&
play footsies& thenthis is not good breeding romulus
become
becoming is all i ask

acurious collaborative combining

words wanting sentences
fragments wanting wholes
possibilities wanting meaning
progress is rapine now
the cubes are putting themselves back together
the grass has picked itself up
&put bits on bits
to make a meadow
there’s an augmentation going on
so press me further
ohplease do
it’s strange how our people path
how they bind &cleave
vanish somewhere
try not to bbinary
better to be tri
try &beyond

(previously published on The Argotist Online)

sin the sea wall

his sin, she saw,
given to the sea wall.
he, hers, clasped and blessed,
clasped and blessed.
some such, the sea saw.

he, her spool,
found strongly tall.
she did, his awl,
to unrest, draw.

the nip of her chin
tucked in
and nuzzled
the small of his back, this small,
as a chill wind
bristled her,
bristled her shawl.

when the waves rocked
causing her shawl to free,
all she, saw he,
but thought
her sins yet small,
yet grabbed for,
clasped for, blessed be.

his craving eyes
drained
and filled
with a vision, this lovely,
as the sea spray
wetted him,
wetted his cloak.

when the wild waves knocked,
causing his cloak to part,
his awl, she saw,
but thought the point yet dull,
yet clasped for, grasped for, blessed be.
there, within view of the wall,
the seas do rise and fall
in some such sumptuous way.

(previously published in the Crab Creek Review)

cabinetmaker

i want to make something
as beautiful as the table you are carving
or are planning to carve
i want to smooth something over time
to break the edges into worn soft light-attracting curves
i want to make something lasting and
as i wonder what
i come upon the thought
of you working with something
nature has already made beautiful
and see how you are just altering
a preexisting beauty
if only conceptually for the moment
shifting its focus
and i wish to do more than that
i wish to create
not tailor beauty
not to rework nature seam by seam
but to make the world perceive
and as i wonder how
i see you stop what you are doing
which stops me doing what i am doing
because as you tilt your head
and as your beard catches light
your chin goes into shadow
and i realize what it is that made you
that it is beauty you are working with
and i want to do something beautiful

AK “Mimi” Allin is a life-long volunteer, a poet in a very old sense of the word who’s making it her mission, sometimes quietly, sometimes subliminally, sometimes overtly, to bring poetry to the people. In the last two years, she became the poetess-in-residence at Green Lake in Seattle, coordinated the “Running Poets” lake run, read Frost’s “Fire and Ice” through a 300 lb block of frozen water to strangers, sent 60 poetry-emblazoned umbrellas around Green Lake, and was nominated for Seattle’s Poet Populist, 2008 (VOTE!) by the Washington Poets Association. When we spoke over the phone, Mimi was in Walla Walla, sitting in the sun with her sketchbook, making a “conscious effort to be fun.” Part-one of our interview focuses on her place as a poet, and her desire to connect others with poetry. Part-two, which discusses language and craft, will be featured shortly. Visit her blog to learn more about her work and events.

DJ: The idea of “being fun” shows up a lot with you, not only in your work but especially in your public activities and poetry installations. You seem to be making an effort to define the word “poet” in a deeply personal way. How are you trying to define the word, especially in regards to how you live in this very poetic sense?

AA: I’ve been having conversations for at least 10-years, probably more, about the importance of poetry and where the artist fits into society. It has to do with coming to terms with one’s ability to make a living, and whether one is self-sacrificing. Something I come back to again and again is that poetry is the highest and most common denominator in our ability to communicate. It’s the form of communication we turn to when we really need to get the message through. After 9/11 we had poetry on the front page of the New York Times. It isn’t a typical thing for us, but it’s where we turn to for both inspiration and articulation.

Art is just a means of explaining and expressing our problems and our place. The more involved you are with projects, the more you see there’s not much difference between fully living your life, exploring your place in life and being an artist. For me, it decided to do this because I didn’t feel I had a choice. I wasn’t finding my community. I think poetry has been lacking a community, which is why it’s kind of lost. Academic degrees and programs form a different kind of community, one that seems separate from the world at large, the community that, I think, the poet is trying to reach. Like many art forms, poetry is a thing that people become afraid of because they haven’t had enough exposure.

The project at Green Lake taught me so much about myself and about what people want. Poetry, dialog, discussion and art need facilitation. People are ready to respond and interact, but we need somebody there to start or focus that dialog. Being a poet and articulating also means facilitating and transmitting poetry to people. There’s this great big public that would love to participate in art and poetry, but don’t know where to go to get it.

DJ: It seems to me that you are doing your part to take this idea of what is poetry away from the stuffy man of letters or the woman up in her room and bringing it out into the public. When did this motivation set in?

AA: I wish I could say why it is I need to solve problems when I see them (laughter). I was brought up with a sense of civic duty, with a need to make things real, and with the idea that if I didn’t do it, nobody would. Dialog feeds me. The work that goes into these projects isn’t the fun part. What’s exciting is seeing people scramble for poetry in a world where if you say, “Here let me read you a poem,” the room clears out. The idea that you can get people super excited, and you can make things happen, is thrilling to me. In the moment, it makes things worthwhile. It energizes me.

DJ: You have a knack for facilitating and bringing thoughts and conversation together in one place, as if, through your presence alone, you serve as a channel for conversation. In that way, it’s a constant facilitation. I am curious, how have you found yourself being received, taking into account both the curious looks and the voices of support?

AA: The day of the Running Poets at Green Lake, people were jumping up and down. They were excited. They were stopping and dropping their mouths, “This is beautiful, you need to get money for this.” It was a wildly popular, successful event. It was an exciting day. Things were free, connections were happening, the poets were, people were excited to see things happening.

While I was doing the Green Lake project, I was spending about 30 hours a week blogging about things that would come up during the day. One of the things that came up was this idea of parallel socialization, where people walk around the lake, they want to be seen, they want to meet people but they can’t bring themselves to go do it. The question was, “Why is this happening.” That was a dialog for quite a bit of time. I was thinking about it, and everyone who came to me were thinking about it (too). A lot of bright people came by and added their bit as to why they thought it was happening.

Some people said, “Well, you know, there I was one day at Green Lake and I thought, ‘I’m going to make a connection. I’m going to go up to somebody, I’m going to say hello and I’m going to talk to them.’” One guy reported that he did, and this woman started telling him her life story. And it was a hard and horrible life story. She’d almost died recently, and she was going through this major surgery. After about 20-minutes the guy was thinking, “I’ve got to get out of this conversation. This is too much for me to handle.” So the fear exists that once we’re in, we can’t get out, and just how much responsibility can we take and how much can we offer to the community.

DJ: As the channel, the facilitator, you’ve probably gotten to that place where, once you’re in you’re in, and you can’t afford to walk away while the show’s still going on.

AA: And I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I did have to come to conclusions about how to deal with people who kept coming back, or made me feel uncomfortable. For the most part, it didn’t happen.

DJ: What was your plan for that?

AA: (Laughter) People were worried because sometimes it would be very cold or raining all day. I wore the wrong shoes, the wrong outfit, whatever. So I would walk up to get hot tea and come back. And people would say, “Well, what about your desk, and what about your books?” And I would say, “Well, you know, something tells me they’re not going to steal my desk, it only costs $40 and I’m not really worried about it. And if they steal a poetry book, I mean, I can’t think of anything better.” That kind of stuff doesn’t really happen in this world, but I wish it would.

Almost everything that came up that I wasn’t ready for became a challenge. That very first day someone said, “Can I give you a dollar, can I donate to this cause?” I had to decide if I was going to accept money and if not, then why. I decided No, and I thought, “For this project it would be too easy. It feels good in our culture to give some money and walk away. What I really wanted people to do was to put themselves into it, or to think about it. So I said, “If you really want to do something, memorize a poem and come back and read it to me one Sunday, or go read this poem and think about what this means. Or go answer the question, Where are our poets?

DJ: There’s almost a Whitman-esque quality to both your approach to being this poet, and also in your use of language in your work. Has Whitman been an influence on you? Or is there a collection of others from where you can draw the line?

AA: I read and studied Whitman in a class called Protest Poetry. It never went to places that were visual or public, but was mostly about the kind of literature that doesn’t survive a protest, and how all poetry is protest. So I really wouldn’t draw a line there.

I think the whole idea of me going grass roots and non-profit, and throwing myself in it, is more a result in my not being interested in money, not having a business mind, or my wanting to keep capital money out of it. That could be a problem, and I’m still struggling with that. I talk a lot with my partner about whether or not the artist can make money doing what the artist loves to do, and if you don’t believe you can than I don’t believe you will. I’m trying to re-envision myself as an artist who makes money. I can see myself being a grant-funded artist, and there all sorts of artists who live off grants and that’s how they do it, but I wonder if you can have poetry become a commercial interest. That intrigues me. Why fight the system continually if you can use the system?

