January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between USA and India. Her short stories have been published in Inner Voices, a contest-winning collection of fiction (Mirage Books, India), and The Cartier Street Review. A 2nd prize winner of an all-India Poetry Contest organized by HarperCollins-India and Open Space, her poems appear in Quay, Pirene’s Fountain, Shalla Magazine, Kritya, The Toronto Quarterly, The Cartier Street Review, Maintenant 3 (Three Rooms Press), Muse India, Danse Macabre, The Smoking Book anthology, Liberated Muse anthology, Mad Swirl and elsewhere. A poetry commentary and a poetry book review also appear in Kritya and The Cartier Street Review respectively. A 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference, Nabina was Assistant Metro Editor with The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and has worked as a journalist and media person in India for about 10 years in places as diverse as Tehelka.com, Down To Earth environmental magazine, Confederation of Indian Industries, National Foundation for India and The Sentinel newspaper. She has published several articles, commentaries and essays during her tenures. An M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her other interests are theater and music. Formally trained in India classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. She blogs at www.fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com and freelances when not writing.
Aleph
The first sound uttered is always forgotten
Possibly it is never even a word. Just
An interjection that derives from faraway
Fears or an anxious rhythm of speech.
The first sound can be heard quite clear
When groans and grunts are taken care
Of with mighty sweep of authorized
Hands that also stifle songs and smiles.
If you were a baby or a doddering pair
Of legs, your first word would be despair
Not a calligrapher’s delight in dusky ink
Blinking away in the heliotrope night.
In one little fable the first letter was
Meant to be the first word of wonder
But no one wrote it down and so later
The ocean took it with fish and dead matter.
Living Room Homily
Women talking in high voice
Tingling streets
An indolent afternoon in the library
– All that glides up to whisper:
How we love life
After poems are read
Blood is spilled
Bee stings are removed
From unresponsive arms
We can measure up to reality
As though it’s a challenge
We can read minds
As though it’s an ancient art, revived
Furry dogs bustling
Smothering fleur du soir
A fleeting glance after remembrance
– Nothing that stops enchantment,
To say we love life
After you come back home
Hobble in the pantry
After newsprint withers
Becomes compost in the bin
I can clamour under the bright light
Straighten my pleats and scarf
I can wake up before dawn
As though night never came.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sriya Narayanan works in the marketing department of a newspaper where she writes feature articles. Her poetry has been published in Nthposition and Eclectica. In 2009, she was shortlisted for the Toto Funds The Arts (TFA) Creative Writing award. A classical violinist she blogs at sriyanarayanan.blogspot.com on animal rights.
The Moral Science Teacher
The pirated book of fables is awash with typos.
Like a row of grey tulips, her uniformed audience sits
On brown benches, staring. Their eyeballs are elevator shafts.
“Why should we learn all this?”
She gives them a test to silence them
So she can have a quiet moment at the window
Overlooking an open sewer where a dehydrated puppy
Is drinking itself to death. She grabs her water flask
And rushes out to its rescue as
The 12-year-old silhouettes begin to go rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.
When she returns, it is recess and the corridors are flooded
With children who fantasize about escape.
Their shoes squish against the concrete floor.
Raising her index fingers to her temples
She makes ripples with them, closes her eyes.
The asbestos roof is being pelted with bulbous raindrops
And is bleeding poison into the girls’ wing.
She ignores a stubborn lump in her armpit, and writes
In cursive with a pastel chalk
“Dip all your deeds in faith”.
Traffic
I’m running late and am stuck at this intersection
Where the temple is vomiting people into the street
(And vice versa).
A loudspeaker cone hangs like a torn wire
From a lamppost whose sides are drenched in bright red spit.
Screams of faith wash over all of us
As my agnostic lungs well up.
I should’ve known better than to bury myself
In my sheets for those extra five minutes.
Others switch off their engines as a gesture of surrender
But I accelerate, look at my watch and at the mirror
I am growing old in this car.
A coconut is severed and flung onto the syrup-soaked floor
What a waste of food.
I’m hungry.
