Guest Authors – Page 9

February 29, 2016February 28, 2016 by Laura M Kaminski

By yon bonnie banks…

for my mum, with lines from the traditional song “Loch Lomond”

If we swim to shore,
escape the frame,
we shall not meet again.
Jean Morris, “Sea Dream“

When Scottish blood gives up its ghost, that ghost goes home first, mother,
before it journeys beyond — the Highland Gate’s at Perth, mother.

Potato blight caused famine, there were only oatmeal rations.
Did Scots become thrifty gleaning history of dearth, mother?

Wool roving (sheep shucking) dyed and woven into clan tartans.
For identity, check the kilt strapped about the girth, mother.

Ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, / And I’ll be in
Scotland afore ye… but Loch Lomond is not Tay’s Firth, mother.

Baa black sheep, dark rumor, our ancestor immigrated to
this continent from prison, came in a convict’s berth, mother.

Scots have the reputation of pinching every penny twice.
For haggis and bagpipes, sheep belly’s pennyworthy, mother.

Grandfather was fond of puns, lowest form of humor. Double
entendre is a frugal fun, it’s not spendthrift mirth, mother.

Below Perth the River Tay is tidal. If Perth is Heaven’s
Gate, do all Scots reincarnate, come back in re-birth, mother?

When I was small you read me poems and taught me to recite them.
I wrote this to thank you for teaching me a Word’s worth, mother.

February 28, 2016 by Laura M Kaminski

Before the Harvest

When I was small, my friends and I would sit
beneath the mango tree and learn to comb
hair until it stood up loose and fluffy, then plow

a straight line down to the scalp and separate
the field into even sections, slowly plait each
into a close, straight braid. My own thin blonde

hair was a frustration — how I secretly envied
my friends their gleaming ebony that could,
at our young age, be plaited into elegance!

My own hair could be brushed and braided,
and it was, but it would not stay neat through
washing, the plaits would loosen, tangle, grow

into a mess fit to nest a chicken. But envy is
even uglier than unruly, steals from the eyes
and smile whatever beauty might otherwise

reside there. I resolved in tight silence, to let
it go, to instead celebrate each time we sat
to braid and found Jumma’a’s hair grown

longer during its most recent time in narrow
rows, found it each time closer to a length
that would permit a woman’s style, a wrap

and sculpting with black thread into a form
and beauty that would be uniquely hers.
We were young girls, then. We took comfort

in the patient, loving touch of one another’s
hands, this ritual that would carry us through
as bodies changed and destinies diverged.

After Robbi Nester’s poem “The Long and Short of It.”

February 23, 2016 by Jean Morris

Sea dream

We two are travellers
in a single dream.
Face up we float
together on a painted sea.
If we close our eyes,
we can drink the scent
of lilies, sense the touch
of angels’ wings.

We are bathing
in impastoed depths.
We are summoned
by siren songs of blue.
If we swim to shore,
escape the frame,
we shall not meet again.

Travellers in a Single Dream, a painting by Victoria Crowe

February 19, 2016 by Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Rosary

We dine on gruel and despair,
our Lenten deprivation.
We hear the creatures scurry
in the attic. We hope
they will dine on the cheese
we’ve left in the traps.

The dog hides in the bathtub.
Once he only hid during storms.
Now he seems to crave the cool
enamel, the clean curves
holding him.

The teenagers keep their evening
plans, despite the threat
of precipitation. You light
the fire, in the hope
that the hearth will lead
them back to safety.
I finger the well-worn beads
brought to this country
in a different century, prayers
lifted in a different language.

Inspired by Dave Bonta’s “In/mates” and Luisa A. Igloria’s “Niyebe” and ““Depth of Field.”

February 17, 2016 by Laura M Kaminski

This Cold Ache

for Dave and Mark Bonta

This cold ache, this longing
to belong — orangutans have
already begun to step into
our filthy shoes, have bred
until their habitat is stressed;
recently, two of them turned
against another, ganged up

and beat and killed her, our
first occasion of witnessing
their females commit murder,
so now we aren’t unique in
this respect, the earth does
not need us to manifest this
option, does not need us as

a repository for the bloody-
minded string of X-genes. Our
services may no longer be
required. This cold ache, this
longing to belong — and now,
your brother and another well-
versed in Australian aboriginal
territory and ceremony have

unraveled the old Prometheus
myth — we’d thought that fire
was ours uniquely, a secret
cleverly hidden in a stalk of
fennel, stolen from the gods.
But fifteen observations of
brown falcons and black kites

lifting and relocating burning
twigs of brush to other places
to smoke out their prey —
and this behavior may well
predate our own successes
with such flames, our own
discovery of the handiness

of lightning strikes, the trial
and errors with which we
learned to wrap the embers
from a smoldering tree up in
shag-bark and green leaves,
carry them to where they’d
be useful in preparing food.

So we are not unique in this
thing either, and may not have
even been the first; the gods
from which we stole that fire
may well have been birds;
clearly, the earth does not
need us to manifest this option,

does not need our bodies to
preserve the DNA of pyro-
mania. Our services may no
longer be required. This cold
ache, this longing to belong —
and now —

Inspired by/in response to “February idyll” by Dave Bonta, and two articles: “The Dark Side of the Red Ape” and “Crafty Australian birds may be resorting to arson to smoke out their prey.”

February 16, 2016 by Laura M Kaminski

Ghazal with an abundance of water

So much water, why not share it?
—Margaret Hasse, “Water Sign“

In the beginning, the only thing present before water
was divided from sky on Day Two: Voice moving o’er water.

He wrote the textbook (literally) — during engineering
the River Lea, Manual of Hydrology, Beardmore water.

In drier climates people are frugal with water that’s left
after washing dishes, irrigate gardens with chore water.

Coconuts grow in the tropics. Whether green or brown they are
coveted treats, a cache of sweet liquid, hidden core water.

Lead. Vanadium. Arsenic. Uranium. Revegator
was a crock cure in 1912, snake oil treatment, ore water.

On the Zambezi River, a traveler can hear it from
forty kilometers — the Victoria Falls roar WATER!

The moon tugs on the edges of the earth’s liquid blankets, kicks
them off, pulls them back, over and over, these tides of shore water.

Tension on the Red Sea’s bank when the slaves were fleeing Egypt —
how to cross? Moses made a path, raised a staff, tore water.

Imagine if we were made of wool, if like the Wicked Witch
of the West we shrunk when we got wet, then we’d abhor water.

Little statue — supposed to be modeled after a ballet
dancer. She refused when she learned Mermaids only wore water.

Rumbling thunder. Terrifying lightning. Wind ripping tree limbs.
A mythical hammer is pounding the heavens: Thor water.

HOLD FAST or an anchor or a heart with MOTHER — sailors get
tattoos. One wanted a wave, fresh ink on shoulder, sore water.

The concrete floor hid a reservoir that filled with rain water.
The house stayed cooler in summer — clever way to store water.

Utah promises adventure of all sorts —- climb, hike and ski,
river running tours that raft the rapids, splash white Splore water.

Hydration Carrier, intimidating name for canteen.
Nalgene flask in a tactical holster pouch, Condor Water.

Children are playing out in the heat. They have a hose and a
bag of balloons, they are laughing and filling up war water.

Everyone is under some kind of pressure, from you and me
to scuba divers. But should we measure in torr or water?

Black, white, advection, hoar, window or rime — all are sorts of frost.
No matter the terminology, they all are frore water.

Dolphin Safe says the tin, a bold claim, a hope porpoises can
find their way out of nets should they swim in albacore water.

Twenty sher, forty lines, forty days, forty nights. Halima
knows Noah declined an encore, he wanted no more water.

February 13, 2016 by Laura M Kaminski

Ghazal with second thoughts

with lines from Luisa A. Igloria’s “Depth of field” and ending with a line from The Book of Flight by José Angel Araguz

In the evening he wants to sink into sweet dreams, featherbed of thought,
but caffeine too late keeps him awake, careening on the sled of thought.

Naked lady on the half-shell, ancient goddess, just created.
Most demi-gods were born of lust, but Venus, love, was born of thought.

She is excited and keeps interrupting you by accident.
Forgive her this froth – she has just tapped the barrelhead of thought.

Twisted into a simulacrum of a lotus blossom, you sweep
tracks of uninvited guests away, erase any tread of thought.

Augustine determined that humans have souls because our skulls are
too small to fit the things we can envision, the wingspread of thought.

At last, / there are times / when it can actually / be as simple as that.
How often you long for a return to childhood joy instead of thought!

Here, Halima reads poems – will they guide her like Hansel and Gretel?
This page is a tablecloth, words the crumbs from the dark bread of thought.

February 11, 2016February 11, 2016 by Uma Gowrishankar

From Shadows To The Stars

The moon is pale as buttermilk, watered
down to feed me in school. Oil-stained walls
crumble as I stuff infinity in my mouth. One
stone a year fills my body, engorges pathways
I essay every day through fetid night soil.

There is sand on the bed, hands tremble
as I carve a wedge of dirt from the fingernail —
particles that compose soul leak from a hole
that remains unvisited like the brick house
at the peripheral colony in my home town.

Birds fill my mouth, stir air in the lungs,
levitate vapour of existence that I see hover
above heads of palm trees framed
by the window – a scrap of paper, letters
scrawled like ants they stamp under their feet.

In the dark space between words I hold a torch
for my mother to examine blue toenails,
black calluses, whorls that once mesmerised –
pathways she consulted to map a horoscope
now a poem unwriting itself on the paper.

The book is on the floor face down, arms
splayed, pages like clumps of hair tugged.
My spine broke, among other body parts
as I flung from the chair — I have known
nothing of anatomy, only of distant stars.

The title of the poem is borrowed from Rohith Vemula’s suicide note. The poem is a response to his tragic death.

You can read the full text of his suicide note in The Indian Express. For more about Rohith Vemula and his death, see the Wikipedia.

February 9, 2016 by Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Cranes

Who will live in these shipwrecked leper
colonies? The cranes, the workhorse
of the Industrial Revolution, crank
away without ceasing, heaving future walls
into place. Pre-fab has such a different
meaning now, as big trucks rumble
the concrete slabs across a nation.

In my office, I fold paper cranes
the way I learned long ago, at a justice
rally on the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima
explosion or maybe for an installation art
piece made of stripped branches.

I write lines from poems on the paper
before I make the creases. I tuck these cranes
into the corners of my office building
and the chain link fence around the construction
site. I imagine them coming to life
at night, a constellation made of cranes
in a starless sky, a navigation
device that no one will need or notice.

Inspired by a Facebook post that noted the anniversary of John Carpenter’s “The Fog,” with its plot of ghosts of shipwrecked lepers and Dave Bonta’s “Finding my way In London,” with this quote: “…but the true avian symbol of the city is the crane.”

February 8, 2016February 8, 2016 by Jean Morris

That lost gesture

Is this the challenge, then,
as older age begins to settle in:
to be fully present to the precious
and fluctuating here and now
while bearing witness to the past
that lives and breathes inside you?
to be cradling always, one in each hand,
two things that cannot co-exist?
as you relish the magic keyboard
that sends your words across the world,
to recall that lost gesture of feeding
a sheet of paper into a typewriter?
to say something about a time
and place that disappeared?

With thanks for both the sentiment and the typewriter image to the wonderful Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina.