Category: Issue 40

Mezuzah + A bull = A word = Grief 

Alexa Luborsky

Mezuzah

let’s begin with a blessing for the doorway
in this blessing   we  forget   the   wanderer
who has no interest in rooms      who holds
onto transient things for shelter           bless
this   wandering   because it is our  meeting
let’s    watch    each    other     bloom   from
the safety of a doorway              why are we
here?  to shape each other           why do we
have each other?  to shape                    who
as  you  write  this  there  is   someone  who
has    been    born    on    the    wrong    side
of a border               as you write this we are
deciding     to     kill     them     on      a   raft
in the middle of an ocean       they are trying
to reach this threshold         as you write this
we     are     drowning    into     each    other
as    you   write   this   you   are   redefining
yourself for an opening           I am trying to
make a list of endangered histories       to ask
why  some bones are  worth  excavating and
others  are left in  the ground is to  ask   why
one of the oldest  concepts of     humanity  is
exile                       the question is   not   why
things  are  unspoken  but   why  they   were
named  and  why  that  name   is  no   longer
used             I am left to wonder if my zayde
engaged  in these  kinds  of  contracts   with
himself        if he   opposed the misprints   of
his name by claiming all of them:    whereas
today I am Moritz                   tomorrow I am
Moshe                         whereas I keep Morris
hidden in my ribs         whereas I take Moses
out at night to walk                  the grounds of
my tired limbs                        whereas I keep
115434                                   at the threshold
and  touch  my fingers to  my lips as  I  enter
where    they   cannot   and  why   is   tonight
different       from        all     other        nights?
because tonight I am not open             to you
because   tonight   history  can   wait   for  me
to grieve                    I will answer tomorrow

A bull = A word = Grief 

A bull bucks against the idea of a noun. It is not stationary. It is moving like how a bull charges at a thing to sublimate the feeling of being a bull.

Maybe I should say a bull is a parable, as in from the Greek para for alongside and bole for a throwing. As in how the act of throwing is rendered a noun to describe the path of the thrown object. The arc made a bull with its horn caught.  

A bull is not something I want to touch. A bull is drowned in its own river.

In other words, a bull is not just a bull it is a collection of bulls nesting inside a word that tells them they are a part of a whole. 

But it doesn’t matter, because once a bull knows it is a bull there is no way to convince it otherwise. 

A bull is a chandelier of bone.

This is to say a body is light. A bull is the repurposed electricity of the bull.

The neck bone of a bull is called an axis. An imaginary line about which the body rotates.

This bull has become imaginary since bone has become an autocannibal. Bone: a verb that means to be rid of itself. Bone the fish, the chicken, the limb, the self. 

In bullfighting there is a strict code of conduct and the bull must be stabbed at its peak exhaustion. It is only a matter of when. 

A bull’s charge is evaded by a veronica. The movement of the matador named after the woman said to have given Jesus a cloth, the one he stained his image on. 

It was originally the cloth that was called veronica, for the image on it. Derived from vera icon or real image. That is to say, a bull is an evasion of a real image. 

A bull is transparent when held up to the light. It cannot hold sweat or blood. A bull is a shroud with closed wounds. 

That is to say, a bull is a bull with the eyes of a lamb. 

---

Alexa Luborsky is an editorial assistant at Poetry Northwest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Consequence, Hobart, JuxtaProse, Meridian, and Palette Poetry. She was born in Toronto, Canada and raised in Rhode Island.

Woodward­ Gallery—Gates­ Mural­ Project
Eldridge ­and ­Broome ­Streets,­ NYC

Woodward Gallery has maintained its public art Project Space—devoted to emerging and established street artists and muralists—on Eldridge Street, in New York City, since 2008. Over the years, Woodward Gallery expanded this initiative to additional sites along Broome Street and Eldridge Street. Experienced in local neighborhood improvement efforts to help clean up graffiti and provide cultural opportunities in the Lower East Side neighborhood, Woodward Gallery recently curated a local roll-down Gates Mural Project, supporting these selected artists, participating under their street aliases:

LISSETTE ABARCA @lasak_art
MICHAEL ALAN @michaelalanalien
JOSE AURELIO BAEZ @jaurelionyc
COSBE @cosbe1
RH DOAZ @rhdoaz
JEN LARKIN @jenprops
MOODY MUTZ @mastermoodymutz
DAVID MILLER WEEKS @dmweeks
JM RIZZI @jmrizzi
MATT SIREN @mattsiren

---

Lisette Abarca, alias Lasak, is an Ecuadorian artist born in Guayaquil. She paints from a place of peace and deep connection with the natural world, specifically scuba diving, surrounded by the ocean´s creatures. With the help of a brush and spray cans, she brings to life images of plants and animals. Her work is inspired by blending nature´s forms and colors proposed by her fantastic creativity. Lasak is now helping people to heal their traumas through art therapy using art and visual media as a tool for communication to rebuild emotional and social well-being. With this focus, she is working with the Ministry of Culture of Ecuador and Cancer Control Centers, such as Solca Ecuador.

Artist Michael Alan is equally adept in several mediums. He draws, paints, and creates performance art as a living, breathing canvas. He uses color to push his positive message: art is a feeling that is tangible, audible, visual—an experience to engage in.

Artist Jose Aurelio Baez uses collage to create layers of texture and color that resemble the aged peeling walls of a subway station. Under close inspection, small swatches of color reveal pasted newspaper articles and advertising posters among other recognizable materials. This process of repurposing familiar objects reflects his experience as a self-taught and traditionally trained artist.

Cosbe is an American Neo-Expressionist painter whose automatic original paintings expose a frenetic, honest, and visceral reaction to his surroundings.

RH Doaz is a contemporary painter, illustrator, and muralist. Drawing much inspiration from within the nostalgia of Hungarian textile patterns, the natural world, and hand illustrated books of his youth, Doaz creates paintings which are whimsical yet stoic in imagery and composition. His paintings are characterized by his bold colors and patterned line work. At first glance, his birds and other subject matter often seem friendly, but upon closer inspection they have an underlying seriousness. His characters are a reflection of the aesthetic of imperfection in life that is not often contemplated.

Inspired by NYC’s urban landscape, artist Jen Larkin feels a deep attachment to the color red, the signage of the subways, and the universal messaging of street signs. Today she blends her career as a graphic designer with street art and public-commissioned murals.

Moody started to make his mark in the graffiti world in the late ‘80s by smashing the streets of Brooklyn and the other four boroughs with his iconic imagery and signature “M” tag. Moody developed his technique on NYC’s urban walls, secretly perfecting his style alongside other street artists at a time when there was no legal outdoor space to show off art. Earning respect from other graffiti artists and producing public murals over the years, Moody also refined a successful studio practice where he continues to create work reflecting the popular culture of today.

DM Weeks brings old master knowledge and street-smart confidence to his murals that invoke a fever of survival through depression. He offers light to dark fabled subjects.

Artist James Rizzi, better known as JM Rizzi, has roots in Abstract Expressionism, yet favors a Neo Contemporary flare. JM Rizzi has catapulted his vision of bold curves and lines punched with bright color. He is equally adept painting massive murals as he is in his studio practice. Since writing graffiti during NYC’s thriving rave days, Rizzi’s art has explored the intersection of abstract art and counterculture. His paintings are an animated conversation between positive and negative space facilitated by rhythm.

Matt Siren is an urban, graphic, and contemporary artist. His signature Ghost Girl image is characterized by black hair with bangs and a sweet round face. Ghost Girl made her debut in Matt Siren’s graffiti and street art around 2005. The shapes used for her face are soft and innocent, but also a bit seductive. Matt Siren gave his character dimension by adding a spiritual element with the flower in her hair. The ghost shape stemmed from the artist’s obsession with Ms. Pac-Man. Over time Ghost Girl became synonymous with the artist’s street identity. She evolved as a symbol of female empowerment and multiculturalism. Siren’s intense counter icon is the masculine, skull-faced Transformer Mask.

ART
 Woodward Gallery—Gates Mural Project Eldridge and Broome Streets, NYC — Various artists

FICTION
Lucky — River Adams
The Pith — Jessica Alexander
Horse Latitudes — Jamie Black
Charlotte — Brock Clarke
Walking — Nathan Dragon
R. damascena — Irene Cox
The Story of “The Story of the Two Sisters” — Daniel David Froid 
Blood Covenant — Alice Hatcher
Fountain — Greg Mulcahy
Spaghettification — Ali Raz
The Borders of Sleep — John Robinson
Fiddler’s Green — Dennis McFadden

GUEST FOLIO
Edited by Suzanne Matson
Introduction
Say What You Will + Farmhouse Room — Jennifer Barber
Mise en Scène + The Nipple Fish — C. Dale Young
plot + girl with cornrows holding hands with stalk + bird of paradise  — Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Photographs by Pauline McKenzie
Moon Garden + Another Blue Sky — Derek Sheffield
Sharks in 3D — Will Dowd
What I Cannot Remember — Christopher Merrill
Poets Do Not Die — Jahangir Hossain; Translated from the Bengali by Lloyd Schwartz with Jahangir Hossain
Gracilaria, or When She Grows a Whole New Body — Wendy Cannella
In the Time of Vanishing Kingdoms — Nancy Dickeman

NONFICTION
The River Roux  — Tom Cowen
Beautiful Things — Zozulka Hausler Lew
There and Back — Maggie Maize
In the Falling Leaves: The Fear and the Fury of the Negro — Allen M. Price
Love, (Un)translated — A. Molotkov
Arlington or No Arlington: That is the Question, Or At Least One of Them — Gail Hosking
The Woman and the Watcher — Melissa Hunter Gurney

POETRY
Let’s Be Mushrooms + Night Blooming Cereus — Tom Paine 
Notes from a Field on Fire + Félix González-Torres– “Untitled” (billboard of an empty bed), 1991 + Multiclausal Exercises in Translation — Day Heisinger-Nixon
Catfish Heart — Beth Suter
Blizzard + Dying Words — Chris Forhan
I Wish It Were Enough to Be— + The Saddest Thing  — Fay Dillof 
Mezuzah + A bull = A word = Grief — Alexa Luborsky

Mise en Scène + The Nipple Fish

C. Dale Young

Mise en Scène

Indigo, aquamarine, turquoise, and a patch
of seafoam: the eye notes it all as we stand
on the sand facing the sea. We always come

back to the sea, its tireless monologue,
the sky above as clear and just as blue.
Between us, few words, the very mark

of familiarity. A quick look suffices, 
and we get naked, not an ounce of modesty 
between us and no one around to judge us.

In the surf, we are like children again,
yet to be hurt, yet to know hunger or
desperation. We do not bathe; we frolic.

One imagines a ship in the distance, people
on deck with binoculars making out the splash
of water and the movement of our arms,

but nothing like that exists here outside
of our imaginations. The sea god has granted
us an empty beach, an empty slice of the sea,

and clouds as expressive as Impressionists,
clouds revealing the basic shapes: bird, face,
starburst and tree. The early afternoon ends

with the two of us lying on a single towel
air drying so we can dress and return
to the town facing the Bay which might as well

be another world. Our arms touch, our hips
touch, and even the air tastes salty at this hour.
We lie there carefully listening to the sea.

The Nipple Fish

Believe me, I know these fish. They are no joke.
The Cenote Cristalino appears as if it has captured 
the sky above and liquefied it, and in the heat 

of late afternoon, it appears even more seductive 
than it normally does. But then there are the fish,
the nipple fish, tiny fish that, for whatever reason,

like to nip at the nipples. I tell the truth here.
And as we enter the waters of the cenote, 
the very minute the water is above the nipple line,

we feel them. Not painful, but definitely surprising.
What is the lesson here? Must there always be a lesson?
Even the most beautiful places carry something less

than beautiful? I don’t know, but we both laugh
as the fish pay us attention that we weren’t expecting.
The sun tilts and tilts, and the shadows begin creating

even darker blues among the bright ones that drew
us here in the first place. We swim and marvel.
We keep moving to avoid the surprise of these fish

that are always just waiting, waiting for you to stop 
moving so they can remind you why their name is so apt.
For a couple of long hours, we swim in the sky. 

We are like gods who have returned to the heavens,
to the seas, but the bites from the tiny fish in these waters
remind us we remain human, all too human.

---

C. Dale Young is the author of a novel and five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Prometeo (2021). A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He lives in San Francisco.

Moon Garden + Another Blue Sky

Derek Sheffield

Moon Garden

“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
– Wallace Stevens

All winter the squares of wire fence 
keep nothing in and nothing out. No

life among mounds of snow, only
every night’s alabaster glow 

until the stars with their stick bones
and quick tongues begin to turn

the glitter of their cold eyes
toward us. But then it is us turning

one morning to the window to see
the earth returned. Yes, we can breathe out there.

We can reach our hands into warming heaps 
of soil and with a fat thumb press in a seed.

Say one that shines like a drop of black.
A flower, say. Say the sun.

Another Blue Sky

Say a stray had kittens in your basement
and you were stroking their marble-gray fur
and gazing into their eyes

just opening the morning
you could hear your mother’s footsteps
stomping out of the house
as she once again 
left for the last time

and say this time it was.
Say all day at school you and your sister
couldn’t stop thinking about these things 
and you ran the walk back 
with your bright keys bouncing
and flashing around your necks
and flew through those silent rooms 

to the pile of kittens 
coming to life at your touch, mewing
and shivering, and the one whose back legs
didn’t work dragged itself

into your sister’s held-out hands. 
It’s your sister’s scratchy voice over the phone 
that calls you back to this time— 
those kittens crawling jerkily 
across your lap, licking their fur, 
the broken one

always in her hands, the soft taps
of its legs like limp blessings 
everywhere she carried it.

“You don’t remember?” she asks
as if she doesn’t believe you, 
can’t believe you could be so free

of that morning
she walked into the lemon-colored kitchen 
and you looked up from your cereal,
milk dribbled on your chin,
and you—your father 

at the counter trying to hush you,
your voice raising his—
you told her what he said needed doing,
and she ran from the house
and you went back 
to spoonfuls of cornflakes 

as she found the bucket of water
with the lump of kitten in the backyard,
two blue eyes like chips of glass 
that stared straight through her
to the blue sky
that had rushed into them.

These are the eyes that find her 
when dreams bring back your mother. 
“Mish you,” she says, her words beginning 
to slosh together, “but you sound just like Dad.”
A pause as she lights a cigarette.
“You,” she says, her voice in the smoke,
“you were the one who told me.”

You the puzzle she’s been piecing 
since first grade, the gaps 
running crookedly between you.
She would like to finish you 
like a patchwork landscape
or bunch of balloons—
whatever it is

you turn out to be. And you
must help, must answer each call
and press the phone to your ear 
and walk from room to room, 
looking down as you step out
under every open sky.

---

Derek Sheffield’s collection, Not for Luck, was selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His other books include Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, and forthcoming in March of 2023 from Mountaineers Books, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry. He is the poetry editor of Terrain.org and can often be found in the forests and rivers along the east slopes of the Cascade Range in Washington.

Poets Do Not Die

Jahangir Hossain

Translated from the Bengali by Lloyd Schwartz with Jahangir Hossain

Like a waterfall
I keep falling and falling,
Finding myself again and again
In the vastness of The Ocean.

Like a riverbank, I crumble, 
Then wake up again on The Island
To shed the fatigue of the sailor 
Who traveled from a distant Continent.

I disappear like moonlight,
Then I’m back 
In the scorching golden desert
On the far horizon.

Falling like the falling of deciduous leaves, 
I resume my existence,
Breed in the veins of veins
Of The Bryophyllum Pinnatum:

The Air plant, the Life plant. 

---

Jahangir Hossain was born in 1982 in Noakhali, Bangladesh. He is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, storyteller, screenwriter, playwright, lyricist, critic, translator, editor, and children’s writer. His book of poems, Chetanarjalachabi (Watercolor of Consciousness), 2016, and his novel Abyakta Artanad (Unspoken Howl), 2019, have been published in Bengali.

Lloyd Schwartz is poet laureate of Somerville, MA, Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at UMass Boston, an arts critic for NPR’s Fresh Air andWBUR, and an editor of the poetry and prose of Elizabeth Bishop. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and Academy of American Poets fellowships in poetry. His poems have been chosen for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His latest collection is Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (U of Chicago Press).