DJ: As an artist, is giving of yourself the most important thing? Or is it more a case where you’re simply going to do what you’re going to do?

AA: Typically, it’s not just materials and I’m gone. Once it was raining at the lake really hard. I was cold, it was winter, and I thought, “OK, what am I going to do? I’m going to read. I’m going to pace and I’m going to read.” I was having trouble turning the pages, my fingers were cold and everything was wet. And I decided to just rip them out and stick them on my poetry desk, which had beads of water all over it. Then I got the idea to go into the little forest, which was about 25 trees up on a hill behind me, and see if I could stick the poems to the trees. And they were sticking. I got about 12 trees covered with pages from my poetry book. Then I went for a cup of tea.

When I came back, there were about five people in the forest reading the poems on the trees. I was just thrilled and I thought, “My God, it’s working.” I put it into place then I watched it happening. The day it’s happening by itself will be a very wonderful day. I won’t feel like I’m out of work. It’ll be more like, “Finally, I live in a world where things are meaningful, where people have access to poetry, where the poets are being heard.” And also, the poets aren’t just being needy, but the poets are being truthful, they have something to say, and they’re giving and not just receiving. They’ve grown up and they’ve come to a place where they say, “OK, I’ve worked on myself and now I have something meaningful to share. Listen to this.” And people do listen when there’s something being said.

MEHope lives in Klamath County, OR, with a husband, two teens, five cats, two dogs and a short list of contrary attitudes. She is MFA free and supports Obama for President.

Rock Chuck

Squeezed between rock and earth and root
marmots, (five months of fat
padding our bones) seep
into sleep like old secrets.

We dream of sun and shoot and bud
dream the hawk over other hills
dream eagles after geese; rolled in
each others armpits, noses cozy with fur.

Mole and vole and squirrel scoot
our periphery, using what heat we waste.
Their haste to bring winter’s end
doesn’t disturb; there’s four more

months to snooze. I roll into my neighbor,
scratch an ear, still in dream;
I will wake in spring a smaller shadow.

Near Wasco

Three paint horses
in the stubble field

disappear around
the canyon’s curve

new snow can’t mute
the crow’s call

the sky here holds
twice as many stars

as are seen through
the pines

so many, they seem to drown you.

Bruce Weigl is the author of fourteen poetry collections and a memoir, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review and Harpers. Weigl has received awards from the American Academy of Poets, and has been the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, Weigl was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. His collection, Song of Napalm, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Lorain County Community College.

The following poems are from Weigl’s 2006 collection, Declension in the Village of Chung Luong, published by Ausable Press. They are featured here with the poet’s permission.

The Stakes as Hands

The stakes that the surveyors laid to mark the boundaries
of my land still stand above the drifted snow, as if someone
outstretched a hand to strangers who may pass my house.
Another war is waiting on the line to start; so many
we will send to die, and tonight
the snow is general all through the city:
an almost vast unfolding into tundras of our loneliness.
Yet it’s only snow. The stakes are stakes, not hands that reach
to strangers who may pass my house or not.

In Love with Easeful Death

That was just now a spirit;
a flicker and then gone
into the dusk of trees at the edge of the party
I can no longer bear witness to.
In the small pond with its faux waterfall and changing
colored lights,
I feed the imported fish into boredom.
That was surely a humming bird,
flit of color and then vanished into the trees.
I don’t ask anymore what’s real, and I told no one
about the absolutely white rabbit
I watched hop through my vision at the Shawmut T-stop
in Dorchester one midnight, I told no one,
but I caught myself wondering,
and then I stopped.

This No Where

This is just a picture we live inside,
white house, black shutters
frozen snow on the roof and on the ground.
This is just a movie we imagine is our lives, silent transfers
here and there in our cars, to appointments we must keep
or else die a little in someone’s estimation; die a little in
someone’s head. That’s what I think. That’s the way I think about it,
and I am only just a little afraid of letting go
completely of knowing anything,
letting go of knowing anything at all,
so I don’t know why
we fret so over the loss of beauty, over the passing, or over the death
of beauty, but we do. We try to possess beauty with our lying eyes
and think we know what beauty is or does, and it’s a crying shame
what happens to us then.

