Hanoi Flower Market A soda can spray after rolling, forgotten, in the car trunk, white slashes of paint foam the canvas, the fizz of Vietnam re-opening. It’s 1999. Step closer and apostrophe strokes evoke white ao dai silk trailing, dozing vendors, and vibrant petal splashes like the painter’s palette, a ripple of marigolds, a wave of sunflowers, a puddle of roses. Shoppers place bouquets in their bicycle baskets. Pedal past fuzzy ducklings, badminton stripes and barbers on the sidewalk, steel black gleam of imported sedans rolling to treaty rooms where rats rustle midnight curtains. Jean Janicke Jean Janicke is an economist, executive coach, and writer. She lives in Washington, DC, and her work has appeared in FEAL, Rabbit, and Last Stanza.
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Dancing in the Shadows bent back, skirts hitched, her swathing costume of white like a burial dress or wedding garment hovers arms bent, wrists sharp and muscled, there is no fear of the shadows that cling to the hollows of the dancer’s face behind her, the accompaniment clings to life on the breath of a voiceless song throwing their heads back, their faces pressed to light or dark instruments cling to their bellies as if they will hold the souls in their bodies as they play the fevered beats behind her, her shadow swallows light, a monster in the guise of a winter wind rolling and spinning, stomping reverberations from heeled feet to pocked floors guitars that hang on plastered walls are a reminder of the music at rest drained of life that players fill like vessels she is a vessel for life the women who watch her flurried, flushed face mimic her movements wishing for the wild ecstasy of her exotic rhythm Raphaela Pavlakos Raphaela Pavlakos’s dissertation research is about Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee poetry and landscape as alternative sites of memory, using research-creation to intersect her scholarly and creative production, as well as finding ethical ways of reading Indigenous poetry as a settler-scholar. Her poetic work can be found in Talon Review, Taj Mahal Review, Word Hoard, and Sanctuary: A Cootes Paradise Anthology, and others. She also co-authored a self-published poetry collection called Mythopoesis in 2022 with Georgia Perdikoulias, which is available through Kindle Direct Publishing. Old Maid My friend shouted, discard, discard, pair of cards flashed hands down on the table, punch spurting on her blouse. I couldn't act fast enough, staring at magpies out the window who'd come to pick scraps left from garbagemen. I never wanted to pair up, caught a reflection of bird feathers and instructions for how to spread an attraction fan, and even that I couldn't manage, instead opened my beak to what could be found close to ground. My friend always won with the odd card, called Old Maid, though it was my brother who said the winner was a loser as he ran out the door to play with boys in the street, or did he even grasp why he repeated the winning phrase far from tablecloths and tea pots. Since then, my relationships have depended on not winning, not chanting discard, discard-- even my marriage. My friend and I still play games though we're older--Mille Bornes, The Un-Game, but I don't confess about a figure I've seen crouching in the corner. I'm sure it's waiting to trick us, ghost of what we used to be or what's ahead, doused in a shroud. Maybe it's a magpie. I tell her I read about the bird and how scientists installed tracking devices, yet within hours wiley beaks and claws tore off the constraints. Laurel Benjamin Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. Her work overall holds themes of family and sibling connections, a journey, nature, environment, extinction, curiosity and the idea of actual versus alternate life. There is loss in what is not said, unspoken and connected to, for example, the mother and the idea of mother. She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon. Join us on Zoom this weekend to explore the incredible story of Mexico's art history. It will be a whirlwind tour through time. Frida Kahlo was passionate about pre-Columbian artefacts and her husband was considered the master artist of Mexico. The couple were surrounded by art stars and brilliant creatives. Of course, Frida became the most beloved artist and icon. We will look at a wide variety of visual art through time. This session will focus on looking at and talking about visual art rather than on writing exercises, but writers will find a wealth of inspiration to be mined for their poetry and stories later. Frida's World: Mexico's Art Story
CA$35.00
Join us to explore the incredible story of Mexico's art history. It will be a whirlwind tour through time. Frida Kahlo was passionate about pre-Columbian artefacts and her husband was considered the master artist of Mexico. The couple were surrounded by art stars and brilliant creatives. Of course, Frida became the most beloved artist and icon. We will look at a wide variety of visual art through time. This session will focus on looking at and talking about visual art rather than on writing exercises, but writers will find a wealth of inspiration to be mined for their poetry and stories later. Piet Mondrian, Grey Tree, oil on canvas, 1911 Cathy Wittmeyer
Cathy Wittmeyer hosts the Word to Action retreat in the Alps and edited the upcoming anthology: Eden is a Backyard: Climate poems from Word to Action from Eupolino Verlag. Her poems explore climate wreckage and human frailty. Her work has appeared in Isele Magazine, Superpresent, Tangled Locks Journal and Book of Matches among others. For more on this engineer/lawyer, mom and poet from Buffalo, NY, see https://cathywittmeyer.com My Head I may daydream for days, along a choice of three, his rule of thumb, but as long as Shakespeare, Amos or Carley include a decent word, in me, the inner voice calms down the arrows in my head. My mind is not always on my side, off to mill while happy valleys, while misery up the stairs, and down my silver linings, I still cannot settle for gold, still cannot think out loud. I may triumph all with merry memories, talk on the phone or fill wishes with infatuation, with -in order of Summers, then Winters - whale diving and King Arthur-land, yet brain just asks a lot of questions. Bethink, the wizard's daughter knew to stop his head with one thump of her hands, and I wished for an eternal ice-cream shop, a window of wonder. Weren’t we all looking out, wondering when life would start? And so, up and down, monochromally, my head learns to wrap around decisions, around sorrow in the kitchen, and days of tiny leaves or tiled coldness. Anticipation fills a head, the choice is mine. Kate Copeland Kate Copeland started absorbing books ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching & translating; her love for art & water to poetry…please find her pieces @The Ekphrastic Review, Poets’ Choice, First Lit.Review-East, Wildfire Words, The Metaworker, The Weekly/Five South, New Feathers, AltPoetryPrompts a.o. Her recent Insta reads: www.instagram.com/kate.copeland.poems/ Over the years, she worked at literary festivals and Breathe-Read-Write-sessions, recent linguistic-poetry workshops were via the IWWG (more workshops in the making). Kate was born @ harbour city and adores housesitting @ the world. It’s a Helluva Blue “Vincent Van Gogh understood colour,” I said, walking the trail to the Hollywood sign. The sky that day glowed bright blue and Brody said it was the blue of the skies in Mickey Mouse cartoons. I said it was like a giant Pantone colour chip laid across the whole of Los Angeles, and then that’s when I said this thing about Van Gogh. He went on, as if he didn’t hear me (later he would say, I didn’t hear you). “The applications are due for Making Art in L.A., like next week.” “Yeah. I’m almost done with mine.” My mind was still on Vincent and the colour blue in his Starry Night painting which was not this blue—it was after all, nighttime in his painting—but if he was here right now, he would paint this blue because he understood it. I think this way because I think that I understand it. I am a painter, after all. I teach painting at a college, I paint in my studio, I show once a year (if I’m lucky) in a gallery. I tell myself I understand colour but then I wonder if what I understand is this: if I were ever to paint a canvas and use this colour for the sky, the verdict from the art world would be saccharine, schmaltzy, amateur. What I need to do, what I want to do, is go see the painting in person so I can really assess just how Van Gogh understood that sky, that blue. Where is it? Paris, London. I ask Brody and he says, MOMA. “Can we go there?” I say. “Can we afford a trip to New York?” “Why do you suddenly want to see that particular painting?” I consider being exasperated but hold back and just say, “Like I said, Van Gogh understood colour.” He nodded, then said, “When did you say that?” The Hollywood sign was around the next corner so I sped up and ran the incline – to get away. To get closer to the sky. Brody was okay as a boyfriend, especially since we are both artists. All – mostly all – of my previous boyfriends had also been artists and maybe that doesn’t work. So maybe I would stop dating artists but then I met Brody and so far it’s working out. Sort of. He doesn’t make any dismissive remarks about my work like so many others did. He’s relatively complimentary. Actually, he spaces out when he looks at my paintings and says almost nothing. Perhaps that’s best. On our third date, at Huntington Library, we went to see the Kehinde Wiley painting of Obama, and also walk through the gardens. “Look how Wiley flattens the canvas,” I said. “Creepy in here with all these other old portraits,” Brody said, sweeping his arm to encompass the 18th-century full-length portraits that shared the space with Obama. “I think that’s the point,” I said. I wanted to admire Wiley’s work but Brody was already walking to the door. “I guess we're going to the gardens now,” I said aloud to no one. Maybe to Obama. We were wandering the cactus garden, which is huge, goes on forever with winding paths and a zillion different cactuses. Cacti. I love the strange shapes. I took a lot of pictures, knowing these would appear in some form in my paintings. I said, “I love these so much.” “They are wild, I’ve never seen a lot of these before. They’re like aliens.” “They are like aliens, and look at the way they grow from one part onto the next, sometimes growing bigger than the base where it started. Some of them are like mutants” (he is uh-huhing as I talk) “in that they change form the farther they get from the base, I wonder if being drought resistant shapes them. I have a friend who is a cactus expert and when she got married, she asked for cactus plants as the only gift they wanted—they were planning a big cactus garden at their new house. Imagine that, a whole bunch of cactus for a wedding present.” “Yep, me too.” “You too? You mean you want cactus for a wedding present?” “Huh? Who said anything about a wedding?” I was going to say, I did just now, but he looked so surprised, I was confused and so I let it slide. I look up the cheapest flights from LA to NYC. I look up the cheapest hotels. I add up everything and there is no way for us to go to MOMA. We just don’t have the money for such an extravagance. I am sad about this and tell Brody that I am sad. “Why did you want to go?” he asks. “MOMA. Van Gogh. Starry Night.” I swear I've told him this five times already in the three days since that hike. “You can see it online.” “You know that is not a substitute for seeing any painting in person.” “Go see the Van Gogh at the Norton Simon. Don’t they have a couple?” “Yes. But not Starry Night. I need to see his blue.” Brody looks up (he listened to me!) the Norton Simon’s collection and shows me the images. “There is the Mulberry Tree. It has a blue sky.” So we go, late in the afternoon. Pasadena is a short drive from DTLA and we wind up the Arroyo Seco freeway and into the museum parking lot. I stand in front of the Mulberry Tree with its blue sky. A different blue than Starry Night but it is Van Gogh’s particular blue, like one that exists just for him. Brody stood next to me, looking around the gallery and not at the painting. “It is a helluva blue. You know it’s made from lapis lazuli,” I said. “We took the same class, of course I know.” “Look how different his sky is from the old paintings,” I said. “How the sky is as much an object as the tree is. How like everything is foreground. How different that was back then. I wish I could have been there.” “Uh-huh. Hey, did you ever see that Doctor Who episode where the Doctor meets Van Gogh and takes him to the future so he can …” “See how his paintings are loved. Yes, I showed you that one. You’ve never watched Doctor Who except for that one episode. That I showed you.” “So, are you done and want to get dinner?” Back in our adjoining studios at the Brewery, I said, “So inspired! Gotta paint.” Brody said, “I agree,” and went to watch basketball on his giant screen TV. I stood in front of one of the three paintings I was working on, one with a blue-faced person that I was trying to keep from looking like an extra in Avatar. I kept thinking about lapis lazuli and Van Gogh and that I would never understand colour, never understand blue, and never understand why Brody had this gap where I slipped through and disappeared. Amy Jones Sedivy Amy Jones Sedivy grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in NELA (Highland Park) with her artist-husband and their princess-dog. She recently retired and spends her time reading, writing, and exploring the rest of Los Angeles. With a husband who is an artist, she spends a lot of time in galleries and museums, so most of her stories are about artists or artist-adjacent characters. The rest are about musicians. Maame in the Alcove I’m not among those willing to look back toward the old gods, those who gave comfort, fear, rites to feel whole. But she twists back desperate to cling to them, Cape Coast bollards in time’s typhoon—its unrelenting gusts tug her braids westward, straightening them out. Perhaps it’s ignorance of the old ways: I can’t decipher what distresses her. A water jug her head once bore lies cracked beside a stool (sagging, much like her breasts), yet the hassock at her feet a trendy pouf covered in durable polyester chintz. I keep such knickknacks in an attic baized in webs, mildew, dust: a warped psalter, masques from a bygone fête—remnants of gatherings fit for her mise-en-scène? Why does she parade them—jugs, handholds on a cliff-face as if they’d stop a freefall? Like me, she sits alone; they’ve shuttered the old marketplace. But if she’ll shop in Shoprite’s fluorescent anonymity for her yams, cassava flour, I could help her connect-- where thousands stream a grainy highlife clip and google Who are Asase Yaa, Nyame? Michael Sandler Michael Sandler is the author of a poetry collection, The Lamps of History (FutureCycle Press 2021). His work has appeared in scores of journals, including recently in THINK, Literary Imagination, and Smartish Pace. Previously he worked as a lawyer, in addition to writing poems. He lives near Seattle; his website is www.sandlerpoetry.com. Méliès Moon I will refuse the cold and lifeless rock and instead choose the Méliès moon, a wild, anarchic planet, one eyeball burst by a rocket’s priapic thrust. I will refuse a cold and distant science and instead choose a lunar snowfall sprinkled by star-girls with shining stockings over forests of swollen mushrooms. I will refuse to be cold and logical and instead choose spectacle, the dark side of the moon governed by skeletal simians, the dominion of dreams I am afraid to confess. Jacob Lee Bachinger Jacob Lee Bachinger lives in southern Alberta where he teaches at University of Lethbridge. His book of poetry, Earth-cool, and Dirty, was published by Radiant Press of Regina in 2021. His work has been featured in Canadian journals such as The Fiddlehead, Riddle Fence, and The Malahat Review, among others. For more information: https://www.jacobleebachinger.com/ Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), film by Georges Méliès (French) 1902 Clouds of Glory Papa was a rolling stone. Papa was a bowling ball. Papa was a Hallmark card. Papa was a pocket slide-rule. Papa was a pluggerdoodle. Papa was a binkus. Papa was a schnulli. Papa was the smell of napalm in the morning. Papa was the odor of formaldehyde rising from the mortician’s open door at night. Papa was a Kool Aid flavor, Man-o-Mangoberry, with a twist. Papa was the Cookie Monster. Papa was an unsacked bottle of port wine, passed hand to hand, in an alley behind Fifth and Western. Papa was the beleaguered Ricci in Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 Italian neorealist masterpiece The Bicycle Thief. Papa was the inimitable Nervous Norvus before “Transfusion” fame ruined him and drove him into seclusion in the Hollywood Hills. Papa was the original Nervous Nelly before a fusillade of anti-aircraft fire ripped through his B-17 Flying Fortress on January 27, 1943, on a bombing run over the submarine yards in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, and parts of the waist gunner were splattered across the hatch of Papa’s ball turret, and the catwalk was slickened with blood, and the babyfaced pilot judged the mission a bust, and dropped the plane out of formation, and turned, and limped back to England on one engine, and crash-landed there, in a cornfield, events which would imbue Papa with a disquieting composure that would remain with him the rest of his life. Papa was a chainsmoker, naturally. Papa was not for sale. Papa was not for resale. Papa was not to be removed under penalty of law. Papa was not for everybody. Or maybe he was. Papa was a rolling stone. Edward Miller Edward Miller teaches writing at Madera Community College. Included among his areas of interest are outsider art, street photography, and the American vernacular. |
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