The Guest Writer page features original work from a growing community of writers and poets who share one key trait: a commitment to seeking the truth through their own unique style, process and sense of craft. Our intent is to feature new work - poetry, short fiction and personal narrative - on an ongoing, weekly basis.
If you are interested in submitting your work and being a featured Guest Writer, we ask that you first read the guidelines, or email words@davejarecki.com to inquire.
Hanna Neuschwander is a Portland writer and editor with roots that extend to the Northwest, Southwest, Northeast, and Canada. Her non-fiction articles about Portland’s artisan coffee and food world have been published in Willamette Week, Barista Magazine, and Portland Monthly. She works at Lewis & Clark, where she is the editorial director of Democracy & Education, a journal for people who can’t think of two more important things.
HOW UNWORRIED I AM ABOUT NEXT WEEK
Skip a rock across the meridian
Fold the state of California in half, and this day
By nightfall I’ll have crossed over
Drinking whiskey at the Coronado
Watching pelicans teach their young
to slide into the envelope of a wave
There will be sun in San Diego
And my brother’s newest pair of $400 shoes
Henry Hughes grew up in Long Island, and has lived in Oregon since 2002. He currently teaches at Western Oregon University. The poems in his most recent book, Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books), come to life on the page through Hughes’ ecstatic voice and willingness to be both playful and sublime. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs (© 2004; Mammoth) won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for poetry. Hughes’ commentary on new poetry appears regularly in Harvard Review. The following poems from Moist Meridian appear here with his permission.
SKELETON PIRATES OF AMERICA
Oil drunk,
masts gnawed away,
we burn black slicks
for a Chinese cargo of toys.
Never dead enough, juggling
cannonballs and Arabs,
brown galley boys
fry fat
to fill our clothes.
Unpaid women pinch
note-wrapped rats between the planks,
and the sun
burns so hot
even sharks
can’t digest the shimmering curse.
I’m George, says the air-conditioned captain.
See all the blue
for my eyes.
DEVIL KNOWS DIFFERENT
Watching them gulp
garbage and skinny eels–two gaunt sharks,
open-mouthed in appeal–I nod,
they pass.
Now, you. You come back with me.
Smell the salt, the oily churn of a twin-screw cruiser,
drunk and wide as the Fifties.
See your parents, the sandy woman
and sable rodded man, telling you to feel the bite,
feel it.
Feel the flounder’s deck-flutter,
taste its whiteness. All the baked clams,
boiled lobsters and barbecued bass
they’ve eaten and served
to fuel the business of living,
of making you.
Parents gone now. It’s your chance
to feed your teenage daughter
more than money. Umbrella beach days without her mom.
Your lectures still too hot to bear.
She wades the blonde bar, waving to a yacht. Sharp sharks
shilling into the scent
between her legs. People say, What we eat
can’t imagine being eaten
Devil knows different.
NEW YEAR’S WITH CHRISTINE
Transmission busted. It’s late
and I have to drive home alone, in reverse,
from Saint Mary’s singles dance,
Bing’s White Christmas on AM.
I see the first small snow
in my taillights, and in ten minutes
the defrost sweats off a storm.
Flakes blow up
finding clouds again.
What if I kept rolling,
New Year’s Day, 1982. Driving us
in love, silly, still drunk
down that terrible hill to your house,
sliding in crystal terror
over the curb
into Neil Cohen’s handsome snowman.
His bottom sphere smushed gray
and that broom jammed in our bumper.
I held his crunchy head,
lifted that gold pipe
and said, Here, have a smoke. And you knelt,
suddenly knowing
to wear that hat meant change.
And you put it on.
HOW I FOUND THE SKY
It was the only time
my father asked me for anything.
Why don’t ya make me a duck for da office?
It was the only time I went to the library
for a book: Waterfowl of North America.
And it was the only time moribund Mr. Brown
gave me a decent piece
of unknotted pine, and put his coffee down
to show me how to bandsaw
without losing a finger.
I cut those penciled lines,
shaped the block, hollowed the center,
glued the body, shaved the head’s fragile bill
and narrow crest, leaving those buffed cheeks–
some ruddy joy
a lonely bird might fly to on a cold morning.
Joy? I don’t know.
I was rasping through recessed confusion,
burning in feathers, drilling shallow sockets
for the glassy red eyes of high school.
And when I carried that blond mallard
through the halls, it was the only time
beautiful Miss Herman, the art teacher
I loved and failed for three terms, spoke to me
of colors: burnt umber, raw sienna, cobalt blue
brushed across the folded wings.
