The Ways We Connect

 
 
Recently I found myself thinking about common threads through the poetry at Rat’s Ass Review.
 
For example, I know that some publications appear regularly in the bios of RAR poets (Rattle and Yellow Chair Review come to mind right now; I know there are several more).
 
I got an email from the last AWP: a woman I had published wanted me to know that she was in that moment chatting with a woman who had published a couple of my poems. Three thousand miles between me and them, but the connection was there.
 
And the reason that I began this train of thought? I received a letter from a poet who has had five poems in Rat’s Ass Review, telling me that she was part of a writers’ group on the East Coast, several of whom had poems which had found their way across my desk and onto the pages of RAR. She mentioned them each by name, and told me that they are known collectively as the Transcanal Writers.
 
 
As I thought about the connections among the poets I have published, I began to wonder if I could perhaps have some fun. This is a start; I will add to it as ideas come to me.
 
The Varied Threads
 
Ekphrastic Poems
Poeti di Puglia
The Transcanal Writers
 
 
 
The Ekphrastic Poems
 
Ekphrastic poems are poems whose subject is some other piece of art — often a painting or a sculpture. It would take only a slight bending of the rules to say that Nat King Cole’s song Mona Lisa is an ekphrastic song. The ekphrastic poems below all contain links to the art which inspired them.  For many other excellent examples of ekphrastic poems and prose, click here to visit The Ekphrastic Review.
 
The Ekphrastic poets are Elya Braden, Michael Brockley, Alexis Rhone Fancher, Angi Holden, Mary Leonard, Maggie Mackay, and Wendy Pratt.

 
 
Elya Braden
 
 
PERSPECTIVE
From A Bar at the Folies Bergère by Édouard Manet
 
At first glance, you’re sure she’s alone. Her eyes, sweet
lemongrass and jasmine, cast down and right,
 
hooked by a glint of silver on the dark wood floor, a button
or a coin. I am invisible in her presence, a ghost
 
in the mirror. “See me!” My black top hat demands
attention, but she has seen too many frocked coats,
 
mustaches and trim goatees, filled too many orders, met
too many wants. She’s stopped imagining
 
the possibility of love, hides the mystery of her porcelain
heart under a cheery nosegay of roses
 
and poppies. A black velvet ribbon hugs her throat,
its golden cameo can’t hide that tiny quiver
 
inflaming my blood. She doesn’t look up, won’t
smile, won’t meet my eye, won’t fill my glass.
 
But she will know me tonight. Tonight when I pad
behind her in the dark, a panther stalking
 
my prey along the shadowed pathways of the park,
my happy knife silent, eager at my side, waiting
 
for the perfect moment to rise, to reap the moon’s
cold light, then plunge into that pulsing
 
stream beneath her alabaster skin and wake her
from her life, this dream.
 
 
WEATHER REPORT
from Office at Night by Edward Hopper
 
The lonely streetlight reaches
through the half-open window, into
the corner office, strokes the white wall,
the metal file cabinet, the fine, round ass
of the secretary snugged in blue. Its
glow casts the words scrawled across
the letter in high relief. They shout
at the man who clutches the letter
in both hands.   She’s onto us,
he says to his new love,
his “true love,” his voice strangled
as the words grip his throat.
Oh baby, the woman pleads, let’s get out
of town, leave this crummy office behind
and start fresh. Maybe California?
I got a sister in LA.

 
The man doesn’t answer, doesn’t move,
silent as the typewriter on her desk
a yard away from his, the distance
like an ocean for so long, when all he could do
was stare into the endless blue of want,
adrift on the ship of wife and family
until one day she threw him a line:
Wanna go for a drink? He’d been
drinking her in ever since, each swallow
his death and his salvation.
 
The woman has forgotten what she wanted
in the files. She clings to the cabinet
to keep from falling, her dark eyes
smudged with tears. His silence is louder
than the first clap of thunder.
Grab the umbrella, she thinks,
here comes rain.

 
 
Elya’s poem Weather Report first appeared in Split Lip Magazine.
 
 
Elya Braden took a long detour from her creative endeavours to pursue an eighteen-year career as a corporate lawyer and entrepreneur. She is now a writer and collage artist living in Los Angeles where she leads workshops for writers. Her work has appeared in Dogwood, Euphony, Forge, poemmemoirstory, Shark Reef, Split Lip Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Willow Review and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.elyabraden.com.
 
Back to the Ekphrastic Poems
 
 
Michael Brockley
 
JOHN SINGER SARGENT’S EL JALEO
 
I clap my hands beside the chair upon which Manuel has placed a pear. He took one bite from it before beginning to strum his new jaleo de jerez with his twin. Rosina from the islands struts on the wooden floor to the ruckus of old gods and wine. The vibrations from her heels drum the frenzy of rampaging bulls into the rhythm. She points to the men who would be her lovers. To the lovers who would be her men. The women in red toss back their chairs in triumph. Spill wine onto the floor where much wine has been welcomed. They are careless with their scarves and sheer dresses.They cry El jaleo! as the guitars ascend to dervish and devil. Even the dark woman who dresses in the feathers of ravens applauds when the music kidnaps Rosina’s heart. ¡How her body finds a place in the blood for rhapsody! I nudge the sleeping Benito, his hands idle in his lap. His head tilted back against the wall. He snores like a risqué tambourine at the threshold of rapture. Rosina’s arms river as her muscles flow through stone in a storm. The only light in the cantina the skirt covering her thighs as she tempests the floor. When the river flows into the delta, Rosina will be dancing with the floating guitars. And Manuel’s pear will not be eaten tonight.
 
 
Michael Brockley has written poems for most of his life. His most recent publications include The Flying Island and Panoplyzine. Forthcoming poems will be found in Atticus Review and Gargoyle.
 
Back to the
Ekphrastic Poems
 
 
Alexis Rhone Fancher
 
 
“WHEN TWO POETS COLLIDE –
FOR AKHMATOVA AFTER THE MOST RECENT BREAK-UP.”
 
after a photo by Philip-Lorca diCorcia
 
Anna Andreyevna is at the bar,
resplendent in a white dress that
rides her thighs, cups her lying, Ruskie
ass. She wears it to torture
me. Ditto those killer red stilettos.
 
Still, the slant of her leg, wedged just
below the bar, is unforgettable.
 
The barkeep flicks on the overheads.
Everything looks better.
Neon makes Anna look trustworthy.
I can’t look away.
Her favorite bar. Her part of town.
Someone whispers in
my ear. “Go home!
She will never leave with you.”
But I stay to watch Anna
dance with the other losers.
 
It is always the same.
We drink too much vodka.
It gets late. I wait. I am only human.
 
Finally Anna dances with me,
shoves her sweaty breasts at me,
her white ass firm in my hands. She
reaches between my legs,
grabs it like she owns me.
“Is this what you want?” she asks,
eyes blazing.
 
She’s tipsy,
but I have no shame.
Tomorrow, she will hate me,
but tonight?
We will fuck as poets fuck.
 
 
When Two Poets Collide first appeared in rawboned, 2015
 
 
Alexis Rhone Fancher is the author of How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and other heart stab poems, (Sybaritic Press, 2014), and State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (KYSO Flash Press, 2015). Find her poems in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Slipstream, Fjords, H_NGM_N, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles, Chiron Review, Quaint Magazine, Hobart, Menacing Hedge, and elsewhere. She’s infamous for her Lit Crawl LA performances at Romantix, a NoHo sex shop. Since 2013 she’s been nominated for seven Pushcart Prizes and four Best of The Net awards. In her other life, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes a monthly photo essay, The Poet’s Eye. Find her at alexisrhonefancher.com/ For more of Alexis’s work, go here.
 
 
Back to the Ekphrastic Poems
 
 
Angi Holden
 
 
AFTER THE DINNER PARTY *
 
A triangular table, seating thirty nine.
The scientific, the artistic,
the intellectual, all women gathered
together to break bread, share ideas.
Boudica and Elizabeth, strong queens both
in a man’s world.
Sappho and Dickinson, poets linked
by words, separated by centuries.
The astronomer, the medic,
the abolitionist.
And from the shadows, neither
on the guest list, two sisters.
Mary, hungry for this feast
of wisdom, perches on the table’s lip,
leans in to hear Woolf discuss
the influence of Modernism with O’Keefe.
While lingering at the margins, knowing
she’ll be left with the washing-up,
Martha worries about the gravy already
drying in the plates’ labial folds.
 
* The Dinner Party by feminist artist Judy Chicago
 
 
Angi Holden is a mature post-grad student and teacher of creative writing. Environmental and family landscapes are key to her work, much of which explores relationships and identity. Her poetry and fiction has been published in a range of online and print anthologies for both children and adults and in 2015 she co-edited the National Flash Fiction Day anthology.
 
 
Back to the Ekphrastic Poems
 
 
Mary Leonard
 
UPSIDE DOWN
 
Notice what happens if you turn Vermeer’s
Girl Reading a Letter upside down.
Do you see the young woman’s face
in the window pane?
 
Do you notice the frame of red and green,
or what’s absent?
 
Do you imagine the girl’s need to escape
the thick walls, the ripe fruit?
 
Don’t you want to see her tear off
the stiff satin of that blue dress?
To be with her lover under the moonlight?
 
Don’t you want to see, don’t you really want to see,
the girl turn to Vermeer insisting, “Do something quick,
 
My tight braids are digging into my still life!”
 
 
Mary Leonard has published chapbooks at 2River, Pudding House, Antrim House Press and RedOchreLit. Her poetry has appeared in The Naugatuck Review, Hubbub, Cloudbank, The Chronogram and most recently in Red River and Ilya’s Honey. She lives in an old school house overlooking the Rondout Creek in Kingston, NY. Away from her own personal blackboard, she teaches writing workshops for all ages through Bard College.
 
Back to the Ekphrastic Poems
 
 
Note: Maggie’s poem below is not strictly an ekphrastic poem, but it is a poem about painter Edward Hopper and his wife/muse/model, Josephine. Since this small collection contains two poems inspired by Hopper paintings, it seems fitting to include her work.
 
 
Maggie Mackay
 
 
THE HOPPERS, NEW YORK CITY
 
You pull me up from my painting stool,
maddening woman with your splash of noise.
The music gets to me, so I cave in.
Three times we dance around this tiny space
in silent swirls and turns and contra checks
to the frivolous swish of this Strauss waltz
past piles of cans and coal and the unheated stove,
my hand splayed on your narrow back, and flexed.
You are surprised I’m this light on these feet
and your fine legs, made famous by my art,
let me lead, bird-wife, three tiger hiss,
drive us, fixed in close circular motion,
our fights parked up, this truce unspoken.
Damn.
 
 
Maggie Mackay is a bravehearted Scot and a final year MA poetry student at Manchester Metropolitan University with work in various print and online publications including Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Bare Fiction, Obsessed with Pipework, The Fat Damsel and Three Drops from a Cauldron.
 
 
Back to the Ekphrastic Poems
 
 
Wendy Pratt
 
 
NIGHT WINDOWS*
 
There is too much heat
in New York. Too much heat
in the hotel room, in the frame
of the open window,
in the unnecessary radiator.
There is too much heat in the blaze
of a single bulb, too much heat
in chafed thighs, in cleavage, in arm-pits,
in neck creases, in the squinting
eye of a belly button. The silk
nightie tags on sweat, and rides up
as she bends and packs, or unpacks
unwanted clothes. The night
is a dozen things on a list,
a number on the back of a receipt;
ink smudged in the heat.
 
* Night Windows: Edward Hopper, 1928 oil on canvas
 
 
Wendy Pratt was born in Scarborough, UK in 1978. Her first pamphlet and full collection were published by Prolebooks, her latest pamphlet, Lapstrake is published by Flarestack Poets. In 2015 Wendy won both Prole Laureate and York Mix competitions and was highly commended in the Forward prize. She is currently studying towards an MA in creative writing with Manchester MMU and a PhD in poetry with Hull University. She is poetry correspondent for Northern Soul, a web based magazine and is also involved in the Womentoring project. She is currently working towards a new collection.
 
Back to the Ekphrastic Poems
 
 
Finola Scott
 
 
MATRIX
(after Firmament by Antony Gormley)
 
Hold fast
get a grip
each hollow cell grasps each
fears the gaps, the confined
spaces
that can’t be bridged, clutch
at top
soil
Metal filaments shine
Fragments take strength
from neighbours
 
All angles, different faces,
find their core
deep
Distance defines
breast to mouth to mouth
kneeling to suck
earth
connected and separate
The sum greater
 
 
MATRIX was previously published at Jupiter Artland.
 
 
Glaswegian Finola Scott’s poems and short stories are widely published in anthologies and magazines including The Ofi Press, Hark, The Lake. She is pleased to be mentored this year on the Clydebuilt Scheme by Liz Lochead, Scotland’s Makar. A performance poet, she is chuffed to be a slam-winning granny.
 
Back to
the Threads
 
 
Poeti di Puglia
 
 
Poeti di Puglia are six women from the UK who met up in an online workshop and, as one of them explains, “Just over a year ago I responded to a message on a forum in which Louise said she was traveling out to her trullo in Italy and did anyone fancy making the trip a poetry retreat? Six of us went – articulate, self-motivated women ‘of a certain age’ who hadn’t previously met… what could possibly go wrong?! We had an amazing and productive time. We’ve since met up again for a writing weekend at Susan’s oast house.”
 
 
Poeti di Puglia are: Angi Holden, Louise Larchbourne, Mandy Macdonald, Maggie Mackay, Finola Scott, and Susan Castillo Street. And this is the trullo:
 
 
louise-larchbournes-trullo

(image by Louise Larchbourne)

 
 
Angi Holden
 
 
THAT SUMMER
 
Exams over, papers closed, we sauntered
through lemonade afternoons, read
dog-eared copies of The Mersey Beats,
fingers sticky with fresh-squeezed oranges.
We listened to Ummagumma and Dark Side
on his father’s Bang & Olufsen, abandoned
our virginity between polycotton sheets,
mouths stained with raspberries.
Waited for results.
 
 
KNEADING
 
Forehead pressed against the knot-holed door,
the boy strains on tiptoe, watches the heave and turn of dough.
She reaches forward, muscles tense; sweat dribbles
down her neck, across her chest, into her cleavage.
She wipes a floury hand across her brow, resumes her kneading;
tonight in the leavened bread he’ll taste her salt.
 
 
OFFICE BOOK CLUB
 
Caught between the pages of the book
you loaned me, a lover’s note,
the paper flecked with hasty ink.
Now when you gather up your Radley bag,
close your door and head for home –
your pin-striped suit uncreased,
you blouse still crisp and white –
I see the tangle of your legs in his,
the tumble of your loosened hair,
I hear your sudden cry, muffled
in the seasalt sweat around his neck.
 
 
TO THE GUY I MIGHT HAVE MARRIED
 
Thank you for the note slipped under my door.
I found it in the morning; my fingers trembled
as I unfolded it. Even now I can see your writing,
that familiar rolling script in royal blue ink.
I called by, but heard a guy’s voice
so didn’t knock. Sorry to have missed you.

I’m sorry too; sorry that you had to come back.
I hope the resits went well. Your approach
to physiology was always more practical
than academic. You would have made
a good teacher back then, before Ofsted.
I wonder how you coped when schemes of work
became more important than physical prowess
and looking the part on the cricket pitch.
You will always be the most beautiful guy
I ever slept with. Know that, at least.
I hope he is kind to you – a better lover
than I was. I hope you are happy.

He was, on both counts. Still is,
all these years later. And yes, I am.
Happier than if you’d knocked that night
and found me alone. Wasn’t I the accepter
of apologies and excuses, the dispenser
of second chances? Always the faithful type.
I hope you found the girl you thought
you’d found in me: the homemaker, the mother,
the teacher’s wife. I hope you are happy.
Know this too: I feel no malice. For all the pain,
I feel only gratitude. On that cold October night
you heard a guy’s voice and turned away.
 
 
AFTER THE DINNER PARTY*
 
A triangular table, seating thirty nine.
The scientific, the artistic,
the intellectual, all women gathered
together to break bread, share ideas.
Boudica and Elizabeth, strong queens both
in a man’s world.
Sappho and Dickinson, poets linked
by words, separated by centuries.
The astronomer, the medic,
the abolitionist.
And from the shadows, neither
on the guest list, two sisters.
Mary, hungry for this feast
of wisdom, perches on the table’s lip,
leans in to hear Woolf discuss
the influence of Modernism with O’Keefe.
While lingering at the margins, knowing
she’ll be left with the washing-up,
Martha worries about the gravy already
drying in the plates’ labial folds.
 
* The Dinner Party by feminist artist Judy Chicago
 
 
Angi Holden is a mature post-grad student and teacher of creative writing. Environmental and family landscapes are key to her work, much of which explores relationships and identity. Her poetry and fiction has been published in a range of online and print anthologies for both children and adults and in 2015 she co-edited the National Flash Fiction Day anthology.
 
Back to i Poeti
 
 
Louise Larchbourne
 
 
GOING
 
Making your eyes spears, you bring me down.
Hand over hand hot soft we climb the ladder of we,
the ladder disappears we are fire eating each other with everything and grace
such detailed grace, the signatures of flame.
Eyes raising eyes, mouth mouth, belly belly long ago your warm wet cock became my engine
air air, two voices drawing signs in it a long way off;
In the fire I have become a new,
intelligence
unknown before,
different than youandme, but is
becoming only light.
 
And then.
 
We go back clean,
our bodies boats at anchor
all but still.
 
 
Louise Larchbourne is also an actor, an editor, and a sometime lexicographer. First published a long time ago in the West Midlands, as a ‘local poet’ in Birmingham she explored the distinctions between poetry for reading and poetry for performance. She was one of the poets invited to contribute to the new anthology For Jeremy Corbyn. One of her poems is included in the collection The Very Best of 52 and another in the newly published Oxford Backroom Poets’ anthology, Infinite Riches. She is on the editorial team of The Fat Damsel, and runs ‘Ekphrasis Poetry at the Museum’, a series of themed readings in situ of selected work inspired by exhibits at the Ashmolean in Oxford. She has a trullo in Puglia.
 
Back to i Poeti
 
 
Mandy Macdonald
 
 
IN A DREAM OF FALLING
 
endlessly repeated
i slip
helpless down the scooped col, smooth
as though you had been shaped by glaciation, curving
just there
between throat-hollow and shoulder
delicate and immense, nothing to break my
fall
 
if you would let me stop, i might
curl up there and sleep
like wildcat or foxcub in your hollows, or set out
(tiny, brave in the distance)
a cataloguer of mirages and treacherous slopes
across your skin’s trackless dunes
 
but there is no stopping
no journey, no shelter, no exquisite
calligraphy of footprints
just the fall for ever
 
 
HOLIDAY ROMANCE
 
it’s like this
quite simple really
i fancied you
i thought i did
at any rate i couldn’t forget the movement
of your hands on my back, my
cunt & your simultaneous
mouth travelling my whole landscape
the way you came up over my
body like the sun
but then i knew i didn’t fancy you
just the way you made love
or possibly the finegrained
hardness of you, like the
white & rose & russet marble stratified
above the beach we swam at
 
maybe i did fancy you
but i don’t like you
i’m sure about that, just
as i’m sure
you don’t like me
even though we did fuck
3 times in the tent on the wasteground on the dunes
in the hearing of the sea
hard & passionate
& long
scratching the fresh sunburn
nice you having a dress on
(what were you thinking of?)
& your hands under it
& my spine lifting to meet
you as though suspended
from the ridgepole
 
away in the sunstruck distance
the wild dogs
keening
 
 
UNREPENTANT
 
You were in the house with her
that night
still my husband, still my house;
I, an exile,
drawn back home after closing time, alone,
 
and there was a red light, for god’s sake,
a red light in the front bedroom
(how was I to know
it was the children’s nightlight?)
 
That rusty bike seat was in the garden,
among the weeds, bound for the tip.
I saw the red light.
I saw red.
I threw the thing. The window shattered.
The noise was tremendous.
I fled round the corner, triumphant,
raging, laughing,
crowing, howling.
 
The next day you phoned:
‘The weirdest thing happened last night: someone
chucked that old bike seat through the front window.’
‘Really? That’s terrible! Did they break in?’
Didn’t miss a beat.
 
 
AN INVITATION
 
To what shall I invite you, sweetest friend?
To dine? Ah, I remember, long ago,
banquets at one another’s houses, when
we’d make a feast of anything at all.
 
Beneath the kitchen light-bulb’s goat-eyed glare
we sliced and stirred and tasted, side by side;
your wrists, escaping from unbuttoned cuffs,
were pale as pearl, and nearly broke my heart.
 
Well, this is not the love I wanted then,
bedazzled by your beauty and your youth.
Now patient time has taught my passion sense,
has schooled me to distinguish love from love.
 
Let’s drink, then, to the serene love of friends,
Which weathers pain and tears, and never ends.
 
 
Mandy Macdonald is proud to belong to the honourable company of those the English journalist Oliver Thring has memorably called ‘deranged poetesses’ (#derangedpoetess). She is Australian and lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, trying to make sense of the 21st century. Music, poetry, good wine and gardening keep her sane. Her poems appear in print and online, for instance in Outlook Variable (Grey Hen Press, 2015), Poetry Scotland, The Fat Damsel, Snakeskin, Triadae, the Maligned Species Project, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted in the 2015 Wells Poetry Festival. The rest of the time, she sings.
 
Back to i Poeti
 
 
Maggie Mackay
 
 
CHILI PEPPER
 
Hernán Cortés gasps.
His tongue vibrates in the liquid’s pulse;
fluted red, pepper slices burst over his mouth.
The lobes swell, stuffed with gunpowder fury
–their flames scream flamenco swirl
the swell of her hips
on Spanish nights, long ago,
the heave of jasmine and orange…
 
He explodes. Heat, heat, so deep.
As she stamps, knuckles hit tables in time,
the rhythm explodes and peaks;
membranes soaked in garlic oil
yield fleshy parts fuelled with rapid-fire
staccato cracks of Palomino whip.
 
A full circle skirt spins, has him reeling.
Ole! Jaleo!    Then pedicured fingers strum, strum,
hum, finish him off in the stomach with a punch
fiercer than the peppers of the Caucasus.
 
 
THE HOPPERS, NEW YORK CITY
 
You pull me up from my painting stool,
maddening woman with your splash of noise.
The music gets to me, so I cave in.
Three times we dance around this tiny space
in silent swirls and turns and contra checks
to the frivolous swish of this Strauss waltz
past piles of cans and coal and the unheated stove,
my hand splayed on your narrow back, and flexed.
You are surprised I’m this light on these feet
and your fine legs, made famous by my art,
let me lead, bird-wife, three tiger hiss,
drive us, fixed in close circular motion,
our fights parked up, this truce unspoken.
Damn.
 
 
Maggie Mackay is a bravehearted Scot and a final year MA poetry student at Manchester Metropolitan University with work in various print and online publications including Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Bare Fiction, Obsessed with Pipework, The Fat Damsel and Three Drops from a Cauldron.
 
Back to i Poeti
 
 
Finola Scott
 
 
AVALANCHE
 
I fall loosen
slide in
to you let go
toppling in
to your heat slipping
reckless sinking
my softness meets
solid you melts
helpless I don’t know where
youbegin&iend
cocooned in our cave
I dissolve
drifts of desire engulf
I’m buried blinded
in you
 
 
TRADE DESCRIPTION
 
Bathing alone
I finish the rich gel you bought for a treat.
At first the velvet liquid froths.
For one sweet moment it caresses.
Perky bubbles blink and wink
then plop and burst sagging
sticky wetness on my legs.
 