The believers form a twitching line with no-arm distance
Sparking off a tug-of-war of tongues.
I allow myself a prayer: may this crowd dissipate.
Sunlight pours through my windshield and climbs over my face.
I try again.
Meanwhile, at the entrance, a triangular heap of footwear grows
Like a sea monkey
Once moistened, unstoppable.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Lara S. Williams is a British/Australian writer who has been published or has work appearing in over twenty international literary journals including Voiceworks, Cordite, Antipodes, Islet, Blue Crow, page seventeen, Magma, Island, Agenda, MiPOesias, Blue Fifth Review, Orbis and Neon. She is currently living in Seoul, South Korea, and spends most of her time writing and eating kimchi. She plays the saxophone somewhat haphazardly.
A Fugue To Happy Moments In Time
‘Son, your mother doesn’t understand like I do. You need this.’
‘I didn’t even apply, it’s a scholarship.’
‘So you’re looking a gift in the mouth?’
‘It’s to look a gift horse in the mouth.’
He concedes with a wave of his hand, sips his absinthe and lets out a loud exhalation. His foot taps to the beat of Paul Desmond’s ‘Take Five’ crackling from a stereo above the doorway; he gears himself up.
‘Hundreds of people apply to this school and ninety nine percent of them spend years beating themselves up because they didn’t make it. Waste money on extra tuition, books. But you don’t need that! They’re giving it to you on a plate. “Didn’t even apply”, good god, boy!’ Another sip of absinthe. He never uses the accompanying sugar.
‘You drink far too many of those,’ I wince.
‘Don’t change the subject. I won’t watch you turn them down.’ He slams the table with his fist.
I smile into my less abrasive vodka, turning the glass in the sun and watching smoky rainbows strike the cement. ‘Calm down. You know I‘m going. It‘s mum.’
He considers, tilting his head at an angle. Past his ear I see the café sign winking to a bookshop across the street.
‘Lie,’ he says.
‘I cannot lie to my mother.’
‘But I can.’
‘I don’t want to tell her some story. I want her to be happy for me.’ I kick at the ground. ‘There’s only so long she can use the same excuse to keep me here.’
‘Now that’s unkind,’ he replies. ‘You know how she feels. She lost her son.’
‘We all lost him. But I can’t stay home with her forever. I’m not him. I’m not a replacement!’
‘She worries. And you should be more understanding.’ He is flustered and I regret upsetting him.
‘Will you come visit me?’
‘Never.’ We are silent for some time and my father raises his hand and clicks, signalling for another drink. I smile and shake away a second vodka.
‘Why not?’
He chews his cheek and thinks. ‘I said I’d never go back to Paris.’
‘Bad memories?’ I ask.
‘No, my son, good!’ he replies explosively. ‘Good memories, excellent, the very best of my life.’
‘Then why stay away?’
He is serious now, eyebrows almost meeting at the bridge of his nose. A new absinthe appears and he pushes it aside, fearing the distraction.
‘Have you ever felt so utterly happy and content that you want to lie down and die, just to finish on a high?’
‘Not exactly. I think it would put a rather sour note on things.’
‘I have!’ He leans forward, eyes fixed on something beyond my ear. ‘Years ago in Paris, I played flute in a tiny restaurant. I don’t recall where it was.’ He waves his hand impatiently, continues, ‘blue window shutters upstairs. It was called ‘L’amour’. I met Gabriella, a Spanish student visiting for a study break.’ He looks at me. ‘She was sensational. Dark and quiet, didn’t ask questions. I finished playing and drank wine with her and the moon came out over the top of her perfect head.’ He pulls a white handkerchief from his pocket and lays it on the table, showing me the embroidery of a woman’s figure in light blue thread.
‘I always liked this.’ I touch the corner
‘You ever wonder where I got it? She gave it to me. One kiss and an eternal memory.’ He stops and shivers. ‘Paris will make you.’ He finishes the drink and I think for a moment he means to stay longer, get drunker. Instead he tumbles two bills onto the table and gestures to the book store opposite us. ‘Come with me. I’m getting you something.’
