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lettervanes
Maureen Holm
you were in it too so i'll tell you though maybe only for the moments while you waited through the rings or maybe just before and that's why you called but too soon or had someone called you first so you couldn't conclude if there is any end and wanted to tell me about how it felt but it was still continuing pink and lavender and yellow or were your colors other a blue maybe you like but that's already too much about you who were there i believe after all through it all but there were others too or maybe they were trees maybe willows maybe pussy willows with buds and arms or the corn in bundles or in stalks except that it wasn't physical palpable paintable tall like that oh no more like air between the letters which certainly were and colors borne on the breeze and the letters were the letters all standing up but willowy from my voc mani sloka the part you haven't heard because it's new these last two weeks but what i heard saw touched wasn't those but the words on the other side english maybe or at least not invented fetched from the chest humus but what side since the letters were 3-d i don't know it just was and oh so voluptuous that may have been one the joy though that wasn't said oh no need was in being in the poem in itself and understanding everything from the shifts in the air now balmy now cool yet beneficent swirling half-waking then fall nestle back among the letters the words and them yielding the other side what i meant when i wrote them not knowing but now so i do how it moves how grateful such sorrow all worth it when the wind when the letters when the pinwheels the words spin about to the finger the phrase on reverse and i in the wisdom so simple remembered as though i'd known all along and forgot and awake forget all but the knowing enough in itself to continue and hope for the air and you there of a morning or not when corn's just where the yellow pink's the thing in itself and lavender's the happy beyond laughter
(Prior publ.: Pegasus Dreaming)
~ .
Beyond Phenomenon:
Undoing the Doctor's Damage, No. 1
Maureen Holm
Blue sky,
red rubber ball,
curly, black dog.
Blue ball,
black rubber sky,
red, curly relies too
on the canine wheelbarrow for
a generation (two)
of yellow argument on green
disputes with green,
concedes / assumes
name noun place breed
for every each one is so
as to
end in the beginning,
phenomenon recorded,
while the grey,
while the thunder,
white dumb ignored,
which is / is not
the / any of it
matter or dog
bred to metaphor,
patient,
writes the Poem
(Prior publ.: Essay, "Ego-Free, The Poem Aloft,"
Big City Lit, Jan '01 and Feb '01)
e. e. cummings: Waterfall
oil on cardboard
8-1/2" x 17"
~ . ~
Lorca's Lady in a NYC Train
Evie Ivy
Verde que te quiero verde . . .
Green, I want you green . . .
(Romance Sonambulo, Frederico García Lorca)
In the busy subway she sits in green splendor,
from her silvered hair to her feet, and eyes closed.
Green streaked hair, green earrings, green jacket, green
scarf, green skirt, to delicate green shoes and socks.
On her lap her pale hands are crossed,
she has green painted fingernails.
And I see different shades of green,
mint green,
pistachio green,
olive green,
emerald green,
deepest green,
blue-green.
She sat with greens of the sea, of the mountainside.
About to exit on the next stop and standing close
to the door, I watch her open her eyes briefly to note
no one in front of her stared and closes them again.
Again, quickly I notice her
blue-green,
deepest green,
emerald green,
olive green,
pistachio green,
mint green.
She sat, dreaming in the greens of the sea and mountainside.
A vision of García Lorca in his New York trip comes.
He stops and wishes her the greens of a Spring morning,
and to stay so green among most gentle winds.
(Evie Ivy is a dancer/poet. Her book, The First Woman Who Danced,
contains poetry based on her experiences with the dance. She has
been writing poetry since childhood and has been heard on radio
and cable TV. She ran the poetry readings at the Moroccan Star in
Brooklyn, which featured dozens of outstanding poets. This is her
first appearance on the magazine.)
~ . ~
Blue
Nicholas Johnson
The cool blue feeling of no feeling, shared,
breeds love as theoretical as blue,
as useless as the jet plane's trail through
its thin slip of sky, the impossible guard
of heaven, tracing a path like memory's
along the knocking heart's divide;
these veins, blue eyes meeting blue, enemies
of feeling, until love's art
sickens in the eyes of children, the future
something silver in the sky and passing
out of reach, unheard of, overhead, a suture
for the wound that wounds us more—acting
as if we might open up the sky right there
with enough blue to throw a whole life into the air.