Portal

In our hallucination, the children are instructed
in the ways of finding shelter
when the rain of our bombs comes down
on their small villages and schools. The children
can identify our planes, and
what our planes can do to them. They

sleep the sleep of weary warriors
beaten down and left for nothing in their lonely deaths
that come so slowly you would wish
your own heart empty of blood.
I watched the people gather in the street
to stop the war that is the war against ourselves,
against the children who practice finding our planes
before they’re blown up into dust
nobody sees, but that
makes a sound like the vanquished.

The First Father-Murdered Rabbit

The smell of the rabbit’s blood in the back of my father’s
chevy from more than fifty years ago
comes back to me today,
out of a tunnel of some kind
is the best I can do
to explain what I mean. The smell of the rabbit’s blood
had been inside me all along; (I am most alive
inside of words, and most safe in their aisle of fancy.)
That boy didn’t have to see the rabbit, pearl of blood
at the tip of its nose,
but he did, and he didn’t have to help skin the rabbit clean,
but he did that too, at his father’s side.
You don’t know at the time
just what it is that you’re getting yourself into;
just what doors
you may open, and then never come back.

I met Bruce Weigl in 1997. I was in a writing workshop that followed the class he taught, and he used to sit with our group for a few minutes before the professor showed up and talk about anything from Bob Dylan to writing to baseball. Later, as a student in one of his poetry workshops, I came to admire his approach and ability in working with a room full of novice writers. Today, Bruce is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Lorain County Community College in Ohio. He was very gracious in agreeing to this interview, which we conducted through email. We discussed poems from his most recent book,Declension in the Village of Chung Luong.

DJ: Bruce, I’m moved by your willingness to peel back layers of your psyche as a means of self discovery while also serving as a mirror for the reader. Rather than making peace with the past, in “Declension” you seem to have negotiated an uneasy ceasefire where the occasional midnight shot still rings out. At the same time, the poems force the reader to examine a very unsettling present reality and future vision.

I’d like to frame my questions around a few of the pieces within “Declension” if you don’t mind.

The first poem I read was, “The Stakes as Hands”. I was struck by the following:

“Yet it’s only snow. The stakes are stakes, not hands that reach/ to strangers who may pass my house or not.”

This seems to be a comment on the nature of metaphor in our lives. Have you, or we, for that matter, gotten to the point where metaphor no longer serves us, or can be seen as providing too much of a blanket under which we hide from the truth just on the other side of the veil?

BW: I like to fight for the literal in poetry, at the very least as a starting point for the reader and for the writer, but it’s a literal in my mind that’s layered and that offers up deeper and more abiding meaning the more you lean on it. Metaphor is beautiful of course and we couldn’t live without them, but at the same time, it becomes too easy sometimes to hide behind the ambiguity of metaphor. I wanted to bring into those poems the beauty of a thing said straight if I could.

DJ: What is the place of metaphor, especially as we attempt to dig deeper toward the absolute truth of things (assuming an “absolute truth” exists)?

BW: I’m not sure poetry is capable of “absolute truth,” if there is such a thing. The only absolute truth I have any faith in is from the dharma and that’s called “ultimate truth,” although more faithful Buddhists would say that any talk of the dharma is simply another kind of conventional truth, like the truth about the names of things. It also has to do with a regard for emptiness (non-nature) as a reality that’s ultimately incapable of being narrowly defined by concepts. Metaphor is a useful and sometimes powerful figure of speech but like anything else in poetry, it needs to emerge naturally from the drama of the poem, whatever kind of poem it may happen to be.

DJ: In the poem, “In Love with Easeful Death”, you distill the scene down to this tragically beautiful image of the white rabbit hopping through your midnight vision:

“I don’t ask anymore what’s real, and I told no one/ about the absolutely white rabbit/…I told no one,/ but I caught myself wondering,/ and then I stopped.”

Here you seem to be asking your readers to choose between the truth of a vision and the metaphor behind it. I’m curious of your thoughts on this.

BW: That’s an interesting take on those lines, and thank you for asking me about this poem. English, largely because of our Anglo-Saxon roots, is an inherently metaphorical language. It’s practically impossible to say something in English without it also being a metaphor for something else. This is not always a good thing. ometimes when you write “shite,” you want it to mean “shit,” and so on and so forth. It’s not true that I don’t see metaphors at work regarding the white rabbit, how could I not, and I welcomed them, but for me the choices had to do more with the literal sound and sense of the poem. Of course what’s behind all of this is the fact that anything examined closely reveals more and more about itself.