MOVING
We were friends
years before
the night among the boxes,
unlabeled for fast stacking in the old pickup.
We’re not finished, I said.
There’s wine, and I’m not taking it with me.
Tipping that last ocean view,
you said, I’ll miss you so much, before that half-light kiss
pressed a bloom
straight through the island. Our hands
sands a wave makes
without music, without a bed. A motion
awaited, undressing like a storm
just ahead. So close
without my glasses. Can you see? you smiled,
one hand touching my face, the other driving
the dented guardrail
over the bridge.
–
A review of Moist Meridian will appear Thursday, December 3. Our complete interview will be live on Friday, December 4.
Ed Skoog’s poetry has appeared in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and NO: a journal of the arts. Born in Topeka, Kansas, Skoog graduated from Kansas State University, and holds his MFA from the University of Montana. Currently, Skoog is the Jennie McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellow at George Washington University, and splits his time between D.C. and Seattle. Previous to that, he was the writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House. The following five poems are from his first full-length collection, Mister Skylight © 2009, Copper Canyon Press, and appear here with his and the press’ permission.
RECENT CHANGES AT CANTER’S DELI
The telephone is no longer upstairs.
Cut fruit in a cold cup will never be whole.
Nothing is where it was. The plate
is beside the bowl. My mind’s all fucked up,
distorted, pale light reflected on stainless steel
of the walk-in-cooler. It is not where it was.
Here’s the spike to build a body of receipt.
Sweat collects on the waterpitcher lip
like the goodbye of a woman I loved.
The clerk bends his body to pray the miracle
of the handwashing station, turns knife to loaf.
The present pours into the pepper shaker.
It settles on the silk ivy of the now. Odds fade
in the sports section fallen between the counter,
where paying my bill I orphan a dime
for a silver mint, and the window snows sun
brilliant on Fairfax, demanding the commute.
They are not letting me drive anymore
and turning onto Melrose on the bus,
the driver, I overhear, has another job,
one he doesn’t know the name for.
Up in the haze some undiscovered animal
watches us, its plan mapped out, fire
swinging up the canyons, unfolding
until flame may flicker tip of sabertooth fang
in the museum where rare finds are hidden.
I, too, am a dinosaur. Rawr. My little claws.
I’m the dredge flopping for tar from the pits.
Click. I am a kind of David Bowie
in the Amoeba everything’s-a-dollar-bin.
I have four fingers and a thumb on my right hand,
equal representation on the left, and fourteen
billion toes. I’m a windup rooster. Who I am
and what I feel are irrelevant enough to be central
to the project of contemporary American poetry.
Or perhaps any art. Poetry’s just the form
of unimportance I teach teenagers above L.A.
under slanted windows that kill, by surprise,
the birds we then write about, gathering bonfire
around the small corpses, because it’s cold here.
THE CAROLERS
in scarf and boot turn
around our neighbor’s pine,
spill grog into snow,
approaching our porch with
“O Come All Ye Faithful.”
A few stumble or sing wrong,
open the door, Jim for
come let us adore him.
Annual Christian, pipered
by their pied joy, I lean
to follow when they go.
A hand holds me back.
The lead caroler, encountering
our Ford glazed with ice,
undeterred, opens the door
and crawls right through,
knees on the seat, gloves
on the dash and headrest.
The rest follow, pulling
“I Saw Three Ships”
through the car like a rope.
Soon I am falling asleep
in vast winter bedroom silence,
and I am singing with them
through local traffic
houses towns lives
exile and years of night.
EARLY KANSAS IMPRESSIONISTS
Silly now, when she visits
dreams, or I visit her, my mother,
in new condos at brief’s edge
where the neon restaurant’s lawn
shallows with winter. She laughs
in the expanse, wordless, collapsing
into snow to wave arms and legs,
craft a figure. I do the same,
like an infant learning its body.
Dusting off, I rise and she’s gone
every time. I see our shapes
then, mine a mimicry of myself,
hers a rectangular silence,
inhuman, without room
for rage shame guilt or scold,
the curves that let us recognize
each other in the air, O,
in our dynamic world today.
SEASON FINALE
My last look around the house
took so long that the vine
climbing the rosebush climbed
into my eyes, and a lizard
climbed, too, mouthfirst from grass,
its skin changing color
from grass green to a green
almost without green,
the color of dust on feather.
