Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

The Humaniverse

an occult relation between man and the vegetable
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

peering out from
his garden lot
John-Reinhart_humaniverse into the public road,
sheepish, nervous
about what happens
between man
and vegetable
as if we were only
here to eat–

man appears a little
lost among the weeds
obscuring more civilized
fauna, and, kneeling
in the mud,
redeems a little patch
of hearty turnips,
thistle and dandelion
crying for more sun
amid the collage
of variegated green,
purple, white, and yellow,
a little care warms
a thousand years

of glaciers, inspiring
angels and dung beetles
shaking hands
with noon-light sun,
blossoming infinities

that offer a new
communion,
praising the wealth
of a delectable
universe

— John Reinhart

An arsonist by trade, John Reinhart lives on a farmlette in Colorado with his wife and children. His poetry has recently been published in Scifaikuest, Star*Line, and FishFood Magazine. More of his work is available at http://www.patreon.com/johnreinhart

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

Powder Keg

(1783-1810)

1.
Walrath_Powder-Keg_Slave-ship To be born a slave but to have known
the taste of freedom is bitter, a tang of existence
like the grit of blood in a clear river,
like steel in your hands—gun-metal freedom,
that can be given or taken away.

Deprived of freedom, the body still keens,
breathes in the wind, picks up its scent,
longs for sweet pain, and marches
with the infantry of death.

I knew long ago the betrayal of fate.
Turning its face from me, it left me for dead
face down in a river, with just my own hands
to pull me out.

2.
Bands of cold steel press into my skin—
my skin, merely a gunshot in a dark coda,
fingerprintless. This shell, a powder keg
alive within—charcoal and fire,
transient.

Walrath_Powder-Keg_sharecroppers I lost myself for a long time, for years
amongst the high towers of white
cotton and castles. Living,
I refused to remember.

I pressed away memories in the fields,
turned my face from the call of ravens
waiting on fence posts and church steeples
and on the handles of plows.

I shut out the soul, collecting memories like lashes of the whip.

The little woman and the children she bore,
who slept beside me in the row house,
were they merely flesh and blood?
Made from parts of me I cannot keep?

I know they are dead, but I wish I could have kept
a lock of hair, a cotton scrap, not the hazy memory
of their smell, the sweet tangle of their feet on the cot,
their smiles at sunrise.

What had they to smile about?

3.
Specters haunt the earth. Shadows broken
away from the sun. Rangers without bodies
to return to. But I know this much,
they are free while I am chained
to the never-ending pain of life’s riven fane.

Where is the promise of my years?
In sleep memory rages, claws
my eyes, sears my nostrils,
hisses in my ears.

— Holly Walrath

Holly Walrath attended the University of Texas for her B.A. in English and the University of Denver for her M.L.A in Creative Writing. She is a freelance editor and the Associate Director of Writespace, a literary center in Houston, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, Pulp Literature, and Grievous Angels, among others.

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

Lost Streets

When fog rises over the Chemung river
and dances up the hillsides

Fog pilfers the unanchored,
collects untethered songs.
Akua-Lezli-Hope_Lost-Streets Nameless piano tunes roll along
in the dark of its impermeable light.

The wriggling shapes of lost streets ascend
green hillocks—the small city
becoming undone, and resurrected.

Labyrinths emerged on three slopes
above Big Flats where lost streets sought
their forgotten shapes. They tangled,
forming figure eights.

By a stroke of deep invention,
city stewards proposed a solution:
name all the alleys, deem them lanes.

They were my private walkways
where crows shouted and shadowed me,
where squirrel highways became visible,
where worlds unfurled on ribbons of light

and, thus weighted and bound
with words, held in place, tied down,
forever moored my wayward Brigadoon.

— Akua Lezli Hope

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, and metal to create poems, patterns, stories, music, wearables, sculpture, adornments and peace whenever possible. She has won two Artists Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Ragdale U.S.-Africa Fellowship, a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for The Arts and the Walker Foundation Scholarship to Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She was a Cave Canem fellow. She received an Artists Crossroads Grant from The Arts of the Southern Finger Lakes for her project “Words in Motion,” which placed poetry on the buses of New York’s Chemung and Steuben counties.

Her manuscript, Them Gone, won the Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Editor’s Prize and will be published in 2016. She won the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2015 short poem award. Her first collection, EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and Other Musics, won the Writer’s Digest book award for poetry.

Notable publications include: The 100 Best African American Poems; Too Much Boogie, Erotic Remixes of the Dirty Blues; Dark Matter, (the first!) anthology of African American Science Fiction and Erotique Noire, the first anthology of black erotica among many other journals.

She led the Voices of Fire Reading Choir from 1987 to 1999. Akua has given hundreds of readings to audiences in colleges, prisons, parks, museums, libraries and bars. A crochet designer, she has published more than 100 patterns. Her interest is in the freeform and the figurative—with a collection of scifi hats. She is an avid hand papermaker, who also loves to sing and play her saxes. A paraplegic, she has founded a paratransit nonprofit so that she and others may get around in her small town.

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

My Mom and Her Home

Fabiyas-M-V_My-Mom-and-Her-Homer These old stones
have undressed their
plaster-clothes. Her roof
is tattered, yet she declines my call.

Fashion and novelty
never tempt her. Her soles
sometimes soil her floor, but she
doesn’t fear a stretched-out index finger .

She refuses a share
of yummy Chinese noodles
or Arabian barbecue chicken
from my kitchen beyond the fence.

She takes steamed rice
and cheap sardine curry
as five-star food to her home.
No one teases her, the ill-mannered slurps.

She hears his footsteps
from the corridor of hallucination.
Nobody chimes in, her secret whisperings.
She likes the fright, the wilderness of dark lonely nights.

Nude red stones in her wall
remain as remnants of old love.
She’ll never come to stay in our new home,

she likes to be on her own always.

— Fabiyas M V

Fabiyas M V is a writer from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India. He is the author of Moonlight and Solitude. His fiction and poems have appeared in Westerly, Forward Poetry, The Literary Hatchet, E Fiction, Off the Coast, Anima, Structo, and in several anthologies. He won many international accolades including the Poetry Soup International Award (USA), the RSPCA Pet Poetry Prize (UK), Speaking of Women Story Prize (Canada), and The Most Loved Poet For March 2014 Award by E Fiction (India). His poems have been broadcast on the All India Radio.

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

Quark Sample

Denny-Marshall_Quark-Sample After a thousand years
an unmanned satellite
brought back a cup
of dark matter: under
the microscope—
nano-galaxies and flocks
of angels. Rows of myths
shattered like hollow glass
bowling pins.

— Denny E. Marshall

Denny E. Marshall has published art, poetry, and fiction in venues such Disturbed Digest (front cover and back art, Jun 2015), Bards And Sages Quarterly (interior art, Oct 2015), The Literary Hatchet (#13, poetry and art, Dec 2015) and Night To Dawn (#28, fiction, Oct 2015). See more at www.dennymarshall.com

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

angels dream up the wildest excuses

John-Reinhart_angels-dream-up-the-wildest-excuses

for waking up late, for missing meetings,
for eating cheese puffs just before supper,
for the broken window next door,
and the marbles stuck up little sister’s nose

responsibility is reserved for earthly matters,
consequences of flesh & bone where
one + one equals two rather than infinity
spun into spiral springs and bounced down

the stairs to crash ceremoniously against physics
so angels can dream lugubrious visions
of sanguine potential and accomplish nothing
of purpose, merely lending ethereal ears

to fickle issues of time-trapped myopic beings
offering to salve the trauma of physics

— John Reinhart

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

Sphinx

Gorman_Sphynx-English

She sits on my bed as the evening grows dimmer
And my soul does her will,
And in the twilight, dream-still
Like wispy filaments, a bright pupil
Narrows, her senses sleepy but limber.

And at the bedside on the linen thread
The spiked tendrils of narcissus
Crackle, her hands stretch across this
Pillow, where dreams bloom off of her kiss
As sweet fragrance off a white garden bed.

Smiling, the moon woman dives into cloud-waves in the distance
And my blanched and suffering psyche
Fortifies itself anew in its fight with resistance.

Gorman_Sphynx-German

Gorman_Schueler_Sphinx

— Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945)
translated by Amelia Gorman

Translation Notes

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry

Love

It rustles through our sleep Gorman_Love-German
Like silk, a delicate gust
Like throbbing blossoms
Opening over us.

And I’m led homewards
On your breath, carried
Through enchanted tales
And sagas long-buried.

And my briar-smile plays
With your primal deep range
And all the earth comes
To nestle in around them.

It rustles through our sleep
Like silk, a delicate gust—
The world-old dream
Blessing both of us.

Gorman_Schueler_Die-Liebe

— Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945)
translated by Amelia Gorman

Translation Notes

Published by Poetry Editor on February 22, 2016. This item is listed in Helpful Articles, Issue 29

Translation Notes

Else Lasker-Schüler’s poetry features a glut of musical phrasing and playful made-up words, with the occasional pun and outright nonsense syllables. While it’s difficult to translate, it also feels like an invitation to be playful myself.
“Sphinx” uses some of the devices and ideas that Schüler turns to over and over again in her poetry. There’s the idea of the “Mondfrau” or moon woman, who also appears to provide similar artistic inspiration in one of her most famous poems, “Das Blaues Klavier.” There’s the tendency of flowers, vines, roots and all their parts to grow in ways they shouldn’t and spread across human life.

Here, she uses her gift of recognizing the power in the sounds of simple seeming words. She maintains an easily graspable but non-traditional rhyming pattern, but even then her rhymed sets of words are linked to each other with subtle sounds that the ear recognizes before it could fully describe them. I kept the same rhyme pattern and attempted to incorporate a lot of m and l sounds and assonance between non-rhyming words to capture this. This included using semantically related words instead of truer translations at times. For example, ‘Leinennähten’ directly translates to linen seams, but I used the word ‘thread’ to be able to rhyme with bed. Additionally, I added the word ‘distance’ in the last stanza to rhyme with ‘resistance’ despite no mention of the word distance, only a collection of far-away things. I added line breaks at slightly different parts of sentences than the original to create the ‘narcissus’/‘this’/‘kiss’ appoximate rhyme. Schüler’s rhymes are on stronger, more concrete words, while I had to compromise and use the word ‘this’ as one of my rhymes instead of ‘Küssen’ or ‘pillow.’

Editor’s Note: The translation here is quite different (but also good) http://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10080037

“Love”/“Die Liebe” has been translated multiple times, but I’ve never read a translation that accurately represented the fairy tale themes of the work. I see it as telling an alternate Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen) story. With that in mind, I translated ‘Dornenlächeln’ as ‘briar-smile’ to evoke one of the English names for the Sleeping Beauty story, “Little Briar Rose.” In this poetic retelling, instead of waking the woman, the couple sleeps together forever, eventually enveloped by the earth. I think it’s beautiful, with just a touch of subversion.

I also wanted to preserve the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling. Schüler is gifted at using the sounds of relatively simple seeming words to a powerful, and here I think erotic, effect. While sometimes there a similarly intoned cognates in English, as in the case of “Schlaf” and “sleep,” other times as in the case of “Zügen,” no amount of substituting words like “mountain” or “range” or “peaks” ever mimicked the sense of breath that she used; I decided to translate for semantics instead of sound. A German poet suggested various possible synonyms, but the word ‘range’ best completed the picture. Additionally, I toyed with the syntax of some sentences to keep a similar cadence to the original poem and included approximate rhymes in places where Schüler used rhymes, leading to sentences like “blessing both of us” instead of a more precise “blessing us both.”

Else Lasker-Schüler was a leading German Expressionist poet who also wrote plays, drew and painted. She was known to love singing and dancing while wearing elaborate costumes and making up bizarre nicknames for her circle of friends. As a Jewish woman, she left Germany after being assaulted in 1932, to live in Switzerland and later Jerusalem. She died in 1945 without ever being able to return to her first home.

Amelia Gorman, currently angling for a career change, is studying computer science, but in the past she was a baker with a background in French literature. She’s married to a German teacher and has many friends and family living in Berlin, so learning German was inevitable. Finding an Else Lasker-Schüler book sitting out on a table in a library years ago, however, was pure luck. Her favorite German pastry to make is Bienenstich Kuchen.

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