(Prior pub.: Hawaii Review)
~ . ~
Sonnet to Blue
Stephen Massimilla
The universal hue.
—Stevens
Resurrection lightens shades of you,
when dawning in the crater lakes of eyes,
robin's eggs—their baby blues—reflect sapphirine skies
or lightning cracks a dome of indigo.
As zephyrs buff the noonday Sun, his helium car,
then plum tree leaves and myrtle berries pip
a rain-glazed roof; blue as bluebirds winging through a dip
in crests of spruce, water dogs and denim sails flash far.
But what of other dyes and deeps? The wild blue iris
whose lemon blood bleeds down bright violet petals;
Blue Morpho butterfly, late lilac ink, grape metals,
wine dregs, whatever shines dark. In the halls of Osiris,
torches of pewter shed blue on the blades of a giant back.
Then the hydra-night, scaled with stars, flames forth, blue-black!
~ .
Ode to Yellow
Stephen Massmilla
Nature's rarest color
—Emily Dickinson
In the poor south
before a storm, when sky turns yellow,
terribly yellow,
and the bee-home turns bright
and bees burn in,
I enjoy sniffing honey-suckle,
love the buzz
in the mimosa.
The quest of youth is yellow,
low in the dawn
or drawn in the dark,
like a flash of that sword
the Knight freed from the stone.
On a ride through the English countryside,
blinking past fields of oil-seed rape,
I want to live out a day that will blaze
into yellow. Speed rips up tracks and fields
reel on, like California sand
to bicycles of lemon rind:
O peel back your golden thighs
along the yellow sunrise roads!
From Santa Monica to Montpelier,
all the traffic lights switch yellow
even in the dead of winter,
but to be elsewhere:
Yellow fish and lizards, yellow tongues
of peacocks. Leafy seahorses are yellow
in the Philippines. Never mind jaundice, or wasps.
Think butterflies, banana pies, four-and-twenty
blackbirds' beaks, sweetest part
of the pineapple, but to be arbitrary:
saffron pistils, tiger's eyes.
And in the Hagia Sophia, priceless in rays
of the eggshell domes,
a small plain bowl,
most buttery of all the Sultan's treasure,
Byzantine perfection of its glaze:
Yellow from the fire, phoenix in the gyre,
serving bowl for ocher,
pastry dough, chickee-fluff, yolk!
O life, luster, halo, joy:
be the Color-Meister of my soul!
~ .
In Green Galvanized Night
Stephen Massimilla
"There is a green grounding screw
on the bottom left-hand corner
of this Xerox copier."
Sliding back, then driving hard. Cracked sky
momently bright as a frieze, but frail to the eye.
And trucks with water rumpling at their prows, trees cranked past like antlers
of migrating beasts, breaking the herd,
whatever has kept our love together. Chained wheels moan up in-roads
turned ocean outlets. From nerves of branches,
egrets lift. Glinting like mint stars from coal pots, like flies, emerald rain
winds down before endless lit-up roofs, before what
once ignited frogs, X-rayed them down to tissues of leaves
to which they stuck.
Through a storm now,
translucent as vitreous humor, my own past comes clear as I enter the brain
of a giant surfacing fish. Night feels like fever
in a womb veined bigger than this dark sum of parts. Termites, wings singed
to tinsel, black snakes with gold bones, compost
for flash sex of fire in grass. O traffic between us, I smell the way through.
Just need to make out
a lamp in the distance, grumbling like trucks in gassed-in summer,
seeking—swirling somewhere, a green grounding screw.
