‘Hardscape Permanence’, ‘Senior Night in North Country’, & ‘Father, Herculean’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Hardscape Permanence

Today you really could have just killed your boss,

could have let him feel your words of razor-fanged

truth slice at him, cut through the stitching of his thick,

unused work-jeans and scar the skin on his knee caps

so that every time he bent down for the rest of his life,

he would curse your name.

But you didn’t. You stayed hunched in the salt of the sun,

cooking like onions, secreting oils you didn’t know you had

while you listened to Carlos and his prayers of calm

as he muttered to you in a language you haven’t spoken since the tenth grade.

You thought of how the rolls of Carlos’ Spanish Rs reminded you of

the rolling hills of your youth, and how hatred for any unkind patròn

was one bubble in the grand boiling of time.

Carlos guided your calloused, tired arms

―your muscles soundlessly stuttering―

as blocks of cement tiles got laid into the dug up front lawn.

Small holy-stones to build the stairway to this suburban front door

on a home that looks like any other home in all of America.

But Carlos worked you marrowless with his faith in you―

his brown magnitude kissed with triumph

as every twenty pound stone got laid into the earth

with the respect of a fallen brother,

and how each rock was consecrated through the action of its placement,

and though you’d never believed in Him before,

you swore you felt Jesus there with you, as long as Carlos,

with the dark eyes of the universe, beckoned you onward.

“But onward to what?” You questioned as the boss cackled, unwet on the phone.

You see because of Carlos, as he placed another reliquary into the earth,

that it is permanence which you crawled towards in the heavy tongue of August,

sweating so fiercely your fingers left prints on the cement.

This stairway, in its small holy masses, through the worship of each patterned stone,

became the only thing you’ve created that could outlast you,

and though you’ve searched for decades for the perfect words to be remembered by,

it is through Carlos’s tireless hand, a soft prayer,

and a dug up front lawn in some American suburb

where you placed your eternity.

Senior Night in North Country

The cold parents wipe white powder snow from torn boots

like emperors might shed diamonds from their cloaks.

The old pair sulk into the poorly lit gymnasium,

and search for their pride and joy;

the boy they love

silently and fervently,

like suns silently warming

the young oak in the backyard.

They have put on their finest hunting shirts,

their most expensive coats;

it is their son’s senior night.

They watch him sling his wrestler’s singlet onto his chest,

a broad, muscled thing which the mother remembers

was once no bigger than her waitress notepad.

The father steps on a piece of wood

that has creaked since he wore a singlet

in the same gymnasium

thirty years prior. His eyes sparkle ruby red at the sound―

at the thought of his lone mother with a frumpy,

bent bouquet in a tired lap.

He points to a clear spot of benching and the two damply take their seats.

The empty flat circle―that wrestling mat, that empty eye―

which their son has obsessed over for years

lies vacant and open before them,

an all seeing iris peering past the old ceiling into

the ebony sky outside where only the full moon looks back.

The white haired coach coughs nervously into the microphone,

trumpeting his voice to a crowd who knows him like a second family,

and who knows this speech on love of toughness

like they know the taste of cold beers and warmth from woodfire stoves.

The coach says their family name, and the couple stands awkwardly with crowns of pride

that feel like anvils in this room of families whose names they’ve known since childhood.

Their still wet boots leave drops of crystal water on that open eye before them

as they bring a frozen set of garnet carnations to their son.

The boy releases an embarrassed smirk, and grows two microscopic inches

like a prince inheriting a title he knows he deserves.

They smile together for an awkward photo

and shuffle in royal unison to the side,

where their coronation ends and they become common folk once more.

The son holds flowers with unfamiliarity and,

not for the first time, the father cannot find the words to express―

“You were just a little acorn, once,” the mother saves him.

She cries and smiles in the way that hides

the yellow teeth she is scared to show the world,

and the father agrees solemnly and tells his son silently

through a wordless tapping of the shoulder

that in the endlessness of the universe,

in the ineffable, infallible, unknowability of

the grandeur of all things,

that this small town’s senior night so many miles from any city,

in the faceless heart of winter,

through bruising grunts and frantic wrestling,

is exactly where he was meant to be.

And the family looks at that open eye before them as it stares

infinitely upward to the gleaming, diamond of the moon.

Father, Herculean

Waiting for your father to move

feels like staring at the broken armed statue

of Hercules in The Met.

How at first glance, he is the creator,

the defender, the hero of the earth,

bound in infinity, stark naked and unafraid

of the sharp teeth of the world–the worlds,

dangling around him like the once hungry flames of

the dead cigarettes piled in the ash trays of

the scorching house.

But you wonder if that lion head wrapped around his skull

is not a crown made from a defeated beast

but a shawl of death marking the numbered days

of the strongest hero among us.

Hercules stands there armless,

limbless, tall and ancient,

yet feeble.

He postures humble, stoic strength,

like a white birch on the edge of collapse,

the rot so entangled within its core,

that its branches leap off in pining evacuation

and gather like empty beer cans in the dust of antiquity.

But maybe, you think, that old power is somewhere

in the dusty thing you look at slouched before you.

Maybe that old strength is still in those limbs that

used to move with the strength of the marble mountains

they were so long ago carved from.

But your living room isn’t The Met,

it’s too cold and smells like sweat and grease,

not poise and intellect,

and you can’t hear the many languages

of eager tourists viewing Greco-Roman works.

All you can hear is the tired sonorous snoring

of a man who isn’t formidable enough

to sit all the way up in the arm chair.

Peter Randazzo teaches history in upstate New York and runs the No Poet Peach blog on WordPress. He has a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies Education from SUNY New Paltz and a Master’s Degree in Curriculum Instruction from SUNY Empire. He has published in the anthologies of Eber & Wein, Hidden in Childhood, Penumbra, and has self-published "Dandelions & The Right Notes" on Amazon.

‘Swimming Class’, ‘Muscle Memory’, ‘Socrates’, ‘Eventuality’ & ‘Sonography’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Swimming Class

A tangy taste in the green

water, frogs we caught in our

hands,

floating leaves the teacher would remove

with a net attached to a long pole.

(Our teachers never came into the water

and no one was ever saved from drowning.)

We plucked bright red berries

as we marched single file to the pool,

wondering if they were poisonous.

We walked according to our role numbers,

Ruchika Jhunjhunwala ahead of

me at number seventeen and

Payal Lakhani behind me at number twenty.

Most of the cool girls were at the end,

like Swarna Sinha and Zaharah Sherriff.

They were big and strong unlike the rest of us

who ran the gamut from skinny to fat.

In class, they seated us by height,

the short girls in the front

and the tall girls in the back.

Being skinny and tall, I went into the last row,

between cool girls who made fun of me.

But I fit in after a while.

I was an anomaly—loose-limbed and agile,

good at tennis but terrible at running,

good at floating on the water and dreaming

but terrible at diving, good at poetry

but terrible at remembering dates.

I heard that Lajja, a girl from my class

killed herself after a few years in college.

She’d been like me—loose-limbed and unpopular

but unlike me, she’d been good

at remembering things and taking tests.

When I floated on the water, she sank.

Muscle Memory

We lie on the divan, the drapes drawn.

I take off my dress and wear his singlet.

He shows off his prowess with the gymnastic rings

hanging from a bar, offers me slippers

to go to the bathroom where the floor is wet,

then makes black tea and asks me if it’s

good. I refuse to praise him for something so

simple.

Later, we lie on the ground, and he says,

I can’t move. Can you adjust around me like water?

I don’t want to be the one adjusting,

but my body contours around him on its own.

Socrates

As the frothy liquid comes out of

me, I capture every last drop.

I am in the line of thought—

a philosopher trained to question

why we think the things we think.

But in full view of the balcony,

I refuse to consider

the whys and wherefores of this action.

I study their eager faces looking at me,

wanting to know what happens next.

I can’t tell them the truth,

which is that their sordid lives go on.

I can’t tell them that it’s a joke in bad taste.

So I tell them it’s a tragedy and I will

die. I tell them a bald-faced lie.

Eventuality

when you get

to the end of an event,

when you realize that

what’s important to you

is not so important to the other,

when you get caught up

in otherness,

when you have been othered,

when you realize

you have given away

your whole “I.”

Sonography

At the radiology center, they bare my waist,

and put cold gel on an instrument

which is pressed all over my stomach.

In the dark, the technician doesn’t look at

me, only at the monitor. I sneak a peek, but

everything inside the body seems

featureless.

A wave of sound is released and echoes

back and forth among my organs

which are like hills and mountains around me.

In the valley, I lean up and shout

something, and the sound comes back in

my direction.

What did I shout? It wasn’t any language I know.

It came from the beginning of all language

when I was just an empty center, and the

sound wrapped itself around me like a

bandage.

The sound protected me from predators,

but now, it circles back to me and tells me I

am the only predator here. I am eating

myself.

Ruhi Jiwani's poetry has been published in The Eclectic Muse, The Binnacle, Off the Coast, Muse India, The Four Quarters Magazine, Femina, North Dakota Quarterly, Jubilat, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, New York Quarterly Magazine, and others. She has a Master’s degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is currently working on her first novel.

‘GIRL NEXT DOOR, These Birds In Winter; The Church On The Hill; Here's To The Yeast Of Us; Late Night Diner’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

GIRL NEXT DOOR

The girl next door

left years ago.

Next door went with her.

In its place,

the government erected

this Federal Nuclear Waste

Disposal and Encasement Facility.

In lieu

of her sunning in her back yard

in a bikini,

I watch workers in

protective coveralls

unload trucks,

roll barrels

into huge underground vaults.

Instead

of the occasional

over-the-fence conversations,

I’m constantly being harassed

by men in dark suits.

As the cliché goes,

she lit up my life.

But she didn’t kill cells.

She didn’t cause

nausea and vomiting.

THESE BIRDS IN WINTER

Bird song is desperate song,

Sparrows chatter endlessly

from the hedge mesh

as if in danger of losing

their voices to the cold.

Chickadee notes jar like

fingers tapping down the scale

on a guitar's rusty strings.

Even the blue-jay’s

sax-like cry

shudders against the

deepening ice.

Trees are bare, branches

nailed to the frozen sky.

Birds sing with beauty’s

dying breath.

Tunes begin to snow

HERE’S TO THE YEAST OF US

I'm brewing beer in the bathtub,

You’re baking bread in the kitchen.

Who would have thought that, years after

we first breathed each other's bodies,

we'd both be sniffing yeast and liking it?

Who would have figured we’d have nothing

more in common now than that fungoid aroma?

I rake my hands through the liquid as

if to stir more of the odor to the surface.

You lower your head into the bread-making machine,

in mute obeisance to the fumes.

This crop of beer, this loaf of bread,

eventually make it to our table.

And so, after a fashion, do we.

THE CHURCH ON THE HILL

The water’s slipped back into the river.

And now the town

is all mud.

The roads are impassable

for all but the heaviest vehicles.

And the entire population

are hunkered down in the church basement,

curled up beneath borrowed blankets.

Even their dogs.

Soon, they will trudge out into mud world,

to the horror of their homes –

the rugs of sludge, grungy chairs,

the smell of foul food.

And the cops will round up

the half-buried dead.

But for now,

there are people,

clinging together,

high and dry.

The mud can’t think of everything.

LATE NIGHT DINER

Two minutes of slow stirring,

and then sip.

Look out the dusty glass window

at the passing patrol car

and then sip.

A glance or two for the fortyish blonde

in twentyish clothes

and then sip.

And a more surreptitious peek ' "~

at the tattooed biker

so he don't know you're staring,

and then another sip.

Maybe a joke with the waitress

can separate a sip or two

and a three-day old newspaper article

will generously split a pair.

Look at your watch and sip.

Scratch your knee and sip.

Before long this coffee

will not only last you the night,

it'll tell you how

that's accomplished.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.

‘Lucan and the Muse’ & ‘Iqrit’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Lucan and the Muse

No sweetheart, Rome's epic muse. Only her keen

cold throat could sing a suicidal queen

sublimely burned impaled. With eyes pried shut,

ears can see blood purpling out of the gut

of sworded Dido. Her unstately face

warps a last Punic shriek the flames enchase,

a backspun echo of the bastard day

the children of the One that Got Away

met Hasdrubal and Carthaginian

peace sickened to cliché. Arms of a man

warring through rains of mythos, Virgil lays

lines supple. Even the caesura plays

accents into discant patterns round the line

styling unorthodox with superfine

into immaculate. Put to occasion

new worlds of taste, paced like a good persuasion.

Intuition refined plucks at bane's harp.

Others are much more point-blank. Dark and sharp

with a horrendous sanity between

exquisite gasconades that steal the scene

at court, and history's rumble, Lucan comes

like a revenge of Muses at the drums,

most metal of all music, loud and real

battering, proud like pounding wings of steel,

battering, beating far beyond all doubt,

like something come to beat those tuning out

a mass grave chorus, chorally right and rude

to baritone an ungrieved multitude

with gusts of what it is that really blows

on mountains sanctimonious in snows,

obstreperous on glory, an honest choke

of rhetoric, his godless Music spoke

spring minds that wept at song and knew not why

to tumble in thunder from a shattered sky.

***

So no this Muse is not a gentle one.

Excessive brightness from a summer sun

helps to conceive how dark She gets you. See

a field of daysplashed flowers in Thessaly

beside the woodland where the farmer's boy

runs piping in the green and skips his toy

horse on the streams. Leaves let light trickle on water

from daylight perfect for Her Balkan slaughter

where javelined soldiers wriggle, a boy begs

hacked dad to live and tree-roots snap the legs

of horses who went mad where riders fell.

Her language is the charm of weathering hell

to Man's savannah beast. At her Lucan best,

she's striking as a pilum through the chest

till the heart skips all beats. Gods know where

men got off calling this trick goddess fair.

She is as fair as life has been for most

humans who lived. A sheer Nobody's Ghost,

She stalks in warpaint and a cloak of scalps

to simper Latin as troops hurt on the Alps

in Fate-black humor, redpills you with bodies

dyed in the bright full moon whose face she bloodies.

At Her yoke, feral eras synchronize

under chill stars that scribble on gaped eyes

frosty sharp canticles of humans felled

in dynamos of regimes born, bled & knelled,

till fluent dread of things to come again

is scratched in proverbs on the tender brain.

She strolls to Rome with weird gems on Her fillet,

winks caustic pride at soldiers in the billet,

then trolls at court, bows

crooked, smiles perverse

at Caesars, and haunts docti into verse

singing the victories & aftermaths

with eyes that know the gods are psychopaths.

Of men's deeds, goddeſſe, ſing; of tryumphe ſtrucke

till the heart marvels what the actual fuck

***

To be the Muse's darling, come like Lucan

bemused in the best court a man could puke in,

dream canceling dream. His role unspooled life's roll

for Her. The murderous varier of the soul.

Nero did read him. From the first, it's blood

he wrote in. Flipped out spectacles and gluts

at court churned the grotesque to a lofty mood

for epic where men jagged each other's guts

sans gods or heroes. No such fey disguise

fit his rank Muse in gnarly Thessaly

who paid neronic price for sanity

watching psychosis blow through open eyes.

Art made the artist. Hideously wiser

each day to autocrats' gushes and kinks,

his jiggering plot boiled over in a plot on Caesar

at twenty five. As no throne-squatter thinks

of pardoning the treason of the sane,

he rendered unto Caesar from his vein.

Rome's epic muse is not a poet's wife.

Of Lucan, She asked little. Just his life.

Iqrit

A ruined church upon a hill

lies in today's debris.

I watched an old man praying outside,

with nowhere else to be.

No majesty distracted him.

Only the olive trees

bent as he bent on buried ground

in silence on his knees.

(I'd say "he had unusual eyes,

a voice like an abyss..."

But there is more than poets' lies

to what a person is.)

I had not come to press him for

his life, or even name.

But hearing my ṣabāḥinnūr

he told me all the same.

Much old Arabian verse laments

campsites with nomad love.

Triteness is just the truth of hearts

and homes compelled to move

as men mourn prints in blackrock sand,

weep over stones and roam.

This man had come to mourn his land

without a home at home.

A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Occitan, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian and Yiddish have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He sometimes writes his own poetry if it really comes to that. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.

‘The Inviolable It’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The Inviolable It

Her anger always boils over just before supper,
manifested in a single nonsensical utter.
She pricks and pries and searches and seeks
to articulate her innards before the words fretfully retreat.
Those words, however, are indeed very sneaky.
They scutter and hide and run like jumping mice, real squeaky.
Lingering just long enough to maintain the belief
that there’s an explanation for her inconsolable grief.
For if an explanation doesn’t exist,
some forgotten reason she’d somehow missed,
if there’s no seed for which this gnarled tree was sown,
how is the girl to untangle its rotted-out roots, it’s merrowed bone?
How is she meant to stomach it all,
the microwave meals, the sacrilegious sex, the quiet phone call
from the silent home where they all know
he's lying in wait, a broken pistol loaded with ammo?
The nights in which she cradles herself to sleep,
heaving with cries?
She does better than her mother ever could
and more than her father would even try.
How is she to stomach it all when it sits in her lungs and squeezes at her heart
and punishes her liver when she attempts to flush it out?
When it’s mixed into the blood that pours from her knees,
from being all-too-much in a stranger’s backseat?
When it weighs down her limbs and leaves her huddled up in the shower,
wishing to God that the one washing the sadness out of her scalp was not herself,
but her mother?
How is she to stomach it when It is herself,
It is who she is, It is her destiny laying dusty on the shelf?
When will the words come to her softly
and finally admit what they’ve been avoiding so awfully?
When will they admit that her language, her suffering, her YUCK,
is not a possession or extension that she keeps in her pocket,
but rather a facet of herself for which she has been sewn together?
By uncareful, rough, uneven hands, an awfully plain, old, cruel endeavor.

Hannah Messer is a current undergrad at the University of Southern California. She is studying Pre-law and English to eventually venture into politics and work as an attorney. A lover of words, Hannah will someday retire to the mountains to write.