November 2011
VOL XIX, Issue 11, Number 223
Editor: Klaus J. Gerken
Production Editor: Heather Ferguson
European Editor: Mois Benarroch
Contributing Editors: Michael Collings; Jack R. Wesdorp; Oswald Le Winter
Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena
ISSN 1480-6401
INTRODUCTION
Jacques Royer
L'automne
Autumn
CONTENTS
SHELBY STEPHENSON
“Melons in the garden, peanuts, roasting-eared corn, September peas”
“The soul takes bullets, hits-bombs-songs sun in the morning”
“Slush is the word, starting with freezing precip”
Sarah Gamutan
A Meek Love
RC Miller
JIHAD
SEX QUIZ
OUT OF BUSINESS
THIS ROOM I'M IN IS
NEW COMEDY
MASK WITH SAUSAGE
MATING SONG OF A DRIVEWAY LOG
FLABBY MASS UP FOR ABS
Slobodan Sucur
Her Name's Angelica B.
John Grey
SATURDAY NIGHT MICHELLE
GREAT LOVER
THAT WINTER BEFORE DIVORCE
Lark Beltran
Free Fall
In Ancient Company
Maintenance
POST SCRIPTUM
Jayne Lyn Stahl
Once a storm, always a storm
Jacques Royer
L'automne et son air triste
Mélancolie naissante
A l'aube de jours sans joie.
La nuit s'endort plus longue
Sur la ville qui s'allume.
... C'est le temps des veillés
Et la saison des pommes.
C'est la rentrée des classes
Avec ses cris d'enfants.
C'est la valse du temps
Qui passe et qui repasse.
Autumn
The sad autumn atmosphere
Rises with melancholy
In the day's joyless dawn.
The night sleeps longer
When the city lights up.
... The time for evening gatherings
And the season of apples.
It is the start of classes
And the clamour of children.
It is the waltz of time
That passes to return again.
(Trns. Klaus J. Gerken / Marie Cliche-Royer)
SHELBY STEPHENSON
“Melons in the garden, peanuts, roasting-eared corn, September peas”
Melons in the garden, peanuts, roasting-eared corn, September peas, butterbeans, turnips,
Collards, cabbage, cukes, Irish potatoes, yams!
Sisters and Brothers shuffle their feet in the sand,
Smoke wafting into the oaks where the wire-fence picnic table sags those layered cakes
The South is famous for-and the moist coconut ones-my father’s favorite-and mine too!
Be still, Son:
I’d hold my breath and know the Pumpkinseed would spin on my line any minute,
The white grub I’d dug under the two holes at the backhouse perfect bait.
The watersnakes nudge the bank at our feet,
The needle-nosed gar, pristine, iridescent, exotic, specific.
Paul’s Hill, Maytle’s world: farming, fishing, hunting, playing ball.
Earl, spell-bound, charmed!
Songster of the schoolground Give me a nickel and I’ll sing for you-
His family’s plight-the “not quite right children”: could they be healed?
The father, a whistler: he would get up before sunup to get the work done up.
Over the handlebars of his bicycle Earl would fly like the mule that folded
Up over Rose’s and Holly’s Hudson Hornet, Earl saying, “I be dog,”
Not stuttering at all, though he did usually, telling his twin brother,
Gerald -“You too g-g-god-damn all mouth.”
He’d sing two songs for one Buffalo nickel.
After the teacher scolded him he stopped riding the bus to school.
The big girls made a fool out of him, he said.
His spells got worse, took to wearing a football helmet for the falls.
It was a treat to see how he’d dote on anyone,
Flailing his arms, singing.
“The soul takes bullets, hits-bombs-songs sun in the morning”
The soul takes bullets, hits-bombs-songs sung in the morning,
The roads gravelly with bridges made for hooves.
Tomorrow we’ll stand up and love one another.
The women and men who fought “for their countries”
Shall come around corners, after cooking and eating on the ground.
Let the bottom doorstep creak.
Walk softly on the graves in the field.
See the crosses.
Hug Martha, Baldy, Little Martha, Huel, Mary, Lieugenia, William.
The farm’s high in wheat and fodder, one huge harvest.
Remember how you live and die,
How love comes over and over.
Stars fall between Manly’s grave and me when the bluebird stops by.
The slaves in the back part of the cemetery gather me in,
The fields scored ten-thousand ways.
In the backyard of the Old Place the Sweet Betsy bush blushes; the black earth’s rich.
Lonesomeness drives my tongue.
“Slush is the word, starting with freezing precip”
Slush is the word, starting with freezing precip.
I venture out to see if the tires will roll.
Snowfall the wipers wipe and the heater heats.
I’m in my waders, playing the minnow for the running blues.
My father’s grave at Rehobeth’s prickly with sawbriars.
Lords of Cultures and Visions, can’t you hear me calling for streams running branches?
I hold your murmurs close to my lips.
You are shaving in the old looking-glass in the pantry of the plankhouse.
I smell the lather in the bowl and hear the swish of your brush.
Memory’s a curl in your eyes, blue as Grandmuh Nancy’s.
Could she be everybody’s grandmother?
She’s in her rolling-chair.
Walking beside me, you wave under sycamores.
How speech comes to ones who wait!
My namesake, the Kentuckian, General Isaac Shelby,
Secures his battle-pieces at King’s Mountain.
Because of him-and another Shelby from K-Y,
Shelby Jean Davis-my hill-jazz-songbird-I am Shelby Dean (Dizzy).
Sarah Gamutan
A Meek Love
It's crude- his smile.
The abundance of his youth elates me.
And the foundation of his tempest;
I told him to leave and escape
With me! Yes with me!
But he won't. He chooses a vixen,
A pensive writer on prompts
And poetry. Well I can be like that.
She always is a nominee-
Fame, Beauty and Intellect.
Yet, she is a vixen. Why not me?
Then I see this picture of a heart.
I bet it's implication – the transcription.
It's like her semantics on numerous
Poems she writes. I write this poem
To subdue her. His love will
Still flow in his youth on me.
This love, you do everything.
You write everything for all sorts
Of imagination, from the tip of your
Tongue. We love and strive.
You read this my love with conviction.
That scribbles of passion will pass on.
I was fighting my own self.
She always is a nominee-
Fame, Beauty and Intellect
Yet, she is a vixen- I see in the mirror.
His love has
Caused me perennial transition;
I now find myself on this poem
A vixen no more. Your love, it
Makes me live.
RC Miller
JIHAD
A basement watches boxes of diapers bob.
It means old-fashioned rebates and me.
Down the road at night is fact.
Salmon meteors extend the
Many ways potato chips were.
I've gained God loving pod songs.
High definition edible frogs of the snow
Search rains for a trace of brain.
Happiness seems very near.
I split into four lights.
And in some passages dripping.
SEX QUIZ
Fangs that creep before they've eyes
You they drink.
You do double before I eye
Things I stink.
Lord
Flee out of me
Between potions from baptized pinks, and
Hobble
As ash covered definer.
OUT OF BUSINESS
From the cook of the clouds
Racists do
Swallow water at the public pool.
A bunch of soda smells dead people.
All I have to say is racist.
Dead people get that
There's a bad problem with zoos inspiring.
There's a dead body with a day old boarding pass.
I'll live its synonymous life for a while and pave
Olmec down syndrome.
THIS ROOM I'M IN IS
Minding eyes with its glass girlfriend
That changes me into her police body and
Forces both my chopped torsos to
Herd around like mounted faces
Where one is
What I'd name
Two people going from bruises to doors
Going shut in some shared head likely causing blunt authority
Over a few chimes of money and then onward there's spout and that's all
Demon penis, Dostoevsky.
NEW COMEDY
Gravestones, hairdryer buyers
Nowhere.
Styes on a lawnmower shower
Chips and salsa come ashore.
MASK WITH SAUSAGE
Doorway of flesh-hooks
Projects Hell without a mouth.
It has
The horror-thickened consciousness of rocks and trees.
Under my head I tout a tail.
Inside that plaster there is a worm.
All of it bites evil ideas in
Serpent-headed feathered fudge.
My thirst is a mailing
Mask with sausage.
MATING SONG OF A DRIVEWAY LOG
The horse fucks a seahorse
Over objects of sunset.
I unlike rock.
Human hands in jars
Bake a silhouette of a submarine's vulva.
Just to splatter its jpeg, I put out
Through a bush a pile of necks
Which stiffen flylaps on the grass between summers.
I'm blessed to think I was born at all.
The looniest of all religions.
FLABBY MASS UP FOR ABS
Tonsil avenue goat carcass tricky stick from the logo tonsil carcasses mole shelters sperm
trick solstice audio silhouettes digesting elbow hair new moles goat-bird cushion carcass
juiced tire euthanized orange bun.
Slobodan Sucur
Her Name's Angelica B.
Death's a lone romantic
sitting out on the breeze
with top hat, listening
to sounds of mice scattering;
catch him if you can
though he's faster
than a one-armed man.
Gender bending epigone
is he to she and blacker
than the night; often
comes waltzing in as femme
fatale with hair like raven's
feathers and eyes
scandalously green.
She's a bona roba whispering
love in tallied words,
those saintly hands holding my mind
as it grows numb with devotion;
her name's Angelica B.
and when I'm stiff she spreads
perfumed air around me.
As muscular seller
of lemonade on street corner,
death spits in mixture
when nobody's looking and grins,
drinking to your health
from other glass, striking you
with thunderbolt.
It's the old woman with one
buttock at both sieges of Azov
and purveyor of ointments
to Candide, adventurer and lover
of Cunégonde, ruined subconsciously
by reminder of what's beyond
the Rococo garden.
Sad to say, can go
no further than autumnal game
between leaves
and shadows too tired
to await flutter of next
year's wings.
John Grey
SATURDAY NIGHT MICHELLE
Pour yourself into the neon streets of the night,
to flatter the welcoming stars,
sprinkled with snow, confident that you are the sun,
to form a sort of alliance
with the dark and the music
and more, your hands reaching out,
your hair sweeping the cold from your back,
eyes lit, mouth pursed,
body slim, breasts pert,
slim waist, long legs in black boots,
one glance and everyone believes in you,
for a goddess is all this world’s been missing,
and here you are, rising in that void.
GREAT LOVER
I am not the great lover. Not based
on what I see in the movies or read
in books. Scarlet and Ashley, forget it.
And I’m not romantic enough to
even iron the tights of Romeo.
I’m just a little tender, here and there,
like occasional glances at the moon,
or the scattered tunes I whistle.
I keep returning to the great ones:
kick and Ilsa at the Casablanca airport,
Cathy and Heathcliff heaving heavenly on the moor.
I feel the tremors. I match wits with the doting eyes.
I understand what is required. I know
where I fall short.
But I must be with you plain and ordinary,
grocery shopping, watching television,
at the breakfast table,
two heads given up to different sections
of the newspaper.
Ivanhoe doesn’t have to listen to
Lady Rowena’s coughing fits.
Clark and Claudette share a room
but neither snores.
I can’t be the great lover,
not with current circumstances:
21st century, bills to pay,
family to get off my back, sickness,
weather, job...
the list is longer than a Dylan song.
But there’s moments when
I feel as if the starry-eyed spirits are in me.
It’s that blood and body of Christ phenomenon.
Only not in church but in the kitchen,
or a field or a deep, dark wood.
I’m amorous at surprising moments.
I’m passionate when I’ve no right to be.
And I am with you, lover, and no one else is.
You curl up in my arms. I whisper in your ear.
Great lovers must make other arrangements.\
THAT WINTER BEFORE DIVORCE
All winter long,
her breath was blue,
and the clock’s fogged up face
ticked off time enough
to make it slower.
Her body lumped up in the sheets
but vapor cradled barely moving lips,
rocked them like the child
we never had.
January, February,
harsh as whips on skin,
mallards skidded on the ice,
geese never took the trouble,
made a circling mess
of going south.
And the weather paid no mind
to walls or windows.
A room, a forest...
ice snapped the will of trees
and people likewise.
She didn’t speak.
Mist clouded her silence.
I prayed for Spring
like praying for strength.
But snow became whiteout,
became drifts big as God’s fists.
Could barely see out.
Could barely see in.
No path was clear and easy.
I never went outside without a shovel.
She stayed indoors.
Shovel or not,
there was no path to her.
Lark Beltran
Free Fall
Tossed by our genes and our whims
and our dreams,
we accomplish or not, soar to bloom,
fall to rot.
Souls in exuberant fling by
The Mover
take time to decide where
their smooth currents ride -
tossed like confetti to glide
before settling,
free-fall fast or slow, final drift
not to know.
In Ancient Company
My necklace flaunts a Babylonian seal.
A Roman emerald decks this transient hand;
a scarab bracelet, steatite and gold,
adorns a wrist that gravitates to bone.
As mannequin for history, I long
to look through eyes which saw these treasures then.
The bracelet, un-eroded by the years,
would mock my sojourn of enfeebling flesh.
I fade; this errant emerald ring will shine,
to clasp new fingers, ghostly, down the line.
Maintenance
That perfect lawn -
focus of envying passer-by glances -
reflects a gardener´s sweat, while the embedded
Architectural Digest home
gives the maid a backache.
Dust and weeds
and grease like a sticky pall of pessimism
intrude everywhere except the Mansions of Heaven.
One covets a cleanliness
24-carat incorruptible; instead,
possessions, like bodies and souls, continually
backslide from optimal. Oh, the scurrying
to keep them all in form, a rebuttal
to erosion of a cliff. The challenge
is lifelong and a bore. "Let´s pare
it down to simplicity!" we cry.
But even ensconced
in a serene matchbox
with loaf and jug and - sometimes - thou,
our hands must rise and fall
in regular obeisance to monotony,
while that perfect lawn is almost always another´s.
Jayne Lyn Stahl
Once a storm, always a storm
Your eyelashes stick
together in
the rain like
a couple of
old whores
your feet
wet as concrete
you are a continent.
I count the languages
you speak as
you gnash your
teeth like
tiny stones
that collect in
kidneys.
you mount the
decades as if
they are yours to
lose
your numbers
words with
wings
that taste good in
your absence still
you embrace the tiny
child you left behind.
We are seldom without
scars yet
we are healing.
All selections are copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of
these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is
prohibited.
YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2011 by
Klaus J. Gerken.
The official version of this magazine is available on Ygdrasil's
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