(This is Stephen Massimilla's first appearance on the magazine. His book,
Forty Floors From Yesterday, received the Bordighera Poetry Prize. His
sonnet sequence, Later on Aiaiai, received the Grolier Poetry Prize. Other
awards include a Van Rensselaer Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize,
and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Poetry Award. His poems
have appeared in The Madison Review, Tampa Review, The American Poetry Review,
Descant, and many other journals and anthologies. Massimilla holds an
MFA
and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He teaches writing at Barnard College.
e. e. cummings: Standing Nude
oil on cardboard
8-1/2" x 14"
(1945)
~ . ~
The Idea of Madonna
Jim McCurry
Though up here I thought it was merely a surreal Chicago,
every beat up storefront and marquee
competing for comet colours, for jagged interest,
the colours came from the movie Dick Tracy—
in fact, there was a Dick in a yellow cashmere topcoat,
but he did Batman stunts, Spider Man flights,
o yeah, he was astral wandering as in San Antone
cityward from boot camp
in search of dance partners and cervesa,
hero returning to a jazz damsel
with Chloe-shadowed eyes,
questing for her from joint to joint,
shunning whiskey, beer, ribs,
each back alley attraction—
shunning the stooge, the eye, the flunky
who witnessed it all and bore the subpoena,
the writ of mandamus, from Hades
to the director and players
and muttered, Now make nice…
Returning to the autochthonous City,
yet where were the pyramids?
Oh, them funky ragtag streets was tinny and hollow,
bad ragtime, Dick couldn't get into it.
Each time it grew more postmodern,
a glitzy diorama—Dick Tracy
plunging up into one of those Argus eyes
of the hovering behemoth
of plastic and steel, or else
pure light—
He flowed through the colours,
himself, of course, part of the colours,
but nothing surged in his post-Adamic throat,
save for those frames in which
the duende appeared.
The other half of Dick's egg.
Where was meter, mater, myth,
muse, goddess of light and truth?
She was the sepia and taupe,
sultry and salty beloved.
She had the bangs, the blackness,
the soft glowing skin tones,
the contralto huskiness
with which she intoned her
x-rated tho' genteel invitations.
Did Dick not recall the time,
escaping from the prison ship,
flying unaided through space
he landed in the cobalt and turquoise
Thought Gardens of the Moon?
Sitting back to back with his sister, Psyche,
in that loveseat-like chiaroscuro?
Yes, and then returning to Earth as needed,
landing on superfeet in Gotham to intercept
some bullying mischief, some
decrepit and moldy machismo?
But Dick was in repose,
the super sleuth still—
always—in secret
: back there
in the dark and mossy
recesses of sacred thought.
In or on the Moon?
Talk about your technicolour!
Dick had been around
several blocks.
He was what you or I
might have been,
before the Sixties,
before Vietnam,
before the abolition of gunpowder
and napalm and missiles,
and wrastlin' and football…
before the Great Amputation.
Who, old Dick Tracy?
That gumshoe shamus,
he badder than King Kong!
~ . ~
Mixing the Colors
Jessy Randall
Jenny Larter and I, age seven, made modeling clay pizzas every day at summer camp, unwilling to break out of this habit once we got good at it: rolling the yellow crust, attaching the red pepperoni, the white mushrooms, the orange cheese. Jenny Larter's dad owned a store that sold "novelties." This was the first time I ever heard that word used as a noun, or at all, really. Sometimes, at the end of camp, we hung out in the storage room there, surrounded by boxes of plastic spiders, fake vomit, and collars for invisible dogs. Jenny Larter's dad was fat and bearded. I suppose the beard could have been a "novelty," but the fat was real. He was real, too, which was more than I could say of my own father. It would have been a great novelty if my father had ever shown up at camp or at my own house, ever. So there we are, me and Jenny, making pizza out of colored mud. We have to be careful not to mix the colors. We have to wash our hands afterward with the sickly-sweet pink camp soap, scrubbing and scrubbing to get rid of the smell of rubber.
~ . ~
Unknown American
Tim Scannell
See the black duck on a purpling dawn pond through gray reeds
Seeming one water for me and him and sky as well liquid changes
Blinking to violet mauve rust-orange quivering God-gold
Yellowy triumph shiver shadowing me back against yet dark stems
Behind me dry and tapping together like thin-slat baskets
Carried empty two-in-each-hand along an ancient path of new wind
Traveling all night from an invisible sun millions of miles through space
Lit ahead of itself round silver moon-on-on…in
Unimaginably insistent up-her-robe seaboard lady's warming
Toe-calf-coppery-thigh bare elbow grease glittering across
The Appalachians pushing down the Ohio where bass jump as remembered once…: raft-rope, flatboat-nail, barge-weld
Currenting the great 'cats' rolled currenting fresh beams
Flickering wind up the Missouri currenting more quickly smooth than furboats before Caudill saw the dall (porchboards tense/release under the rocking rocker-arc) all the way to—but he can't see—Per
Hansa's frozen flinty eye gazing West through blizzard stalks.…
Well, Ántonia Shimerda survived: at last, at last grandmother kitchen
Counter earned—sacrificially—all Grace
Even right to the Great Falls rainbow-ray spray (iron boat sunk, well then: Plan B) breezing up and across the Divide horses tumbling very
Hungry men how-how—"How"—could but one have died? Oh yes,
Baby-step beginnings snaky and tentative learning and learning
That what/where/when/how/why leans elbow, shoulder
Down the Columbia's roar drowning tribal laughter running
To shore to see 'em die (but that is…yes, is tribalism's Fate and
Its taboos even…, even in sunny sun: black wall (no-no limits ='s death
Guaranteed; while ideas breed parameters—ah, sweet finagle, adjustment to this quiet eddy slough where I bend—crouch—watch
Its seamlessly brightening feathery metallic-maroon head
Turn toward me,
Both of us hearing inaugural seasonal mufflings
From the East distinguishable inside this
Louder booming of decision cocked…,
Uncocked…; weighed (consider).
e. e. cummings: The Book
oil on cardboard
8-1/2" x 17-1/2"
~ . ~
The Dreamer and the Dreamed
Robert Scott
(a performance piece, with apologies to García Lorca)
Green how I want you green.
Green light. Green flame.
The shadow shadowing the dark,
the car entering the park.
The lights' repeat reflections
dream the clock upon the glass,
green time, green the number 9,
hands as cold as steel.
Green how I want you green.
Amid the fire and the glare
all things stop and stare,
but nothing was seen.
Green how I want you green.
The lights of the city descend,
multiply eel eyes
in shards of shattered glass.
Crushed metal magnet
drawing everything in sight,
and the trees, lurking in reptile darkness,
recoil a rattle hisssss.…
What now? And what to do?
The clock holds motionless, steel hand eclipses
green time, green the number 9,
on a corner just outside the park.
"Cabbie! My wallet for your wheels,
my shoes for the spot on which you stand,
my image for your likeness.
Cabbie, I'm bleeding on this dirty street!"
—If I could, sir,
this deal would be done.
But I am not this moment I,
nor is this dream my own.
"Cabbie! I want to die
in my own bed,
wooden frame
and cotton linens.
Don't you see my condition,
leg askew and head profused in red?"
—A deep dark halo surrounds your head.
Your blood bubbles and gathers
like a cloak around your shoulders.
But I am not this moment I,
nor is this dream my own.
"Lift me then, at least
toward the light.
Lift me up! Lift me!
I want to see the light
so I can go along my destination."
Arm in arm we lifted
toward the shining light,
leaving a trail of blood,
leaving a trail of years.
The bustle of the crowd
rippled to a hum.
A hundred sirens cut
a swath out of the sky.
Green how I want you green,
green light, green flame.
Arm in arm we rose,
the long drawn sigh
leaving a bitter taste of rust,
a sweet and herbal scent.
"Cabbie! Where is the light?
Where is the burning bright?
I'm cold!
I've never been so cold!"
Burning bright, cold and dark
cast a shadow over street and park.
Above the wreck,
above the sirens' pulsing dirge,
the bubble bouncing off the glass,
the clock moves on, the light changes,
green time, green the number 9,
hands as cold as steel.
The burning crowd
gathers ever closer.
The ambulance departs.
Green how I want you green.
Green light green flame.
The shadow shadowing the dark,
the car entering the park.
~ . ~
In Your Pocket, the Ticket Throbs
Zach Sussman
Your house, in the July dusk, is a mouth
crowded with yellow windows instead of teeth.
Glazed in the kitchen's bare light, dishes soak in filmy water.
White moths sputter like matches struck across the screen door.
You linger in your pink room,
eyeing a swallow's nest perched in the eaves.
One floor below, your father dozes shirtless,
a rock sunk in the lake of the bedroom mirror.
Beached on his green carpet, twisted cans writhe like trout.
You hear your mother open the fridge, pour a glass of milk.
Now her slippered feet on the stairwell, her goodnight, Ellen
suffused with chest pain the way afternoon congests the curtains.
When, one by one, she extinguishes the lamps,
evening smeared like mascara against the windows,
you unravel the nightgown from your waist,
then dress before the closet and descend into the lawn.
So when, paused before a streetlamp to pin your hair,
you glance toward the blackened house,
all the teeth are broken.
~ . ~
On the Road to Rose Blanche
Gyorgyi Voros
3
The next day, cliffrock a pink granite composite
of diamonds and mirrors; a white beach
littered with jellyfish like cabochons of amethyst.
And offshore, a ferrous shock of blood red
on the wave-tossed rim of the continental shelf,
bulk of quartzite and rosepink aggregate, blazing,
in the right sun, like a rose floating midocean.
Hence: Rose Blanche, boutonniere tossed
by love's chevalier to heartsick sailors
as token of approaching land, or
cruel bouquet beyond reach of those stranded
townside. Rose Blanche, both hope
and its abandonment, what trick of orogeny
set you down as a frieze of color
for the color-starved, the habit of your mineral's
shattered mirror-slashes, flaked light
illuminating a life to come beyond
love's gangplanked architecture?
We could have swum for it, but turned
the truck around, headed south
for Puerto Basque. Slept amid volcanoes.
Slept among them
still much later as we segued onto
the Massachusetts Turnpike,
the peopled regions of the world,
the better and the worse to come.
~ . ~
Before Drawing
Martin Willitts, Jr.
1.
Before there were visions,
the dawn was colorless and damp,
night was a tar pit of primeval confusion,
no one played harmonic blue notes,
and the palette was empty of words
men grunted in caves during snow blinding,
endlessly waiting in harsh gray conditions
and fire created by accidental lightning,
a bloody handprint on the wall
then everything fell like dominos
someone drew the conclusions
and stylized bison leapt out
shadowed by possessed hunters
beginning the first community
and the end of everything
2.
we have forgotten:
how to mix paint with eggs;
simple structures like oranges are not round;
wars were won by the best mapmakers;
and we celebrated imperfect nudes
until we wove colored fabrics
3.
after we trapped rainbows into paint,
the radish of our innocence
exposed as turtle bellies,
our desperation was green sighing
of an impotent man broken as chairs
and discarded as extra striped socks
such immediate un-forgiveness
painted by brilliant arguments,
no two vanishing points meeting
until someone steps back
becoming lost
in the moment
4.
on the eighth day
god created communication
and man forgot
to write it down
he tried to accuse his hazy mind
after seeing the sharp burgundy
of woman's fresh nipples
and how his feet melted into clay
teeth chattering nonsense
trying to impress her and failing,
his hands carving his feeling on stone,
no wonder creation is in every story
~ . ~
Oasis
Hanne Winarsky
The terrible cascade of glass bulbs
a tense forest, a harvest
of slick thighs and shining hair
of cash and its papered journey
in the sounding room of lights and carpet —
follow like the yellow brick road to
Vegas.
Oh, desertuck oasis. Here you are again
resurrected with canopied cabanas
and stripes of river pool
in daytime white blond
pink sun and cement;
the paling arrangement
of tomatoes a neon alcoholic rush—
Your siren call the sea of color defying
night where only night and sand exist.
Breasts and jeweled penny slots that roar
behind the Flamingo's slow fade,
through Tropicana halls of matted turquoise,
breath into chlorinated wallpaper and
the dizzy doorframe paintjobs,
the pools and blues a thicked swamp
whose green charades once Garden
but lit with a hot sizzle of glass and wire:
one voluptuous,
synchronized mass,
the echo of each carnival in town
will glow shadows off fields,
the empty station and black asphalt
transformed among high notes and throng…)
And in the desert capital of carnival
the small town large, the ring master
counts to three steps up from sand
to stage cracks the showy whip
and conjures from the fields:
the little boys with quarters
the dunking booths
the wooden racehorses
the strong man scale
of Vegas:
colossal cabinet
of all the darks.
~ . ~ . ~
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