DJ: Staying with this theme, there’s the following line in “The Head of the Company”:

“I still had faith in those days that the truth mattered…”

What do you see is our ultimate relation to truth, and what is the poet’s role in opening truth up for us?

BW: It’s a slippery slope until all parties agree upon terms, but for me, truth in poetry has to do with a particular quality of voice – which may or may not be entirely artifice – but which has the power to draw me into itself and force me to see the world as I should have seen it all along; it’s that, and the sense too that when you read the poem, you feel the weight of a whole life there, projected back into time from that single sustained moment of the poem.

DJ: I recall you once said that a poet should never ask questions in a poem. (You said this a decade ago during an undergrad lecture.) As much as I wonder if you still feel this way, or adhere to this “rule” yourself, how does this notion relay back to the poet’s role in guiding us closer to truth?

BW: I’m sure I said that, and I’m also sure that there are countless examples of the appropriate use of questions in poetry (Homer comes to mind), but when I teach writing poetry, and when I write poetry myself, I want all of the questions to be answered by the writer; I want the writer to take responsibility for answering any questions that may come up, otherwise who else is there to answer them. It’s that simple for me.

DJ: Finally, I’d like to talk just a moment about two poems, “This No Where” and “Portal”.

“This No Where” opens with the following: “This is just a picture that we live inside,/ white house, black shutters/ frozen snow on the roof and on the ground./ This is just a movie we imagine is our lives…”

Balance this opening against the opening of “Portal”:

“In our hallucination, the children are instructed/ in the ways of finding shelter/ when the rain of our bombs comes down/ on their small villages and schools.”

In both cases, it seems as if one could apply words such as “wishful thinking” to replace an uncomfortable or unfortunate reality, whether the notion that there’s nothing more to strive for than three bedrooms and a two-car garage, or that children are safe in the war zones we create. Or, as you say toward the end of “Portal”:

“We try to possess beauty with our lying eyes/ and think we know what beauty is or does/”

These lines seem to have been written by someone who, upon digging to what he felt was as far down as he could go, (or climbing to the top, if you will), discovered that he’d merely worked his way to the start of an entirely new layer, “With miles to go” as Frost put it. I’d like to get your feelings about this. And, in serving as a mirror, what are these lines reflecting back to the person for whom wishful thinking has replaced the grimmer reality that’s waiting to be exposed and expressed?

BW: That’s difficult, especially since I’ve just spent two years finishing another book and haven’t thought about this one very much in awhile, but I’m certain that what you’re reacting to there is the idea that I tried to build the book around: the image and the landscape, and the language of literal and figurative decline. These are images for me of what could be the end of days, or at the very least, images of an enormous moral collapse. “Portal” is about what it says it’s about: openings between this world and other worlds, which sounds outrageous to talk about literally but which have deep meaning for many people. It comes from my Stephen Hawkins/George Jetson theories about time travel. In terms of the lines being “reflected back” as you say, I think that works too because the words are meant to be like incantations in those poems; like testimony that the speaker has to be accountable for, has to stand up for when the time comes.

Jack Lorts is a retired educator, living in small town eastern Oregon, and a poet publishing in little mags as well as a recent chapbook, The Daughter Poems & Others, by Pudding House Press.

The party at Ralph’s
was the party at Ralph’s
(he was in Europe, Bora Bora
or some such on a Fullbright).
Everyone from the Project was there.
Bobbi, who was house-sitting for Ralph,
said     What the hell

Come on over     If Ralph were here
he’d ask you
(he’s in Tibet or Tahiti
on a Guggenheim or some such).

A barrel of cheap wine was passed
cold pizza
and the usual solutions
to the world’s problems.
Vince, Herb and I
    watched the game on TV.

The party at Ralph’s
was the party at Ralph’s.
Thanks, Ralph,
wherever you are!

Rhiannon Lewis-Stephenson, traveler, poet, writer, cynic, romantic, and a bit of a freak, a student (as of now) of institutionalized learnings in Humboldt, trying to move to Portland or Seattle.

Beatrice’s mind was art gone wrong, a weathered collage that had been peeling loose ever since he left her. She had led a separate life from me since the beginning, but I couldn’t mind, her innocence prevailed her. I would watch her strange rituals sometimes, her compact self completely still in the warm dirt of our garden with the bees kissing her crimson flowered t-shirt as though she sweated honey. The buzzing did not affect her in the least bit; she would close her eyes like she was listening to symphonies played by Beethoven; the music of the bees surrounding her. They were the heroes of the flowers, their rites so engraved in their communities of marigolds, daffodils, and penny royal, absorbed past distraction. Their work was thorough, gentle, and without selfishness, and I could only believe that I would have not known these simple details of the bees if it was not for Beatrice’s unprejudiced sight. So I loved her, because she took me past the judgment I had held against their stingers, and let me lose myself in their strength.

Some days I found Beatrice in her hole of sadness, having fallen too far in for even the bees. On these days, I would tell her stories of my days in college, still only a sophomore, my two years of college hardly making it a well-known experience; but I knew enough of the bustle and hum of paperwork to feel pain from it. I would explain my hatred of all the endless reference papers I constantly had to cite, the glances and the gossip. I knew that she didn’t care but I felt that one does as one can. Whether she listened to me or not, it doesn’t matter now, but I realize that I could have, and should have, tried harder. She received no one but me when she fell in such a state, and then, in these moments, we were friends.

Beatrice spoke to me less than any person I knew, but in those few words she taught me more than anyone had. “In which that you despise, you love.” Her advice would echo constantly in my head, the little sentences, the strings of poetry she spoke like the trickle of a mother’s breast. The effect of her dark redwood eyes would leave me lost, feeling as though I had been passed through a different place, one unknown to my chosen state.

When she would speak, her lashes would flicker, a half lit lamp. It’s my soul, she would tell me, it has been halfway blown out. Only then would I choose to leave because it was then that the good time would end, the quiet would enter the room, her head would bow down, and the smiles would grow fewer. Her guilt, she engulfed herself inside of it, its hungry belly eating her up until I would feel as though I did not know her.

At times when she was well, I would imagine that maybe she would take me away, her gypsy talk would light me up inside and make the wildflowers look a lot brighter; for she threw reality away like it was naught but a piece of scratch paper:

“We’re the whole thing, Damien, we walk with those who did not burn the witch, we advise those who lose themselves inside these cities. You’re only a part of me, as I can only be that part of your imagination, so I sing to you and you play me guitar. Those who tell of riches and your box houses, they’re the stingers on the bees, the venom in the snake. For whose life are they to judge? Our roads we take are dust-scattered and there the fires burn. You cannot be accepted because you look through glass windows and you do not see where the villain went, but you question why the hero’s heart was broken.”

It would be nonsense speech, and the people who would visit her would leave telling me, “She is definitely not quite right, Damien. Except for her beauty, there is nothing here for you anymore. You are passing your point of common sense, boy, it’s time to quit.”

They would offer me full paid jobs in which I could write my stories whenever I wanted to, in beautiful sites of green grass and oaks, but I could only refuse and think of who’s really all right in the real world.

Beatrice never spoke to me of him, but I knew he was there always, behind her lilted speech, I could feel the hurt inside of her. His bus had come and gone, and he had gotten off a long time ago, but she still held the ticket in her right pocket. Some nights I would find her sitting near the telephone, her wild eyes blank and sad. These moments I would feel the bees inside me bursting to come free and the jab of their precious stingers against my heart, for her love was never mine, and my love was always hers.

Brian Hardie is a 24-year-old writer from Portland. He’s been writing poetry since the age of seven, and has been published in a number of small press journals including The Pebble Lake Review (Austin, TX), Conceit Magazine (San Fransisco, CA) and Angel Exhaust (UK). He has also toured the West Coast and Midwest as a musician. He’s currently in the process of writing a book of abstract poetry.

Instead of being text book romantic,
I level the basis of nervous
Contentment, walking a thin
Line synopsis of the Tragic
War between detectives and
Thieves singing
Belches in a new drug scene
Fabricated from the wild
Horse sedative, wallowing
In the dusty mind storms,
stinging the skin. Homicide
Drama begins her song with
A drumbeat.
Bullets and rays
Shot behind strung out eyes
Praise and break bread with all
But the Addictions killer. Sober
Senseless hidden views of Washington
Equally stabilize the loss, lingering as
That possible romantic overdose subsides.

After having explored various professions and traveled to seven countries outside the U.S., Sione Aeschliman has returned to Portland, Oregon to work on her writing and make a positive difference in her small corner of the world.

My tongue, which had been asleep all my life, suddenly woke up three days ago after tasting a Thai curry. Since then it’s been alive and pulsating, aching to experience new textures and tastes. It longs to run itself up the smooth, salty neck of the footballer or to follow the sharp, perfumed jawline of the woman on the metro. It would like to creep into the shriveled mouth of the toothless old crone, to caress the withered gums and poke into the crevices left by the teeth that long ago abandoned their posts. It would feel the prick of bristly hairs of a man’s large nostril on its tip. It wants to know everything, all of life’s most intimate secrets.

Emily May recently moved to Portland from Burlington, Vermont to make magnetic poetry and the West Coast branch of her environmental non-profit. She blogs at mtremix.blogspot.com and is available for hire.

“That the world is not one, that the world is not whole, that perhaps I must decide to get away from all this, that if I want to make something of myself, then at the same time I must leave all that is mine behind me, all I can do and all that I know; leave these people sitting on the doorsteps outside the house where I live, drinking coffee and talking about all that they know, say goodbye to them forever. And if that is what I must do to develop myself, as they say, then what is the point of it all?”
-Per Petterson

This is leaving, being in an airport, left, there is no place or time in here but it is supposed to be California, but is a nation, a day, a life away from Home. Leaving is being alone at Yankee Pier, a classy restaurant for an airport, drinking pinot grigio next to a round-faced blonde man who recommends the clam chowder. “Some of the best I’ve had,” he says shyly, turning from his newspaper. I am immediately overcome with sadness for him and us and the airport and his rumpled news, but in the middle of my glass of wine, we talk at length about college (his daughter just graduated, an English major at the University of Portland), and Burlington, Vermont, whose young, wet green mornings I’ve just ripped myself from (it’s nice), wind power (a good idea, a growing industry), and Isreal in the summer of 1969 (he returned right before Woodstock). He is returning from Hawaii on a business trip, wishes his wife was with him, bought pineapples encased in brightly decorated cardboard and plastic handles. He is inquisitive and congenial and interested, mistakes me for an adult, thanks me for the conversation. I mourn his absence when he leaves to catch his plane home; I always become attached to the ever increasing mass of fleeting former strangers who reveal humanity and kindness and daughters who are English majors.

People who dine alone and drink alone usually have sharp jaw-lines and agendas, tailored pants and chic but comfortable shoes. They have an air of glamour about them, fashionable distraction, as they pore over their files or barely creased bestseller. They have places to be tomorrow and people waiting for them there. I feel like a fifth-grader, wide-eyed and nervous, accidentally dressed, in someone else’s old clothes. (No one is waiting for me where I am going).

I agree with the waiter when he suggests another glass of wine, then wonder if this moment of presumed celebration– I am a human, an adult, have made the choice to hurtle 30,000 feet above sea level toward a place 3,000 miles from where I was, to drink seven-dollar-a-glass Oregon wine served by a dapper waiter who says please when he places the glass squarely on the square napkin on the square table for one– is actually one of sad submission to this airport lifestyle that confuses me, tempts me, and I want to–do– loathe in its impermanence, uprootedness, embodiment of our fossil-fueled, self-indulged instant gratification that will soon bring this country, the world, down with it.

I call my sister, my twin, whom I’d deserted twenty-four hours earlier in a fit of poorly concealed regret and fat tears– no super-ego, all id. She is now three time zones away, probably eating dinner alone, while I am attempting to fulfill some outdated Romantic notion of finding something like oneself very far from where one comes from. The phone rings until her canned voice prompts a message. I hang up, choking, wondering how people all over the world continually complete tasks like leaving still in one piece. In the world now, children leave their mothers. Suddenly the world that we can travel, must travel, seems cruel and horrible, a twisted and monstrous negative magnetic force that pulls humans from one another, in airports people separate and cannot say what they have prepared to say.

People at other tables engage in miniscule talk with strangers seated far from themselves. All of these people have homes, people they love, but I imagine them perpetually awaiting their planes, always speaking to new strangers, running from the people and places they love, listening to songs that were on VH1 ten years ago in airport restaurants, the singers they can’t quite place.

Soon, the plane will ascend, souls floating untethered through space, bodies searching for a place to lay. In the air, the wings of the plane will reach back toward the earth, toward the smooth curves where the land and water fit into one another. The clouds stretch out before us, under us, like a field; the wings bounce and we’re at the mercy of gravity.

I think I might split in two.
-Per Petterson