tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91373952597011822952012-02-16T05:34:05.122-05:00Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comBlogger171100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-45587512573381583832009-03-04T21:45:00.003-05:002009-03-04T21:50:27.071-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Chainsaw</span></span><br /><br /><br />When it stops I'm grateful,<br />both for the sudden quiet<br /><br />and for the girl singing next door<br />whose voice rends the air<br /><br />as if the air had begged for it,<br />but in a languorous way,<br /><br />not the helpless way<br />quiet goads a chainsaw. <br /><br />The girl wields her voice<br />like the man his chainsaw,<br /><br />but recklessly, without fear of it<br />mutilating whatever it bites into.<br /><br />She flings it into my yard.<br />It slices me clean through.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Michael Milburn</span></span> teaches high school English in New Haven, Connecticut. The author of two books of poetry and a collection of essays, Michael's recent writing has appeared in<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> New England Review</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Onthebus</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Burnside Review</span>, and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Ploughshares</span>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com">OT!M </a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com">No. 2</a><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-4558751257338158383?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-10150419868418179302009-03-04T20:51:00.008-05:002009-10-25T10:04:17.447-04:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</span><br />Chad Davidson<br />Southern Illinois University Press, 2008<br />Review by Rebecah Pulsifer<div><br /><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 142px; height: 213px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6uPBnwF4UA/Sa8zgSE56HI/AAAAAAAAAfY/32BIhrGNbtY/s400/Davidson+Cover.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309519115394345074" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>At once a swaggering sensory jumble, a renewal of the urban pastoral, and a wise illumination of the everyday commercial ritual, Chad Davidson’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> invites its readers to find beauty where they least expect it: the franchise, the gas station, the cheerleader. In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta, </span>disaster is a place, and we’re standing on its corner. It is “a small store selling gasoline, / coffee, cigarette lighters, Starburst;” it is also “Like the American finch, building / its nest so tight its nestlings drown / in storms….” Splitting open the insides of Gold’s Gym and Target, Davidson reveals the sometimes elegant, sometimes gritty machinery of an urban life fueled by dollars and knickknacks: “the Milano-style whatnot” that is so familiar and so rarely examined.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>In some ways, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> chips away at a literary taboo by opening the door on contemporary American capitalism without apology and without regret. The speaker in these poems is at once persistent and playful, facing the “dear church of the cherished storage bin, / dear Cheerios and the bowl to drown you in” head-on. Although the book will numb the reader with its brand names—the Maglite, the Chevy, the transfigured Predicta—it will revive the reader with its reverence for words, sound, and syntax. In “Diva,” Davidson writes:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> …I’d like to<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>slip out and slide to the spout<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> end of that buoy throatwise<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>and risen to song. This is weird,<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> I tell myself, by which I mean<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> the Anglo-Saxon kind, which kills<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>the very veery my heart adores.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> Heart, if you have the heart,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> help me swing the dinghy round.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>We have but one tongue between us.<br /><br />The tongue of the reader becomes the text of the speaker; moments of “Tequila-Sunrise sun” and “the iPod snug in its skin” reveal that the absolution for our spending and our Hollywood-ized melodramas is that by these we unearth new coincidences of adjective and noun that can further piece together the scraps of meaning we are given. Despite the hopelessness of lines like “the watermelon… / and the black seeds pregnant with possibility, / aching for their hour, which passed some time ago,” <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> is at best a starry-eyed cynic. It mourns lives that succumb to the malaise of consumption, but delights in that same act, which offers a new path for language.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>Perhaps the most concrete identity in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> is the city of Los Angeles. Davidson often nods to the movie industry and the car culture so often associated with the California coast; in addition, his swift yet sprawling images and rollicking enjambment build a city of their own across the page: it mirrors the physical space from which the speaker watches “a new star scarring the night’s black bay / above Los Angeles.” Nature is not absent from L.A., but it is only a “forgettable desert,” one of the reasons <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> seeks new deltas of image and sound in glossy store aisles and the “warehouse sky.” In turning away from nature, Davidson often turns to the television—“the Brady Bunch who aged sixty minutes each week;” in short, towards the forced reality of entertainment. But does the glamorized cheerleader—whose choreography “is nothing / if not naked prophecy”—reflect Hollywood’s glitter, or does the Predicta simply capture and stage the consumer’s own complex patterns? It is a question that follows Oscar Wilde’s central paradox in “The Decay of Lying,” and one that Davidson argues both sides of. Los Angeles is a place where this can happen. Davidson uses the city for its vibrancy and re-shelves it at more intimate moments, when the landscape of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> is undefined or scattered: it becomes any place where “The sun chokes on the fishbones of TV antennae.”<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>In its later sections, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> seems to grow older, calling up Byron and Eliot where before the reader met Sheila in the gym or a naked woman serving sushi. The language-games of the book’s earlier sections are pressed by the weight of titles like “The Divine,” “Advent,” and “Idol.” Yet the poems here still retain their earlier energy even as they turn towards more familiar literary spaces. In “The Death of Byron,” Davidson’s variation on his earlier themes is perhaps more somber or more introspective:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>The unpeopled landscape was that much more<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> unbearable after we invented nature.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>We picked up our futures, what little we could<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> find in the rumped commotion of the back-heavy,<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>while entire pastures, whole heaps, waited for us<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>where we had come from. Had you looked up then<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>(I did), you would have seen the moon open its hinges<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> like a jaw and shut. Shut up. Shut down.<br /><br />Albeit without some of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span>’s initial spunk, the later poems gracefully consider questions first introduced wittily yet fleetingly. Here, Davidson gives the speaker more time to reflect on what before were joyful fragments: glass shards waiting to be softened by the ocean.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Last Predicta</span> lets a little more light into the world we already are living in. It toys with the reader; it both offers up a new vocabulary and commissions it to build a town, towers and all. Davidson’s latest book sparkles and flirts, “mock[s] sacrificial rites,” and holds forth both the question and the answer in a voice at once challenging and wise.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Rebecah Pulsifer</span></span> is the Associate Editor of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">OT!M</span></span>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-1015041986841817930?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-73049327273167607462009-03-04T20:30:00.008-05:002009-03-05T12:13:09.719-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</span><br />K.A. Hays<br />Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009<br />Review by Rebecah Pulsifer<div><br /><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6uPBnwF4UA/Sa8vW5j4IZI/AAAAAAAAAfI/j_z5lZs7DZI/s400/Hays+Cover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309514556148031890" border="0" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Apocalypse, </span>nature is not the backdrop to a speaker’s narrative; it is the narrative, and K.A. Hays allows each hyacinth, each plot of earth, and each season to exist as it always will: in a fluid, halfway state. Here, an untouched garden is a site of action, where “soon, the rattler, tomorrow, will swallow us, / its skin first gold, then brown, then shed….” So often in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Apocalypse</span> the landscape and the speaker blur or enmesh, a strange unity—as if the subject is the object—that the speaker pushes to its limit: “I want to see / as a garden would, in winter: the toad / under leaves, mapped in brown….” Here, in a world created by an “arbitrary crash,” living things must tend to or become each other as defense against an always immanent yet opaque unmaking, which may someday leave only “bugs who have no sense / of the tragic.” But though the speaker imagines “How brown it would be” to become a turtle and nestle in “the profound mud,” one fact denies that: while nature is content to bury itself and “hulk on,” the speaker must grapple with the patterns of this world, collecting and shaping them into moments rich with the about-to-be-losing, which <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Apocalypse</span> both mourns and rejoices in.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Apocalypse</span> relies as much on sound as image to welcome in the reader. Many poems offer delicate rhymes that are as unexpected and necessary as rays of light, as in “The Way of All the Earth” (which will be included in The Best American Poetry 2009):<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>When the winter of dust<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> blustered sixty-four million years back,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>and the great beasts who stalked the land suffered<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> and fell, their bulk heaving the hills—<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>all of that was only a loud game of billiards<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> to the turtles, who sank down away from the light<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> and let the arms and legs float in the waters,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> each belly atop another shell, the skin assuming<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>the work of the lungs, so the lungs—<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>as the earth above wasted and tore—<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> might, through that din, be still.<br /><br />Here, the sound-scape is crafted so carefully that the trail of vowel sounds seems to open up a new language or even new images for the poet to pursue. This is a music Hays often returns to: like the wren in her poem “But Then Again It Might Be Possible,” the speaker “has a double / voice, halftones and overtones, released / in the same moment.”<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>The poems in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Apocalypse</span> spend many lines imagining another existence, a sort of in-between space in which the speaker can reject the temporal, the limited, and the human by envisioning a role in nature’s careful repetitions. In “That Death,” the speaker admits the distance that exists between herself and a brush wolf:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>...It loped,<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> a line no longer than a hyphen,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> and skimmed the scrub a half mile off,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> then sat, to make a silhouette<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> of dog (but not quite dog). I sensed<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> what it was, but did not want to come<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> to the fact (to touch the rib, to rub<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> the raked fur at the crown).<br /><br />The speaker hesitates in the moment before recognition, a tense deliberation that mirrors other moments in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Apocalypse</span>: in “Hyacinths,” the speaker raises bulbs—“like ancient kiln-fired balls”—noting “A bulb will rot in water, / so it must sit, hanging over / what could end it.” The speaker makes dog from wolf; friend from predator, toying with the earth’s coincidences though they may become danger, apocalypse, the irrefutable ending so often hinted at throughout Hays’ book. To accomplish this wire-walking, the voice in Dear Apocalypse is often whimsical and bold. The title poem confides in the reader: “we had / a god who grumbled<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . .</span>through us… / He was, like any other man,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . .</span>complicated.” In “I Don’t Believe the View from Here,” Hays writes of a whale’s baleen:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> How easy it would be<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> if I had a filter like that for perception,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>so only, say, honeydew and the words of true prophets<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>could rush in like nourishing plankton while my own death<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> and the suffering of others couldn’t reach me<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> but were stopped just at the lip—<br /><br />There is the sense that these speckles of imagining, this unapologetic frankness, this delightfully peculiar voice is constructing magic from the darkness, or—in the words of Hays—“doing what conditions urge.”<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Apocalypse</span> holds the world by the hand while allowing it to evolve and die. Its richness of image is like looking in a snow globe and seeing every memory in order; its prismatic voice is like opening the door to a mind and examining each thought as it strolls past. Hays’ book will both cringe at the apocalypse and write to it a letter, sharing such immediacy, such beauty, and such boldness that it—and us, the lucky readers—might be made to remember something of this world.<br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Rebecah Pulsifer</span></span> is the Associate Editor of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">OT!M</span></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to OT!M No. 2</a></span></div><div><br /></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-7304932727316760746?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-45943322417333684052009-03-04T20:13:00.005-05:002009-03-05T01:30:11.828-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</span><br />Poetry chapbook by Gary Metras<br />Finishing Line Press, 2008<br />Review by Rebecah Pulsifer<div><br /><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 111px; height: 161px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6uPBnwF4UA/Sa8qy5bkQgI/AAAAAAAAAew/_kLwiqXy_zU/s320/Metras+Cover.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309509539591373314" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>In Gary Metras’s rich, chapbook-length sequence on the life of Francis d’Assisi, the reader is welcomed into a teaming, imagistic world where Francis “hear[s] God in birdsong” and is “the witness of a doe birthing a fawn / in a florid clearing....” An elegiac remembrance of the patron saint of animals and the environment, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Francis d’Assisi 2008 </span>traces the life of Francis from the beginnings of his religious awakening to long past his death, when his message still reaches “the beggar woman by Bernini’s fountain… the one with the lion in the cave of water....” As the sequence progresses, tension grows between the modern world (where “fathers…/ strap bombs to their daughters”) and Francis’ peaceful message. The two act as a counterpoint to one another, resolving finally in the sureness of a moment unquestioningly believed:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> Because a child ignores the tourists and only steps<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> on the white stones to enter the cathedral<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>Because sheep graze the hillside<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>Because a woman loves you<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>there is God<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>There<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> is.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>Despite the occasional condemnation of the modern world—which Metras represents as “the great age of global leisure”—Francis still has a place here: a beggar woman “lifted her face to me when I placed a euro in her hand….” At times fearful of the shifting face of religion and nature, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Francis d’Assisi 2008</span> finds its stride when it allows the colors of the old and the new to run together in what becomes simultaneously an impressionistic elegy to simplicity and a patient urban pastoral. Ultimately, Metras’s careful craft and sensitive lineation paint the life of a familiar figure in crisp, evocative images. Both for spiritual refreshment as well as literary pleasure, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Francis d’Assisi 2008</span> is well worth reading.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Rebecah Pulsifer</span></span> is the Associate Editor of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">OT!M</span></span>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-4594332241733368405?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-58043755618550093592009-03-04T19:46:00.005-05:002009-03-05T01:30:41.511-05:00<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</span></div>Poetry chapbook by Diana Raab<br />Plain View Press, 2008<br />Review by Rebecah Pulsifer<div><br /><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Q6uPBnwF4UA/Sa8kMdo0KCI/AAAAAAAAAeo/4Qmb-GEFbu8/s320/Raab+Cover.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309502282225952802" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>Dedicated to the introspective diarist Anaïs Nin, Diana Raab’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Anaïs </span>captures with painstaking precision brief autobiographical snapshots of the poet’s own life. Memories heavy with the speaker’s relationship to her parents, drugs, death, and men vie for primacy in this warm collage, which utilizes a stark—almost journalistic—narrative style. The speaker’s reflections are sometimes unexpected and always highly personal, cataloging in relentless detail her skating lessons as a child, a road trip to Woodstock, and afternoon walks with an admired lover. At its best, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Anaïs</span> offers a chiseled look into the making of a woman. The book’s opening poem, “Klein’s,” captures a surprising bluntness that Raab tames persistently with her photo-like images and glaring syntax. The poem is a rich description of the New York City of the speaker’s childhood:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> ...until nighttime when we mount<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br />. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> the same train back to our quiet<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> neighborhood in Queens where the loudest<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>sound you’ll hear is a cat crying in the<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>dead of a hot summer night.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . .</span>The danger in this type of ruthlessly direct writing is that at times it wavers between honesty and flatness. In lines like “I hate how horses make me feel,” or “I live to write / so I shall not die,” the speaker’s dedication to detail and self-reflection becomes like a room without a door: the poem collapses into darkness; the reader gropes for a place to exist in a wash of literal language. Ultimately, Raab’s homage to Nin resonates with an unparsed honesty that offers a complete and unsparing story of a life. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Anaïs</span> is a gift of complete admiration from one writer to another.<br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Rebecah Pulsifer</span></span> is the Associate Editor of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">OT!M</span></span>.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-5804375561855009359?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-65418216323242989562009-02-21T15:51:00.002-05:002009-02-21T15:57:18.136-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Ghost-Me</span></span><br /><br /><br />The ghost-me appeared in my mirror<br />while I was out buying groceries.<br />By the time I got back he had taken<br />my place in the living room.<br />Now, most nights, we play backgammon<br />or one of the ancient games.<br />The ghost-me takes his time with every<br />move. It is his studied silence<br />that unnerves me most. His silence,<br />his ingenuity, his book-smarts.<br />Yesterday he asked me to move out. I<br />have nowhere to go. I have no one to<br />take me in. The ghost-me doesn’t<br />listen to such negativity. He says I<br />am only as good as I pretend to be.<br />I hate his homilies, too. The ghost-me has<br />replaced me now from tip to toe.<br />He asked me to write this to you, my wife.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Corey Mesler</span></span> has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Talk: A Novel in Dialogue</span> (2002) and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon</span> (2006). His first full length poetry collection, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Some Identity Problems</span> (2008), is out from Foothills Publishing and his book of short stories, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Listen: 29 Short Conversations</span>, will appear in March 2009. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has two children, Toby, age 20, and Chloe, age 13. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He also claims to have written “These Boots are Made for Walking.” He can be found <a href="http://www.coreymesler.com">here</a>.<br /><br /><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com">Back to OT!M No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-6541821632324298956?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-86390390440590737872009-01-04T16:32:00.004-05:002009-02-21T16:00:05.245-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">And Then She Stabbed Him<br /></span></span><br /><br />I have to kill you, though I haven’t decided how.<br />Cancer, perhaps, sugaring your face in polyps,<br />the violins swelling behind your rickety hospital bed.<br />Or a gunshot to the chest, shattering your ribs<br />and the heart behind like a finch in a cage.<br />But you’re what my professor calls <span style="font-style:italic;">the protagonist</span>,<br />which means you’re impervious to bullets and love,<br />free to die only in one of those wrong-place, wrong-time deals.<br />Maybe you’re a cutter—though the audience couldn’t know—<br />breaking the mirror in your too-clean bathroom,<br />shredding like cheese the skin at the bend of your elbow<br />where no one can see. I’d hate to jab an ice pick into your skull,<br />or a harpoon’s barb in your thigh right after you saved<br />so valiantly the aquatic animal named Jimmy.<br />But my professor harps my draft thirsts for <span style="font-style:italic;">conflict</span>.<br />that it demands <span style="font-style:italic;">your baby’s mama</span>, or Japanese ex-cons,<br />abortions and the stones thrown at the clinics.<br />Everyone loves a dead hero, though I have never loved you<br />that way. You could have delivered your saccharine thank yous<br />at the podium, stroking your trophy’s head like a little Buddha,<br />never noticing the curtain’s faint ripple, my hand disrobing<br />its knife or machete—something sharp and Hollywoody—<br />never noticing, as you lay there gasping, the <span style="font-style:italic;">Yes!</span> cries<br />of my professor, capturing the roundness of her chest in flat palms,<br />or all the eyes of the cameras trained on me, and how I skirt around<br />your body, springing that note card from my waist pocket, flying off<br />the names of all the little people, your name, of course, first.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Brittany Presley</span></span> lives in San Diego, California.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to OT!M No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-8639039044059073787?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-44806944621901823992009-01-04T16:25:00.004-05:002009-01-04T16:31:38.494-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Dominoes</span></span><br /><br /><br />Everything was a domino—<br />or a theory about them. I played dominoes<br /><br />in my bedroom, fun for twenty minutes,<br />till I wanted to see Miss Jane chase Jethro<br />on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Beverly Hillbillies</span>. My parents believed<br />in dominoes too: Viet Nam, Laos,<br />Cambodia, Thailand—then—<br />Mt. Prospect, Illinois, Ho Chi Minh’s men<br />hiding explosives in dime-store lockets.<br /><br />A helicopter left Saigon.<br />A decade had gone.<br />I was in college, stadium rock and Camus.<br /><br />Dominoes found me asleep<br />in my dorm, snuck in the window,<br />caged me—the dots fell off each one,<br />pinned me, prevented screams.<br /><br /><br /><br />In 2008, WordTech Press published <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Kenneth Pobo</span></span>'s new book of poems entitled <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Glass Garden</span>.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-4480694462190182399?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-20053732977540424842009-01-04T16:15:00.003-05:002009-01-04T16:24:01.841-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Stars</span></span><br /><br /><br />Walk into the room of night sky and sit<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>in the chair facing<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> the jagged trees until Orion rises,<br /><br />fast as the world’s spin in a moonless sky, so fast<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>you can’t walk across the floor<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>to the opposite wall<br /><br />before the sky has changed<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> and the hunter and his dog<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>are far past zenith guiding you to a place<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</span> you know well,<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>where everything you dread<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>happens, their passage<br />through the air like a clang<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>jarring you out of sleep,<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>not needing any word from you as you stand<br />and walk out of the room,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>already forgetting<br /><br />the stars in their fixed courses,<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>the certainty they warn.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Stephen Black</span></span> was born in western Tennessee and currently teaches at Georgia Southern University. His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in the anthology <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses</span> as well as <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Number One</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Magazine</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Eagle Eye</span>, and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Mindfulness Bell</span>.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-2005373297754042484?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-85349452661993789242009-01-04T16:05:00.005-05:002009-01-04T16:14:15.291-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Language Poet</span></span><br /><br /><br />My fingers long to smooth supple skin:<br />Warm putty stretched over stone,<br />The beautiful lines across<br />A man’s forehead<br />When he is reading poetry.<br />Inside the brain pan, letters gallop and leap<br />Over bridgeless synapses and ideas burn<br />With meaning.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>I thought men,<br />Like different fonts, were mostly alike,<br />That their differences were all on the surface,<br />But I couldn’t speak the language, thought them<br />All predators or the occasional mangy coyote<br />With his keening note at night to unnerve.<br />I loved only dead men’s words:<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Heart, how like you this?</span><br />I settled for berries when thirsting<br />For the deep juice of melon,<br />Have known the congress of sparrows<br />While longing for the jaw of the wolf.<br /><br />So fearful, not of darkness, but of light,<br />When all else cast a shadow where I stood,<br />This one waited patiently, listening for my breath,<br />And when it quickened caught me unaware.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Our poetry</span>, he says, as I smooth his forehead.<br />The she wolf rolls over, exposes her throat,<br />Fearless with the alpha male, submission<br />To his fangs her chosen thrill. And finally<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . </span>I am fluent.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Cherri Randall</span></span> received her MFA in 2004 and her PhD in 2008 from the University of Arkansas. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Her work has appeared in journals such as <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Sojourn</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Colere</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Paddlefish</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Potomac Review</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Permafrost Review</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Bewildering Stories</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Main Channel Voices</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Paper Street Press</span>, and others.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-8534945266199378924?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-54149595267807259842009-01-04T15:57:00.003-05:002009-01-04T16:02:21.152-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Uncle Herb’s House</span></span><br /><br /><br />In the painting,<br />Aunt Donna ignored<br />the three Peony bushes<br />in front of the house. <br />The eaves are brown<br />as in reality, but the door<br />was more cobalt than slate.<br /><br />The shutters flapped<br />at any wind, as we ran<br />circles, chasing fireflies.<br />We hid behind the<br />Elderberry bushes<br />wearing boy haircuts<br />and raw knees. Dirt was<br />just a layer of clothing<br />for my sisters and me. <br />We made small forts between<br />the hedges, and disappeared for hours.<br /><br />The shade from the house grew<br />moss instead of grass<br />and it soothed our bare feet<br />that sizzled from the asphalt driveway.<br />We blew bubbles of Ivory dish soap,<br />tiny rainbows on each one’s shell,<br />like oil shining on a puddle. <br /><br />Uncle Herb must have had cats<br />because half empty bags of Whiskas<br />and Tender Vittles slumped<br />on garage workbenches, but no cat<br />would stay at the sound of<br />shrieking girls hiding and seeking<br />behind dusty toolboxes.<br />With his crooked walk<br />and occasional smile, he was<br />the hermit outline of Dad,<br />purring out of his drive way in a<br />1982 Volkswagen Rabbit. <br />After Uncle Herb and Marianne<br />divorced, he sold the house.<br /><br />I didn’t know that Aunt Donna<br />painted until Christmas<br />when Dad unwrapped the painting. <br />It hangs in the office where sunlight<br />hits the wall through blinds.<br />Painted leaves turn their backs<br />to the light like a real Silver Maple<br />when a storm is whirling<br />in the clouds. <br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Carolyn Helmberger</span></span> received her BA in English Literature from Creighton University in 1998 and her MFA from the University of Nebraska in January, 2008. Her work has been previously published in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Connecticut River Review</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Pedestal Magazine</span>, and is forthcoming in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Cooweescoowee</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Plainsongs</span>, and elsewhere.<br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-5414959526780725984?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-51102147020445441722009-01-04T15:41:00.005-05:002009-01-04T23:58:50.146-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Kiss and Ride</span></span><br /><br /><br />When Tiffin and Natalie laughed at the sign<br />they were implicating kisses,<br />those clammy undoings<br />native to the back four seats of the bus.<br />Only I understood<br />how <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">ride</span> was twice as dirty,<br />having read my father's<br />double stack of Mayfairs several<br />weeks before.<br />In the hours my parents spent<br />browsing at Magruder's,<br />I re-read the readers' letters, absorbing<br />new erotic verbs: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">ride</span>, as in<br />to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">ride</span> a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">hot rod</span>, which requires<br />one to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">arch</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">writhe</span>,<br />a repertoire of measures I would<br />later explain<br />and ultimately demonstrate<br />secluded in the den,<br />imagining the tartan slipcover<br />as a velvet quilt,<br />pleased I knew enough<br />to be the boy.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Cochlea</span></span><br /><br /><br />flush light cavity,<br />petal canal<br /><br />I have built boats<br />dispatched them<br /><br />down your<br />drowsy channel<br /><br />swabbed in circles<br />at your innermost<br /><br />wall, I have panted<br />out coordinates<br /><br />disbelieved<br />resistance<br /><br />fancied the tunnel<br />a constant conch<br /><br />and tightened<br />and tightened<br /><br />this<br />smallest screw<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Veronica Fitzpatrick</span></span> grew up in Virginia. She holds a BA and MFA from Michigan State University and the University of Notre Dame, respectively, and is also an alumna/apostle of the UVa Young Writers Workshop. She currently lives and teaches film in northern Indiana.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-5110214702044544172?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-10576588567393879702009-01-04T15:30:00.003-05:002009-01-04T15:57:22.779-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Cushion</span></span><br /><br /><br />My body prepares for the fall of planets<br />by holding one imaginary globe<br /><br />in place of another. Its brain<br />skims paperback Shakespeares<br /><br />so that also has something to consider, the pleasure of last twilight,<br />again and again.<br /><br />Into memories of birth the knees smile<br />like mitts into slow-balls, the femurs, fibulas, tibias<br /><br />all sticks that must persist the burning of souls<br />in their pit outside King’s Canyon, the sap sizzle, the pop.<br /><br />On Yucca Mountain, genes like ash clouds deposit<br />in case survivors—<br /><br />And the right and left hands shake on it, reconciling years<br />and years of estrangement. Believe me, the mind’s considered<br /><br />everything, never well-enough prepared as muscle for that first falling star,<br />first sequoia to snap loggers’ chains out of its desire<br /><br />for neck and shoulder, which it would shear like a train.<br />For that eraser-sized fingertip that does, and delicately,<br /><br />that doesn’t ask for resignations but positions<br />the back of this skull<br /><br />into a flatter pillow, thanking something as it does for its failures<br />of insight: who will catch the first stone, first flowers, first waves<br /><br />of brilliant new light. Preparing, simply<br />preparing, bears such gifts as these.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Disclosure</span></span><br /><br /><br />Hardest snowstorm we’ve ever seen—<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . .</span>a weighted fist<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>on a woman’s sunken<br />chin. On the floor<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . .</span>this light bulb’s delicate<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span> all-of-me<br /><br />is how<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . </span>it will happen: filament at our feet<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span>ear of the world<br />hanging on<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . .</span>this ring our bodies crack: what now?<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . .</span> The ear waits.<br /><br />First this is<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . .</span>the answer.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Damon McLaughlin</span></span>'s work appears in various web and print publications including <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Stirring</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Pedestal Magazine</span>, and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The North American Review</span>; his first collection, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Exchanging Lives</span>, debuted last spring from The Backwaters Press. Damon lives in Tucson.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-1057658856739387970?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-63061679280875375042009-01-04T15:24:00.002-05:002009-01-04T15:29:08.834-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Above the Gunnison</span></span><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">August 2008</span><br /><br /><br />We climbed in a grey wind,<br />you my barefoot, pigeon-toed<br />daughter, contemplative like me,<br />pausing now and then<br />to study the workers<br />toiling by an ant-hill<br />or the glitter of a far cliff<br />emerging from a cloud.<br /><br />We climbed steadily<br />toward a radio tower<br />with its array of microwave antennae,<br />wind-warped chain link fence<br />and signs warning<br />of dangerous frequencies<br />as in another age<br />pilgrims might have climbed<br />to a wayside temple<br />and a sacred pool.<br /><br />We said little,<br />sharing the ample stillness<br />of a mountain afternoon.<br />An ease crept between us,<br />we who often find words<br />too difficult.<br /><br />And so we paused, drinking in<br />the wide green valley of the Gunnison,<br />the muted silver of the river<br />and the shadows of the mountains<br />beyond the clouds. Their shoulders<br />held in the light, unseen,<br />I felt, palpable enduring rock.<br /><br />As we started down, we heard<br />far thunder, and then<br />a volley of nighthawks<br />swept over us, crying fiercely.<br />I said, “They are fleeing<br />the storm.” “No,” you spoke<br />in gentle correction,<br />“They’ve come to hunt<br />in the early darkness.”<br /><br />Down the mountain<br />we made our slow<br />descent, me occasionally<br />stumbling on loose stones,<br />you, more sure-footed behind me,<br />careful of the small<br />toilers underfoot, collecting seed<br />at the end of summer.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Marc Hudson</span></span> teaches creative writing, medieval literature, and much else at Wabash College. Recent poems are forthcoming in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Salt Hill</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Sewanee Review</span>. His most recent book of poems is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Disappearing Poet Blues </span>(Bucknell UP). <div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-6306167928087537504?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-88155273642487113152009-01-04T14:25:00.001-05:002009-01-04T15:22:06.568-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Elena Nistor<br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">a day in my life</span></span><br /><br /><br />i’m moving ahead full of compromise unpunished imposture<br />i’m missing i miss myself i miss the vigor of grammar<br />i can’t get enough of talking about myself<br />luckily no one’s listening<br />i’m like a smeary snapshot<br />the road goes on and on it’s tough going everyone’s breathing carefully<br />watching warily something’s going to happen<br />i might smash the mirror its shape would explode this premonition’s suffocating<br />between me and myself lies the entire history of a dead language<br />i’m still speaking syllable by syllable i’m poisoned blood that water can’t wash away<br />i crawl on i shout<br />my home’s so far away i’ve lots of time i write poetry on the bus<br />maybe my books will come out while i’m standing clutching the handhold<br />for me they cut down the woods<br />my offspring will have nowhere to hide<br />nowhere for sunday outings<br />they’ll grill garlic sausages in the library<br />the ecological balance is going to hell because of me<br />i’d better start writing palimpsest-poems or learning to crochet<br /><br />my former friends have children and all kinds of monthly bills<br />i have wrinkles deadlines and a typewriter<br />and they say i don’t know what i want i don’t know why<br />every poem is an organ removed and the surgeon’s drunk<br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">a beautiful spring day. on the field.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span><br /><br />i lost then laughed then cried<br />then i stood up punched my fist into the wall slammed<br />every door behind me raked the dead leaves<br />threw away the rags straightened out my desk<br />turned the radio on stared at the ceiling—war<br />was about to break out in the gulf the dog begged for food<br />everyone had something to do the phone rang—it was<br />the wrong moment it was evening the next day<br />i was supposed to return some books to the library<br />pay my taxes i had plenty of reasons—<br />it was my best friend “i don’t want to live this way any longer.<br />why should i.” “don’t be a coward. life’s beautiful. in two days<br />you’ll get paid. so what if she left. we’re not designed<br />for happiness. we have different parameters.” “you’re right.<br />call you again.” he hung up i stared at the ceiling<br />i was a hypocrite i closed my eyes<br />my room smelled good the hemlock had blossomed<br /><br /></div><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">about leaving</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><br /></span><br /><br />as if suddenly it were evening and very cold<br />you can’t find your way back<br /><br />(a boring book a film you’ve seen before<br />the temptation to find parallels with what happens to you<br />discussions about responsibility and lack of it<br />you light another cigarette to make your presence felt<br />you strive to take part something inside you<br />prevents you from speaking from justifying yourself you react<br />slowly as when on the street someone asks you<br />the time little clouds of smoke weave<br />recent happy events wonderful events)<br /><br />the sensation that you’re being led by the hand<br />a state of artificially-induced wakefulness<br />umbrellas neon lights cab drivers drunks<br />you dig for another coin a terrible mood<br />for big words and definitive gestures<br />to leave to stay<br />as if suddenly it were evening<br />but at the other end of the line morning<br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Letiţia Ilea</span></span> is a young, increasingly important Romanian poet from Cluj-Napoca in the region of Romania known as Transylvania. She has published three books of poetry, the most recent of which is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">A Serious Person (O persoană serioasă)</span> (2004).<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Elena Nistor</span></span> graduated from the English Department of the University of Bucharest, and she is a lecturer at the Bucharest University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine. She is currently a PhD student, working on a thesis on contemporary British women poets and a member of the Centre for the Translation and Interpretation of the Contemporary Text, University of Bucharest and the translation project poetry pRO in the U.K.<br /><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Adam J. Sorkin</span></span>'s recent books of translation include Ruxandra Cesereanu’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Crusader-Woman</span>, translated mainly with Cesereanu (Black Widow Press, 2008) and Mariana Marin’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Factory of the Past</span>, translated with Daniela Hurezanu (Toad Press, 2008); two 2007 books, Magda Cârneci’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">București: O colecție de mirosuri / A Collection of Smells</span>, translated with Alina Cârâc—photographs by Dan Hayon (Romanian Cultural Institute Publishing House), and Radu Andriescu’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Catalan Within</span>, translated with the poet (Longleaf Press); and three 2006 books including Magda Cârneci’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Chaosmos</span>, translated with Cârneci (White Pine Press) and Mariana Marin’s <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Paper Children</span>, with various collaborators (Ugly Duckling Presse). He was awarded the 2005 Translation Prize of The Poetry Society (U.K.) for Marin Sorescu’s<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> The Bridge</span>, translated with Lidia Vianu (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), and was Regional Editor for Romania and Moldova of the recent <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">New European Poets</span> (Graywolf, 2008).<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-8815527364248711315?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-35521916659839119572009-01-04T14:16:00.001-05:002009-01-04T15:20:28.462-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">October opening like a flower on a highway;</span></span><br /><br /><div><br /></div><div>how I would like to crush the blossom of this month.<br /><br />Fall splits in two.<br />You are the definition of joy.<br /><br />I compare you to the light glinting<br />off the bridge, the glass<br />on the shoulder of the highway.<br />Every stupid song on the radio.<br /><br />You be the sun this time.<br />Try me day in and day out,<br />and night, like alternating currents.<br /><br />18,000 chord progressions—<br />an infinite number of tones.<br /><br />The spark isn’t gone, the spark doesn’t go anywhere.<br />The shock of first touch<br />remembers itself; the way lightning travels up.<br /><br />When we beat the spark into life.<br />When we warm it with words.<br />When it grows to a flower,<br />how surprised we are.<br />How easy love is.<br /><br />October gets on with its self,<br />color draining from the leaves,<br />as if beauty is a trick of the light<br />returning.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Gravitational forecasting</span></span><br /></div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . .</span>“My life was still a mansion to be filled;<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . .</span>now it is an overstuffed trunk I’m scared to open.”<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .</span>Lauren Hannon<br /><br /></div><div><br />We are sitting on the beach<br />along the cliff of falling rocks<br />guessing at our futures when<br />a man comes along and tells us,<br />“The area of falling cliffs is off-limit.<br />That piece of rock you are sitting on<br />was attached a week ago.”<br /><br />And sometimes we are not sure<br />if we are the cliff-face or the rock.<br />Black hole and event horizon.<br /><br />In space, linear momentum is maintained,<br />until acted on planets continually fall<br />toward the sun (sunward)—<br />witness a giant object such as a star contract—<br /><br />This is for Lauren whose absence<br />is an absence in my own presence.<br />This is for Lauren<br />whose future is my enclosed space—<br /><br />Sometimes I think the world rests<br />on your back alone, (as in the time in Jersey<br />your shower caved in,)<br />and sometimes you are the star contracting,<br />gravitational attraction<br />like nights we drink wine on the beach<br />because judgment is the first thing to go<br />but then you still have everything else,<br /><br />put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time,<br />we could see the space of us contracting—<br />the way an explosion is really a series of explosions.<br />Internal pressure, a mechanical process, almost as if<br />forecasting itself. Marvel at the first surprise:<br />the astrononomic evidence of us—<br />we have too much luck to spare—<br /><br />so often we confuse two things<br />for what they really are.<br /><br />And this is our future, we are,<br /><br />There are some dying languages<br />where there is no future tense.<br />The closest we could come is<br />the last words of a lost people:<br />“as into the darkness of a storm.”<br /><br />A star contracts, we are that star<br />the space around that star contracts.<br /><br />(We are.)<br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Joshua Gottlieb-Miller</span></span> has been published in I<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">nnisfree Poetry Journal</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">If Poetry Journal</span>, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Prairie Margins</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span>. Most recently he received a fellowship to attend the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. To his long-lasting pride and embarrassment, he was the 2004 Bethesda Youth Poetry Slam champion.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">OT!M</a></span><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/"> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-3552191665983911957?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9137395259701182295.post-21514353351764191822009-01-04T14:05:00.003-05:002009-01-04T15:20:53.193-05:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">All I Know About Mathematics<br /></span></span><br /><div><br />Odd: a scarecrow in the city,<br />on a raw rooftop of someone’s<br />simple-minded home of brick and<br />sweat equity, a scarecrow in<br />blue jeans and a red shirt able<br />to veil vague distances arrived.<br />The clouds add the white needed<br />to make these moments an abstract<br />American flag.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. . . . . . . . . . . . .</span>A week later:<br />the scarecrow is gone—Canadian<br />winds? new ideology? My steps<br />lead to my address suddenly bare,<br />gravitas gone slumming. High school<br />never explained why zero was<br />invented. The Bible did say:<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Just try to add one cubit to yourself</span>.<br />Giants use a simple math: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">all mine</span>.<br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Piazza</span></span><br /></div><div><br /></div><br />Sometimes I read a young poet<br />and I’m jealous not to still be that<br />young. I used to be addicted to<br />words like <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">piazza</span> and worked<br />for years to get my heart broken<br />in one. I did it. So many words and<br />adventures were still ahead of me.<br />Let the young “stitch the broken<br />world” for its their enemy and<br />not mine. I’ve been on top of<br />a lover and conjugated Spanish<br />verbs and I’ve <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">borrowed</span> a truck<br />to follow the moon into a poem.<br />Be glad the young are dangerous<br />as they learn the world is full of<br />wild mirrors that can be shattered.<br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Rane Arroyo</span></span>’s latest poetry books are <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Buried Sea: New &amp; Selected Poems</span> (University of Arizona Press) and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Same-Sex Séances</span> (New Sins Press). He lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio. He can be contacted at <a href="http://www.ranearroyo.com/">www.ranearroyo.com</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://otemporamagazine.com/">Back to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">OT!M</span> No. 2</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9137395259701182295-2151435335176419182?l=otemporano2.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Nick McRaenoreply@blogger.com