Nine Mile Magazine Spring 2015

ART & LITERARY MAGAZINE Spring 2015 // VOL 2 // ISSUE 2

New work by Marvin Bell Jasmine Bailey Roger Weingarten Jim Cervantes Sylvia Steen And many more…

Editor: Bob Herz Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels Cover Art: Sylvia Steen, a porOon of “UnOtled” — Used by permission of rthe arOst Copyright © 2015 by Nine Mile Magazine.

Poetry and artwork copyright of their respecOve authors and arOsts. All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may be reproduced in full or in part without prior wri^en permission from its owner.

Front cover is a porOon of “UnOtled,” by the arOst Sylvia Steen, who has this and other work in this issue.

Send submission inquires to: info@ninemile.org ninemile.org

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Contents Marvin Bell 7 The Book of the Dead Man (Van Gogh) The Book of the Dead Man (Milk) About Marvin Bell About the Poems Jasmine Bailey 12 Theory of RelaOvity Mentor Palimpsest About Jasmine Bailey About the Poems James Cervantes 17 Bridges From the Physical Song: This Is It Hello, Again You know what October is like About James Cervantes About the Poems Catherine Arra 27 Ode to B3 First Flight Nested Light About Catherine Arra About the Poems Roger Weingarten 34 Invasive Species The Far East Side of Cleveland/ The Coney Island of Hanoi/ Main Street, Montpelier The Saigon of Tranquility About Roger Weingarten About the Poems William Schulz 44 Thanksgiving trees Nearing SolsOce Warnings About William Schulz About the Poems

Sylvia Steen 49 Dames Grandpa and the Buffalo Robe UnOtled Expired Thelma About Sylvia Steen About the Work Barbara Conrad 56 Two Sexagenarians Strolling Unconformity Considering CastraOon Smell of Salt The Barbeque Pit About Barbara Conrad AestheOc of Witness Siwsan Gimprich 68 When the Shoals About Siwsan Gimprich About the poem L. B. Green 70 Stuck There Spare Me Lean Closer About L.B. Breen About the Poems Ken La Valle 76 ReflecOons of Nature The Beach About Ken LaValle Michael Colonnese 79 Beauty as a Secondary ConsideraOon On Black Ice About Michael Colonese About the Poems Elinor Cramer 87 Last Summer on the Detroit River About Elinor Cramer About the Poems

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About Nine Mile Magazine Nine Mile is an online magazine of literature and art, digitally published in the Spring and Fall of each year. It was founded by and is edited by Bob Herz, and unOl recently, the extraordinary Whitney Daniels, about whom more below. Our purpose is simple: to publish the best wriOng and artwork available to us, with a special focus on Central New York, where we live and which is undergoing tremendous ferment in poetry, art, music, and literature.

Like the 25-­‐mile long creek from which we take our name, the magazine follows a varied course, with different wriOngs and arts coming together to form a cohesive whole. Our views are broad and we’re excited to be able to provide publicaOon and appreciaOon to our fellow creaOve types.

Nine Mile is a labor of love. It is not supported by financial individuals or insOtuOons other than ourselves. We regret that we are unable to offer compensaOon to arOsts and authors other than publicaOon in a quality collecOon, in the company of others who share a dedicaOon to their art.

This issue is the first that will go to bed without the services of Whitney Daniels, who created the look and feel of the magazine and was responsible for much of the wonderful art featured in past ediOons. We will miss her great eye for design and her irreplaceably sanguine temperament. She never met a problem she couldn’t solve, or encountered a situaOon that compromised her paOence and tolerance. Many thanks for all you have done, Whitney!

We hope you enjoy this and all our issues, which are available online. If you have Ome and inclinaOon, please drop us a line and let us know what you think.

– Bob Herz, Editor

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About Talk About Poetry Talk About Poetry is the new podcast venture of Nine Mile Magazine, a discussion with other poets about poems that interest, annoy, excite, or otherwise engage us. Each session is 20 -­‐ 30 minutes long, and all are available on Soiundcloud and on iTunes. Our blog provides an extended discussion of the poems and an opportunity for listener feedback.

The addresses are: Soundcloud: h^ps://soundcloud.com/bobherz iTunes: Talk About Poetry Wordpress blog: h^ps://talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com ParOcipants in the discussion are all poets and writers. Discussions to date (Spring, 2015) have been: Robert Bly’s “Old Boards” Marvin Bell’s “About the Dead Man and Your Hands” Brigit Kelley’s “Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone” Phil Memmer’s “How Many Shapes Must A God Take” and “Psalm” Georgia Popoff’s “ The AgnosOc Acknowledges the Food Chain” and “Name InconsequenOal” Stephen Kuusisto’s “Sand” and “ They Say” Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Voetex Sutra” (2 parts) Links at the discussions provide full texts of all the poems under discussion.

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Submission Policy We want to see your best work! Submit via email to: info@ninemile.org.

• Poetry: submit 4 -­‐ 6 poems in word, text, or pdf format.

• Artwork: submit 3 -­‐ 5 small jpg files.

Include your name and contact informaOon along with a brief paragraph about yourself (background, educaOon, achievements, etc), a statement of aestheOc intent for these poems or artwork, a photo of yourself, and a link to your website (if available).

We will respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us, reconnect to make sure we received your submission.

Note that at least for now we do not accept essays, reviews, video / moOon based art, or Q&A's without invitaOon.

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Marvin Bell The Book of the Dead Man (Van Gogh) Live as if you were already dead.

Zen admoniOon My step is unsteady.

Vincent to Theo

1. About the Dead Man and Van Gogh The dead man lives with the shell of Van Gogh’s ear and a nauOlus brought in by the Ode. He wrinkles the skin of his hand unOl he can see in it the black indecency of crows in Vincent’s wheat field.

He sees the self-­‐portrait stare that shook the arOst’s will to live.

If the canvas were not a window, if the paints were not blood, if the frame were not a prison, then one could put it aside.

The dead man’s easel triangulates eye and heart to a pinpoint on the horizon.

Van Gogh’s workman’s boots, his oversize sunflowers—these swallow the dead man looking.

His mulberry tree pounds its chest, just try to walk past.

His pink roses shout, his wheat stacks give birth, his thatched co^ages tremble, his crabs dance.

His bedroom in Arles remains askew, his sOll lives are everything but.

Every stroke a thrust.

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2. More About the Dead Man and Van Gogh Vincent’s crows are not crows but crows stuck to thick air.

A chair Vincent paints is not a chair, but a Van Gogh chair.

There is a sky, there is earth, there is toil in the wrinkled sunlight.

Somewhere a sea, and someOmes light.

The thick strokes and layered memory of his correspondence were themselves the hoarse equivalent of the painterly.

It is all Vincent, a clawing topography of an inner life.

A calligraphy that oozed.

The dead man, too, has turned his life into his livelihood at a price.

It is more to have swallowed absinthe and digitalis, to be hypergraphical, and sun beaten, and to know the margins of bipolarity.

It is more to have suffered in yellow

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The Book of the Dead Man (Milk) Live as if you were already dead.

-­‐ Zen admoniOon One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-­‐ Albert Camus

1. About the Dead Man and Milk The dead man's imaginaOon contains the future.

The logicians will be shuwng their eyes when they lose in the past the proofs of his mind's eye.

The quantum physicists will be donning mi^ens when they see how their presence distorted the present.

Friends of the ethicists will be hiding their pals' knives when the purveyors of ends and means overcome them.

When, that is, ethics is shown to be a luxury of circumstance.

The issue before us is, therefore, did Sisyphus drink milk as a child?

Does that explain his innocent persistence?

Does it account for his happiness absent success?

Was it a protecOve coaOng for the inner life to come?

One does not bypass the emoOonal resonance of one's primary elixir.

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2. More About the Dead Man and Milk The dead man, like Sisyphus, can be followed.

He knows, whatever the salvaOonist says, that entropy trumps Ome. He is at peace with depleOons and erasures, and he smiles to recall the sensuous milk bo^les once ley at the door.

He has run behind the ice truck in the heat.

Stay with me, he says, follow me to the new worlds of the mind.

The dead man did not need a scrapbook, nor keep a journal, nor lean into the future with his hair combed.

If it rusted, if it melted, if it evaporated, that was not the end of it.

The dead man acts anonymously in several places at once.

He shreds the records and prescripOons, and dissolves the pills.

He has gone on drinking milk to get over things.

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About Marvin Bell

Marvin Bell’s recent books include Ver;go: The Living Dead Man Poems and Whiteout, a collaboraOon with photographer Nathan Lyons. AAer the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts, a collaboraOon with Christopher Merrill, will appear in 2016. He teaches for the brief-­‐residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University.

About the Dead Man Poems I wrote the first Dead Man poem while living in the Northwest during the winter of 1986-­‐87. It felt as if it belonged in a book lost to anOquity. Although I Otled the poem “from: The Book of the Dead Man,” there was no such book, and I had no intenOon of wriOng it. In fact, I did not write another Dead Man poem unOl four years later. Then I was engulfed by the sound, the metabolism, the stance, the reach and the vision of the form. The form of Dead Man poems is subversive. The poeOc line is an elasOc sentence. There are runovers but no enjambments. PercepOons are not linear but kaleidoscopic. As for their each having two Otled parts-­‐-­‐any poem, having ended, may begin again and the shape of the whole may thus be changed. The Dead Man is not me, not a persona, not a mask, but something of a universal consciousness. I tell people not to read more than one or two at a siwng.

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Jasmine Bailey Theory of Relativity Waking, you discover our life lasted a few minutes; only women in painOngs live slower.

The truth of backs is the towel will never dry them. The tsunami gathers but does not land.

Even destrucOon is beyond the gods who singe lush TahiO. Did you once think nights only ended if you fell asleep?

If plums imagined the basket that contains them, then Sunday, then summer.

I walk correcOng the meadow’s tangles and my fingers lose their order.

It is not in our power to reverse the oversweetened coffee, to become mistaken.

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Mentor Argen;na 1974-­‐1983 Like every student I want you, grateful to have been revised to taste.

Records did not prevent me from discovering how you possessed me into absoluOon. Someone remembers my arms when I wove through the block party belly dancing.

Another says my hair was black, another auburn, a third common brown. Many believe I had hair.

Someone remembers telling me a joke, that I was judgmental and loud.

Part of my name’s been restored.

No one appreciates your art more than your backward Galatea, unobtrusive as air, begging you silently to lavish again the white paint.

You are a son of the sun, and like the sun lookers squint against your work, unable to take in the extent of it, inarguable, unproofed.

BapOsmal kerosene, honesty of daylight, you raised me before your witnesses lined against the cement wall, taking and giving orders according to the diurnal pa^ern you got from Saturn before you felled him and fed his evidence to the ocean.

Ushuaia eres. Nothing can be south of you.

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Palimpsest Argen;na 1974-­‐1983 Standing behind everything you see, my image appears a stain troubling this jacaranda, the tall sisters with beer and almonds on their sidewalk table, the confew spilling from skyscrapers ayer a cup game won against Africa or the Balkans.

To be cast underneath Ome and vellum, to serve a pracOcal cause, is something I understand from opposite the one-­‐way mirror.

Your side is brightly lit, and someOmes that feels like privacy.

But I am blind and invisible, both. SomeOmes the illusion is nearly reversed, and I think I see your face beneath that of the haggard man holding a stethoscope to my chest to see if I have survived this round, or because he thinks there is something, he could not be certain, or swear to in a court, underneath.

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About Jasmine V. Bailey Jasmine V. Bailey's chapbook, Sleep and What Precedes It, won the 2009 Longleaf Press Chapbook prize, and her book-­‐length collecOon, Alexandria, published by Carnegie Mellon, won the 2014 Central New York Book Award for poetry. Her work is featured in 12 Women: an anthology of poems, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

About the Poems In these poems I work with different versions of the love poem. "Theory of RelaOvity" explores the disorientaOon and sense of suspended animaOon that the end of a relaOonship creates. The painOngs are meant to evoke a sense of incompleteness, fuOlity, and entrapment.

Reality, by contrast, is unknowable but ulOmately contains possibility: the plum cannot sense its basket let alone the world beyond it, but it is there and limitless. Chaos and our desire for order will never be resolved; acceptance of this opens a path away from despair.

In "Mentor" and "Palimpsest" the ArgenOne Dirty War is my jumping-­‐off point.

This was a conflict that began during the presidency of Isabel Peron and conOnued with the military regime that ousted her; at least 20,000 ArgenOnes were "disappeared" by the military dictatorship, oyen being tortured in clandesOne prisons, killed, and their remains hidden. These poems are not about specific events or people: "Mentor" explores the profound, problemaOc inOmacy between torturer and vicOm. "Palimpsest" explores how a capOve

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relates to those outside of their painfully constricted world: the lack of physical contact magnifies the power and infinite reach of the imaginaOon into the lives and minds of others.

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James Cervantes Bridges From the Physical 1.

Without a glossary, I was pleasantly lost.

I could stop anywhere and look into the window of the word. SomeOmes, as in the case of apto;c, needlessly reduced illustraOons bubble up from memory. Is that angry blotch a cloud, a signature, or a bird shot and plummeOng into an audible field of winter?

Would enlargement reveal the arOst's intent? The profile of a dry brush might be a return to scale. Apto;c, at any rate, means without inflecOon, an indeclinable noun.

2.

If that world is closed I can look over my shoulder.

Teresa is quite new to this country.

She knows You guys, Come on, Give me a break, and her eyes complement her smile. Responses are appropriate, proximity and deployment of bodies are correct, though

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frozen camouflage. Teresa's eyes dart ley and right.

3.

The California colleagues wonder if one pretends this upsurge of blood. They forget the daily rows of brown faces, the uniformly straight black hair, like the files of the indigenous of SanOago, la Virgin stamped in On and strung around their necks, or done in plaster about the size of a loaf of bread, or life-­‐size, carried on a li^er, and with gimmicky eyes that follow you.

4.

I borrow labi, the word of lips and easy entry, inscribe it with a pencil on the magnolia leaf from a neighbor's tree.

Trios and quintets from the fat radio bounce clear to heaven. A flirt lasts unOl 3 in the ayernoon.

Ensconced with homework

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in a satchel, I kick it through the open closet door.

So it is with unfinished things. unfinished forever, there to look at, unfinished, yellow and incomplete.

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Song: This Is It A yodeler in the alps could be Mockingman, could be a bearded man in the shade of his wagon thumping watermelons, offering a wedge, could be the father in an idling car who yells the mother's name.

Mockingman knows the calls of summer high and low.

The sun comes up as if it has been out all night.

Trees have had no rest and the grass lies down as if to plead, "Burn me."

This is it: there will be no fall no winter, no spring. We count nights rather than days, sing a day song all night long.

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Hello, Again I'm sure it was you kicked up from Iowa dirt, loying like a giant crow from Windsong Farm's grazing field to erase the sky and take my breath.

And that morning in the dark of a sOll late-­‐November dawn when leaves rustled and my black lab rooted on the walk to growl and raise the hair along its neck and mine . . .

Come to think of it, you must have been the two hemispheres of oblivion closing on a thread of light. That's all that was ley of me, dear friend, a thread, a way to climb up again, for now.

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You know what October is like You know what October is like.

One day we cross the path of its damp arc, its mulOples suddenly with us, gables and bu^resses, ribs through which the air sinks with its cold weight.

I am with you that ayernoon, cloistered in what we draw around us. We read of a new moon and this seems out of season; an enOre party of amateurs has tumbled from Mont Blanc. We do not follow those li^le plates of ice, we have our own laments: the dead singer, whose cry next door you took for pracOce, a laugh carried over to my shame. I press for your arm beneath your sweater. We are like separate homes whose furnishings come to hand as rock and ice, a rickety descent in which our bones are tossed within us. * The breath of my sleeping covers the panes with broad-­‐leafed ferns.

I marvel at the ribbons that come from my nostrils, rising in a cell of ice and disinfectant, loose bandages twined with them, spun from the cadmium bed onto a black frame.

I scratch a line on the pane: blue sky and white mountain, then a skier who is a dot that blinks. Down, down,

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I will travel south again this morning, into a green embroidery with a scarlet thread and one moOon of water.

I catch sight of you now. I call, and call forth three streams of darkness, the creases of this mask.

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When the Twig Snaps In October I take up work from the previous year. It is a split-­‐screen in this neutral home, with one side in a storm of dead leaves and pencil lines, a smudge on the urban winter. There is a pressure, a kind of urgent summer on the other side. More than fall, it is a place of severe elecOons. Should we, being of sound mind, write it off? Sensing the snap, should we commit ourselves? Sure enough, there's the li^le twig breaking, though swallowed by voluptuous sound, painted with deep, rich colors by the curator, imagined perfectly, along with the other prerequisites for seducOon. We need a break, we need islands!

Imagine where breakers are literal, where mellow analyOcal voices sha^er at the reef . . .

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About James Cervantes James Cervantes's latest book, From Mr. Bondo's Unshared Life, is available from Hamilton Stone EdiOons and at Amazon. Other books include Sleepwalker's Songs: New & Selected Poems, Temporary Meaning, The Headlong Future, and The Year Is Approaching Snow.

He was editor of The Salt River Review for thirteen years, and is currently foreign correspondent for Hinchas de Poesia.

Cervantes also edited, with Leilani Wright, Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry (U. of Arizona Press, 1997), and is the editor of the In Like Company: The Salt River Review & Porch Anthology (MadHat Press, 2015).

About the Poems I write li^le and slowly and am further slowed down when I’m nearing the compleOon of a project like the anthology from MadHat Press, In Like Company, and also find it nearly impossible to write just ayer I’ve published a book of poem. So, I’m grateful when anything helps the process along. One such event is the background to the poems appearing here in Nine Mile: On my computer desktop there’s a folder labeled “in progress” which contains bits and pieces and drays of poems, and recently I rediscovered one of those Ony documents Otled simply “NOTE*.” Opening it, I found this: “See drays/ beginnings in 2003,” which in turn sent me to a folder Otled “drays/beginnings” within a folder Otled “2003,” which contained poems wri^en that year. So, three of the poems in Nine Mile owe their existence to that archeological

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expediOon (“Bridges From the Physical,” “When the Twig Snaps, “You know what October is like”). But, my choice of which “drays/beginnings” to work on was in turn influenced by a very recent poem, “Hello, Again,” which referenced events that connected historically with details in those much earlier beginnings.

There was, of course, a string of free associaOon between poems and details that I doubt I could reconstruct.

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Catherine Arra Ode to B3 In the fluted vase of a loblolly pine the nest, a broad, twig-­‐Oered affair engineered in crisscross, latched-­‐sOck precision padded with meadow grass you were born in late February (the 22nd to be exact and they named you B3) a Q-­‐Op, bobble-­‐head hatchling all belly hunger and need ayer Mama & Papa labored the days of snow and more snow the wind, rain, sleet, heat fog & fate to deliver you finally to the sky.

I've watched the weeks -­‐ a web cam addict never without iPad, iPhone or far from the desktop -­‐ witnessing the cradled wilderness of your rearing, the modeling of manners One never kills needlessly. One never wastes food.

One never abandons its mate or its young.

One masters the code of its species & is true.

Flexing, perching, preening, clawing -­‐ then branching & mantling balancing grand gestures with weighted grace, you wonder at the sky, the distance you will go

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& your powers.

At 12 weeks, a down-­‐mo^led, silky black grey 3 feet long, a 6 foot wing span you're sOll a baby, miscalculaOng branches & crashing dive-­‐bombed bullied by blue jays sOll needing your Mama's belly feathers & long night vigils.

InsOnct driven, exhausted you nose dive, belly flop the nest bed, splay yourself out like a paper kite, side stretch that right leg, those sexy talons beak-­‐set your sight over sOcks to watch & doze waiOng the call.

I whisper....

Take your ;me lovely girl, go slow... from this place you can never return.

You say, No, it's simple. I’m an eagle.

Then one morning in late May (the 22nd at 7:11 am. to be exact) a flapping silhoue^e in rising white light you claimed the sky a blinding starburst of sun and web cam quivering in your wake ________________________________________________ Nine Mile Magazine -­‐ Spring 2015 -­‐ Page 28

with me, berey, gu^ed longing, holding & wanOng to hold, unlike your Mama who delivers fresh fish, calls you back to nest & watches you eat as you always eat.

It's simple, yes... but today before she departs you nuzzle her belly, stroke her side feathers with bowed head.

Could it be...did you?

Go, B3 go live between sky & pine & with you this wild heart.

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First Flight To hesitate (I know) you start, go and stop wiggle down, adjust spring upright, step-­‐step step ahead to the edge determined, periscope look-­‐out …shiy, side-­‐side side-­‐side to a sudden reverse back squat.

Desire rides tension between doubt and desOny the passage entered or not. (I know)

How I imagined this day for you the liy, soar, height and grandeur How elegant slicing sky becoming like wind.

I imagined the crash too a sightless spiral, scraping bark broken and never rising again.

Half do not survive the first year un-­‐winged or dead (I know)

but you (hard-­‐wired insOnct) go a fearless staOsOc either way.

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Nested Light Baby eagle earth-­‐brown down where will you go, now lone hunter, seeker without parent or nest trading innocence for the kill, losing all (feathers, eyes, beak) for steel grey, gold white tail & crown?

Though I’ve memorized the pa^erns in your ashen under wings, studied the Olt of your exquisite head, I have no inches on a door frame, circles in a tree no compass or sextant, no way to mark migraOons, molOng follow the story of your making from fledgling to mate.

Tell me baby eagle where will you go & how will I know if ever I see you again?

In the cleavage of your senses in nested light, in the place where you found me (there) all things take flight.

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About Catherine Arra Catherine Arra’s poetry has appeared in the Naugatuck River Review, the Perfume River Poetry Review, and Postcards Poems and Prose. Red Ochre Literature published her first chapbook in March 2014. She lives in the Hudson Valley in upstate NY. Her interests include hiking, biking, wildlife preservaOon, photography and yoga.

She says: I live in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York where I taught public school English and wriOng for 34 years.

Recent poetry has appeared the Naugatuck River Review, the Perfume River Review, Postcards Poems and Prose. In March, Red Ochre Literature published my first chapbook, Slamming & Spliwng. Now joyfully reOed, I teach part Ome, facilitate a local writers’ criOque group and migrate south during winters.

About the Poems Listening to a Living On Earth podcast on NPR in early February 2014, I learned about an eagle web cam newly installed at Berry College in Rome, Georgia and took a look. The cam brought the viewer into the nest where a mated pair took turns incubaOng two eggs, though only one would hatch. Ayer that first look I couldn’t turn away. My daily checking-­‐in on the nesOng family grew into a fervent streaming of acOvity in the days leading up to the eaglet’s (B3’s) fledge.

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The Berry Eagles, along with visits to a local nest near the Ashokan Reservoir in upstate New York, inspired a series of poems about these majesOc raptors and the fearless grace with which they survive the perils of nature and man.

I’m fortunate to live in a rural area teaming with biodiversity, but now a variety of wildlife web cams worldwide enable anyone, anywhere to witness the purity and peace in wild things.

When man moves away from nature, his heart becomes hard. -­‐Na;ve American Proverb – Lakota Sioux

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Roger Weingarten Invasive Species Beaver palace. Snowshoe. Ice over methane from centuries of cows trapped in muck. Why I didn’t faint—as I drove my ley arm to the ball and socket into it to liberate the old rawhide strung pla~orm shoe—but daydreamed instead of my bearded nemesis who had tracked my nightmare through a life of reaching for that word stuck in my craw or love turned

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into shit—go figure. But for the first Ome ayer a lifeOme of almost outracing that farfetched reach, waking in a cold sweat to avoid the threat, I turned to the honed steel. As he held it, gleaming in the sunlit dream, to the jugular notch I offered in this pastoral moment, he turned into an old college chum orbiOng on the next café stool who invited me to play poker with pals this

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very night. I want to, I shot back, but confessed to not having two nickels to rub together. Another Ome, he consoled, grinning as he skated the edge of the blade across my Hebrew neck.

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The Far East Side of Cleveland/ The Coney Island of Hanoi/ Main Street, Montpelier For Weigl The backyard bullies’ tobacco-­‐stained grins pour over the chain links, climb the ragged bark and fall on my li^le brother and me hypnoOzed in play.

Pinned to the lawn, they slap and pummel us into breathless fits of crying. Joyriding a rented bike at daybreak, I let go of the handlebars in the sweet breeze of exhaust and coriander, let go of the low dwellings at the blurry edge of my nearsighted vision of the rickety train that brought me, of the jet lag and otherworldly coloratura slur of this marOan lingo. Lewng go of that quesOon you ley me with in the departure lounge of my imaginaOon, where I liy the soles of my wingOps from the pedals and crash into the serene

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loneliness of the answer. Alleycat dancer, the sharp-­‐knuckled, rope-­‐muscled girl and her older unbathed brothers crawl like red ants across the Bermuda grass and kick my brother into oblivion ayer tying me to the rusted swingset to watch. I’ve never stared into the central square of Hanoi. I don’t even know the dust-­‐bedevilled granite sheds two blocks away or the fine line of brown hair mohawking my ante diluvian tesOcles. Didn’t I spelunk the Slovenian cave where Rilke lost his fooOng standing on an underground bridge two hundred feet over hell? Didn’t you kamikaze into my half-­‐full nowhere of a life and fill it to the brim with chocolate Kama Sutra goodies? Isn’t it hard to concentrate in this iffy oblivion of North Vietnamese urban rain forest swelter El Ninoed halfway around the planet to our sweet

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untangling-­‐-­‐ here, under these broken bits of sea shells and sharks’ teeth pa^erned sheets? If only, you say and reach for the small of my lower back.

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The Saigon of Tranquility Not her backward somersault on a moon so orange you could juice it. Not the snow goose among a flying V over the moonscape who dropped a bayonet shaped quill into her shoulder basket of bi^er papaya and tree fungus not meant for the brother he didn’t find tunneling toward daylight. The hell with the years of moonlight into the future, in an alley dusky and li^ered with trash behind the Boston Harbor Custom House, where he will not step on her toes or reach for the dark ravine of her dimple, dark glasses and cane. Nor will she spray the pepper into his shock. She will not tuck the right toe

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of her shoe behind her ley heel and turn on the ball of her foot while he crumbles into the next century. She will not and neither will he.

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About Roger Weingarten Roger Weingarten, author of ten collecOons of poetry, and co-­‐editor of eight poetry and prose anthologies, has lectured, taught and read at writers’ conferences, poetry fesOvals, and universiOes naOonally and internaOonally. He founded and taught in the MFA in WriOng and the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College.

His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Louisville Review Poetry Prize, a NaOonal Endowment for the Arts Award, and an Ingram Merrill FoundaOon Award in Literature. Stranger at Home: American Poetry with an Accent: co-­‐edited with Andrey Gritsman, Interpoezia Press, was published in 2008, Premature Elegy by Firelight by Longleaf Press in 2007, and Open Book: Essays from the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, co-­‐edited with Kate Fetherston by Cambridge Scholars’ Press in 2007. The poems published here are from his 11th collecOon, The Four Gentlemen and their Footman, just published by Longleaf Press, and available from the press or Amazon.

About the poems “Far East Side…” This swooped down on me in a Bruce Weigl exercise session: First: write about some place from your past, , then, 2nd: leap to somewhere exoOc, then, 3, leap back to the familiar but write about it as if it were exoOc, something like that. Fun, liberaOng, and it lead to this scrambled memory narraOve that leapfrogs back and forth from Asia to Ohio to our smallest state

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capital.

“The Saigon of Tranquility” is a sideways elegy to an undeclared war that took place elsewhere then brought its tensions stateside. I tell it in the negaOve as if it were a relaOonship between a couple gone sour.

“Invasive Species” is a travelogue through a lifeOme of recurrent dreams where I’m being chased by a badass knifetoter, usually sporOng a sizeable beard. A shrink pal suggested that I let the guy catch me and see what happens. I did: in this sewng, he skates across my throat; in another, he pulls out his Johnson and hoses me down. Did I die or get wet? Find oneness or peace? I leave the answer in your hands.

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William Schulz Thanksgiving Trees This tree holds robins that refuse to move.

A tree in Hebron is always snow-­‐covered.

An old elm, roots sOll sprouOng, falls in a terrible storm.

That tree on the side of Carter's Hill stands in a wind full of crows.

And this one cold maple I climb only on Thanksgiving.

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Nearing Solstice 1. dark dark day the sun a sliver of memory slipping away

let daylight se^le slowly

islands will appear and ledges alight handholds we’ll follow longing for night 2. what has become of the buoy off Georges Bank adriy and silent since Thanksgiving gauging the colors of clouds winds calm seas building nothing to report

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ducks passing overhead give a slight whistle 3. first light reflected within the water off Clapboard Island

listen a voice says the weather for Chebeague and MaOnicus Monhegan Muscongus

each morning the same each morning changed high Ode just before sunrise

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Warnings to the east beyond sea smoke and pines weather begins cold winds move light across waters ice on moorings an hour for gulls and crows even the simple ducks not you alone and slipping you are but clouds gray and eastward you’ve turned your back to the landing and me though these gusts will linger and my step sOll slip ________________________________________________ Nine Mile Magazine -­‐ Spring 2015 -­‐ Page 47

About William Schulz Bill Schulz was born and raised in Maine and now lives in Portland. His work has appeared in The Seneca Review, Kansas Quarterly, and other publicaOons. He holds Masters Degrees in Poetry and Theology. Naturally, he is a health insurance execuOve. He hopes someday to put experience and educaOon to good use and raise goats in the hills above Ragusa, Sicily.

About the Poems I live in a house on a hill in Maine that looks out on Casco Bay. On winter mornings, sunlight emerges slowly from a cold AtlanOc. Some mornings there are ships offshore that were not there the night before, slowly circling around Clapboard Island while waiOng for dock space in Portland Harbor.

Every day all things are the same unOl they are not.

These two poems are part of a personal almanac – interior data collected to help me navigate the recent deaths of two people very close to me: the sudden death of a cousin – not yet 50 – and the slow, unrelenOng demise of my mother, who died at age 92.

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Sylvia Steen DAMES

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Driven

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Grandpa and the Buffalo Robe

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Untitled

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EXPIRED

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Thelma

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About Sylvia Steen I am a self taught arOst from Nedrow NY interested in painOng images of early modern women using facial expression and body language as a mean of communicaOon. I am also a descendant of arOst William Steene who painted the official portraits of many well known figures including Franklin D Roosevelt. I have exhibited my work widely throughout central NY in several one person shows and various juried compeOOons.

About the work “DAMES" 40x48 oil painOng (Prints Available) "DRIVEN" 24x 36 oil painOng (prints available) "Grandpa and the Buffalo Robe" 24x30 oil painOng (prints available) "UnOtled “ 30 x40 oil painOng Prints available “EXPIRED" 30x40 oil painOng (prints available) THELMA 28 x36 oil painOng (prints available) SteenArOst. Original Oil PainOngs and prints for sale.

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Barbara Conrad Two Sexagenarians Strolling the Landfill on Green Turtle Cay and wondering where we go when we leave this world of coral-­‐packed islands floaOng in blue salt. Do we rust away, dust away, sha^er into shards like those stacks of Mount Gay rum bo^les, burned out '71 Corolla in the rubble, and on the far ledge, a turquoise baby stroller.

(Is everything here turquoise?)

And what will we be like in the life ayer – a cracked porcelain sink, empty can of WD40, a busted bicycle, ro^ed hull of a fishing skiff or some girl’s wedding dress, moth-­‐shredded ayer twenty years, silver trivets no one polished?

On the hill stands Simon, wearing ash and smudge on his work shirt. He manages the burns when the wind is leeward, turns mortality to smoke.

We stop to listen to wild hogs rooOng in the scrubby underbrush, sure to be next week’s bacon, and a farmer's loose chicken, darOng from two local teens

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with their baited cardboard trap and string.

Our aunt bet us we couldn't catch a bird, they boast from a golf cart perch, snacking on dry cereal from a box. A few bucks we figure, to get them out of her way.

Easy theology on a gli^er-­‐perfect day,

a day they don't look past.

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Unconformity -­‐-­‐-­‐ a gap in earth's geological strata, when fossils are lost, as in the Grand Canyon Three days in a row, tornadoes have torn up the Midwest, twisted rouOne into rebar, trapped the children. A blanket of grit fla^ens roads and houses, wraps them in conversaOons caught mid-­‐breath while the storm sabotages promise, burns vows to cinder. Unbidden gaps in what might have been evermore. § I think of that summer in the canyon, when we watched the pop of moon shoot over ancient red rock walls, touched five billion years of limestone, sandstone, shale, basalt, layered and re-­‐layered.

Rocks that speak in rhythms older than Greek or Hebrew.

Supai, Redwall, Toroweap, Kaibab, Vishnu Schist.

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Anointed names. Riddled with rain, worn by wind, shiyed by river's rage.

Lizard's refuge now. § We'd hike to a feminine place, a deep red passage chiseled by water flow in a pink fragile furrow.

A trickle spills into a sOll pool. We step in, rub fingers over what feels like skin.

Talcum and sage. We are carved from this. § And from this -­‐-­‐ random tempest whisking up our status quo.

Chewing on metal and wood.

Horses spinning through air like loose spi^le.

Bones woven in webs of tangle.

All one can do is wander the rubble unOl the sun flares wild again and barely visible in a bruised sky – that same moon breaking through.

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Considering Castration -­‐-­‐ aAer a report that 14th century eunuchs lived up to twenty years longer than non-­‐castrated males Suppose you were the mother of a young son called to serve the imperial court.

You know that only the ruler is non-­‐castratus. You've heard the tales from other kingdoms -­‐-­‐ knife to the shay, tesOcles baited with human waste, clamp of a dog's bite.

But jobs are scarce and if, in hunger, your boy has stolen a goat from the marketplace or a pocket of plums, emasculaOon is a lesser penance than death.

Is that what you’d tell yourself?

That he may rise from treble singer or harem guard to be favored by the king?

Or when drained of desire, he’ll live longer?

What about you, ley with only the scent of him whole, the grace

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at his birth when you traced every body part – ribcage and nose, curve of the ear, each finger and toe, and ayer his bath, how slowly you’d bend to trim his nails with your teeth, so careful not to let him bleed.

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Smell of Salt Even if I were a blind person, tapping my red-­‐Opped sOck toward a path through ocean dunes, I'd know by the odor, it's garbage day on Ha^eras Island. SOnking hulls and fishy bones fill the cans of co^ages, proof that guests have swallowed up a week's worth from the sea, leaving their leavings for me to remember * That Ome our dog Pinto rolled in a dead fish at Ki^y Hawk just as we were packing the car to go home, how my mother hosed her off but even now * Note to the weekly renters: So you there in the SunPhun, Ocean MoOon, and For the Halibut. Extravagance comes to mind.

Indulgence.

Excess.

Glu^ony.

InsaOability.

Loneliness. *

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Maybe it was a family reunion you were having, a last fling before a son goes to college, old girlfriends single-­‐again or cancer-­‐free -­‐-­‐ and ravenous? * Marcel Proust wrote "taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring...remain poised a long Ome, like souls...and bear unflinchingly, in the Ony ... drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollecOon.” * So what if I, solo traveler, once had my essence ripped to shreds, raw flesh hanging like a hooked fish.

Go ahead and weigh me.

Take home the damn trophy.

But don't make me linger in your bliss. * Or simply this: the hippocampus is connected to the olfactory nerve (and the shin bone's connected to the ankle bone -­‐-­‐ and I'm eight years old again). * Note to Ishmael: What was it like on the Pequod,

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its rail and deck trimmed in stench: mackerel guts, shrimp heads, plankton, krill. All the while, catch ayer catch, Ahab would hold out for the big one, wishing it sliced and empOed, filling the bilge with odiferous doom. * Boil 'Ol they float to the surface Clean out the feces with a knife Pop and suck the heads Scrape off the scales Cut open the innards Twist off the claws Crack the back and squeeze out the meat with your teeth -­‐-­‐ I'm thinking about the cracking of bones. * And that whalebone ley to rot on the bow of the novel, in the captain’s dreams, its jaw the sieve of the sea, eighteen feet of cone-­‐shaped daggers, blubber stripped, picked clean by gulls, delicious jubilee. * What could be more lonely than a beached whale, the one everyone tries to save. Bucket ayer bucke~ul of water, what they think

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he needs, no clue he might be hungry.

Or the baleen I heard about, swimming solo up the coast for decades, miswired, his song unanswered. * And one's essence?

Pluff mud between my toes. Cord grass Ockling knobby knees. Crokers, drums, and menhaden gone as the marsh empOes. A mullet leaps.

Fiddler crabs and snails burrow to keep cool.

The blue heron waits. Mussels and oysters wait.

Bouquet of low Ode on an inland breeze -­‐-­‐ chlorophyll, animal decay. A father liys his bait bucket to show this barefoot child how to smell the salt.

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The Barbeque Pit We’ve climbed barefoot down from the hedge of evergreens.

We’ve washed the soles of our feet at the edge of the bathtub, also our scabbing knees.

We're cracking a window for something familiar.

You. Daddy. There in the backyard. Burning a two-­‐inch sirloin, swilling a double bourbon while lightening bugs flicker.

They took down the barbeque pit when we sold the house.

(They took down the house.)

Those doves sOll mourn on the wire by Mother’s forsythia bush.

The bees have ley the ligustrum.

We want the bees back, the fireflies, the mockingbird.

Even the steak you’d sear on Saturday night, creosote-­‐crusted, its raw flesh too tough for us to bite.

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About Barbara Conrad Barbara Conrad is author of Wild Plums, (FutureCycle Press 2013), The Gravity of Color, (Main Street Rag 2007) and editor of Wai;ng for Soup (Main Street Rag 2004), a collecOon of poetry from her weekly workshops with homeless neighbors in Charlo^e, NC. She has been published by journals and anthologies such as Tar River Poetry, Sow's Ear, Southern Women's Review, Southern Poetry Anthology (NC), Icarus, Kakalak and the NC Literary Review. Three poems were finalists for NCLR’s James Applewhite Poetry Prize, 2015. When she's not chained to her wriOng desk, she's in the community working on social jusOce causes, visiOng daughters and grandkids or hiking the North Carolina mountains.

Aesthetic of Witness What is poetry, I’m wondering, if not witness to the world and of the world.

For me, it may be witness of an item in the news or some moment in history that touches a nerve. It could stem from my own memory or a personal encounter with a place or event.

Whatever the trigger that nudges – tornadoes in Oklahoma, a study of 14th century eunuchs, the smell of garbage on the Outer Banks, memory of my father burning a steak -­‐-­‐ it invites me to reflect, remember or respond.

Hopefully, with a bit of discipline and an insigh~ul editor, I can do it in a way that neither judges nor ponOficates, but creates a welcoming bridge between self and the world.

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Siwsan Gimprich When the Shoals When the shoals are full of fish, birds gather over them.

Hawaiian Proverb And when the storms come And the fish dive for safety to the deeps farther out, For us who live in the air, we Breathe in the air We exhale the air, the shoals hold us up The deeps are our danger.

The birds arc and wheel Above us, hungry For the fish who have ley As we are hungry for the air Which is their universe.

Our needs are solid And fish require the waters As birds must have air.

When we are hungry, We seek our own levels.

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About Siwsan Gimprich My name is Siwsan Gimprich. While this is not the name I was given at birth, it is the name I selected when I began to study the Welsh language. I never became fluent, but I got a great name out of it.

I am old enough to have a lot of background, but very li^le of it is interesOng as straight fact without the embellishment. Suffice it to say that I began wriOng poetry in high school, a^ended the University of Iowa, and then desperate to escape the Midwest, I moved to NYC, went to CCNY, where I won numerous wriOng awards and edited the literary journal called City. I have conOnued to write, and my poems have appeared in Prometheus as well as several small press anthologies of Haiku. Most recently, poems have appeared in Spillway Magazine and an online/small-­‐run magazine called SpitMag. The Winter 2015 issue of River River will contain some of my poetry as well.

My poems are driven by both environment, physical and psychic, and story.

About the poem Being a non-­‐academic, I rarely talk about what I am doing with my poetry, preferring Eliot's idea that once my pen leaves the paper, the poem belongs to the reader. In this poem, I was exploring the idea of the universe being a balance -­‐ safe and dangerous at the same Ome. The place of security for one is a peril for another. Here I spoke of different classes of animals, but the idea can be extended far beyond the biological.

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L. B. Green Stuck —aAer Claude Royet-­‐Journoud In the South, in the Episcopal Church we say: Lord have mercy. We say, Lord have mercy, a lot.

On the block, in the hood, at the desk, at the dance, while listening to Deepak Chopra, or dangling from the side of the house, water-­‐blasOng the gu^ers.

I need a clean, clear thought, a form, a noun to announce a sight. I read the whole of poetry is preposiOon and sense there are the scurrilous, the kindhearted, even the giants of ignoble limbs that in their quarrel, also beg, for one reason or another, to be Oed together, at the same Ome released.

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There I learned the conceit of dream and the eroOc life in that li^le room on the hill above the sound at the window curtains of ninon blowing in and out.

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Spare Me —ayer Lucian, Greek saOrist and poet, 2nd Century A. D. Spare me the new neighbor I’ve tried months to like, the one with the bug-­‐like, wrap-­‐around black sunglasses, who hammers the Goliath-­‐like, commercial sign into our property, up by the road, without the smallest courtesy of asking permission. Spare me the weak man on whom kindnesses are poured, for he is: a broken jug. A person who never understands the cost of such gestures, does not contain. Spare me myself when razor-­‐edged my tongue grows without even speaking.

When, in ayernoon, I day-­‐dream

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about nudging close to him, about whispering in his ear something sharp as hewed stone, intended to pierce in three words. Is loving thy neighbor as thyself a floor exercise for the mind, the heart, the good?

I’m working on it. I am. But the floor is rigid, cold, hard.

And I keep wondering, since he’s a builder, if he has any idea about how words can provide a certain harmony, the fiwng thing?

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Lean Closer —aAer Sunny Allen Lean closer to the earth, to the lit brazier, so near the blue blaze bleeds your cheek. Fling to the fire gods that one word, undeniable fuel, le^er by le^er carved upon the heart. The one that hurts so when the flame fli^ers to ash, it frees you from the bright strike of its hard hoof.

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About L. B. Green L. B. Green is author of the books Judas Trees North of the House (2003), Night Garden (2009) and THE ART OF SEEING In Sweet Silent Thought (2010), a collecOon of poetry and photography. The North Carolina Arts Council www.ncarts.org , the MacDowell Colony www.macdowellcolony.org , and the Virginia Center for the CreaOve Arts www.vcca.com have awarded her grants and fellowships. Freelance writer, poet, painter and photographer she has been the recipient of both the Robert Ruark FoundaOon Prize and the Randall Jarrell Prize for poetry. Her photography, painOngs and drawings have been shown in regional and naOonal solo and group exhibiOons. She lives and works in Davidson, North Carolina.

About the Poems The four poems here are a means of individual introspecOon. They are works drawn from an ongoing manuscript of poetry and prose tentaOvely Otled: In ConversaOon: Yet Again Witness to The Odyssean ImperaOve. The speaker is busy thinking. She ponders in her home, in her yard, around things, and in places that are familiar to her. She has a sense of humor. She is serious. She is acutely aware that there is a difference in the words onward and upward, the horizontal and the verOcal, in terms of philosophical tension, as the German Philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, menOons in his book, You must change your life, when wisdom is: as pracOce, and necessary to be, and to remain human.

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Ken La Valle Reflections of nature Whenever we travel to a certain place We are touched by natures beauty of that place We walk or stroll, see and hear a message all around We see reflecOons from some water dancing on the leaves A stream that glistens when passing soyly beneath a bridge An orchestra of birds playing a melody to our ears The sun from above pulling tree branches up and up The ivy climbing on a tree bough making a pa^ern to behold So pause a moment to see and hear the message all around For all of this brings some ReflecOons to our mind

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The Beach White sand beneath your feet Blue sky above your head Wave’s spray against your face Jewe's rocks that scrape your feet Small children building sand castles The Plover protected in their nest This mysOc place for all to think

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About Ken La Valle Ken La Valle is a poet who lives and works on Long Island and in Albany, NY. He is deeply involved in his community and has worked closely with SUNY at Stony Brook to help to build up the college to a naOonally-­‐recognized insOtuOon.

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Michael Colonnese Beauty as a Secondary Consideration There’s sOll an incorporeal trace of it at the 27-­‐A exit, where a thin shadow of barbed wire along a concrete barricade proclaims the summerOme reign of the cosmopolitan dandelion, a green fuse extruded between creosoted Oes, and conspires to collect hosannas from drought-­‐stunted crabgrass cracking the dry asphalt around an inflatable rubber dome where the Highway Dept. stores sand and salt for winter, a landscape of inescapable silence, an event horizon with an alternaOve ending that exists

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only in the eternity it takes to channel surf with a dead remote.

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On Black Ice Shortly ayer passing a terrible accident on I-­‐95 with flames and mangled torsos hanging out of cars at dusk, on the eve of the winter solsOce, I’m zipping across snow-­‐frosted fields of drought-­‐stunted cornstalks that never got harvested, and for some reason keep remembering a red Rubbermaid cooler filled with melOng ice chips and a dozen dead, undersized sea bass confiscated by a warden from the Department of Fish and Game and the empOness of fish eyes ________________________________________________ Nine Mile Magazine -­‐ Spring 2015 -­‐ Page 81

in bodies already gu^ed but about to be dumped for the sea to reclaim as if the gulls and blue crabs had more of a right to devour such flesh than the unhappy angler from whom they’d been seized.

Black ice is a human construct, an invisible fear,

a traveler’s caveat, a warning sign funcOoning like a propheOc dream of fire-­‐opened pine cones

about to germinate on scorched earth, a dream about my novel, the early one that never found a publisher

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in which the bi^er stench of the hero’s regret is coughed up like clo^ed blood into the silk veil of the belly dancer.

Along the highway’s shoulder, lost scraps of shredded Ores hunker down in the weeds like grouse targeted by the idle rich who someOmes imagine their wrecked Lamborghinis molding away at the bo^om of a frozen pond, where I too can imagine myself

submerged for a moment, filled with the muck of memory as the evening sky holds Oght to the slow descent of leaves

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from branches bare and gray as the bald Ores I drive on, and keep hydroplaning along on, over ice, in the humming dark.

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About Michael Colonnese Michael Colonnese has been an organic farmer, an industrial chemical salesman, an armed guard, an adverOzing copywriter; a lobster fisherman, a reader for the blind; a beer-­‐truck driver, a life insurance salesman; a punch press operator, and the sound man for a small documentary film company. These days, he's both a poet and a writer of ficOon and creaOve non-­‐ficOon. He is the author of a detecOve novel, Sex and Death, I Suppose, which won the Dark Oak FicOon Award and was published by Oak Tree Press; a poetry collecOon, Temporary Agency, won the Ledge Poetry Prize and was published by the Ledge Press. His latest poetry collecOon Double Feature won the 2014 Dell Poetry Award, and publicaOon by Big Table Press is scheduled for Spring of 2015. His short stories, poems, creaOve-­‐nonficOon pieces and essays have been published in many popular magazines and literary journals. He holds a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and he currently directs the CreaOve WriOng Program at Methodist University where he also serves as managing editor of Longleaf Press. He lives in Faye^eville, NC.

About the Poems My own poeOc aestheOc always seems to me to be a very obvious one. but it probably isn't-­‐-­‐obvious, I mean-­‐-­‐for it doesn't appear so when try to explain it.

Basically, my poems are deeply confessional-­‐-­‐although not in the sense that they aspire to provoke the reader's pity or funcOon as a kind of literal reportage. In "Beauty as a Secondary ConsideraOon" for example, I'm recalling

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the very real and dangerous 27A exit off I-­‐95 in Bridgeport, CT, the hometown of my childhood, and I'm a^empOng to connect the ways I feel and think about that memory-­‐haunted landscape with images and language I haven't seen used in poems before. Hopefully, if I'm candid and clear, I can describe the small links between events in my own thought processes without senOmentality or syntacOcal redundancy-­‐-­‐all of which generally requires a lot of revision. I'm also simultaneously trying to pay a^enOon to the sounds of individual phrases and to promote a kind a musical unity that has almost nothing to do with tradiOonal metrics or forms but nevertheless makes uses of poeOc devices like assonance and alliteraOon-­‐-­‐all without being too obvious or heavy-­‐handed. And if I can finally squint at one of my own poems in dray and decide that it's a finished thing, a rhetorical construct that describes an emoOonal response such as other readers might also experience in similar circumstance, I feel less alone for having wri^en it.

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Elinor Cramer Last Summer on the Detroit River I miss Margery, my father says, but it’s been some weeks since I cried.

At 95 he’s landed on an island which needs provisions.

On board with him was his second wife.

The aides bring pills and clean laundry.

He’s grateful, and memorizes their names.

At dinner with the fellow ship-­‐wrecked, he says, Dan’s place was to my right.

They say he went to the hospital by ambulance. Where you’re siwng Margery sat.

He tells of the ebb and flow, the nighwme rowing out.

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About Elinor Cramer Elinor Cramer's first poetry collecOon She Is a Pupa, SoA and White, was published in 2011. She has two chapbooks, Canal Walls Engineered So Carefully They S;ll Hold Water, and another to be released in 2015. She lives in Syracuse where she pracOces psychotherapy. Her website is elinorcramer.com

About the Poems I like poems that look at what it is to be human and take their energy from a story, however individual. There's something powerful that comes in the reading if the details and the understanding were put there just so. I try to get at these, and to make something happen in me when wriOng. My father would have been 100 years old this year. He walked, read, and was pre^y sharp when he needed the care described in the poem. His hearing was just bad enough that conversaOon was very difficult. I think of 'island' as reflecOng that smaller world as well.

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Check Us Out — Great talk about great poems!

We are here — come join us: Blog: h^ps://talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com Soundcloud: h^ps://soundcloud.com/bobherz iTuines: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-­‐about-­‐ poetry/id972411979?mt=2

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