How changed from last winter’s
midnight when I let the dog out
and rats ran from the mimosa
to the fence while shingles
sparkled on the lawnmower shed
and in the grass, a cold lizard
raised a claw. How changed
from next week’s water
writing its black line across plaster
I cannot read in California,
where I hold the cellphone hot
while Lofstead, early returner,
kicks the back door in
to tell me of the damage.
Images come fast to the small,
impersonal screen,
linoleum sandy and streaked,
walls dice-dotted with mold,
and through a broken window,
the rosebush ash-gray, the yard
ash-gray and without lizard.
MISTER SKYLIGHT (excerpt)
When you enter the city of riots, confess
what turns your life has taken,
what is hard-on and what is mineral. Confess
until the wind catches itself by the tail.
Or find some solace. Mr. Skylight captains
a houseboat downstream like a vitamin.
I can only just begin to bear the chain-link fence.
Reflected in a puddle, the image trembles
as I tremble. The image freezes, I shiver.
It is like the enormity Gregor Samsa
is hoping to sleep through, but, well, can’t.
The woman playing Atari in public has, has…
Everything’s hauled away. In buckets.
These peaches, for example. I have heard
of you, yes, the monkey says. The moon
offers its offensive and ridiculous bulge.
Out in the salvage yard the snowy drifts
are not snow. White paint on frames,
they lean against front doors that won’t open in.
Mr. Skylight, stumbling through, asks
“Didn’t we just finish painting this wall?
Aren’t the brushes still drying on the sill?”
When the moment opens again,
remember to feel the immense province
pulling in, a hand here and here,
remember to smell what first was sweet,
apricots just sliced, one half-globe still rolling.
His wife ran upstairs to call police
as the “assailant took the victim’s own
paring knife from the counter.”
We show this on the snowy channels
most sets veil, between the black and white:
how they dragged Mr. Skylight inside and made
demands, then went deeper into his building,
and the iron gate lifted off its spindle.
Hill of stubble in moonlight, the hog
bristles across the lawn,
eats whole bouquets, eats bouquets whole,
plowing tusk through silk rose, a fresh lily.
Our headstones surrender their salt.
Wilder animals would not perturb us.
Worse hogs will cross and sand
down names. This one, at least, grunts life.
He would eat hog, could he make one die.
If there is a man inside the hog costume,
wanting to feel unchanged, so there is a hog
wearing an inferior fake man.
–
Read a review of MISTER SKYLIGHT here.
–
Nora Robertson writes fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays, which have appeared in such publications as Redactions, Alimentum, Monkeybicycle, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, Plazm and Portland Monthly. She is a contributing editor to the New Oregon Arts & Letters webjournal and is the producer and writer of the New Oregon Interview Series. Her recipe poem, “How to Boil an Egg” (below), was nominated by Redactions for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. Her performance work has been showcased in Portland in the Enteractive Language Festival, the Public Works series curated by 2 Gyrlz Performative Art, Phase One: Words + Music; Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic Series in the five-woman show Housebound, and in Tiffany Lee Brown’s site-based installation Play Me at JAW 2008 at Portland Center Stage. She lives in Portland, Oregon and works for the Portland Public Schools.
© by Nora Robertson. All rights reserved.
HOW TO BOIL AN EGG
Targhaz Interiors
2. The kind of pan with the special core that conducts heat all over is best. Allow the tap to rush frigid and breathless. The water will need salt. Have you heard about the slaves of Targhaz who dug out chunks of grey-white salt in sub-Saharan holes, dry as their salt-block homes sucking water from their bones as they slept? Foremen only lasted two weeks. Faces rotated through like the burning yolk-yellow round of sun overhead. And what about that snake god of Ghana asking for lovely virgin bottoms, rigid and headless? I imagine I am that girl, pinioned, winner of a local beauty contest. While I’m waiting, it happens that blood drips down my inner thigh, red as hibiscus, spoiling the meat. There’s no warrior to rescue me. I have to rescue myself through biology.
3. Boil all this with the egg, seven minutes at least. If you’re hard-boiled, you’ll like it plain with a little salt and pepper. Sometimes, it’s easier that way. There are many ways to devil your egg, with blood-flecks of pimiento or the rendered fat of a hen. My grandmother used to make hundreds of these in the late 60’s for what they called entertaining. In a bone-white house with tilework shimmering milky light off the walls, she laid them out in rows on gleaming platters. My mother came into the kitchen once in the middle of the night and found her peeling eggs. Her body was bent over as she was sobbing. My mother remembers the feel of her shuddering when she rushed to hug her, the streams of salt water running down between their faces.
(previously published in Redactions)
–
MY HUSBAND AS SENSITIVE INSTRUMENT
2. When two of our good friends decided to sleep with another two of our good friends and the one who was my old girlhood pal like hips rotating out of the same socket bucked up the nerve to tell me about it, he already knew. You can keep the jumile alive almost indefinitely in the crevices of a leather bag as long as you feed it the right mixture of leaves and grass. The Maya would strip the god costume off the carcass and prepare the honored sacrificed one for the coals. They thought each moment had a personality and that by careful observation, you could know which way the wind was blowing, what was dangerous and safe.
3. When it is the right time, crush the jumiles in a stone mortar, volcanic. Grind in a little chile, salt, tomatoe. The mixture will become soupy, corpuscular, time to fleck it with green of chopped cilantro and punch it with lime. The summer I drove in circles across the hot body of the country like an arrow returning to its bow, my husband already knew why. But it’s easy to tell when you’re lying, he said. Maybe no one was ever paying attention before.
4. Ladle the jumile mixture across just-made tortillas sent from a cupped kneading hand onto the griddle to the plate. It goes well with strips of meat leftover from barbeque, with fermented maize. I had allowed someone else to run the flat of his hand across my back the same way I later ran it across my husband’s, like brushing fingertips across a harp, across the steely inner strings of a piano. Rib stacked above rib, shuddering with wet.
(previously published in Alimentum Journal)
–
Dana Guthrie Martin lives in the Seattle area and writes wherever writing will have her. She shares her home with her husband, her pet hamster and her robot, Feldman. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Blossombones, Blue Fifth Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Coconut Poetry, Failbetter, Fence, Juked and Knockout Literary Magazine. In May, Martin will enter Converse College’s low residency MFA program, and in July, Blood Pudding Press will publish her chapbook, The Spare Room. You can read some of her collaborative work with poet Nathan Moore at Mutating the Signature.
ROBOT WORKERS
— after John Donne
For every robot that goes down fighting
There are two or
Three or legions who turn away, trying to
Blend in with suits and satchels, going to
Jobs they don’t want so they can feel useful.
They’ve learned this is what it means to be real —
To leave the fallen, as if each day were
A war, the lawns
Of their suburbs littered with mines:
The dog catcher
Who lets frothing dogs chase robots down streets
While driving alongside in his truck, laughing
And bellowing “Bot!” in accusation;
The children who kick and spit and slap wads
Of gum on their metal behinds so they can’t
Sit on benches
Without sticking to them; the housewives who
Draw their curtains
Because they can’t stand the sight of one more
Damn robot. Meanwhile in factories, work
Drones on and the robots bemoan nothing.
They move just as they’ve been programmed to move,
Fingers trilling like a dance, placing things
In their places.
ROBOT LOVER
— after John Donne
Why not me? Why not my human-
Like fingers and other hard parts? How would
That differ from licking a fork
Clean or having a mouth full of braces?
You know how I charge your skin when
You come close, the hairs on your arms rising to
Meet me: allegiant soldiers
Who listen to your body’s mute desires.
Your electrical wires, woven into
Every inch of who you are, brought
You here. And the blood that moves inside me
Could warm you until your devices
Soften, then melt, if only you’d give me
One free download. How easy that
Would be. So slide over here like
A well-lubricated cog, and add your
Piece to my machine. What I mean is this:
You complete my design; you’re what
My creator had in mind. My circuits
Are heavy with you every night.
If I had been built to dream, my dreams would
Be viscous as crude oil, pungent
As electrical fires. You would be there
With your flawless architecture —
Our world as small and flat as a diskette —
Calling me through caustic smoke and liquid.
HALLUCINATION #1
For weeks, ghosts
have made their way
down the long hall
that leads to your bedroom.
They handle the doorknob
of the closed door as
you lie in bed and watch
moonlight glint off
the knob’s imperfections.
More ghosts stand
in the middle of the lawn,
cast shadows onto the room’s
far walls. Once, you heard them
ease open the window
above your bed, felt their
dry breath on your forehead.
What was it they whispered
just before they disappeared like
invisible ink? Something akin to
talking in tongues, a message
that drives you to wait
for their return wearing
your best nightgown,
with your face made up,
the covers thrown clean
off your body.
NOTE: The poems ROBOT WORKERS and ROBOT LOVER are from a series that follows the line syllable count and overall structure of John Donne’s love poems.
Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine. She hosts the talk radio poetry show Translated By, which can be found at blogtalkradio.com/onword. The following poems from Beers’ first full-length collection, A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing Ltd) appear here with her permission.
© 2009 Shaindel Beers
CICADAS
Where will we be the next time
they emerge, in 17 years,
when brood X nymphs first wriggle their way
out of exit holes, climb the trunks of oaks and maples,
sun themselves on viburnum,
pale and helpless, before their wings dry
and darken
so they can fly safely to trees to mate, lay eggs,
and die?
I’m not sure I have a concept of 17 years.
I remember Ronald Reagan was President,
I was jealous of my friend Lindsey because
she had a Debbie Gibson hat.
The Princess Bride came out, and is still
my favorite movie.
Seventeen years in the future seems daunting.
The boys at the little league field behind my house
will be men, the neighbors’ dog will be dead
and the tree in my backyard
will no longer be mine.
I could be living anywhere—
not one to put down roots, I can’t even guess.
Just yesterday, I realized, looking out your window,
that in less than two months
new trees will greet me from another window.
No longer the canopy of hardwoods,
but lush, tropical greens year-round
1,300 miles away from you.
And though we’ve talked about this,
I wonder what you’re thinking,
what you would like to be doing
with the seventeen years that this year’s
nymphs will spend underground,
burrowing, living on the roots of all those trees.
ELEGY FOR A PAST LIFE
I miss the honest life we used to lead
scraping up odd jobs so we could see
a movie the next town over,
and stare for a few hours at people
on the drive-in screen who weren’t
like us — who didn’t wear too big hand-me-down
flannels and mud-caked boots —
and even if they were playing farm people,
had never known that pinching pain
in the sacral spine that paralyzes
as you heft the bale by the twine
and let it avalanche down to the ground.
For days, after seeing a show, we’d sit in the loft,
legs dangling over the bleating sheep below
and dream about the life we’d live
when we’d escaped. Back then at sixteen
I thought we’d make it out together,
and become writers, the only job we could imagine
where we wouldn’t smell like shit or hay or cows
but too many months passed when I didn’t bleed
and when we were safe, the test negative
and burned in the rubbish heap behind the barn,
you left, too afraid of being trapped
in a cornfield town
to wait for me.
A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR
He was tall, well-built, blue-eyed,
a guy most girls would want to take to bed.
Then he reached for the beer with his left hand,
revealing the stump of his right.
We could tell the second he knew that we knew.
We’d smile, but the smile wouldn’t travel
all the way to our eyes. He’d turn back to the bar,
fold his arm closer so that we could
no longer see
as we rushed off to sling beers for guys
not as good-looking but more whole,
the ones who leered lecherously,
on “Short-Shorts Night”
and left ten dollar tips for two dollar beers
always expecting more, always bitter when we didn’t deliver.
The quiet one, we wounded week after week, a guy
any of us would have considered “out of our league,”
“a long shot,” if he had been unbroken,
the sad, blond man we were afraid to love.
SUNDAY WORSHIP
They used to chuckle at him softly
the way the small-minded do at the simpleminded
when he would snore or fart in church–
And sometimes let him carry the collection plate
while they dropped in a sweat-earned buck or two
from callused, earth-caked hands. But it was her I watched–
Imagining how hard it must have been to have
a Mongoloid son and a husband so cruel he called
the boy “It” and left her out of shame. And yet–
she sat every Sunday of my childhood
beside a forty-something son she still dressed every day
and felt blessed enough with her life
to make me ashamed to pray for more.
REWIND
Fridays Mrs. Wampler would give in
and leave the projector light on
as the film wound from one real to the other.
At six, the world moving backward amazed us
more than the world moving forward,
though that amazed us, too.
Full blooms squeezed back into buds;
seedlings hid themselves underground,
but our favorite was our claymation version
of Beauty and the Beast. We would cheer as each
petal affixed itself to the thorny stem
and the beast grew stronger, clap as Beauty
no longer wept at his deathbed. And soon,
he was a prince again, too polite to ever
insult a crone. This taught us that beginnings
are always best, despite all they say about
Happily Ever After. If we could invent
the automatic rewind, bodies would expel
bullets that would rest eternally in chambers,
130,000 people would materialize
as the Enola Gay swallowed the bomb,
landmines would give legs and fingers
back to broken children.
Right now, teeming cancer cells
would be rebuilding blood and bone.
Brian Turner earned his MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Styker Brigade Combat Team, and Infantry Division. Prior to that, Turner deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovnia with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000). Turner’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, American War Poem: An Anthology, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary of the same name.
Here, Bullet, Turner’s first full-length collection, was published in by Alice James Books, an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. The following five poems are from this collection, and appear with the author’s and the publisher’s permission.
© 2005 by Brian Turner. All rights reserved.
TWO STORIES DOWN
When he jumped from the balcony, Hasan swam
in the air over the Ashur Street Market,
arms and legs suspended in a blur
above palm hearts and crates of lemons,
not realizing just how hard life fights
sometimes, how an American soldier
would run to his aid there on the sidewalk,
trying to make sense of Hasan’s broken legs,
his screaming, trying to comfort him
with words in an awkward music
of stress and care, a soldier he’d startle
by stealing the knife from its sheath,
the two of them struggling for the blade
until the bloodgroove sunk deep
and Hasan whispered to him,
Shukran, sadiq, shukran;
Thank you, friend, thank you.
ASHBAH
The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,
unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice
sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.
DREAMS FROM THE MALARIA PILLS (TURNER)
This time it’s beautiful.
He’s in the kelp beds somewhere
off the California coast, floating
where green leaves touch the sun,
as if he’s disentangled
from thought itself, as if the mind
has come this far, up from the depths
to release him to the crests and shallows
drifting wave by wave back to shore.
He knows there are bombs
washed up on the beach. There are limbs
of people he has never met. Bandages
soaked in blood and salt.
He knows the Qur’an and the Bible
have washed page by page to shore,
their bindings stripped loose, their ink
blurred into the sea.
And if people are crying there,
wading out in the surf to carry it all
back in, then he hasn’t seen them yet.
The ocean sounds in the bones
of his skull, and the albatross fly
reconnaissance over the waves,
searching for a route home.
OBSERVATION POST #798
It is in the watches of the night
that impressions are strongest
and words most eloquent.
—Qur’an 73:1
Tonight, we overwatch the Market District
by the ruins, where we know of a brothel-house:
green light above the door, windows shuttered
in French panels swung open, gauze curtains
hanging translucent in the heat.
It’s over a hundred degrees, even at dusk.
I scan each story with binoculars
and a smile, hoping to glimpse the girls
drawing open the curtains,
their silhouettes edged in light.
When a woman walks out onto the rooftop
smoking a cigarette and shaking loose her long hair,
everyone wants what I hold in my hands,
but I am stilled by her, transported 7,600 miles
away, as a ghost might gaze upon the one he loves,
thinking, how lovely you are,
your pain and beauty a fiction
I bend into the form of a bridge, anything
to remind me I am still alive.
SADIQ
It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
—SA’DI
It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in the desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.
Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press. His first collection, Overtime (2001), was finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, New Letters, Manoa, and River Styx. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, the Moncalvo Center for the Arts, and Oregon Literary Arts. He now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux, both of whom are on the faculty of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program. His poems are published here with his permission.
HOMEMADE KILN
from Fortune
We humped the fire bricks eight steps down
into the root cellar, laid them up
with castable mortar, the drawings
in Pottery Magazine: archway, damper,
recessed firebox, fuel line fed
from a number two diesel drum
resting above in the grass. We loaded
the pots glazed with cobalt and gold,
laughing and passing a fifth
of Jim Beam. That year my drinking
would land me in jail, I’d wreck
two cars and a five-year marriage
while everywhere the gas crunch choked off
the pumps. Ford’s Pinto with its
exploding gas tank selling into the millions,
Nixon and Iacocca shaking hands on TV.
Soldiers came back from Vietnam,
raspy, thin, haunting the unemployment lines,
hitching rides under freeway bridges
smoking their monster dope in the rain.
We fired the kiln for thirty-two hours
while we drank and played cards, passed
out and slept, while the bright flame growled
and sang to itself. Until both shelves
melted and the pots all fell, broken except
for one yellow vase, shining intact
in the rubble. The new moon rose and set
like a stone over battered fields of Maryland corn,
the pond bottom’s silts, red mud of streambeds
hardened like limestone and flint.
We had nothing to sell, nothing to show,
shoveling burnt shards into the trash.
Cattle slept standing up in the pasture,
the death frost burning under their feet
and a siren began to swell in the distance,
kilos of gray ash traveling away from us:
highway ashes, ashes of flight,
ashes of worship and follow-your-bliss.
COMING HOME
from Fortune
I’m fifty miles west of town,
a stranger driving this coal dust valley,
bottom land chopped into the river.
Bunch grass stabs its glittering arrows
up through the frozen gravel. I can
remember holidays like repeat episodes
of schizophrenia, furniture breaking
downstairs in the dark, everyone’s heads
bowed like hostages over the evening meal.
I’m passing close to the villages:
Avonmore, Saltsburg, Leechburg, Apollo.
Forgive me my history, I want to say
to those broken hills, the slow river,
it feels like it happened to someone else.
Forgive these ghost’s hands bringing you nothing,
this heart filled with cobwebs and rain.
TELEPHONE REPAIRMAN
from Overtime
All morning in the February light
he has been mending cable,
splicing the pairs of wires together
according to their colors,
white-blue to white-blue
violet-slate to violet-slate,
in the warehouse attic by the river.
When he is finished
the messages will flow along the line:
thank you for the gift,
please come to the baptism,
the bill is now past due.
We live so much of our lives
without telling anyone,
going out before dawn,
working all day by ourselves,
shaking our heads in silence
at the news on the radio.
He thinks of the many signals
flying in the air around him,
the syllables fluttering,
saying please love me,
from continent to continent
over the curve of the earth.
NEAR THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
from Overtime
I said goodbye to my father in a black Oldsmobile,
unwilling to park and linger, waiting for the flight
to Pittsburgh. It was August, almost time
for his classes, and the mountain sky was clear
over Denver as I herded the big car down
through the switchbacks, leaving the airport behind.
That night I camped by a stream in the foothills
named for a saint I’d never heard of.
I don’t think he’d planned on dying any time soon,
stumping through the terminal doors in moccasins
and shorts, the end of a dead cigarette in his teeth.
He’d insulted my poems as usual,
eaten his pork chops and eggs, leering
at the waitress when she brought the Bloody Marys.
Before he got out of the car he’d stuffed two fifties
into the ashtray and told me to keep firing.
When I was twelve I didn’t want to be President
or King of England. I didn’t want to be in movies
like my children do, lying dazed in the TV’s astral glow
listening to the guitars. I wanted hair on my arms
and big shoulders. I wanted to be a man like him,
draped in mystery. A cigar and a hat flecked with rain
singing, “If I Loved You” on the way to work, or leaning
against the Turb Club bar, relaxed and elegant,
the Racing Form in one hand and a whisky in the other,
gazing down at the horses and sighing, “Christ, Mac,
would you look at the wanton splendor of it all.”
That night in the Rockies, jumpy from five days
of drinking, I couldn’t sleep, listening to the darkness.
I wanted to tell him about the wild mustangs
at Pyramid Lake, the Northern Lights crackling across
the Yukon, ask if he thought they might be angels,
ask if it hurt him that I never came home.
My father was six miles above the earth,
Melville’s Typee in his lap, wedged into an aisle seat
and calling for another gin, the lights winking on
across the wing: red, right, returning,
and his hat pulled low
over the yoked forebones of his skull.
The next day I would drive west through deep canyons
into the splintered light of Utah,
electric dust rising from cracked blue hills
where nobody knew my name,.
Whatever it was he gave me, in the early years
after my mother died,
that fierce kindness I’d required
to believe in the world’s sudden reckonings,
was mine now. In a few months
he’d be gone.
Reagan would be President
and I’d be struggling, bankrupt, divorced.
But that night the stars came down close to the road
like the eyes of the coyote
as I cut across Nevada,
remembering how we collapsed in the snow
when the Steelers lost the title,
and laughing to myself through the darkness
all the way back to the coast.
Arthur Smid is an artist living in Portland, Oregon. He regularly writes about culture for online magazines. If you’re curious about what goes on in Portland, he invites you to comment on his site. When Smid’s not busy collaborating in his hometown, he likes to correspond with people from around the world. He has taught English as a Second Language in Japan and Spain. Currently, he is at work on a book of performance poetry to fuel the next adventure.
I hear her on the phone in the kitchen. “He’s gay,” she says. Stopping at the foot of the stairs, I try to figure out if I am gay. I have my right hand on the handrail, and it looks gay. My right hand is definitely the gayest part of me. I take my hand off the handrail, stand there a minute and listen.
“He’s nice, but he never tells me I’m beautiful. He never admires my body.” I walk into the kitchen. Jill covers the mouthpiece and tells me under her breath, “I’m talking with your mother.”
Passing the kitchen table, I take a banana from the fruit bowl and pull a chair around and sit backwards on it.
“We really look forward to seeing you,” she says to my mother in New Jersey. I don’t want to go to New Jersey. I don’t know what Jill is talking about. She isn’t talking about me.
“Do we need to talk?” I ask when Jill hangs up the phone.
“I’ve been sleeping with your brother,” she says, “and I think he’s gay.”
“Why do you sleep with Rick?” I ask.
“Because he always comes home drunk and sometimes I help him into bed,” she says. My younger brother can’t be blamed for his indifference to my wife’s body.
“He’s okay,” I venture. “Of course he won’t allow himself to get it on with you.”
Rick comes in the kitchen. His hair is flat and sticking up on one side. His eyes are puffy and half-open.
“Hey,” he says.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Hi Rick,” Jill says.
“So what’s going on?” I ask Rick.
“What?” he counters.
“Are you gay?” I ask. Rick looks in the refrigerator a minute and takes out a jug of apple juice.
“Maybe that’s what I need to figure out,” he says and sits down and drinks out of the jug. None of this really matters to me. I stand up and walk over to Jill and kiss her on the cheek.
“See you,” I say to Rick. I leave the house and then I think: maybe, this does matter. I walk over to the kitchen window and watch Jill drop her robe and start to make breakfast. Rick just sits there.
I go back in the house and holler out, “Hey, did I forget my keys in there?” In a minute Jill walks out with her robe tied. I’m standing in the nude with an erection.
“Let me try,” I say and walk past her into the kitchen.
Paulann Petersen is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She has three chapbooks–Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, and Fabrication. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Wild Awake, was published by Confluence Press in 2002. A second, Blood-Silk, poems about Turkey, was published by Quiet Lion Press of Portland in 2004. A Bride of Narrow Escape was published by Cloudbank Books as part of its Northwest Poetry Series in 2006. Her most recent collection, Kindle, was published by Mountains and Rivers Press in 2008. The following poems appear her with the poet’s permission. Visit Petersen’s website to learn more about her work.
A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE
from Kindle
Seen close enough,
tungsten atoms make
a starburst. Farthest galaxies,
a prick of light.
Tungsten traces lay inside
the tomato I ate this morning.
Its globe held in one hand,
I took it into me
bite by bite. Juice and seed
smeared my chin.
Love apple.
Small, red sun.
Our galaxy lies inside
a cosmos waiting
to swallow me whole.
Night coming–fast.
TRAVELER
from Kindle
Cast ashore
like some fleck of wood
brought here from afar
by the sea,
you reel–stunned
to breathe this reek of
strange urine, strange perfume
thick in saffron heat.
Here you are, foreign one,
familiar with only
the moon and stars,
a cloud-shaped sky,
the lidless eye of sun.
Take heart: only what floats
could be carried
as far as you’ve come.
AS FALL DAYS CONTINUE THEIR ONWARD COUNT
from Kindle
I wrap myself in a garment of summer
that carries me back
to the huge garden plot
I tended for years, then left behind
years ago. Far away,
three hundred miles south
and east of here, I carry
a hoe into rows of sweet corn–
chopping at chickweed, purslane, quackgrass,
at sprouts of plantain. By hand I pull out
the interlopers hiding against
inch-thick stalks, then take a rake
to the path of soft dirt
between each row. Rake and step,
rake and step. But not
heedful enough. I have walked
on the earth I so carefully smoothed.
The corn is in tassel. Pollen drifts, thick–
yellow filling each footprint.
Who knows what grows there now.
A TAMING
from A Bride of Narrow Escape
The bride across the street,
sleek-haired, her fingernails
dipped in red–ran to me flushed
from screaming, awry with fear.
A bird was thrashing, flinging against
pale walls, the picture window,
draperies of her living room.
She was stop-heart
afraid of its frenzied and slow
disintegration, the feathers loosed
and wafting, its refusal
to find the open door.
Her rough boned, no-longer-a-bride
neighbor, I would catch what she couldn’t
bring her finely wrought self
to touch. I would carry it outside,
buoy it home to leafy branches,
into a swath of expanding air.
My fingers long, hands big enough
for its wings to stay safely
pressed along its sides–
heart beating as wildly against
my startled palms
as wilderness itself
held still.
FERAL
from The Wild Awake
I bleed in a dream.
My hand, clamped
around the muzzle of threat,
lets go. Those milky
teeth are free,
and I bleed
with no reason
for fear. It’s just
color, really
and the lightheaded
reel at the sight
of that color: rush of
wild poppies. Two, three,
a whole rash field,
strew of wet silk
then a fine dust
floating from one black
throat to another.
I let blood in a dream.
No loss, no loss–
it’s merely a step toward
waking, a trail of scent
I leave for each
dream animal to follow.
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