Invisible Bear, Volume 3 by The Invisible Bear

The Invisible Bear POETRY & VISUAL ART REVIEW

2017, Volume Three Durham, North Carolina

The Invisible Bear POETRY & VISUAL ART REVIEW

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CONTENT EDITORS

Jessica Q. Stark I. Augustus Durham Raelynne Hale John Paul Stadler Daniel Stark

COVER ART

“Sign” Yasuaki Okamoto

Summer 2017, Vol. 3

The Invisible Bear is published annually in the summer. Address all correspondence to The Invisible Bear Attn: Jessica Q. Stark, 328 Allen Building, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708. Single copies $5.95. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Invisible Bear Attn: Jessica Q. Stark, 328 Allen Building, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708. All rights reserved by the authors; all poems and artworks in the magazine are works of imagination. The Invisible Bear features poetry, visual art, and occasional scholarly criticism or interviews. We do not accept hard copy submissions. Please submit according to our guidelines on our website to thebearinvisible@gmail.com. The Invisible Bear accepts simultaneous submissions, but all work must be previously unpublished. The Invisible Bear is partially supported by annual funds affiliated with Duke University’s English department graduate poetry working group. For more information about The Invisible Bear and submission guidelines, please visit:

www.theinvisiblebear.com

CONTENTS

VISUAL ART 9

No Littering Yasuaki Okamoto

The Name Repeated in a Dream Bill Wolak

15 Coexistence Yasuaki Okamoto 16-17 Sup Rio Aubry Taylor

POETRY

Sur-Object U-460, Sur-Object U-458 Duane Locke

Animal Collector Yasuaki Okamoto

Depth of 60 Ft Yasuaki Okamoto

Sur-Object U-459 Duane Locke

The Secret of Nightfall Bill Wolak

Sur-Object U-424 Duane Locke

Life in the Concrete Jungle, Water Tank in a Desert Yasuaki Okamoto

20-21 Casualty E. Withers

Flare Richard King Perkins II

Woman and Bird Matthew Woodman

12-13 November 9, 2016 Angela Shaw-Thornburg 14

Caught in a Caption Haji Khavari & Roger Sedarat

16-17 Sup Rio Aubry Taylor Missed Connection: To the Go-Go Unicorn in the NoHo Denny’s Jeremy Casabella

A Speed Bump’s Elegy Ryan Simmons

Father’s Day Bear Kosik

26-27 Touring William Conelly 29

Zen on Main Andrés Amitai Wilson

30 Trauma(s) Jigisha Bhattacharya 31

Metaphor of My Wasteland Shola Balogun

32-33 Six Tweets from Washington Michelle Hartman 34-35 Strange Geography Michael Strand 36

We invent our time machine, neglecting to account Jonathan Greenhause

Cinnamon Drop Robert Beveridge

INTERVIEWS 40-45 Little Corner Tête-à-Tête: A Conversation with Safiya Sinclair I. Augustus Durham 46-47 Artist Spotlight:Yasuaki Okamoto

EDITORS’ NOTES

The Editors of The Invisible Bear collectively dedicate this issue to the parents whose children have been taken by the state, to #blacklivesmatter, to Standing Rock, to those who speak truth to power, and to the hardworking creators in the world who brighten up our glum reality.

***

Dear Reader, I am so thrilled to usher in the third issue of The Invisible Bear. In this volume, you’ll find a strange geography of pieces that converse with one another on the tense recollection (and fantasies) of human memory, the pinpricks of loss and trauma, and the unexpected solace found in the absurd, the estranged, and in the figure of the exile. It is during this time—a moment rife with political tension and an alarming din of public bigotry—that we seek art for its most prized potential: to disturb, to re-imagine, and to bend the confines of our current realities towards something grasping, complicated, new. I invite you to sit with these pieces long enough to allow your own sight to wander. What do you see? Warmly, Jessica Q. Stark Editor-in-Chief The Invisible Bear

FLARE by Richard King Perkins II You unknotted the sun a lesser vastness solar magma which becomes the the reflection on your teeth you released your wild shadows to the reclusive frontier where we had once lain unknown to anyone hidden at high noon you pantomimed avian trade winds plummeting through humid handholds day barely black you hummed in grayest gloom You gave away an ounce of restraint the scent of asphalt driveways you sloughed off a thin spindly glint burrowing into a condensation of failure and drew back your lips killing the angels of your lesser self sweating contempt and little yellow flowers sun bleach will someday cleanse allâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; you descend into optics smiling.

NO LITTERING by Yasuaki Okamoto

THE NAME REPEATED IN A DREAM by Bill Wolak

WOMAN AND BIRD by Matthew Woodman

after Rufino Tamayo’s painting “Mujer y pájaro,” 1944 Hung so it would hang we carry cages to convince ourselves we’re free to fly from one appointment to the next poorly scrawled scheduled bullet the windows allow us to work under natural light

November 9, 2016 by Angela Shaw-Thornburg

DuBois turns over in his grave: All, nevertheless, flutter round it curiously or compassionately They say, I know, excellent colored man your blood I smile reduce the simmer A problem is a strange experience peculiar babyhood a wee wooden schoolhouse a vast veil a blue sky great wandering shadows fine contempt dazzling opportunities theirs, not mine. reading, healing, telling; or tasteless sycophancy silent hatred mocking distrust of everything white waste in prison-house walls Stubborn sons of night must plod darkly or be stone The Negro is revelation One dark body torn asunder lost He would not bleach his soul. 12

This, then, is the end. Black artâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; paradox of his own flesh and blood a-dancing and a-singing He could not articulate In the days of bondage Slavery was the sum the cause the root of all Years have passed Still A poor race in a land of dollars bastards prostitutes servants, half-men burning the American Republic the American fairytale let me tell again.

CAUGHT IN A CAPTION by Haji Khavari

translated from Persian by Roger Sedarat The artist in prison for turning members of parliament into monkeys and cows reproduces her drawings on horded paper cups, arguing with the animals who put her in this cage.

COEXISTENCE by Yasuaki Okamoto

SUP by Rio Aubry Taylor

MISSED CONNECTION: TO THE GO-GO UNICORN IN THE NOHO DENNYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S by Jeremy Casabella

Nectar on the opalescent belly of a moth colored desert-full-of-lavender or burlin-abalone-shell purple glistens with that same dim thrum of the powdered glitter over your skin like sun on the tongue of a hummingbird or migrant bee from when there were beesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; as it unsettles off each polleny bud.

SUR-OBJECT U-460 (top) SUR-OBJECT U-458 (bottom) by Duane Locke

CASUALTY by E. Withers I simply cannot fathom the death of Julia Roberts: she’s always been here. It’s like the time Kurt Loder skewered Jewel’s book of poems for misuse of casualty: I won’t even entertain it. “Semantic drift,” Jewel says, yanking with a quiet violence at the lavalier. “Casualty could easily become casualness. Take literally. It means figuratively. It’s completely wrong but literally no one cares.” “You did your best,” Kurt says, checks his Nokia 5110. Jewel cups her left breast, skirts the tart web as if groping past loose buttermints at the bottom of a purse. “My loyalty is not to some exclusionary club of latte-sucking introverts but to the written word, itself,” she says, parroting a mostly flattering Amazon review (June 8, 2002). Kurt smirks.

“See, here’s your problem, Loder. You’re subscribing to a false sense of permanence. Think about this: MySpace loses 40 million visitors per month in the relative blip of 3 years. They redesign the interface, your comments disappear, and nothing’s left except a folder full of screencaps and a fistful of air and even Timberlake’s a fuck-up and I still cannot remember my Photobucket password. Can we say for sure our memories are real?” “I find your theory dubious,” Kurt says. “I had to get a new phone number to get rid of Google Voice. That’s something I won’t soon forget.”

ANIMAL COLLECTOR byYasuaki Okamoto

A SPEED BUMP’S ELEGY by Ryan Simmons You decelerate When you meet me. As far as you’re concerned, I’m just a road block. For me, you’re tethered To the ground. As far as you’re concerned, I’m only ballast. I’m just here to slow you down, With good intentions. As you pass, we kiss; Then you’re gone and speeding. You leave a mark On my cold stone.

FATHER’S DAY by Bear Kosik We were sitting in three Adirondack chairs under tulip trees. Dad was on my right. My brother was on my left. No, maybe I wasn’t in the middle then. I’ll get it right later. There were black tree ants, the big ones, everywhere. We had them at the house too, when I was growing up. Our dog would follow them, nose to the ground. Just wondered where the ants were going, I guess. It’s funny. Tulip poplars make everything seem so small. Mottled bark, so tall, the light orange and green flowers littering the ground beneath them. I’ve never seen a flower fall from a tulip tree. They are way up on the branches and then they’re there on the ground. Only the ants are normal size under those trees. Dad was on my right. And in front of us, low clouds, clinging to the hills, came toward us. We watched. No, we weren’t watching, really. We were sitting in three Adirondack chairs under tulip poplars. Dad was on my left. My brother was beside him on the other side. And there was a fourth chair that I forgot about.

The horizon, the hills, the view we weren’t watching disappeared as the storm approached. The rain cut suddenly through the towering trees. The ants moved quickly to the ground among the fallen flowers. We ran from the torrent we hadn’t seen coming.

DEPTH OF 60 FT by Yasuaki Okamoto

TOURING by William Conelly Crater Lake, Oregon

Clammed in a rental car, climbing scrubby highlands, we speak of settling beside the boulder stands scarved in white water race, as if we’d never settled all the years back east, just coped, and somehow wrestled woodlands into balance with our marriage prospects, nothing in abundance but work and thoughtful sex. And now we’ve got a son would here be different? Would the worn lava spills that rank the Rogue’s descent pool evenness of mind— samadhi—on a plot with goats and hens? Make east a western afterthought? We speak as if the here or there of anyplace explains how people rise, through time, to states of grace, people themselves aside: imagine outdoor showers after lofted days, long evening reading hours, 26

while down the lava steeps stalk mountain lions and bears, discretely charmed, like us, in rough but fertile pairs…

Ahead by half a mile, your sister rides with James, and husband Jacob, playing chatty travel games: ‘Is that a manger or a manager?’ she asks. ‘A gallon bowl will hold how many one pint flasks?’ At nine, James’ chore is still primarily to laugh. ‘Which has the longer tongue then, zebra or giraffe?’ ‘The one,’ crows James, ‘that takes more licks!’ Above the wheel, Jake bares and flips his tongue. His wife remains genteel, as we would do, resigned that Jake is Peter Pan with a vasectomy— not the pure family man. We slow into a queue, turn at the Rim Road sign, and there’s no lake in sight, no crater verge to climb. We park the cars. We slog an acre’s worth of puddles, scale the sodden snow plowed into chest-high muddles,

and then observe the caldron: lapis blue waters rounded by escarpments, clear as sky, as deeply founded.

we’ll say we sensed the havoc coming… If we did, we couldn’t gauge the dross a married landscape hid.

In mirrored rooms we judge the Infinite’s disguises: as if reflection were the life love energizes.

III

Here, pretty postcards say, a dome of magma grew to mountain height before it cracked, convulsed and blew twelve cubic miles of innards outwards, pumice, ash, a pyroclastic surf— a province’s width of trash— only to sink and settle in this massive bowl, pooling snowmelt and rain for us to drink in whole: the gods’ own chalice this, too great to be refused, dangerous to possess. The human stands bemused. The family needs to eat. Chatter starts up again, tectonics, magma, pig iron core: let ‘em all go spin. James rides shotgun with us, the long decline toward town, while Jake continues as his consort’s feckless clown: He speeds, slows ‘til I pass, waves, speeds, and plays cockhorse right to our motel door. Years after their divorce,

SUR-OBJECT U-459 by Duane Locke

ZEN ON MAIN by Andrés Amitai Wilson The wall counts breath in white squares of tile, in black squares of tile, in mortar mind. Toes graze cushion, Knees root buckwheat. Wooden Buddha flickers In winter flames and wick. Every few minutes— The chime begins. and shadows flicker across main street. Do they see us dancing from the windows— fist to solar plexus, feet, gliding as ghosts above main street? Do they feel us sensing them with feet tucked beneath bottoms, pelvis, coronary throne, encircling the belly? The hara quickens. Then, squeezes out (though never completely) death. In fact, who is “they?” Who is “us?” And who is “who?” And what is “what?”

TRAUMA(S) by Jigisha Bhattacharya I. In the middle of my sophomore venture, I never knew how to unbreathe masculine vowels with such languish. I wished you had known my fetish for rolled sleeves and fold chins or roots of red crystallized in bougainvillea struck Capricorn trees. Now that we have come unscathed to the riverine highway with muddy cheeks, reminding me Of your blade tongue, staccato through green veins; where the peacock shed a monsoon feather today, or maybe two. The only voice in your headâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; of the lepidopterist, the color-collector. II. Your everyday trauma half-touched me lately. Tangible, almost, yet so slippery 30

like the sudden childhood odor in an ever so alien city. Tangible, almost, like I could reach out to your military existence in my hypnic jerks. I wish I were a part of regular makeshift shelters. You build out of the still-living. And poetry stinks of segments vaguely interwoven as yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blood-moon is indeed inside us, green.

METAPHOR OF MY WASTELAND by Shola Balogun The chorale of the balladist in the Akropolis is the metaphor of my wasteland. There is communion in the silence of the millstones and in the dimness of the eyes. There is union in the absence of songs and in the ravages of the sun. Restless run of the unrest at the polling booths is for rice. My people pant after rice. The beggars and the abandoned street children grope for oil lamps as darkness draws the veil over their plea to the state. Patrol wagons rid the streets of probing eyes of the poor. There is bond in solitude and in the limits when the heart envy the birds. The loneliness of the homeless is the metaphor of exile.

SIX TWEETS FROM WASHINGTON by Michelle Hartman I. Newly elected Congress members slid into the city in limos so large they were more a car with a glandular condition. #Freeride II. Booze, blow and bucks so plentiful several new members could easily approach a banshee and ask for show tunes. #Feelingnopain III. Last night they rolled out the new agenda so aggressive some of the newbies went outside to vomit up things they havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t eaten yet. #Werule IV. Motivational speaker today: Never look back all youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll see is lost opportunities to help creeping up on you with bad intentions. #Sellyoursoul V. The fashion is latest, the spouses well groomed, but Nature is still red in tooth and claw and many feet here are cloven. #DancewiththeDevil

VI. Every meeting is prayerfully opened by distortions of humanity; old stone monsters carved on churches and cathedrals across Europe. #Falseprophetsrock

THE SECRET OF NIGHTFALL by Bill Wolak

STRANGE GEOGRAPHY by Michael Strand

dedicated to #blacklivesmatter

The boy, saltine white, shuttles cans into beige plastic grocery bags, shell chalk dust rising like fine smoke from the access road to Paradise Plaza. In younger years, the sign was a parrot, “Paradise Plaza,” outlined in not-quite pink and green, would-be pastels but darkened in shade and dulled in color, any pretense of loudness removed to fit the shell whiteness of the place, and better yet, the customers that visited. In go the bananas, Chiquita stamped, imported from places where United Fruit had long laid claim; tariffs layered like bruised skin and soaked with sugary syrup like those plastic cupped pears you ate as a child, your over eager mouth slurping down the sweet liquid once the fruit was gone. Bags of Domino thud into the bags, white and otherworldly in the inside, something to be trafficked, the sugar refined as my little green apron, me shuffling out the old folks and rattling grocery carts into lines like a rickety old master counting heads. When Justin Hamilton’s Auntie and mother shopped, I forgot all pretense of Suzy’s perfect cashier braces, her curves that teased me into fictions—how one night, I might be her pick; instead, long faces, old and wound too tightly, 34

some over tanned but white, still, in their shrewd determinations, pierced the walls of the store when two black bodies passed through the adjacent checkout line. Sarasotaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pride, their boy, would play Division 1, and all be damned in that white washed paradise, broken and bereaved. My bike ride home, sun soaked and pavement hot once cost me: gallon of Publix milk hanging poorly from its handlebar fulcrum, the grocery bagâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tendrils pulling apart like elastic tendons of meat to be eaten. Crack. The bag split, white pooling on the sidewalk, me cursing at frayed plastic, smelling milk souring on my skin. Cadillacs piloted by, by white haired pocket books. A crematorium cool grocery hiding in plain sight hushed other boys in strange geographies who cracked more than milk

riding home on their bikes,

or just never made it at all, their color running into color pooling red down the pavement. 35

WE INVENT OUR TIME MACHINE, NEGLECTING TO ACCOUNT by Jonathan Greenhause for the speed at which we move through space; so one by one, travelers are sent backwards towards the age they’re most attracted to: The life of Jesus or the Enlightenment, the Paleolithic age or World War II; but then they materialize in the farthest reaches of our galaxy, desolate places through which our Earth’s long since raced. Their lifeless forms accumulate, these millions of adventurers happy to risk their lives for a chance to alter the course of everything. This basic miscalculation of space appears blatantly obvious, yet scientists somehow miss it: Some opt to go themselves to the storied era of their desire, & their first sensation’s an acute dearth of oxygen, an awkward weightlessness they’re instantly trapped within. A lucky few wind up on a planet similar to ours but are left dangling miles high in the atmosphere or buried within rock, vaporized by magma. We’re inexorably a product of our own time & place, subject to painful deconstruction when separated from our causes & effects. The ongoing tragedy lies in our inability to discern this, how we continue to launch ourselves into the backwards void we thought we’d skillfully outwitted.

SUR-OBJECT U-424 by Duane Locke

LIFE IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE

WATER TANK IN A DESERT by Yasuaki Okamoto 38

CINNAMON DROP by Robert Beveridge The last thing you remember is a thought about how fine it is to be in a bright bar with the music turned up and a shotglass in your hand. The photographic evidence shows the heelmarks on the table are yours and that, yes, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re natural.

LITTLE CORNER TÊTE-À-TÊTE: A CONVERSATION WITH SAFIYA SINCLAIR by I. Augustus Durham IAD: Early on in the book, you give an overview of how the name of the collection emerges: “The word ‘cannibal,’ the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, comes from the word caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh and from the word ‘Caribbean’ originated. By virtue of being Caribbean, all ‘West Indian’ people are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage.” How do you understand your own cannibalism, and how is the book itself a cannibal? SS: How do I understand my own cannibalism—do you mean in the linguistic sense? IAD: Sure, in whatever sense you think emerges. SS: I have been thinking a lot about savagery, and how people of color, certainly, in the media are labeled as “savage”; we are bombarded with these images of us as savages, the black body as a threat, and what does that mean—to be a savage? So I was engaging with this idea quite a bit, and I found this etymological link between the words “cannibal” and “Caribbean”, and it was very obvious then that this was the title of the book and this was the frame of the book, even if I hadn’t always known that when I was writing the earliest poems. I wanted to explore the fact that when Columbus came this archipelago and encountered the natives, the ones who were resistant and fought him, he classified them Caribes; and the natives who were kinder to him he classified Taínos. And so this idea of the identification of the other through this western, white gaze is a really potent one to think about because then that means to be caribes or caribal or cannibal or savage means to resist the oppressor. And if to be savage and cannibal means to resist the oppressor, then that’s how I understand my own cannibalism—I am cannibal. And the book itself is trying to resist the language of the oppressor, which is English, just as much as I’m trying to define myself while thinking and writing in that language, while unravelling all of that as a Caribbean poet in a postcolonial world. IAD: In the poem “Pocomania,” you do a sustained riff on the parent, and I cannot help but hear resonances of melancholy. Does the location of the parent signal a kind of loss, a loss one is always trying to repair? And if so, how does Cannibal engage in that reparative work? SS: Thinking about loss, as it pertains to a parent, seems to always happen for me, on the page anyway, through the father. I have always felt this disconnect for societal or cultural reasons between the father and the daughter, certainly in my family life and 40

in my childhood. It is a theme I am always circling back to in the poems. I don’t know if that circling or ruminating that I am doing is reparative in any way, maybe in the moment of writing the poem, but it is something I keep coming back to. So even if the wound is repaired, but for a moment, it gets torn again and I come back to it again on the page. IAD: Speaking of fathers and daughters, throughout the collection you make illusions to girls and girlhood, even your own, in poems such as “Autobiography,” “Spectre,” or “In Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My Seeing.” So to your mind, and in your work, is black girlhood generatively dangerous? I say that in juxtaposition to a poem like “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda,” precisely because conceptions of whiteness, namely white women, would never presume Eve to be duplicitous or deadly. So you have white women as duplicitous or deadly, and black girlhood as generatively dangerous. SS: Okay, so you’re fracturing girlhood versus womanhood. White women do not populate my lyric imagination, so I couldn’t articulate the girlhood of my poems against their notions. Any woman I speak from or dream into is a black woman. She is the lyric “she” of my poems. The original woman. For me, our girlhood is a site of many violences, and not just the body—the spirit, the self. And I feel in so many ways, that so many factors are coming to crush you that you feel exiled from yourself. I try to write myself out of this feeling that the black female body is the first site of exile, and I have felt that way for a very long time. So I do write about girlhood through these many violences—historical, linguistic, literal, familial—as a way to escape it. And when I write about womanhood, it’s about subverting that violence; it’s about inhabiting that danger and violence as a source of strength and power. It is a way of turning of that historical violence on its head to say that the danger is not from without: now it’s within. That to me, in some way, is powerful. IAD: Can you speak about Virginia in the collection? If I consider your own cannibalism, the poems in which you repurpose [Thomas] Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia bring to mind a reading of European encounters with cannibalism in Fiji: “ . . . it was believed that the spirit of a dead person remained with the body for four days, and that if you ate the corpse before this time elapsed, you ‘prevented it from ascending to the spirit world and becoming a source of power and guidance to your enemies.’” It seems as if you are engaging in cannibalism in reverse in that you eat Jefferson, having been in his “home” over a span of two years instead of four days. SS: Okay! I never thought about it that way because you know, the cannibalism in Fiji also led to genetic madness. But your notion is also an interesting thing to think about—consuming your enemies, right? IAD:Yes, to make sure that the spirit didn’t . . . SS:You’re not moving on. 41

IAD: Exactly! SS:You are not going to heaven! I am very fascinated by historical texts because so much of our world, language, and culture today is rooted in the historical. A lot of people fail to examine this and know where some nefarious views originate—the words we use, the social practices we have. For example, speaking of words, I was interested in this idea, that Thomas Jefferson first used the word, “belittle,” in Notes on the State of Virginia. I kept thinking about him first coining that word, so I thought I would write a poem that centers itself around this sense of exile I felt still while living in Virginia, living in the shadow of Monticello, where he is worshipped in a fervent and tone-deaf way that I couldn’t understand. Very much in the same way I’d thought to myself, “Why shouldn’t I colonize The Tempest?”, I thought again to myself, “Well why shouldn’t I repurpose Thomas Jefferson?” I guess that is, in some way, cannibalizing the idea of him and his ideas, but I never thought about it as its own kind of cannibalism. But I could see it like that: it’s re-centering the master’s words through my own mastery. This is something I have been trying to do with the work; I don’t know if I’m succeeding but that’s what I’m aiming for. IAD: In thinking about repurposing the master’s words for your own work, and I think too when you bring up the ways in which he is still revered in Virginia, that brings up a valence of the religious that also traffics in the collection. Do you think that by repurposing the master’s words to have your work come to be—subverting these norms—there is a manner in which you are engaged in exorcism? SS: And what would I be exorcising? IAD: It could be the ghost of Jefferson that still resides in Charlottesville. In our conversation about girlhood, it could be an exorcism of the fear that exists around that. SS: I guess I do engage in some kind of exorcism often, exorcising or excising, when I find something to be dangerous or cancerous to me, my selfhood, and my being. How do I interpret that as a poet? How do I come to that ritual on the page? I guess my way is to be savage about it. IAD: Throughout the collection, you invoke Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as Césaire’s reimagining of the play. Of all of the work by either man, why those pieces? SS: Being from the Caribbean, the play about a shipwrecked European coming to an island, claiming this island for himself after learning the magic from the native witch who lived there, then expelling her from her home—it is begging to be excavated and reexamined. This idea of living in a place that’s not quite yours with rules and a language that’s not yours, that’s just been given to you, and to have to live with this fact that so much has been stolen from you. How do you process that? How does Caliban make 42

sense of that? And so I was fascinated not only by the links between the Caribbean people and Caliban himself—and of course many postcolonial scholars have also come to this link—but how could Caliban now enter this conversation through a female gaze. Could I grow a limb of myself from Caliban, who has been so decidedly male in the scholarship? Couldn’t the strangeness of his body also be my body? So The Tempest was an obvious choice for me. And thinking about forces of nature—the hurricane, the storm, a violence that then gives birth to something—is interesting for me, too. I start the book with this quote from Brathwaite—“The hurricane doesn’t roar in pentameters”. Again, that turns The Tempest on its head, in that it upends this Shakespearean idea, his western prosody, the pentameter. In the Caribbean, everything is chaotic and lively; we live in the tropics, the jungle, right? So the ordered pentameter is not how we would naturally assemble ourselves poetically on the page. Thus, a lot of my work is trying to find the balance in this— because I have received this western prosody as a poetic foundation, while also dreaming and speaking in the natural chaos of the Caribbean, and what does that balance sound like or look like? Through sound and music and imagery, populating these poems in a way that all their life is bursting off the page. The Tempest was always a play I kept coming back to, thinking about Caliban and the anger stemming from so much loss. IAD: It’s funny because in my program, you have to do these things called apprenticeships; my first one was in a class on Shakespeare’s romances and comedies, and we read The Tempest. It was interesting that when we read it, the students could not fathom Caliban as a redeemable figure; they could only ever read him as violent. SS: But they couldn’t understand where the violence came from. IAD: They could not grasp: wouldn’t one be violent if his home was invaded? For them, it was more that he’s violent and, ironically, he is so toward these women. And as apprentices, we were thinking but his mother and his home and his magic—all of these things are co-opted and taken—and they couldn’t grasp that he would be angry and rightfully so. So hearing you think about it that way is intriguing because in a lot of other spaces, people are thinking, “Oh no, that would never be how you would read Caliban!” As if to say he is unredeemable, which is why the Césaire is important, because he redeems him. SS:Yes! And he gives him autonomy, and he gives him a voice. And I use this Césaire quote (from Une Tempête) in Cannibal where Caliban sort of unnames himself (“Call me X”), because the name he’s been given is Shakespeare’s name, is Prospero’s name, which goes back to the history of our language and its dark roots. But yes, Caliban’s anger is my anger, is your anger, our father’s anger, etc. It wasn’t hard for me to understand because it is something I’ve felt since I was born. IAD: Having provoked Césaire, the last poem in the collection is “Crania Americana.” When reading it, at the end, I could not help but think about Langston Hughes’s “A 43

Dream Deferred” in that the poem also ends with a question. As well, it brought to mind the black radical and aesthetic traditions with relation to how the provocation of questions pervades, like say Sojourner Truth, Saidiya Hartman, et al. This equally made me ponder the work of the canon in the collection insofar as it seems that one’s mastery of the “tradition” is wholly contingent on one’s exposure to it. What I mean is the fact that I can see Langston Hughes in that last poem and also see the limits of Shakespeare’s reading of blackness suggests to me that one, that ever nebulous category, or more specifically black readers writ large, has to discern varying modes or genres before they can even have a seat at the table. How does your own discernment of the canon, vis-àvis Jefferson, Shakespeare, O’Hara and my insertion of Hughes, create Cannibal, and to whose canon does the collection belong? SS: Well, I’m really interested in your earlier notion around cannibalism where I drink the blood of my enemies, to prevent their dissemination. To make sure that there is no future for sinister ideas and ideals going forward in this book. It is a kind of transfiguration—I am taking this one thing and making something else, and I like that! But it is true that you have to hold all of history inside of you in order to make any sense of it and before attempting to make a future. It was really important for me to end the book with a question because I think a lot of my poems end very closed, with finality. The gesture of ending on a question is not one I do often. But it seemed right to do at the end of the poem where the question is: “Master, dare I unjungle it?” It is a question, but it is also a threat. IAD: And a conversation. SS: And a conversation that is moving toward some kind of futurity. So all the past and the history of the entire book is behind me and I’m moving forward—what’s next? It is finding power in the self. Whenever I think about Caliban, I want him to find power in himself, which I don’t think he ever finds in Shakespeare’s pages, because he moves from one master to two drunken masters; he never finds power in himself and beauty in his nature. So I want us to find beauty in our own nature—savage or not—and accept that the threatening parts of us are also beautiful and make us who we are. It is also still playing on the idea of being called “savage” but turning that and saying, “Yes, that is a beautiful and powerful thing!” And in terms of canon, what do you think? IAD: Well there’s a way in which one could say, considering your sources, it is very Shakespearean. SS: Do you think it is? IAD: I don’t think so. One could make a claim it’s quite emblematic of a certain negritudinous tone. 44

SS: And that’s not a bad canon to be a part of! Put me there! IAD: For sure! So if I think about the kind of Shakespearean nature of the collection or its negritudinous register or its black American vocality, it’s quite a diasporic project. SS: Right, but I don’t claim black Americanness. IAD: Right. SS: But I like this idea of being slippery. It is its own chimera. IAD: And one of the poems. SS: Right. So it’s a creature that is patched together from all the different things that make me who I am but it’s uncategorized; you can’t really classify it. I like being . . . IAD: Untitled. SS:Yes, unclaimable. Or untamable. *** [1] Richard Sugg, “Eating Your Enemy”, History Today, Vol. 58, no. 7 (July 2008). http://www.historytoday.com/richard-sugg/eating-your-enemy. *** Safiya Sinclair joined us this year for the Little Corner Reading Series in Durham, NC to read from her latest work. Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length poetry collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award. Sinclair’s poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and won the 2015 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. In 2015, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Sinclair earned her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and she is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. 45

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: YASUAKI OKAMOTO

Photograph by Tokio Kuniyoshi “As children, my elder brother and I used to draw and I often imitated his drawings. When I look back at all the artworks I have created, from the beginning I primarily painted animals, flowers, insects or natural landscapes with colorful elements. My paintings perform a kind of surrealism that incorporates icons of death, life and/or nature. My work is metaphorically based and inspired by my travel throughout Europe, Asia and North America. I left Japan in 2001. Since then, I have lived in London, Barcelona, Granada, Montreal, and now New York City. In each place I studied local animals and native flora and fauna.This includes both extinct, endangered, and non-endangerd species. I enjoy familiar drawing and painting plants and animals. Prior to beginning a project, it is important for me to comprehend the ecology and grasp its nuances. I am concerned with social and environmental issues of our planet which you can see in some of my artworks; I would like the viewer to feel something and to have a deeper concern for the theme that I’ve creating in a subtle way.” For more artworks visit www.yasuaki.info and social media. 46

Yasuaki Okamoto is a Japanese fine artist who has lived in England, Spain, and Canada, and is currently based in New York City. He studied at The Art Students League of New York and The National Academy Museum and School. He has traveled and been inspired by many more places. He won the Edward G. McDowell Travel Grant in 2014, the Xavier Gonzalez and the Ethel Edwards Travel Grant in 2013, the Lawrence Littman Scholarship in 2012, the Mary Birmingham Award in 2010 (Curator, Hunterdon Museum, New Jersey), and others. He has exhibited about eighty shows mainly in New York City, including at the Affordable Art Fair in NYC, the National Academy Museum, the Corey Helford Gallery, Art Expo NY, Spectrum Miami, the Agora Gallery, and Art Revolution Taipei. His work has also appeared in art magazines, newspapers, and many public and private collections. Notably, his work was featured in the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery in New York and the Williamsburg Art Historical Center. Yasuaki Okamoto was unanimously selected this year by the The Invisible Bear editors for this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s featured artist spotlight.

CONTRIBUTORS Shola Balogun, playwright, poet, and writer whose creative Muse is the Mystic ladder of the Yoruba world and Judeo-Christian thought, is from Yoruba in the southwestern part of Nigeria, West Africa. He has been a guest writer and contributor in the areas of poetry, postcolonial studies, and dramatic criticism to various magazines and journals. Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland, Ohio. Recent/upcoming appearances in Survision, Loud Zoo, and Ghostlight, among others. Jigisha Bhattacharya is currently pursuing a Masters in English literature and Cultural Studies from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She wants to continue further research in Memory and Narrative Studies. Poetry is something that she has grown up with, her earliest memories being her granny reading out rhymes. Her poetry has been published in her vernacular langauge as well as in English in magazines and journals in India. Apart from poetry, her other hobbies are daydreaming, collecting tobacco wrappers, and sleeping. Jeremy Casabella lives in Bakersfield, California where he teaches English and writes poetry, short stories, and pwoermds. His most recent poems appear in Eclipse, Shot Glass, Route 7, The Ekphrastic Review, Vinyl and The American Journal of Poetry. His pwoermding is featured in the anthology TheWisdoms of the Universes in a Single String of Letters from Xexoxial Editions. After military service, William Conelly studied three years with Edgar Bowers, taking both a Bachelor and Master’s Degree under his guidance at UC Santa Barbara. Post graduate work in transport and financial services, sales and commercial writing, preceded Conelly’s return to academia in 2000, where he has served in both America and the UK as an associate professor, tutor, and seminar leader in English Studies. With three sons grown and a dual citizenship, he and his wife reside primarily in the West Midlands town of Warwick. Uncontested Grounds—an assortment of his prosody dating back four full decades— remains available from The Able Muse Press of San Jose, CA. I. Augustus Durham is a rising sixth-year doctoral candidate in the English at Duke University. His work focuses on black studies from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, interrogating the construction of melancholy and how that affect catalyzes performances of excellence, otherwise known as genius. He has published articles in Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Palimpsest: A Journal onWomen, Gender, and the Black International, and Journal of Religion and Health. Michelle Hartman’s latest book, The Lost Journal of My Second Trip to Purgatory (released in January 2017, from Old Seventy Creek Press) is a first poetic look at child abuse and

its effects on adult life and is the first book of its kind from a recognized publisher. Along with her poetry books, Irony and Irreverence and Disenchanted and Disgruntled, from Lamar University Press, Lost Journal is available on Amazon. She is the editor of Red River Review. Haji Khavari is a graduate of Yasouj University in Iran, where he studied architecture. He plays in a punk band and edits a zine, Plastic Roses. Bear Kosik has authored three novels, many essays and short works of fiction, several poems, and an analysis of the state of democracy in the USA. He is a resident playwright with Manhattan Repertory Theatre. Duane Locke lives hermetically in a city that is a stranger to him. He invented “Sur-Objects” in June 2016, and already has had 132 pieces accepted for publication. Also, a poet. 7068 different poems published. 34 books. The latest: VISIONS (2016). Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, Illinois with his wife, Vickie, and his daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications. Roger Sedarat is the author of four poetry collections. His most recent book of translation is Nature and Nostalgia in the Poetry of Nader Naderpour. A recent recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize in Translation, he teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York. Angela Shaw-Thornburg is an independent scholar, writer, and teacher who lives in Columbia, South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from Rutgers University. She has published critical and creative work in Southern Literary Review, Small Axe, Blood Lotus, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Journeys: International Journal of Travel and TravelWriting. Ryan Simmons lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. He has previously lived in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., and Madagascar. He writes whenever possible, even if he hates doing it in the third person. Michael Strand graduated from the University of Florida in 2006, where he studied English, history, and poetry. Currently he works as a sales manager for a regional staffing company in New Hampshire, where he lives with his fiancee, Siera Kelley, and daughter, Aria Strand. He been writing seriously for the last 5-10 years, and began submitting his work a little over a year ago. Rio Aubry Taylor is a multidisciplinary cartooner specializing in abstracted narrative. Xe possesses an MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies and critics have referred to xir as “the trippiest of the CCS cartoonists.” Xir work has been published by the Swedish Comics Association and The National Cartoonists Society, among others. Rio’s latest proj-

ect, JETTY, is an ongoing work of brutal psychedelia set one billion minutes in the future: jettycomics.com. Andrés Amitai Wilson was named after the Spanish guru of classical guitar, Andrés Segovia. The younger Andrés was coincidentally trained as guitarist at the Berklee College of Music, but he is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches. His poetry, prose, and criticism have appeared widely in print and on the web. As a sideman and recording artist, Andrés has played music throughout the contiguous United States, in Europe, and in Israel. When not reading, writing, or playing music, chances are you can find him going on adventures with his elfin children, Eden and Liam, cycling, running up some mountain, or breathing deeply atop a yoga mat. www.andreswilson.com E. Withers is a poet and performer from North Carolina. Her first chapbook, You Are a Mistletoe Drone, is forthcoming via Weekly Weird Monthly. She lives in Minneapolis. Bill Wolak is a poet, photographer, and collage artist. He has just published his twelfth book of poetry entitled Love Opens the Hands with Nirala Press. His most recent translation with Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, Love Me More Than the Others: Selected Poetry or Iraj Mirza, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in 2014. His collages have been published in over a hundred magazines including: The Annual, Peculiar Mormyrid, Danse Macabre, Dirty Chai, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Lost Coast Review, Mad Swirl, Otis Nebula, and Horror Sleaze Trash. In 2016, he was a featured poet at The Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival in Craiova, Romania; Europa in Versi, Lake Como, Italy; The Pesaro International Poetry Festival, Pesaro, Italy; and The Xichang-Qionghai Silk Road International Poetry Week, Xichang, China. Mr. Wolak teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Matthew Woodman teaches writing at California State University, Bakersfield and is the poetry editor for Southern Pacific Review. His poems are forthcoming in Sakura Review, The Meadow, Sierra Nevada Review, Hawai’i Review, and S/WORD. More of his writing and links to past publications can be found at www.matthewwoodman.com.