The golden shower of oil, once
caring and nurturing like you,
has lost its gentle touch.
It fails to smooth rough patches
or tease shy nipples.
I shiver and let the spray wash the silk away
no longer savouring the pampering.
 
Too late I realise
The label promises more than we did.
 
 
TAPAS
 
What to choose?
Lush moist bites
Where to start?
Hot spicy morsels
Then what?
Velvety smooth nibbles
What next?
Salty treats
spread for our delight
pleasures for the sharing
Amuse bouche
Sweet nothings
Silky titbits
Amuse toi
Flavours savoured
Amuse moi
 
 
MATRIX
(after Firmament by Antony Gormley)
 
Hold fast
get a grip
each hollow cell grasps each
fears the gaps, the confined
spaces
that can’t be bridged, clutch
at top
soil
Metal filaments shine
Fragments take strength
from neighbours
 
All angles, different faces,
find their core
deep
Distance defines
breast to mouth to mouth
kneeling to suck
earth
connected and separate
The sum greater
 
 
MATRIX was previously published at Jupiter Artland.
 
 
Glaswegian Finola Scott’s poems and short stories are widely published in anthologies and magazines including The Ofi Press, Hark, The Lake. She is pleased to be mentored this year on the Clydebuilt Scheme by Liz Lochead, Scotland’s Makar. A performance poet, she is chuffed to be a slam-winning granny.
 
Back to i Poeti
 
 
Susan Castillo Street
 
 
TARANTELLA
 
We walk down to the village
and into a different world,
six ladies of a certain age,
 
stroll through a rainbow arch of neon light
Crowds swirl. A circle forms.
The men and women grab our hands
 
and sweep us in. We whirl
in tarantella wheel,
feel the percussion in our bones,
 
throw caution to the winds,
bare pale white necks to grinning moon,
reach avid for bright bursts of stars.
 
 
Susan Castillo Street is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita, King’s College, University of London. She has published three collections of poems, The Candlewoman’s Trade (Diehard Press, 2003), Abiding Chemistry, (Aldrich Press, 2015), and Constellations (Three Drops Press, 2016), as well as several scholarly monographs and edited anthologies. Her work has appeared in Southern Quarterly, Prole, The High Window, Ink Sweat & Tears, Messages in a Bottle, The Missing Slate, Clear Poetry, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Foliate Oak, The Yellow Chair Review, and other journals and anthologies.
 
 
Back to the Threads
 
 
The Transcanal Writers
 
The Transcanal Writers are: Nina Bennett, Linda Evans, Patricia L. Goodman, and Helen Ohlson.
 
Visit their website: TransCanal Writers.
 
 
Nina Bennett
 
 
I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW
 
We first made out to vinyl.
Stacked on a portable turntable,
45s guaranteed chastity, even teenagers
can’t do much in 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
 
By the following spring,
we graduated to albums. 15 minutes
made possible more discovery, tentative
exploration interrupted to turn the record over,
 
place the stylus precisely
on the outside edge of Strange Days,
side 2. Your hands mirrored the spiral groove
the needle traced, progressing steadily to the center.
 
Then it was the car radio,
restricted only by our curfew
and limited space between the dashboard
and the front bench seat of your parents’ station wagon.
 
8-tracks, cassettes, CDs
made things easier. No stopping
to flip the record, no hunting for albums.
Your iPOD holds songs enough to last all night.
 
 
Delaware native Nina Bennett is the author of Sound Effects (2013, Broadkill Press Key Poetry Series). Her poetry has been nominated for the Best of the Net, and has appeared or is forthcoming in publications that include Gargoyle, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Houseboat, Bryant Literary Review, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Philadelphia Stories, and The Broadkill Review. Awards include 2014 Northern Liberties Review Poetry Prize, and second-place in poetry book category from the Delaware Press Association (2014). Nina is a founding member of the TransCanal Writers (Five Bridges, A Literary Anthology).
 
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Linda Evans
 
 
WELCOME TO THE END OF THE EARTH
 
He is a good son,
doesn’t follow in dad’s drunken footsteps
mother’s thriving co-dependency.
Still, he marries crazy.
Her name, Angela
a fallen Angela
falls in and out of love.
He is a good husband,
builds her dream home
on an island full of pirates
who long for her hidden treasure.
In line they walk the plank
fall into the warmth he hasn’t felt in ages.
He is a good brother,
cares for his sick sister.
Kindness comes at a steep price.
Jealous Angela falls out of love
tosses all he owns into the hell fire
that burns in the corner of the backyard.
He is a good patient,
doesn’t cry when he hears “Leukemia”
opts out of treatment
doesn’t want to be a burden.
Tells his parents goodbye
not to look for him; they don’t
but sister does.
Finds him, in a grove of scrub pine
 
dying alone in a pop-up camper,
a gun under his pillow.
 
