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http://www.donaldkolberg.com
Woven Tale Publishing Š copyright 2013 ISSN: 2333-2387
The Woven Tale Press
Vol.III #3
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Sandra Tyler Author of Blue Glass, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and After Lydia, both published by Harcourt Brace; awarded BA from Amherst College and MFA in Writing from Columbia University; professor of creative writing on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including at Columbia University, (NY), Wesleyan University (CT), and Manhattanvill College, (NY); served as assistant editor at Ploughshares and The Paris Review literary magazines, and production freelancer for Glamour, Self, and Vogue magazines; freelance editor; Stony Brook University’s national annual fiction contest judge; a 2013 BlogHer.com Voices of the Year. http://www.awriterweavesatale.com
ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Michael Dickel, Ph.D. A poet, fiction writer, essayist, photographer and digital artist, Dr. Dickel holds degrees in psychology, creative writing, and English literature. He has taught college, university writing and literature courses for nearly 25 years; served as the director of the Student Writing Center at the University of Minnesota and the Macalester Academic Excellence Center at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN). He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010). His work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art books, and online for over 20 years, including in:THIS Literary Magazine, Eclectic Flash, Cartier Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Sketchbook, Emerging Visions Visionary Art eZine, and Poetry Midwest. His latest book of poems is Midwest / Mid-East: March 2012 Poetry Tour. http://michaeldickel.info
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: FICTION: Kelly Garriott Waite Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Science Monitor, Thunderbird Stories Project, Volume One, Valley Living, The Center for a New American Dream and in the on-line magazine, Tales From a Small Planet. Her fiction has been published in The Rose and Thorn Journal (Memory, Misplaced), in Front Row Lit (The Fullness of the Moon) and in Idea Gems Magazine (No Map and No Directions). Her works in progress have been included in the Third Sunday Blog Carnival: The Contours of a Man’s Heart and Wheezy Hart. She is the author of Downriver and The Loneliness Stories, both available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. http://kellygarriottwaite.com
FLASH FICTION: T.K. Young: US-based writer; author of the flash fiction collection When We’re Afraid, and currently finalizing the upcoming “pre-dystopian” science fiction novel Chawlgirl Rising for publication. He posts original work, writing tips, news and contests at www. flashfictionblog.com. THE ARTS: Seth Apter Mixed-media artist, instructor, author and designer. His artwork has been widely exhibited, and represented in numerous books, independent zines, and national magazines. He is the voice behind The Pulse, a series of international, collaborative projects, the basis of his two books The Pulse of Mixed Media: Secrets and Passions of 100 Artists Revealed and The Mixed-Media Artist: Art Tips, Tricks, Secrets and Dreams From Over 40 Amazing Artists, both published by North Light Books. He is the artist behind two workshop DVDs: Easy Mixed Media Surface Techniques and Easy Mixed Media Techniques for the Art Journal. http://www.sethapter.com PHOTOGRAPHY: Susan Tuttle Award winning iPhoneographer and DSLR photographer. She is the author of three instruction-based books (published in the US and abroad by F+W Media, North Light Books) on digital art with Photoshop, mobile photography and DSLR photography, and mixed-media art. Her fourth book, Art of Everyday Photography: Move Toward Manual and Make Creative Photos (about DSLR photography and mobile photography) was recently released by North Light Books and has been a best-seller in its category on Amazon. She is currently the Technical Advisor for Somerset Digital Studio Magazine. http://susantuttlephotography.com
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Dyane Forde Author of forthcoming Rise of the Papilion Trilogy: The Purple Morrow (Book 1) http://droppedpebbles.wordpress.com Lisa A. Kramer, Ph.D Freelance writer, editor, theatre director, and arts educator. She has published non-fiction articles in theater journals, as well articles aimed at young people for Listen Magazine. Her fiction is included in Theme-Thology: Invasion published by HDWPBooks. com. She is the director of a writers’ workshop From Stage to Page: Using Creative Dramatics to Inspire Writing. http://www.lisaakramer.com
Our staff is an eclectic mix of editors with keen eyes for the striking. So beware–they may be culling your own site for those gems deserving to be unearthed and spotlit in The Woven Tale Press.
Editor’s Note: The Woven Tale Press is a monthly culling of the creative web, exhibiting the artful and innovative. Enjoy here an eclectic mix of the literary, visual arts, photography, humorous, and offbeat. The Woven Tale Press mission is to grow Web traffic to noteworthy writers and artists–contributors are credited with interactive Urls. Click on an Url to learn more about a contributor. If there is a “Featured!” button, it will link you back to a special feature on The Woven Tale Press site. To submit go to: http://thewoventalepress.net
http://danieltrindadescheer.blogspot.com
D D ii g g ii tt a a ll Art Art 1
El Vie
ejo
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Figure (3) Velos
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eltrindadescheer.blogspot.com
Luminaria
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Muros
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rindadescheer.blogspot.com
Preambulo
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The Distance of / to Sleep
Contrary to mathematics and science, the distance between points A and B is not a straight line nor a constant even – rather, subject to many shifts, variables that pull the horizon inside you – out from your seat /consciousness. Look, you mustn’t be so alarmed or afraid. The angle of sky and its gracious cloud-cover imbuing sunlight when your face magnetized to chestnut earth dips when you forage your disconsolate secrets – those things you hide behind all the doors you close 1 after another – The turn-on of the closet. You there, I see The speed of your chariot-body glass-metal coach when you drive the gas pedal down and your heel rips the dark carpet and all those magenta peonies un-bloom your mouth. Then the variable of trust – your trust of yourself and the other(s). Your bleeding bank account and roster of grievances. How you count them and too many other things that move and cannot be counted. I know. How the counting (one of those many games you play) orients you Vertical. Thank God. But after too many sets of hands of hours of days of hours upon hands of hours the thoughts fall out of holes even though it’s hard to breathe. Then the subsequent gathering of Figures and attendant shadow(s) lurking you behind the house. Where the birds give up their dreams of forest. Yes, it all starts to fall out – leaving you there. Mopping up goose-down at the gloaming what your friends say shall pass and they wait for you – fingers attenuated – the bones of sea birds bleached in the sun. The sea lost / left in a dream you cannot dream mountains or sea or leaving.
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Though salt in your mouth and forest.
Fleshed the winter house cage of bones aches to be fleshed back from its rusted sculpture left out in the snow and ice too many seasons without words touch or sun just the Artic winds ripping the core hollow at the solo cusp of the universe not beautiful in its rancor not brave aches to be flesh for the artist’s long fingers of dawn drawing spinning gold bronze peach pink opalescent cloud glow in the mirrors of clouds lost in the pond with dark swans who have given up their glory to sun to sleep with their necks arched into each other’s down feathers on the waters of self-destruction with the old woman her wild weeping willow hair who comes to sit but forgets to feed them to be coaxed out of such ravaged hiding in the cave of the singular here hurt bird trust the hand to cup lift to breast to coo be spoken sung to sleep now in the deep rivers of Lethe without thought without the memory of all lost in the storm where there was no shelter no mother no brother no memory of moon glow no Book of Wisdom no pages of proclamation path to home coaxed beckoned stroked by the long brushes of horsehair fallen queens betrayed by rook the knight the pawn forgotten goddesses eyelashes of broken dolls whose eyes don’t shut at night for sleep here here on the canvas cusp of being come here jittery bird in the storm of January into the night of savages a new nest of tiniest twig dried flower milkweed sunflower petal yellow lemon light not a sunglare but a lifting into early daylight lemon glow warm in the glass coach chariot traversing the horizon’s promise of distance tomorrow the agenda of awakening not to reason not to fear’s grapple at the neck at the gutted core painted in lemon light day glow brave not alone at the cusp of the singular the cathedral of sky poised arrested by light and sudden music movement swirling colours and ink being in the mirror of river of remembering a bravery without letter without sound fleshed into fleeting perfection of perception a film of golden memory copper pennies thrown down a wishing well amber eyes arrested in gaze at the camera the other long fingers probing nectar from the hollows the swell of river and milk from the mouth of the dark cave aquiver with awakening with touch the brush of hair flowing willow the trust of sky to fall back into night into pillow arms here elbow to elbow lost swans
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http://www.donaldkolberg.com Abandon
Steel Mesh Sculptures
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Abstract forms created in steel mesh open up visual planes; the inherent open nature of the material allows us to see the front of pieces from a si of view. Planes of form background to foregr back again, creating a along the surface and the mass of the sculptu
– Dona
Feat
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Sorrow
e back and ingle point move from round and movement d through ure.
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ald Kolberg
tured! Torso
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Meditation Sculpture
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Steel mesh
allows the artist to play with the spatial elements in ways that move visual form from stationary to dynamic concepts. Shadows created by these sculptures appear three dimensional, complementing the original structure of the art. Viewed together they are a dance of form and movement –Donald
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Kolberg
Waiting for an Answer
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For me, art is alw the relationship betwe – Donald Kolberg
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Glass Sculptures
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City
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y Block
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http://www.fourcornersdesign.blogspot.com I’d heard about the practice of deciding on a word for the year. I liked this idea. A kind of touchstone. So my word for 2015 is actually two words:
Dig Deep
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Within the first months of this new year, I am trying hard to stay true to my words: Dig Deep. To look beyond the surface.
Out of the Box
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http://www.mbshaw.com
Branching Out 19 19
E
NC A U S T I C S
Elemental
http://www.mbshaw.com
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Circular
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Tarnishing Red
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Fogged
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Unbuttoned
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http://www.jo-ely.co.uk
The Thief The old man softly blinks his eye and turns a corner, into the child he had been, and there’s nothing in his face to note that transformation, only a blinking eyelid. An old man’s gentle amazement at the end. His cover slips away, revealing rib bones fanning outward like the long teeth of a comb. The nurse switches every light off as she goes out, until there’s only a thin, low gleam. Flickering mottled bulb, at the far end of the corridor. But before she goes, the nurse whisks the curtain back between him and his hospital roommate. A hook snags and droops on the runner– her face appears suddenly in the gap. Her dark iris-less eyes remind the old man of his sister, then she turns away. Of course the nurse is about twenty-five years too young to be his sister, and he knows that. Not that it matters. Last year he thought he’d seen his sister in a ten-year-old girl swinging so high, her mother gasped and clutched her handbag. The whole swing-frame had shuddered, and the other children shrieked and got off. But the girl had gone on swinging like that. He can still recall how her left shoelace, undone, whipped back and forth, how the toes of her school shoes, pointed skyward, were scuffed, and that the child’s face was grim and determined, wind-blown red. He’d thought she would never fall. That a girl like that could never. The second time when he thought he had seen his sister was in the face of a middle-aged woman, looking harassed and purposeful at the wheel of a Volkswagen stuck fast in traffic–two children were fighting in the back of her car. The third time he’d preferred to forget, but could not. From the passenger seat of his son’s car, he had seen an elderly woman walking her shopping trolley down the edge of the highway. She was barefoot and her ankles bandaged. Pushing her worldly goods, she wore a strange expression, one both amazed and serene. None of them were her. All of them were her. There is soft groaning from behind the curtain. And now the nurse whisks the fabric di25 vider back on its busted runners once more. Takes a hold of the steel trolley and tries
to turn it. The back wheel, twisted, squeaks and complains. When she’s got the trolley where she wants it, she sets the brake. She looks at the old man and then away again. It turned out later that his sister had taken not just the family’s rent money, but the grocery money, the savings. Every penny, down to the last dirty downtrodden tiny coin. She must have searched pockets, purses, floorboards. Scrabbled in back cupboard jars, that’s what they had said in the village afterwards. They had called her The Thief. There had been a small uproar in the village, on account of the money and the family left without a pot to piss in. The old man’s three younger brothers, were parceled up and divided between family across the neighboring counties, grandparents, a maiden aunt in town, an estranged and childless second cousin. His mother hadn’t cried until they’d come for the baby. A less than three-months-old girl, red teething patches on her cheeks, small dimples set deep in her elbows and knees, soft lines in the chubby backs of her knees. Wide-eyed. He can remember the strange hands untangling her tiny fingers from her mother’s dusty grey curls on that last day. He doesn’t remember what came after the untangling moment. Only a sort of long and bovine keening. You think it can’t be coming from you, but it is. The nurse takes two small steps toward him, puts a hand on his forehead and mops his face with a tissue drawn from her apron pocket . “Now now,” she says, clucking, “What is all this noise for?” She checks his pulse. Raises her left hand to signal somebody from the corridor. He can’t see what she sees. Only the white strip light above his hospital bed. He can only see his own black lashes clutch and un-clutch the light. He thrusts out his bony left hand, grips the frame of his bed. His hospital roommate has been coughing. Sputum gleams on his bottom lip. Beneath the man’s beard, there’s a lump the size of a snake’s egg. He puts his hand to his throat, jabs at the air between himself and the nurse. The nurse, unfazed, glances his way before noisily scribbling notes on her clipboard. The man mouths the shape of a word, only no sound, just the flash of a jagged white tooth. He falls asleep suddenly, bizarrely, his pointing finger drawing an invisible line 26 down the air.
The nurse checks her watch, leaves. The old man listens to the tap of her shoes down the long corridor; blue tile, white tile, blue tile, white tile, blue....He has to look away at the now still man in the next bed. He closes his eyes. The old man’s sister had been hard, that’s what they’d always told him. And maybe he’d even believed that for a while. But the lines were redrawn differently, as the years passed. The past shifted into new lines, shadows appeared in strange places. He’d seen her getting on the bus. He had been around eleven years old when his sister ran. It had been a pivotal moment for him. Her leaving that way. And he’d made his mind that he would leave too. He had watched her go. He had felt the rhythm of those tires bumping over rucked, rich earthy road, as she’d clattered slowly and clumsily away. Even now the old man dreams of bus wheels rolling, sticking, sliding in the country earth, the rubble-strewn roads, dipping and sticking in the ruts and cracks. There’s an ancient promise in the leaving–a replenishment. As he’d stood there in that cold light watching her leave, the bus heaving against earth, watching until it was a black dot in the distance,his fingers numb and frozen, he’d felt her shimmering–and he’d known he would leave too. Like his sister before him he hadn’t left the village, he’d fled. She’d led the way. She’d marked it with pathfinders, dropped softly in the dark that hung beneath the children in those days. Even now, sinking back against crisp hospital pillows and sheets, he can see the bus rolling away, gathering pace, as the window panes screamed and rattled, as she took off. Mapless and harsh-lit into her future, what did she feel? Everybody had known that his sister was hurting somehow. Knew it deep down in their bones, though they told themselves that it couldn’t possibly be so, that. And yet there had always been small signs of damage in her. As clear as the chips and the cracks in a vase. No one had spoken up for her, and perhaps it’s that way still, he thinks. That strange dark magic of denial, like casting stones instead of seeds, because all those village ladies, wearing their best hats, in church had bowed their heads, as if to say, “Seeds I tell you, Seeds that we are planting here.”
27 And then the next day their men headed back out to the fields, none of them stopping in
their tracks, the rusting tractor revving dangerously, and not one of them had dug in their heels to ask himself: “What about that child?” and, “What can be done?” No one pulled those words out of their parched, dry throats. Only looked about them, at the miles and miles of hard-wrought, miss-sown land. And so it went on. The relationships between the families in the village being sown too, like the fields. A hundred years or more of plowing between folks, then there were the hedgerows, of course. Your piece and mine, the fences. All the fences. There’s your cow that grazed my sheep field fifty years since, and we’ve barely mended the fence between those long dead animals. The joints and joists and hinges on the gate. The gate is falling off its rusty hinges, there are other fragile things here. Above all there is how the land lies, there’s the long account of what’s been lost and won between us neighbors. The small guilts and the debts. And so everyone knows about ‘The girl,” of course, yet “No one knows a thing.” And truly believing that they don’t. Because there were no words for that, not yet. And so the unspeakable thing could gather in the silence. “Let us pray” he remembers the vicar saying on the Sunday after she left. And the village had gone on. As if she’d never been, his sister. Blameless, they believed themselves to be, right to the end. Quite blameless. Trackless as the rucked, rich land of his childhood. He sighs, scratches at the shiny hospital wall behind him, peels a little whitewash out from under his nail. Forget it, he tells himself. Forget her now, she’s gone. Only there are things he can’t forget. There are things he won’t. She must have waited for her moment then, he thinks. That golden child, that “Thief,” but that harsh-lit and hard little girl, who of course wasn’t hard at all, but only broken, waited ‘til her whole life seemed like an infinite pause, vast intake of breath. And it is now, now, and she was strange and wild, and that moment must have seemed a scream with a hand clapped over it, and the stumbling, scrabbling, from the rotten floorboard to the crack under the bench, her mother’s coat pocket and the seam of her grandmother’s hat. The crumbling hole in the skirting board/ And all the time her watching the crack under the door like that, listening for the sound of a boot in the gravel outside, and then fingers freezing up with fear, skittering about the cottage like a nervous animal, and when it came, when the door was flung open, cold 28 winter sunlight poured into the cottage and she pushed her brother aside, went tearing
t down the front path. Wrestled their gate. Caught her nail-bitten fingers on the rusting latch, skittered out into the country lane and seemed to vanish for a moment. He’d chased after. The bus had been timed perfectly. The country bus that was always late or was much too early. Running toward the bus, she’d stumbled against a boulder hidden in the long grass at the roadside, cracked her ankle but she didn’t seem to the running boy, to feel it. Because at the last, it turned out that she was running for her life, and she knew that. Running for everything there might ever have been or will be soon. Stolen coins noisy as she ran, chink, clink and clatter, rattle. Bruising her hip. And he’d thought that she stood a chance then. In the big city. A girl like his sister. Sur-viv-or. Roll the word out on your tongue. There had been a crack in the old bus window, and he wonders now if she had felt the cold wind rushing past her ears? He wonders if the stolen coins had felt cold against her hip, if they had weighted her down. This is what it feels like to survive, he wants to tell that pale girl child at the old bus window. And he’d rooted for his sister with everything he’d had, because he knew there would be no mercy if they caught her. “She’d better not show her face around here again,” the family had said afterwards. But in her sharp breach of the rules, she’d obeyed an older and a much greater law: Run from harm, Child. He believes now that his sister took the money so that she couldn’t come back. Because sometimes you can’t trust your feet, they veer and circle ‘til you end at your beginning, the last sigh rolling back to meet the first one coming. But she’d severed it, his sister. A neat, savage incisor through the last fraying ends of love, and saved herself.
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http://cathleenbailey.weebly.com
Miss Black and White Doll 3030
Cuyahoga Forest Spiritx Quilt
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http://cathleenbailey.weebly.com
Cocoon Felted, Beaded Crochet Cocoon Felted, Beaded Crochet
Detail Detail
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http://michaeldickel.info
Yesterday—a Poem of Remembrance Parents of an infant girl prayed in thanks at the Kotel after so many years believing they “didn’t merit” a child— the weather nice, reasonably warm for October.
A goat standing on the roof of a yellow shed saw.
At the light rail stop an angry man turned the wheel and sped his car into people waiting.
A small red bird rested on his shoulder, the air filled with color— speckled bubbles, sefirot of an artist’s imagination contracting and expanding to burst.
The three-month old girl sprang into the air when the car her stroller struck. But she did not land— only her clothes fell down like white, dropped petals on the table-cloth.
The weather was nice for October and his love for children too great to let her fall. It was the only thing that he could do, one last painting that he wanted to give you.
An old man-nanny fell for her, in Montana I think it was. His body collapsed to earth. His spirit grabbed hers. He carried her into the sky as his brain bled for her.
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He turned blue, grew wings and flew—a violin under his chin.
In memory of Pansy Bradshaw
L a n d o f
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Hyperborean form—frosted by pastels, disturbed by shadow strands—calls unending dusk-dawn in sacred colors. An indeterminate matrimony desires fire inside a wood cabin, order restored where upheaval emerges from swells against the sky. Yet, the stroked shape and blended palette structure a syntax of blood, a semantics of nerves inflaming lonely twilit-snow, liminal moments of memory with promises of maize-tinted nourishment, hope from the midnight sun.
Greenland Painting by Judith Appleton
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Poetry as Image
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After Four
Absence
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Dragons
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Lightplay
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Parsley
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Stillness
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ISSN: 2333-2387