~ Issue 4, May 2019 ~
Editor-in-chief Aya Whitfield (@avolitorial) Literary Editors Kavi Kshiraj (@thermonous) Charle Liu (@streetsiding) Riri M. (@verilies) Lianna Schreiber (@ragewrites)
Anatolios Magazine accepts submissions of poetry, prose, and visual art (including photography) during the open submission periods indicated on our site, anatoliosmagazine.wordpress.com. Cover photo by Peter Pryharski on Unsplash
General Submissions This Reminds Me (art) by Janelle Cordero …………………………………… 3, 7, 10, 13, 16 Six Micropoems by Margarita Serafimova …………………………………………………… 4 Gethsemane by Will Stenberg ………………………………………………………………… 6 Cosmic Blues by Howie Good ……………………………………………………………… 8 Where the Light Gets In by Carter Vance……………………………………………………… 9 History of the World by Joe Bisicchia ………………………………………………………… 11 Forever Summer by Carter Vance …………………………………………………………… 12 An Instance of Human Flourishing by Rob Colgate ………………………………………… 14 What We Did That Summer by Carter Vance ……………………………………………… 15 Small Town Living by Howie Good ………………………………………………………… 17 forbidden fruit bites back: a concept by Maryam Emamdee ………………………………… 18 Bird by Will Stenberg ………………………………………………………………………… 20 00 .
Members Section vernal divinations by Lianna Schreiber …….………….………….…………………………. 22 deification (art) by Aya Whitfield ……………………………………………………………. 23 from malva with love by Lianna Schreiber …….……….………….………………………. 24 immolate by Aya Whitfield …….……….………….……………….………………………. 25 vulture-scavenged by Kavi Kshiraj …….……….………….……………….………………. 26 00
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This Reminds Me​ (ink & watercolor) b ​ y Janelle Cordero 3
Six Micropoems Margarita Serafimova
1. A Person from Yemen In the mosque of rough water, bright, shining eyes and wet skin. The sun is fire.
2. I was walking in the wilderness, and it was breathing me; it was fresh, it was dense. I had, on my skin, electricity.
3. The Fine You were carrying me in the heavenly within the sea. In the deepnesses of reality, we had in our caress the beginnings and the end.
4. Alaskan quietude. They are hurling themselves, great thunders, the whales feeding amidst the ocean in the night.
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5. I was in the water, the water was inside of me. I smell of sea. I am going where the ones who first came out of the ocean are.
6. To You Why fear me? I am only someone who will die.
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Gethsemane Will Stenberg In the heavy grass the bugs clobbered my calves like stones, the air sagged with scents, the earth hummed, but life in the Abbey was ordered and calm: I chanted and worked with the brothers, ate their plain food. At night I made attempts at prayer, little lights cast into the void. One day we heard that the United States had been attacked: planes flown into buildings: people falling like embers. The horror hit us, then back to work. The next night I was in my cell, sleeping when I awoke to a faint voice: — Help me, help me. A brother came and we padded through the stone halls and into the night. Beneath my window, an old husk of a monk had collapsed. — Help me, help me, he chanted. (my help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth) We cradled him. He grabbed my arm and asked me, asked as if I might know, as if I could tell him why he had lived so long.
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This Reminds Me​ (ink & watercolor) b ​ y Janelle Cordero 7
Cosmic Blues Howie Good I’m not really into cosmic things, but I don’t have a choice. Salvador Dali is forever. I used to see seagulls everywhere. Then a mirror unrolled from the sky, and the seagulls were just skeletons. None of it made a lot of sense. Someone said to me, “It’s simple. A black hole is where time and space disappear.” Simple?! Solid objects are melting into air at an alarming pace. It’s not an unknown future. It’s almost here. I think it must be like a wasp nest in a barrack in a German concentration camp or 634 minutes inside a volcano.
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Where the Light Gets In Carter Vance The harshness of city windows, scrubbed-clean expanses of red brick, the finishing school cafeteria clatter up against inky cooling cauldrons with tire rubber finish that stay straining against foresight fever of how much I needed, just to be steady in the brigand morning. Not staying there with anyone else, imperfect in glassware revolution style, shoelace fabric without courage to slip out into gossamer thread of kindred spiriting, a blank repetition of lyrical truth eluding us. The darker silence of pastime spaces consumes chalked-out light fixture; how stars hid, blinked beyond raising up of old stone spires to where the leaking of sun-faded fates too do.
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This Reminds Me​ (ink & watercolor) b ​ y Janelle Cordero 10
History of the World Joe Bisicchia And so, the hanging fruit has always had a seed. What did we do with it? What shall we? Never quite silent, the tree, even in peace, rustles as the breeze bends us. We know all the green and allow it to envelop our sky, and hypnotize. In the dreams, in the veins of all the leaves, sits the puzzle piece. Nothing new. Down to the roots. Love is a word, an ongoing verb. There is need, always was and always will be. The hanging fruit has a seed. Near the heart. What can now start?
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Forever Summer Carter Vance The washing in of late afternoon comes tidal in still glass of warm shades, soothed calm with bright-breaking whispers in windowsills over and against the dawn fires, a wafting trash burn that flicks unnoticed against pale blue spaces, like sullen damp through air bricks. When all is calm, relieved, bound again in immortal palm green, it gives feeling to impossible time drifting past on electric rumour. In a second of gutter-running rain, there are no masters, no reasons for disbelief in magic’s presence, save the unpaved tumble it was to the sickly slick of carved-off roadsides, the tossed metal clang being thrown to-fro in bleached sheet breeze sweep. It looks like much more, or less, than this, frozen in eye-dropper place by the worst of memory, But, most of all, it never went on as long as the sun, setting even against tricky haze.
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This Reminds Me​ (ink & watercolor) b ​ y Janelle Cordero 13
An Instance of Human Flourishing Rob Colgate I dreamt of a perfect poem and overslept. Took the words into my arms like I held my mother's dog before he died, held the lines in the space behind my bones between my brain and the surface. Gazing at the sound of it all, each syllable dripped and trickled down through my body like rose petals after a storm. I rubbed rose petals between my fingers after the storm, sat with the storm, took the storm into my arms like the words of my poem before they died. The rose petals in the space behind my storm were between my bones and the sound of it all. I overslept. My mother's dog dreamt of the storm and the words. I rubbed my brain and the surface, dripped and trickled through my sleep like a perfect poem. I sat and my fingers were rose petals before I died.
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What We Did That Summer Carter Vance You never did quell these storm clouds with your speech, tempest crash of waves with time that throw us upon rough shores still, as bodies nameless to each other, carrying mask shrouds around in patchwork star craft that we had before been; but, then, what had changed? It wasn’t that the echo noise had drowned in cascade wave of sweet sayings, of clasping symphonies that won out above this din of pen clanks that made the best of sour times, the best of winsome heart skips; no, far from it, they remained. But, it felt freer, shedding husk-shell of normal, half-lies we had to speak for ourselves to be found, the wounded searches we took on ice flows between seas of blessed belief and fearful-minding of ever-closer clock ticks of empty altar bells; that was all gone, with you.
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This Reminds Me​ (ink & watercolor) b ​ y Janelle Cordero
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Small Town Living Howie Good My heart is a town so small it doesn’t have a doctor or a cop or a priest, doesn’t even have anyone on standby to plow the roads in winter or fill in the potholes in spring, and maybe that’s why people say all those teeth-rattling, bone-jarring things about me, but you ignore what people say and undo your buttons and unpin your hair, and then it’s like daylight at night, the light streaming in on a soft slant, poking at the black seeds in the corners and the weeds in the flowerboxes, stirring the town back to stunned life.
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forbidden fruit bites back: a concept Maryam Emamdee preface: youa tender twenty-one, wearing morality on not one sleeve but both; a microcosm of the city itself- mapped out in the crests and valleys of literature (each intonation is a revelation on your tongue); my name in your mouth and your mouth a mere ocean away, the ebb and swell of your chest is enough to stupefy me into a reverie (my spirit has been tracing these all-too-familiar memories, leaving indentations in the maze of my mind)
won’t you come undo what you’ve already managed to get undone? babei’m weak at the knees, tendons soft, unscathed dove(this is what eve succumbed to- the sin of the sting and the ardor of the apple) you, from clay, and i, of clayinfused with the metaphysical wick of life; tongue doused in gasoline and blood equally tepid,
if we were to immortalize this moment on the timeline, i’d be on fire- glinting and gleaming and held together by goldyou share your monochromatic dreams with me as if relaying a film, as if dreams are the apotheoses of a deity induced sleep;
epilogue: is this the right time to tell you:
ex nihilo: (from nothing);
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i had murmured in a round voice that God said ‘be’ and the universe appeared, created in an image, out of nothing from nothing; everything out of nothing,
which is to say: when memory loops out of my ears in gossamer strands, the fact is that i’d forget my name so easily, before yours, yours, yours
which is the same as saying; this apparent creative drought was nothing but a facade; it was a loving voidand as the adage goes, if you stare too long into the void, it stares back.
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Bird Will Stenberg There is a bird lost in the Newark Airport. He hops to the window where the big sky beckons then flutters to the blank ceiling. In here it is exactly unlike a cathedral but to him cathedral or Newark Airport are both just not sky. Now I am in Italy, and I hope you are in the upper air, little bird. My heart is a bell that rings for you, because you looked at me and said, Brother, nothing they have done to us can ever be done to us again.
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vernal divinations Lianna Schreiber rebirth is a gutted fish and she’s rising, the skins of our yesteryears all leathered alength the gored ridges of her spine; mother, I am dreaming of a woman made of fire with seven swords for a tongue and she’s saying, apocalypse is here, apocalypse breathes with your lungs, your skin, your tongue; she wears you to dinner, sheds you off to sleep. what do I make of such a heavy omen? what do I make of myself? I have washed with ashes; I have circled my own grave, craven and crawling on bloodied knees. what more can I pay? all I have left is the skin of my face, the bones in my hands; a name, wretched, blessed, chosen to robe me in my final hour, when at last the world will have made me shiver. how much more must I burn before I am rendered inviolable—?
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deification​ (copper drypoint & monoprint on plaster) b ​ y Aya Whitfield
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from malva with love Lianna Schreiber my sorrow, can you hear? I am singing from the fire, throat raw with a haunting of birds; o, I am singing for that namelessness which hovers between being wanted and being loved. this song is for you: all for you, a dulcet of dolour meant as your match; you who are among the words my first, my last, my lovedmost. say, can you hear? merls have unfurled themselves for you on my tongue; the forest is ablaze, mad with your name, a bacchanal of Death. what higher ecstasy is there? what greater paroxysm? the Dove chides: so many gods to die for and yet you’ve chosen flesh. be it so; never have I pretended to be anything but thistle-hearted, blood-bound in my thirst’s pursuits.
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immolate Aya Whitfield remorse is the garden where you planted gray feathers and waited for them to bloom. you wake choking on mothsilk in a grave of red-gold, horizon a conflagration calling your name—it’s not your name, just a memory. just a voice that cradles you and offers no mercy at all. you love the voice because it is the only thing left. nothing grows from death but paper knots and the cold turning of wheels in an eternal clock. did you expect flowers, bloodhanded child? in the dark without colors you’re spinning your own shroud for a dying no one else will give you. everything burns. you set the fire, you ate the ashdark glass, you want an unmourning, a funeral alone. you expected flowers.
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vulture-scavenged Kavi Kshiraj split-second, your fist knotted like violets in Ophelia’s rainfall-hair, your fist against the silk-bolt dark of your thigh split-second, think of the relief before the pain. the girl said, s o you should be dead, loot-flickered words like lanterns in skeins of night, and something universal about water and the wolf-joint of these three rivers, gnawed away, about how you are holy until your breath returns. there are things you do not say. split-second, think of how May is a poltergeist and your skull is cracked ceramic, your ribs robin’s eggs, yolk dripping against walls. you write because you want a truth scarved from throat: there is a scavenger black-winged in your open mouth, and
picking at your own
you are a vulture bones, and
split-second, you are Juliet grief-feral, the dust of your crypt between teeth, the metal limned between your hands split-second, your fist knotted like burial-flower strewn on Juliet’s casket. who are you grieving? the stage-lights
are transient this is a play -
you are stripped, bare-boned, prayer-mouthed into a planetary orbit, and scorch-sunlight is a spool of mirrored river, 26
dreaming of you, and mix your metaphors. you are dark-eyed, red-tongued, guilt-handed, and the girl says like theft, ​you should be dead.
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Author Biographies JANELLE CORDERO is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in the seventh most hipster city in the U.S. Both her writing and her paintings are sparse narratives that emphasize the disconnected nature of the human condition. Her writing has been published in dozens of literary journals, including Harpur Palate and The Louisville Review, while her paintings have been featured in venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. Her debut poetry collection, Two Cups of Tomatoes, was published in 2015, and her chapbook with Black Sand Press was published in 2018. Her newest chapbook with Bottlecap Press is slated for publication in January of 2019. Stay connected with Janelle’s work at www.janellecordero.com. MARGARITA SERAFIMOVA, international human rights lawyer by profession and passionate diver, was a finalist in the Christopher Smart (Eyewear Publishing) Prize 2019, Erbacce Press Prize 2019 and 2018, Summer Literary Seminars 2019 and 2018, Hammond House Prize 2018, Red Wheelbarrow Prize 2018, Montreal Prize 2017, and nominated for Best of the Net 2018. Her work appears in Agenda Poetry, London Grip, Waxwing, Trafika Europe, A-Minor, Poetry South, Orbis, Nixes Mate, Leveler, Minor Literatures, Writing Disorder, Noble/ Gas, The Journal, miller’s pond, Obra/ Artifact, Arteidolia, TAYO, etc. Visit: h ttps://www.facebook.com/MargaritaISerafimova. WILL STENBERG is a poet, musician and bartender who grew up in the wilds of Northern California and currently resides in Portland, OR. HOWIE GOOD is the author of The Titanic Sails at Dawn (Alien Buddha Press, 2019). CARTER VANCE is a writer and poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, Canada currently resident in Ottawa, Ontario. His work has appeared in such publications as The Smart Set, Contemporary Verse 2 and A Midwestern Review, amongst others. He was previously a Harrison Middleton University Ideas Fellow. His debut collection of poems, Songs About Girls, is currently available from Urban Farmhouse Press. Find him on Twitter as @cartervance. JOE BISICCHIA writes of our shared dynamic. An Honorable Mention recipient for the Fernando Rielo XXXII World Prize for Mystical Poetry, his works have appeared in numerous publications. His website is www.JoeBisicchia.com. ROB COLGATE is a student at Yale studying psychology and poetry. His poetry embodies an ekphrastic response to the environments that he has been exposed to and the social structures in which he participates. In projecting the nuances of his own experience onto different landscapes, he seeks to illuminate corners of the collective consciousness via extrapolation of the personal. As a gay, brown, schizoaffective poet, he aims for quiet subversion of the expected norm as he translates pieces of his identity and narrative into verse. 28
MARYAM EMAMDEE is a science student in high school whose work has previously been published in Body Without Organs Literary Magazine. She's an avid Frida Kahlo supporter with a soft side for cats and film photography. Most of her work stems from her dreams, which are a main source of her inspiration. You can find her at @marsanart on Instagram. LIANNA SCHREIBER is a Romanian author. A self-described “Neoromantic”, her work mostly concerns itself with human nature, mythological and folkloric truth as well as tradition, and the most defiant of emotions — love. She can be found @ ragewrites on tumblr. AYA WHITFIELD lives on the East Coast and never stops writing (but probably produces too much poetry about the moon and the ocean); thinks flowers and cats and eating berries are the best things in life; drinks far too much tea; and can be found as @avolitorial on Patreon and most social media. KAVI KSHIRAJ is a queer, Indo-American poet found in New Jersey. They spend time on hobbies such as writing, mythology, and their various identity crises.
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