Before the salmon-full, PUthe alewife-less, PUtropic blue Mussel-filtered water,
Was a green lake PUT_CCCCCCof indigenous fish.
A fishing industry.
Before that logging.
After eradication.
Before that trading.
Before that, words of people comprehensible over and around us –
Before most of ours – PUthat’s the take,
PUTif you’re wondering –
Describing the bounty. The ease of it.
The rise and fall Of waves on an inland sea, One of the great Cycle-keepers.
Let the gunk go down its gullet Is one way back to the true Inheritance of all that violence.
The other is to let The moist, rising earth – PUthe great Kankakee – Absorb – more than once more The particles that float about, PUand entomb them In some future peat.
Poetry by Amalie Flynn + Images by Pamela Flynn: “#150,” “#151,” “#152,” “#153”
Flow #150
SPIDER / 150
Thick in Louisiana swamps
Atchafalaya Basin
Hot cypress shooting out
Stretching in that bayou
Where pipelines
Pumping black gold oil
Cross across the swamp
Like spider veins.
Flow #151
TRACKS / 151
How I find tiny cuts
The skin of my inner
Thighs outer lip my
Labia
Cuts from his finger
Nails small bloody
Crescents
Like beetle tracks.
Flow #152
SPOIL / 152
Or deep in a swamp
How oil companies
Create canals
Push earth into piles
Push mud into banks
These spoil banks or
Dams
That block blocking
Water so it cannot
Flow.
Flow #153
CLAM / 153
The sky is full of trees
Now after
After he hits me over
The head
With a pipe metal pipe
Hard on
The crown of my skull
Bone and
Suture cracking like a
Clam shell.
Pattern of Consumption is a year long project featuring 365 poems by Amalie Flynn and 365 images by Pamela Flynn. The poetry and images focus on the assault on women and water.
New Poetry from Marc Tretin: “Justin Alter, Slightly Drunk, Addresses Maya, Who Is In Egypt” and “Maya Ricci Alter After Excavating A Pyramid South Of Zairo”
HOT WIRES SCALD / image by Amalie Flynn
JUSTIN ALTER, SLIGHTLY DRUNK, ADDRESSES MAYA, WHO IS IN EGYPT
Now as I am hungover and queasy
stumping about the tilting house
and sappy as my face is green,
Maya, your sculpture of Qetesh,
that goddess of sex and ecstasy,
whose torso of clear pink plastic
has a heart made of puzzle pieces
dangling from wires that run to an
automated external defibrillator
normally used to shock
a rapid cardiac rhythm
back to normal, stares at me with eyes
filled with both desire and despair.
Though feeling embarrassed
I touch the pink nub you meant
to be her clit and a soft whirr starts, then
puzzle pieces spin so fast they tear, and scatter
and the bare hot wires scald
the insides of her perfect breasts.
I pull the plug, but the smell of burnt plastic
fills our bedroom despite the open windows.
Why do you have to be gone so long?
MAYA RICCI ALTER EXCAVATING A PYRAMID SOUTH OF CAIRO
As I stooped beneath the
standing sun within the
meter-by-meter carefully
measured order of this
archeological dig and
brushed pottery shards
and papyrus crumbs through
a sieve to sift out the sand,
the heat’s strong hands
touched me like a half-
wanted lover, whose warmth
is too familiar with my
body to refuse and that’s
why when Jamaal, the site
boss said, “You look
overheated.
Cool off in my trailer.”
“Yes,” I said, knowing I
wanted to betray Justin
but not knowing why, so
after we had sex and while
I was thinking how can I
use this experience,
I saw Jamaal shave with
a straight edge then I saw
the dead-on right image for the God Set,
a cave-sized skull made of razor blades,
entered by stepping
over teeth made of sharp knives
into total darkness
except for a weak light
piercing this skull
through one of its eyes
and in that eye is a web
and tangled in its threads
are Zipporah and Justin.
Their faces, formless rags.
Their bodies sucked out hulks.
New Poetry by Scott Hughes: “Still”
THE FAULT LINES / image by Amalie Flynn
STILL
I never thought of you
as a hopeless romantic; this was news to me.
Are you still meditating? Meditate
on this:
You can take the Mulholland Highway across
the ridges of two counties
and stay high a long time.
We parked there once in your subcompact
in love and unconfined.
From the afternoon shade of a scrub oak
I remember the ridge route home,
the silhouettes of Point Dume and your profile
in the afterglow.
Since then I have been a jack of all trades
and a master of nothing:
unremarkable, unsubstantial, undignified;
unresolved, unremembered, unconceivable;
unqualified, unpublished, unreadable.
I looked for you in the county beach campgrounds
where you went with surfers from your high school.
I looked for you in all the places I heard you were in love.
I looked for you where rumors sent me.
I looked for you in the hills of Northridge
where we walked around the fault lines.
I looked for you among the barstools
from Venice to Ventura.
I looked for you in old Beach Boys songs.
I looked for you in stacks of photographs.
I looked for you in the bottom of a glass.
I looked for you stranded after a concert.
I looked for you at the Spahn Ranch.
I looked for you in the bittersweet words in books.
I looked for you in unsold manuscripts.
I looked for you in the margins of old college notes.
I looked for you in every woman who looked at me.
I looked for you in dharma talks.
I looked for you in shrines.
I looked for you in my next life.
I don’t think my karma is right.
Forty years on the hard roads of two counties
and I am
still.
New Poetry by Tony Marconi: “Song of the Roadway Door”
WE AND MACHINES / image by Amalie Flynn
…three hundred miles, PUT CHahead the road more visible PUT CHas the land dissolves in the pink light PUT CHARAPUT CHARAPUT CHof almost dawn
you sit beside me, PUT CHeyes fixed and restful on my face, PUT CHoffering hot coffee from a thermos PUT CHPUT CHARAPUT CHARACwhile the farm news PUT CHARAPUT CHARAPUT CHAbreaks morning music PUT CHARAPUT CHAPUT CHARAon a local station
i could be here forever, moving toward an unfamiliar place, held by speed and the vibrating engine, PUT CHARAPUT CHARAtouched by the warmth of your breath
i could be here forever, even as day turns into twilight; PUT CHARAPUT you borne lightly on sheets stiffly cleaned, PUT CHARAPUT wrapping your strength within, around mine; PUT CHPUT CHAprepared for tomorrow’s miles
we and machines; PUT CHPUT CHAonly we moving, moving; PUT CHARAPUT CHARAPUT CHAi could be here forever…
New Poetry from D.A. Gray: “Mosul Reflections,” “St. Martin in the City,” “The Rearview Has Two Faces”
STOMACH OF A COUNTRY / image by Amalie Flynn
Mosul Reflections
Ten years and the place is not the same. Memory of green hills in a dry land, cratered by what fell from the sky. I don’t know whether to trust the image on the screen or the one in my mind.
One I only knew as Sayyd gave well water, sweet tea and mince meat on laffa. We were tired from the spring rains, three days in the stomach of the country, we sank into the hard wooden benches and we ate. I thought of Jonah, not wanting to travel here, and when he did, enraged at an apocalypse that never came – how he rested under a bush then watched it die. The father of the family smiled as I ate — both of us, with time, smiling.
Dost thou well to be angry?
His child in the corner never took her eyes off me. Her mother would glance over, expressionless, as if waiting for something that never happened.
Rain fell like mortars, knocking the edges from the dirt roads, craters in the middle. In a few minutes it would take us with it, descending. We’d see the fragments, some carved reliefs; we’d wondered what we’d destroyed, what we’d left the world – an image of broken rock in need of a makeshift savior.
St. Martin in the City
Hunger sometimes reaches up grabs your cloak while you’re riding. You can’t shield your eyes, or go into hiding. Every treasure you’ve carried home, is never enough. A beggar beside the road, lifts his head; loose skin and sullen, he shivers and so do you.
* * * The day before we shipped I was walking with Preacher into the Walgreens for cold medicine and we saw a man asking for change. ‘Pity it couldn’t be him,’ Preacher said, not waiting while I fished for coins.
Since returning the eyes of every refugee leap out of every face.
* * * The stuff of nightmares.
Suffering
you thought you knew.
Sometimes it happens, a hand reaches out and causes you to draw back – until you see your fear in their eyes
both surprised how easily the veil between you parts.
The Rearview Has Two Faces
Your memory has two faces. The thought occurs as you adjust your mirror in the chapel parking lot.
The eulogy’s done its job, a few tears from even the most stoic, stone-faced ground pounders, the cracks in the First Sergeant’s voice as he belts ‘Smithson,’ once, twice and again – as he waits for a response that never comes. If you believe the words- he defended the abstraction of freedom with every fiber, never showed late, said his prayers, and flossed. You remember an emails he sent. ‘When I get back, there’s a lineman job in Oklahoma. And the houses are cheap.’ Days before he did it. You remember the night on your property, shooting empties off fence posts. ‘I’m not going back,’ he said. And you knew he would. Frustrating as hell but reliable. And you’d rather have sincere doubt than cocksure and careless.
The sun from the East burns the side of your face through the driver’s side window. In the rearview you can see your left side turning red. Yeah. The night he told you, you didn’t sleep, agonized over what to do about what he hadn’t done yet. And when he showed that morning, early, two full duffel bags and a goofy grin, you chided yourself for doubting. You look one more time. Sometimes he’s there sitting in the back seat, an afterimage lingering after the flash has burned, you still trying to regain your vision.