I’d been there many times before, always finding unpriced copies of penguin editions in boxes at the counter. I watch my father disappear in that direction, then return clutching a sheaf of lined paper.
‘I knew they had this here,’ he says. My fist fills with paper and he ushers me out onto the street. ‘Beautiful on the flute, that.’ As I look he digs in his pocket and unwraps a chocolate cigar.
‘Satie? Ah, Trois Gynopodies.’ I point the music at his mid-drift and nod my head. ‘Thank you.’
‘You can play that at your final performance.’ He sprays cocoa smoke around my ears.
‘I might not get that far.’
He backs away, jabbing his cigar in the air. ‘Course you will. You’ve got Satie.’
‘Can we go home?’ I walk beside him and finger the corners of my sheet music to sweat.
I arrived for orientation on the third of February, early on a snowy evening. My bags, bursting with music sheaves and polishing oil, slapped against my father’s flute, all pressed tightly to my thigh like a child. Already students milled around the entrance hall dragging cases, stands, trunks, coats and naked instruments. A rumble of languages filled the quiet spaces in the air. As I made my way to the dormitory a black boy with coloured beads in his hair dropped a saxophone and I heard the squealing snap of valves.
My room was a twin, the room mate not yet arrived. I put my flute on a narrow metal-framed bed and inspected the pine shelves above the head board. After lining up a few books and unpacking my pressed clothes I went to explore the grounds.
Outside I buttoned my overcoat and turned the corner of the building, heading for a varnished wooden gate set into the surrounding fence. Slipping through I entered a small courtyard dark with pine branches. Bird feeders and bony rose stems dangled from the wood and tangled together until the two became one impenetrable force. Fresh snow sat on the grass like carpet free of footprints and rain stain. A paved ring of brickwork clawed through, its only adornment a rusty iron bench.
Seated was a young woman tightening the string of a viola. She drew the bow across its face, listening closed-eyed. I thought her beautiful; haematite hair wound around the neck of her instrument, knuckles pink in the cold, finger tips white with string pressure. I approached, watching the slender arm slide back and forth. Her eyes opened when my heels clicked on the bricks.
‘Bonjour.’ She lowered her viola.
‘Don’t stop,’ I murmured.
She smiled and put the instrument away. I looked at the shape of her coat collar against the white throat. Her eyes were wet with large irises that rolled around the line of my face. I wanted to say something about her playing.
‘Embrasse-moi,’ she breathed in melodious baritone.
‘I’m sorry?’
Snow settled on my head, melt running behind my ear and traversing the hairline to spread at the nape of my neck. Her breath clouded into my nostrils and I smelt cinnamon and tasted tiny speckles of snow on her cheeks. Her left elbow was remarkably warm, sheltered as it was in the curve of her body whilst playing.
The spotlight swoons across my flute and ignites trickling mirrors in the valves. I see a man, short and portly, standing at the front. He waves a familiar white handkerchief and his presence gives me a pleasurable jolt.
I hold the flute like a fine sword, feeling a brassy thrum beneath my fingers. The lights dim, signalling my introduction.
‘This piece,’ I announce, ‘is for my father, the flautist Albert Pewty who has come here, at great risk to himself, to hear me play Satie.’
He remains standing, a tweed apostle, and the smile he illicits transforms my piece from perfected mournful practises into notes bent warm and sweet. The performance is long, accompanied by piano. I dimly hear my own playing over the roar in my head.
Behind my body the concert‘s highlight appears: an enormous silver moon born from moulded ceramic and tiny shards of glass, thick like the bottom of a vodka tumbler. It lowers before the backdrop and lights hit it on all sides, sending moonlight in every direction.
I see my father sit abruptly. His face is shadowed and he lowers his head to rest on his chest. I end my piece, arms lifted level with the flute, an unusual and ungainly stance but one that allows my body help the music collapse into finish. I lower my shivering arms and bow.
When there is relative quiet on the other side of the curtain I return to the stage. Looking down I am surprised to see my father still sitting in place.
‘Dad!’ I call out. ‘I can’t believe you came.’ I rush to the edge and drop down, sit beside him. ‘Did you enjoy it?’
He doesn’t look at me. I reach out and touch his lapel, run the finger down his body, feel the warmth of flesh under his clothes.
‘Answer me.’ I look down and see his handkerchief on the floor, a footprint across its body. ‘Dad?’
He is dead at sixty three, captured in the final happiness he feared. I bow my head and press it into his neck. I wonder why he is so warm and I so cold.
‘I’m glad you came,’ I whisper.
The jazz saxophones were swinging, punching out a fast paced version of Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker’s Street’. The vocalist, a young man, was perched on a green stool, thin black moustache pointing at the drums balanced across his knees. I sat, head on chest, nodding out of time.
‘Vous desirez?’ The waitress repeated herself three times to my silence before giving up and leaving a menu on my table.
A woman opposite me lifted dark eyes to meet mine. She was wrinkled and very beautiful. There was an aura of contentment around her greying hair.
‘You’re sad,’ she said in a thick Spanish accent. ‘Would you like a drink?’
I lowered my head and nodded weakly. ‘Thank you. A vodka.’ I paused. ‘Actually, absinthe.’ The woman called to the waitress and she soon appeared bearing two glasses and a bottle.
‘Voila, Madame.’
‘Why aren’t you with other young ones, enjoying such a beautiful night?’ She looked up at the moon, now full, hanging above her silver-tinted head. I took the absinthe in my fingers, steeled myself, and swallowed.
‘I’m not much for company tonight. But thank you.’ I gestured with the empty glass and she dipped her head.
‘Drink, talk.‘ She sipped and threw a hand across her glowing head. ‘After all, you’re in ‘L’amour’.’
I turned my head to look at the peeling wood sign. The blue window shutters banged in the breeze. I clapped my hands together and laughed. ‘Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?’
The woman went to refill my glass.
‘No!’ I cried involuntarily, placing my hand across the rim. ‘One is enough. Just one.’
Her tongue reached out to caress her bottom lip in slow contemplation. ‘It is a beautiful night,’ she sighed. ‘I have met a beautiful, sad man. But I am happy. If I were any happier, I would die.’
I don’t hesitate. ‘You probably will.’
‘What an end to the world.’
The drums fell away and one single saxophone carried the tune. The same rough voice sang only to me. Felt only me.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Jee Leong Koh is the author of two books of poems Payday Loans and Equal to the Earth (Bench Press). His new book of poems Seven Studies for a Self Portrait will be released by the same press in March 2011. Born and raised in Singapore, he lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter (http://jeeleong.blogspot.com).
In His Other House
In this house there is no need to wait for the verdict of history
And each page lies open to the version of every other.
—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “In Her Other House”
In my other house too, books line the floor to ceiling shelves,
not only books on stock markets, self help, Singapore ghost stories,
but also poetry, Edwin Thumboo, Cyril Wong, Alfian Sa’at,
and one who moved away and who wrote Days of No Name.
My father comes home from the power station. When rested
(and this is how I know this is not real) he reads to us again,
for the seventh time, Philip Jeyaretnam’s Abraham’s Promise
in a sweet low voice, unbroken by a frightened young supervisor.
When he closes the book, my dead grandfather stirs from a dream
and says a word or two, that really says he has been listening.
And my beloved, knowing his cue, jumps up from the couch
to clear the dishes, for, as he says, dishes don’t wash themselves.
Softly brightened by a feeling I do not hurry to identify,
I move to the back of him and put my arms around his waist.
His muscles twitch like the needle on a motorboat’s dashboard
as he turns a porcelain plate against a rough cotton cloth.
The light from the window looks like a huge, blank sea.
In this other house there will be time to fill it but now
the bell rings with a deep gold tone, and here, on a surprise
visit, are my sister and her two girls coming through the door.
The Hospital Lift
The Virgin was spiralling to heaven,
Hauled up in stages. Past mist and shining
—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “Fireman’s Lift”
My mother is the aged Queen of the spin
of washing machines. Her body sags now
but when she was young eyed and toned
she washed St. Andrew’s Children’s Hospital,
whose best feature was its old hotel lift.