 
Linda Evans is a writer, in the small college town of Newark, Delaware. A member of the TransCanal Writers, she has a short horror story published in the collection Tales of Madness and the Macabre: Scary Stories for Scary People (Lulu Press, 2011). She has a poem published in Pulse, The Voice of Medicine (Dec. 2013). She performs poetry readings at various venues and has collaborated with her fellow writers on an anthology, Five Bridges, published fall of 2013. In May 2014, Five Bridges was awarded second place in the Delaware Press Association Literary Contest.
 
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Patricia L. Goodman
 
 
THE BURN
 
I just love it! he’d enthuse to her
when asked why he lit a bonfire
every chance he got. It’s better for me
if you enjoy it, too
, he’d admit. She convinced
herself she was acting the obedient wife,
but did not adore the ritual. She attended
every lighting, and when flames
leapt up, lashed the sky, she tried
to lose herself, the way she could in a Mozart
symphony or Franck’s Panis Angelicus,
but all she felt was the way it roared
in her ears, blackened
what it touched, left only ashes.
She’d even push close enough to redden
her skin. Her friends all adored fires,
sang about them, wrote about them,
like that hot new candy bar
everyone was crazy about,
that to her, tasted like tire rubber.
What was she missing? Was she afraid
of abandoning herself, stepping off
that cliff in the dark, trusting to wind?
He’s gone now and she avoids fire.
The scorched places in the earth
are growing over
with a tougher kind of grass.
 
 
POISON
after Jan Beatty
 
I carry a secret pouch of cyanide pellets/I poison the teen who lured my nine-year-old innocence into the foyer of the local candy store on Sunday/shoved my hand down his pants/made me squeeze his erection/I poison the sophomore geek who made snide remarks about my poetry because I was an old white woman/I poison the long-haired guitar player who strung me along until I refused to sleep with him/dumped me on my rear/even in a sheltered life of innocence/enough offenders/so I poison the sixteen-year-old who pulled me into the woods at fifteen/smeared my mouth with saliva before I knew what had happened/I/ too embarrassed to tell my father when he asked if he was being fresh/upset I would never be able to claim sweet sixteen and never been kissed/I poison the man in the train station in Toronto who screamed I want that little girl/while my mother clutched me in panic/until the police came/hauled him away/I’m on a roll now/I poison the grunge in Spanish class who ridiculed me because I answered all the teacher’s questions/one of my husband’s best friends who wanted to meet in a motel/a colleague whose boozed eyes ogled my cleavage when I was pregnant/I poison the father of a patient who announced too loudly that he wanted to get in my pants/I poison all the men who wanted me for my face/my body/without noticing I had a brain/I poison all the boys in high school for being afraid to date me because I was too smart/too pretty/too distant/I see the reasons now/my terror of body/of feelings/of sex/so I poison the Victorian morals that made me think all physical intimacy bad until after marriage/when it was too late/cripples me even today/because poison within rebounds/like cyanide on my own tongue.
 
 
CLIMBING
 
We blushed, just blossoming
into women, as our pretty, daredevil
 
friend shinnied up a poplar.
Its trunk was narrow enough to wrap
 
with toothpick legs, press against
the buds of womanhood. A group
 
of boys joined us, voices cracking
with the first traces of maturity,
 
eyes riveted, willing to trade their skin
for bark as her legs slid up, then
 
her arms, shorts riding higher and higher,
body pulsing in rhythm.
 
Near the top, in a climax of branches,
she stopped, smiled. We felt our own
 
pulses race, as we watched the boys squirm,
begin to joke and poke as boys do
 
when they can’t turn down their boiling.
 
 
WAN CHU IN LOVE
after Richard Jones
 
It is late, my lovely wife
and my hands are cold
from the chill
of the snow-filled night.
I have traveled late to return
to you. I warm my hands
between my eager legs,
then scrub them in our little bowl
of water. I want them
to be as clean and pure
as our love. You lie waiting—
the innocence of a young girl,
your black hair arrayed
on the pillow. When I slide
my nakedness
into your silken body I am
spring rain anointing pale peonies.
You are warm, inside and out,
and far more willing
than Su Mei, my young dancer
beside the river. Her I must
cajole and convince.
It takes all night.
 
 
TWISTED MISTER
 
He’s demented, this house sparrow,
who insists on building a nest
in the cage of my tube feeder. Nothing
like breakfast in bed. All day he tucks
dead grass into the cage, fights off
 
other males and red-bellied
woodpeckers four-times his size,
then sits on the cage, sings for a mate.
His nest breaks all natural rules—no
protection from weather, too accessible
 
to predators. Last year I tried
to discourage him, finally gave up,
let him build. The feeder went empty.
So did the nest. I guess prospective
mates didn’t like the neighborhood—
 
no place to raise kids, sort of like building
in a fire-prone canyon in California
or too close to the water for hurricanes.
This year he is still mate-less. The ladies
all give him the feather (middle primary,
 
right wing). One female watched
for a while. I swear she shook
her head, rolled her eyes. He’ll have
to get lucky—find one who, in spite
of his quirks, still considers him sexy.
 
 
Patricia L. Goodman is a widowed mother and grandmother and a graduate of Wells College with a degree in Biology and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She spent her career raising, training and showing horses with her orthodontist husband, on their farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She now lives in northern Delaware, where she enjoys writing, singing, birding, gardening and spending time with her family. Many of her poems have been published in both print and online journals, and anthologies and she was the 2013 and 2014 winner of Delaware Press Association’s Communications Contest in poetry. Her first full-length book of poetry Closer to the Ground, was a finalist in the Dogfish Head Poetry Contest, and was published in August, 2014 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. In 2015 she received her first Pushcart nomination. Much of her inspiration comes from the natural world she loves.
 
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Helen Ohlson
 
 
JACK
 
He was an ass.
On the hunt, laden with our packs,
he would hang back on the rope
going up the mountain, then run ahead,
kick up rocks and yank me silly
all the way down.
 
The only saving grace was,
with those long ears,
he looked like a mule deer at night,
tethered far from us,
a better target for grizzlies
or midnight hunters who shoot at anything.
 
At home he kicked the cats
who ran him in circles around the stake,
bucked off anyone
who tried to ride him,
and pulled me over to munch on my garden
whenever I attempted to walk him.
 
He was my husband’s purchase,
but my burden.
One day I came home,
and Jack wasn’t there.
One day my husband came home,
and I wasn’t there.
 
 
STEPPING OUT
 
I always like when men get dressed up
to come see me
I watch through my window
as they pull up in their cars
 
sit and fuss with their mirror
fix their hair in the latest style
from Lee waxing his flattop
to John pulling his long grey hair into a pony tail
 
they get out, straighten their slacks
put on a jacket
sometimes reach in to pull out flowers or candy or both
I really like that
 
George steps out of his stripped down’55 Chevy
to hand me purple orchids on prom night
Greg brings me Gary Wright’s latest album
and a bracelet he found on the sidewalk
 
Rich, his long legs in slim bell bottoms,
shows up one night with a bottle of my favorite perfume,
a gorgeous smile, and sings Englebert Humperdink songs to me
I keep the bottle for a really long time. I like it
 
Gary gives me a volume of James Joyce
then takes it back
saying I’m not smart enough to understand it
Ha! He’ll pay for that
 
Joey comes in with a Christmas tree
thoughtful enough to bring all the ornaments, too
Phil brings me cake
I really, really like that
 
These days they bring me plants instead of flowers
I don’t know why
and wine instead of candy
that’s a good change
 
Like me, they walk more slowly now,
and I think when I land in a rest home,
I’d like it if the men still come to see me
all dressed up and bearing gifts
 
I’ll hear the elevator rumble up the shaft
crack open my door just so
carefully lean my white head against the jam
and peep down the hallway
 
he hitches his belt a little higher on his belly
pats down those few renegade hairs on his head
takes a deep breath, coughs
and shuffles his feet in my direction
 
I open the door to let him enter
he reaches into his baggy pocket and pulls out
some reefer and a bottle of Viagra
I’d really like that
 
 
CATCH AND RELEASE
 
Dressed in their Cabela’s,
feathered hooks pinned to floppy hats,
they whip their lines across the water.
Expensive lures land daintily on the surface,
and flutter about to trick the dodgy trout.
 
When the wind blows through the canyon
sharp silver waves slice
across the fast running Missouri,
covering the rocks where the
fish hide
or maybe lurk in the
rushes by the bank
waiting for the next hatch of flies.
 
It isn’t the kill the men are after,
but the catch.
Like the men at bars who ask
for phone numbers,
but never call.
 
 
LONGING
 
He sleeps quietly in his mountain home.
Born into the cold,
he keeps still through
the dark nights and days.
When he wakes, he seeks the light
of my pale blue eyes.
 
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“No,” I whisper.
I twist in my sheets with such longing.
I want to fill our hunger.
Slowly, I slip out of bed and dreamwalk to the kitchen.
Whiskey and sunflower seeds for him, tea for me.
 
I return to bed, and he
slips back beneath his headstone.
The longing lasts,
like the geese riding the blue Missouri,
the huckleberries blooming in the hills.
 
 
Helen Ohlson is an award winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous print and online anthologies. She has been published in the Indie Excellent Finalist, TIMES THEY WERE A-CHANGING: WOMEN REMEMBER THE 60’s AND 70’s and the Delaware Press Association award winning, FIVE BRIDGES. Her other publications include PHILADELPHIA STORIES, THE BROADKILL REVIEW and most recently, DANCE. Helen resides in the Utopian village of Arden, Delaware, where Utopia might be up for debate, but artists and writers enjoy unabashed community support.
 
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