Issue four// Jim Fuess

Blue and Purple Abstract Painting #2
Mary #2

© Jim Fuess 2010

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Jim Fuess is a painter. His works are mostly abstract, but there are recognisable forms and faces in a number of the paintings. He strives for grace and fluidity, movement and balance. He has had recent solo and group exhibitions in New Jersey and New York. He is the Chairperson and Founder of the New Art Group (NAG), who will be curating 10 art shows at the Watchung Arts Center (NJ) during 2009-2010. You can find his website here.

Issue four// Hugh Fox

WRITING

1.

Let’s call it Schubert, Lili Boulanger, André
Previn and Elgar-Shostakovich all in one brain-
doored cave just waiting for the right Hirt auf
dem Felsen / Shepherd on the Rock, the right
bricks and peaked red-tile roofs, the right legs
of Eun Jung Lee working for her D.M.A. in piano,
the right plate of chirimoya on the kitchen table,
a glass of fresh pomegranate juice, the full moon
mooning in through the drape-cracks whispering
"Write it down, you’re the last prophet around to
get down the Passion and Buriel of the Grey House
-----and all the downtown sky pricks."


2.

Find me in the basement archives if you want
to find out about the 1930’s rising-from-the-dead
Chicago and living inside stone-sculpted orthodoxy,
what Old Country Polish-Czech-Peruvian grandmothers
meant in their sacred backyards with their sacred
lilacs and barbecued chorizo, Beethoven and Millet
not reborn but not allowed to cough their last cough,
Hollywood-Paris Dietrich-Hope prophets on sacred
prophetic screens of yet-to-comeness, when a Christmas
watermelon was a fiesta incarnation and morning Mass
opened daily cracks into the resurrection waiting for us
on the other side of Water Tower, Tribune Tower, Wrigley
-----Building forests death.


3.

You’ve been there too, or maybe you haven’t,
need an Ile de France time-map to see yourself
in snap-the-fingers time-space, who’s really there
in front of you (3 AM) and at the noon hour pork-
bar, who’s really on the pulpit or in the crib, or
a walk through the foresty graveyard, whence-
when writing revelations, no firebirds for a while,
just the resurrecting ghost-fields and rebirthing
-----rivers, beyond cougar-raven

----------As-
---------------ness/
----------Is-

© Hugh Fox 2010

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Hugh Fox has a PhD from the University of Illinois, and has gained Professorships at Michigan State University, the University of Hermosillo and the University of Católica, as well as a John Carter Brown Library Fellowship at Brown University. He has worked as an archaeologist in the Chilean Atacama Desert, edited Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry, and during the 1960s was the Latin American editor of Western World Review and North American Review. He has had 110 books published, and 1,435 of his poems have featured in literary magazines. His latest book is The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox, published by World Audience (NYC).

Issue four// Guy Franks

Guy Franks has translated two works of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, from
Poemas Y Antipoemas (1954). The second translation will appear in the next issue.

Sinfonía de Cuna
(Lullaby)

Once, while wandering
about in a park
By chance I found myself
With an angel

Good Day, he said
And I answered him.
He spoke in Spanish,
I Spoke in French.

Dites moi, don angel.
Comment va monsieur.

He extended his hand,
I grabbed him by the foot.
You always should get a good look,
At what an angel is like!

Vain like a swan
Cold like a crowbar
Fat like a turkey
Ugly like you

He scared me a little,
But I didn’t let him go.

I searched through his feathers
And I found them
Hard like the hard
Shell of a fish

Just think if it were Lucifer!

This made him mad
And he attacked me
With his Golden sword
But I ducked just in time.

He was the silliest angel
I will ever see.

Dying of laugher
I said Goodbye, Sir
Off you go on your way
Have a nice day
Get run over by a car
Get hit by a train

And now the story’s over
The End.



Sinfonía de Cuna

Una vez andando
Por un parque inglés
Con un angelorum
Sin querer me hallé.

Buenos días, dijo,
Yo le contesté,
Él en castellano,
Pero yo en francés.

Dites moi, don angel.
Comment va monsieur.

Él me dio la mano,
Yo le tomé el pie
¡Hay que ver, señores,
Cómo un ángel es!

Fatuo como el cisne,
Frío como un riel,
Gordo como un pavo,
Feo como usted.

Susto me dio un poco
Pero no arranqué.

Le busqué las plumas,
Plumas encontré,
Duras como el duro
Cascarón de un pez.

¡Buenas con que hubiera
Sido Lucifer!

Se enojó conmigo,
Me tiró un revés
Con su espada de oro,
Yo me le agaché.

Ángel más absurdo
Non volveré a ver.

Muerto de la risa
Dije good bye sir,
Siga su camino,
Que le vaya bien,
Que la pise el auto,
Que la mate el tren.

Ya se acabó el cuento,
Uno, dos y tres.

© Guy Franks 2010

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Guy Franks is not what you'd call "talented" or even "handsome", but he had the good sense to not give up learning a language after GCSE and can now translate interesting Latin American poetry.

Issue four// Ashley Bovan

© Ashley Bovan 2010

-----

Ashley Bovan lives and writes in Cardiff, and is studying for a distance learning MA in Creative Writing (poetry) at Lancaster University. He also composes music and takes photographs. He can be found online at www.ashley-bovan.co.uk.

Issue four// William Doreski

Your Poisonous Mushroom Salad

Lanky summer afternoons
cough up mushrooms so toxic
that touching one is fatal.
Yet you dice them into a salad
and eat with no ill effect.
You goddess-types enjoy mocking
the mortal parts of us males,
but this meal is going too far.

The weather map features storms,
west of us, blotched purple and red.
If they get this far, the lightning
will flatter you in dimensions
so cosmic even galaxies
two billion light-years distant
will have to concede your excellence
two billion years in the future.

For now, watching you gobble
your poisonous mushroom salad,
I suspect you hope I’ll claim
a comparable status and eat
a plateful and amuse you with
the destruction of my liver. No
thank you. A cicada saws
the light into tempting slices

that aren’t very nourishing. Enjoy
yourself while I wander alone
through the woods in search of edible
specimens for my own salad -
gnats and mosquitoes whirling
about me, the crack of my footfall
assuring me that so far
I’ve survived your deadly wit.

© William Doreski 2010

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William Doreski’s work has appeared in many print and electronic journals, and his most recent collection is Another Ice Age (AA Press, 2007). He teaches writing and literature at Keene State College (New Hampshire).

Issue four// J. R. Pearson

History of Fish

(Part 1)
Interview with the Moon & Altruistic Intentions
of the Venerable Judge Whoseits In The Sky

Here's a voice with a knife in its neck.
Says palm the pulse in the pavement,
moves to the touch & never blinks at the trance
washed over your beach-clean brain. Thread the road thru
your open iris, it's a matter of leverage;
whorled fingerpads play down the galactic arm,
it's a problem of resonance. How to whip pianola notes
into heavier elements. How the flame lifts below carapace, zero G
pulls the flu
thru bones, a rope-a-dope on your stomach. O-O the moon is a
material witness
to a murder, sits in dark, pale on a single stool & dangleburns a
bent Camel.
Says: sommeil avec la chair mortelle, sommeil avec la chair
mortelle.
In translation: vitamin D don't grow on trees son.
Don't find it frozen cartons on your doorstep
come first light. Your momma never buttered brains into bread
that walked around & built spontaneous kingdoms from nothing
but lust for heavy words.
Either way be prepared to taste the
avalanche, fiver fingers of midnight
talc & the sound of steel torn in two.


(Part 2)
Anthem for the Disenfranchised Fiddle-Drawn Frogmen
& their Mistress the Inevitable Granite Conclusion

Double helix anthem? "Rage rectangular, rise isosceles.
Act octagonal invertebrates!"
Best response? A pause in retractable fangs
silent as water sitting Indian-style
on sandstone, cool as a wash of creosote bushes beneath quartz
when the sun spools off in bolts.
Nothing spins like Bassey in June.
Listen to rusted Ric-Rac notes peel the wind raw,
reminds you of half-breathed songs
& a secret room behind a third rib
that never tells lies except the ones you reeeally need.
Truth is water in the desert basin falls like the back of a coat
& come star-black night
roots let go in one long sweep of a wing,
rivers resurrect themselves from bone
& ply fish to unborn algae. Picture steel
rasp on lilted nerves. Raise wet-slapped palms
to nuclear winters in your psyche's
last broke-open door; count to fifty &
you'll never think twice about trading the shallow roar in your
lungs
for eyesockets sliced under straight-faced marble, reads:
HERE LIES (INSERT NAME).
BEST LIVED BEFORE 2010.

Look! There we are, gone in a finger of smoke.

© J. R. Pearson 2010

-----
J.R. Pearson directs MFA studies at the Antarctic Middleclass University for Brainfreeze Origin Studies. He spends his summers bird-watching as a charter member of Annual Atlantic Pegasus & VHS Viewers. His work is in or forthcoming in Biz-Dat Blingery, A Penguins List of Tragic Consequences for Adultery, 9mm Driveby Piercing, Spicey Itialian Sausage, and Sh!tfaced & Loving It!

And if you don't believe that then you're a pessimistic jagweed.

Issue three// Neila Mezynski

Three Horses


Feb 6th: On The Way

Large hands on wheel, He sits so tall. Mounds of whipped cream on either side. Waterworks on road and eyes. Wailing sirens and stand alone trees. Bathroom breaks in bleak houses. Not yet for Ben, someday, I’ll get it. You know, I feel all right, Paul says so. No divider for swirling snow. Comes down and lands politely on the window shield. May I? Faster and faster on the too slow wiper. Can’t see. Laughing chaos from the backseat drivers, she calls the shots. There’s the place she put her arm in the milkshake! Horse oh, horse, see the deer?

© Neila Mezynski 2010

-----

Neila Mezynski resides in San Jose, California. She was once a ballet dancer and choreographer but more recently has turned to abstract painting and writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Snow Monkey Journal, Word Riot, Foundling Review, Weird Year and Breadcrumb Sins. She also writes art and music reviews for online and print magazines.

Issue three// Stephen Williams

Hopefully It Never Happens

Sunset
fire over the city,

not knowing
how many more will ignite,

they lit martyr fuses
sleeping amongst us,

how could we have found
the underground deviates,

we are the land of the free
now burning,

sunrise finding angry mobs
wanting revenge....

© Stephen Williams 2010

-----

Stephen Jarrell Williams has been called ‘The Poet of Doom’, ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’ and ‘A Minstrel for Love’. He was born in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and his parents are native Texans. He has lived most of his life in California. His poetry has appeared in Liquid Imagination, Blue Collar Review, Rusty Truck, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal and Scifaikuest, amongst other publications.

Issue three// Alison Ross

Miro’s mirror

Miro’s mirror reflected the skeleton of chaos.
It deconstructed time and made a maze through space.

Miro’s mirror wept suns at Rimbaud’s funeral
and wrote cumming’s epitaph with the blood of commas.

Miro’s mirror gouged out Shakespeare’s eyes.
It pre-saged the death of poetry
and fought World War II in reverse.

Miro’s mirror cracked in half.
The left half reflected "Spring Song" played by Dr. Seuss.
The right half showed the Buddha in the throes of cacophony.

Miro’s mirror deconstructed chaos and made a maze through Rimbaud’s heart.

© Alison Ross 2010

-----
Clockwise Cat publisher and editor Alison Ross dabbles delicately in verse. She also spews incessant invective. Her personal utopia would be to dwell inside a painting executed by Joan Miro, wherein Frida Kahlo, Arthur Rimbaud, Jorge Luis Borges, Dr. Seuss, David Lynch and The Cure all converge in felicitous, surrealistic bliss.

Issue three// Stephanie Marley

Poetic Manifesto

The Japanese Garden is a botanic structure designed by way of a traditional

[the Japanese garden] [traditionally Japanese] intent for a specific effect.

The garden maintains over centuries a parallel: an unchanging design existing beside a continously altering context and landscape

[thoughtscape].

This is possible because the intentional specific effect designed for the garden visitor is for the garden visitor to gain no specific experience from the garden.

[Truth is that there is only one truth: there is no objective truth].

This tradition hasn’t not been altered or abandoned in search for a new design [of progressive thoughtscapes] because of the garden’s infallible ability to deliver it’s effect: [we are alone] forever the garden shall allow subjective contextualisation and active interpretation.

There is design; there is view; [T]here is object; there is space; therefore, there is fragmentation. No objective use or meaning summarises the garden.

There is no conclusion: therefore, there is fragmentation, a dispersal of infinate passive

[there is only your own conclusion]

frames to be viewed or not to be viewed, to be joined or not be joined.

[We shall stomp on the grass.]

Then a Japanese garden should be approached differently to other gardens: a Japanese garden should be acknowledged as a potential space for a different active participation. The viewer must seek out what it may offer her, and only her. She must read herself in the ferns, the boulders, and the spaces between them. She should acknowledge that space as possible discovery. She must accept that space shall always partially exist. She takes her own route, directs herself: perhaps even discards the map.

[We stomp on the grass!]

The viewer may take photographs of a few frames in an attempt to document those specific views, [the breeze can make nothing still] but when outside the initial site performance, the viewer’s experiences gained whilst within the garden cannot be re-experienced [the breeze makes nothing still]. To attend the memory of those experiences will only allow re-interpretation.

[When it was the winter season, snow rested upon the leafless branches. When it was summer, mosquitoes bit ankles. The breeze made nothing still.]

To seperate fragments from others is a healthy past-time. If frozen by documentation, however, the fragment, now framed outside its context, is restricted within its original form: it now has potential to become unchangable. Over periods of time, the document may replace the original interpretation, and the memories belonging to that experience are, unless frequently visited, overridden. Instead, re-interpret and re-visit those flexible fragments which belong to Memory. Instead, further the potential to become a continuous reflexive subject outside those initial experiences and performance sites.

[When it is the winter season, snow rests upon the leafless branches. When it is summer, mosquiotes bite. Breeze makes nothing still.]

[He bought a fan: a memento. We wrote a poem: a memento.]

With words it is easy to document experiences by creating mementos: keepsakes, closed conclusions; I would argue this is not entirely fulfilling the potential of experience, and in turn, of art; to look back is to move forward only if there is space, only if art is an arena for (re)interpretation and (re)discovery. We can predict nothing at all. Breeze makes nothing still.

How would we adapt to the unpredictable, and what would it lead us to discover? [Safety blankets are irrelevant]. Too readily accepting given structures without honouring their potential to the self, nor looking beyond them to other possible subjective structures creates documents: what we may describe as proof of occurances. Occurances are irrelevant to experience.

[No safety blanket is to become. Courageous.]

© Stephanie Marley 2010

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Stephanie Marley studies English Literature and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in formulating a process of producing poetry which imitates the process of self-creation and self-acceptance. She is in love with Julia Kristeva, and plans to study East Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies after graduating this year.

Issue three// Harry Calhoun

Like pressing tar out of asphalt

or taking the diamond back to its fossil bones
or an oyster without the pearl’s grit
or flying before we knew that titanium flew

it’s all the right circumstances
separating this from that
constructing and deconstructing

the death of the mother
the pressure
caused me to write and I pray:


if it be diamonds
may I be rich
in understanding and forgiveness

if it be coal
let it warm and light
the journey

if it be pearls
may they be
of wisdom

anything so I can understand
how sadness heavier than any air

can be a blessing

yet in some ways

it is

© Harry Calhoun 2010

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Harry Calhoun's poetry, articles and essays have been widely published. He is the author of an online chapbook, Dogwalking Poems, a trade paperback, I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf, and the recently-published The Black Dog and the Road. He has appeared in The Chiron Review, Chiaroscuro, The Centfigugal Eye, Bird’s Eye reView and Monongahela Review, amongst others. His website can be found here.

Issue three// Donal Mahoney

Chino and Chambray

Forty years older than I,
Charles, in his tweed cap, stands starched
in gray chino and blue chambray.

For more than a year his broad tie
has let the same iridescent duck
fly against a vermillion sky.

Like a Vatican Guard
he oversees the parking lot
I cut through each morning

far corner to far corner
as I cleave two triangles of cars
parked in my wake.

I ask him one morning,
'Charles, do you mind
when I cut through your lot?'

'Not at all, sir,' says Charles
as he stares straight ahead
and starts the windmill

of his good arm to lead
the pearl Hummer
now pulling in.

© Donal Mahoney 2010

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Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has been published in The Wisconsin Review, Commonweal, The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Public Republic (Bulgaria), Calliope Nerve and Opium Poetry 2.0, amongst other publications.