I would close the brass grille with a clang,
thump the big black top button, grow up
watching the concrete floors drop to my feet,
the bowl that glowed in underwater green
the babies crying, startled by the light
in blue gowns the boys chasing the clown
the professional look of clean white smocks
before arriving on the roof, the air
smelling of detergent, wind and sun,
the sheets flapping like giant birds.
When my mother turned to greet me
with a tight smile (now loosening indefinitely),
how was I to guess the magic act
of hauling up an ancient lift
by spinning modern wash machines?
The Bowl
I made a trip to each clock in the apartment
—Elizabeth Bishop, “Paris, 7 A.M.”
One clock is short. Another clock is a dog
that bounds round every twelve years and barks
at dogs not yet born and dogs gone before.
The good clock in the kitchen is a bowl.
The one I check to go in step with New York
rests in my pocket, next to my penis,
and rings with a ringtone called Melody.
So many clocks! How does one keep time?
I have lived here long enough
to have had three loves, one of whom
is sleeping in my bed, a ghost from the west coast.
He ticks softly, this clock. The second
goes all the way back to the Mayflower, he talked.
The third is striking fifty-one today. He sounds sad.
How do I sound to him?
How do I sound in his tall apartment of clocks?
My collection of clocks
in that apartment, and that apartment, and that apartment in the city?
First visit to an airport, I was rapt by the world clocks,
Jakarta, New Delhi, Tel Aviv, Berlin, London, New York,
steel round-faced timekeepers, all different and all right,
their hands ringing in my ears
the sound a wet finger makes rubbing round the rim of a water glass,
and I felt like a dog that is trying to catch its tail.
Dizzy, yes, but filled with so much joy
I think I have not left the spot.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
.jpg)
Heather Taylor Johnson moved from America to Australia in 1999 and since has received a PhD in Creative Writing, has had a poetry collection, Exit Wounds, published, and has discovered that reviewing poetry is a fantastic genre to work with. She spent all of 2010 living in the Colorado Rockies with her husband and three young children and though she couldn’t leave the subject of ‘home’ alone in her writing, she also found that mountains were very difficult to ignore.
While A Flock Of Seagulls Flies North
Tree stumps wide as the length of my body
and as long as yours
touching mine
from head to toe
scatter this beach;
its perimeter the outline of a powerful tide.
Without you there would be no ex-pat.
Without me no working visa.
We inhabit this earth as if it were our own.
Trying to imagine this ocean carrying
great trees of small forests in such a rush
of movement and moons
depositing them on foreign soil…
sand, not soil
but then you and the beauty of this drowned-out colour
and washed-out texture, how the stumps broke apart
from roots and limbs to rest on this beach
are just the reasons I am here.
The reasons I move, then rest.
Amongst It
Our nine year itch moved us to the mountains.
Small town, big earth
we breathed it every day:
snow
snow falling
snow sifting, resting, misting upwards
from a sexy wind.
Our waterless lips
were constantly parted
constantly wanting to lap it up.
We became so spontaneous the frozen waterfall
we walked upon, ad-libbed and perfect.
And the night in the lounge after Sunny’s party,
the mess, wood stove, us.
Riotous snowballs melted down
the backs of our knitted necks
and the jolt, the stagger, the interchangeable
skin and liquid ice (liquid ice
and incredible skin).
Something fleeting about it all.
And those mountains –
their permanence.
When we finally looked away we breathed;
it was evergreen, deer dung and snow.
In the end we became asthmatic
because after the mountains
my eyes found yours
and then we gasped
forgetting to breath
forgetting the snow
forgetting even
the mountains.
.jpg)
Anca Vlasopolos was born in Bucharest, Rumania. Her father, a political prisoner of the Communist regime in Rumania, died when Anca was eight. After a sojourn in Paris and Brussels, at fourteen she immigrated to the United States with her mother, a prominent Rumanian intellectual and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anca is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her poetry collection is titled Penguins In A Warming World. Anca is also the author of an award winning novel, The New Bedford Samurai and the memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement.