John at the piano, a few years before beginning lessons.
Music Lessons
By John Unger Zussman
Last month, I wrote about a misguided art lesson that undermined my creativity as a child. Here I recall my early music lessons—with a decidedly different result.
“Sing!” commanded my piano teacher, Mrs. Maas, at my very first lesson. Even at seven, I understood that she did not want me to vocalize along with those first simple explorations of the notes around middle C. No, she meant make the piano sing. But what did that mean? And how to do it? I had no idea, and apparently it was too obvious to ask.
Whatever she had in mind, I somehow had a talent for it. I practiced diligently and progressed quickly, encouraged by the lavish praise of my parents and teachers. At my first-year recital, Mrs. Maas practically had to drag me off the stage as I played, from memory, every piece in the Bernice Frost first-year method book READ MORE
While I had already begun writing a piece on the looming 2011 food crisis, in lieu of my birthday, I decided to shelve it for this month. Instead, I felt the words of Wendell Berry offered more on the subject of food, hope and the future than I could possibly say. I know heroes are supposed to have feet of clay, but few people inspire me more than this man. Enjoy. …READ MORE
It wasn’t a dream, more like a vision,
if vision meant steam rising from
a body, meant heat from the living—
I became the eye of a round-stomached cobbler.
I became a word in a fable. I became
the tongue in the mouth
of a girl. I became limbs like those of trees stripped of bark.
I became a shade of vacant white, like light
lifting from the skin of the sun.
Once I was attractive, once, you could smell it on me
like kerosene, that kind of thing, about to catch fire.
I never used the word beauty except when it was required,
ironically, but then I became the word, a creature transforming
in the moonlight.
Something strange happened then.
A man becomes frightened,
not at what he has done, but what he is about to do;
The wet of grass on skin,
the cold of the night
when you lay your body down.
Once I was attractive, once—
and then I became the night,
and then I became the air.
(“Heat” was originally published in Prick of the Spindle and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Adam Eaglin was raised in Summerfield, North Carolina, and has degrees from Duke University and Boston University. His poetry and reviews have appeared in Gulf Coast, Publishers Weekly, and the Harvard Review. A recipient of the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, he works in publishing in New York City.
Editor’s Note: Adam Eaglin is a master of metaphor. He effortlessly manipulates images to create an Alice in Wonderland-esque world for his readers to slip into as if a rabbit hole. With moments like “if vision meant steam rising from a body, meant heat from the living,” and “The wet of grass on skin, the cold of the night when you lay your body down,” we the readers are taken on a journey into a man’s inner thoughts and experience and into the relationship he inhabits and the transformations that ensue as a result thereof.
[The following translation was originally published in Per Contra.]
Erlking
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(translation by Okla Elliott)
Who rides so late through windy night? A father holding his child tight. He has the youngster well in his arm, He keeps him safe. He keeps him warm.
“My son, what twists your face with bother?” “Don’t you see the Erlking, father? The Erlking with crown and shroud?” “My son, it’s but a sliver of cloud.”
Lovely, lovely child, come with me. Such wondrous games you will see. What bright flowers there are by the shore, What royal clothes my mother has in store.
“Father, my father, are you listening To what the Erlking is promising?” “Child, calm yourself, be calm, please. It’s just the wind rustling dried leaves.”
Sweet boy, don’t make such a fuss; My daughters are waiting on us. My daughters sing the nightly tunes to cradle you beneath the moon. READ MORE
Yiayia and Boy George (photo by Andreas Economakis)
“Perfect Makeup”
by Andreas Economakis
My grandmother Anastasia, or yiayia as I called her, must have studied Zen. She could spend hours seated motionless in her jewelry store in the Nile Hilton, a geriatric Greek sphinx staring blankly ahead. Overwhelmed by the utter tranquility in her shop, I would escape as often as I could whenever I visited her in the summers, wandering around the dusty and chaotic streets of Cairo for as long as I could stand. I would beat a hasty retreat to the cool sanctuary of the air-conditioned Hilton, with its refreshing “Asir Lemoon” lemonades and overwhelmed pink tourists, only when my feet could carry me no longer through the blazing Saharan heat and pungent city smells.
Cairo has a peculiar odor. Anyone who’s ever visited this ancient bustling city of 17 million or so souls will attest to this. You become aware of the city’s pungency from the very moment the airplane doors crack open on the sizzling tarmac of Cairo International Airport. I’m not a smell specialist, but if you put me in a headlock I guess I’d equate the city’s smells to a batch of ripe tropical fruit fermenting in old petrol smog. The Hilton was a natural haven from all this, a controlled oasis of sorts. Like any desert wanderer, I would invariably end up at the oasis when on the verge of heat stroke. In fact, I think the Hilton’s café was named The Oasis, if my memory serves me right.
There was a bookstore next to my grandmother’s shop and I started buying and feverishly reading anything I could lay my hands on. I would sit in this red and white vinyl chair behind the spotless glass of the jewelry store’s front door for hours, my head buried in Hemingway and Kazantzakis and London and Marquez. Occasionally, I would peak out at the crowds of sweaty tourists that drifted by, chuckling to myself, knowing full well what state the poor sods were in. I’ve never been good at playing salesman and I generally ignored my grandmother’s pleas to help with the odd customers who walked in, preferring my role as family bookworm. My grandmother would yell at me for reading so much, telling me that it was bad for me.
One day, I looked up into the Hilton lobby and saw Boy George walk by. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There he was, in his black robe, jewels, long hair, bangles, make up and signature bowler hat. “Dirty, filthy hippie!” my grandmother blared out, shifting uncomfortably her seat. “I bet he sleeps with dogs!” she added. I stared at my grandmother with wide eyes, not so much surprised at her comment but at the fact that she had moved in her seat. I explained that he was a famous musician, a very rich, dirty filthy hippie. “Really?” she asked all bright-eyed and bushy tailed. My grandmother might have been conservative, but a fool she was not. Visibly excited, she asked me to bring him into the store so she could meet him.
I ran out into the lobby and caught up with Boy right before he went into The Oasis. “You’re Boy George!” I said, eyelashes batting up and down over the big stupid grin that was plastered all over my face. Boy stopped and turned toward me, smiling. A pleasant smell overtook my nostrils. 150 degrees outside but the man smelled like a bouquet of freshly cut flowers. I told him that my grandmother wanted to meet him and pointed to our shop. He courteously followed me in and I made the introductions. Boy’s presence seemed to overwhelm my grandmother. It was as if an alien from planet Zork had stepped into her inner sanctuary. She totally forgot that she wanted to sell him some jewels. The only thing she could think of to say to Boy was that his make-up was perfect. Her own was always too heavy, gooped on as if with a builder’s spatula.
Perhaps feeling awkward at all the silence, Boy smiled and excused himself. My grandmother sprang back to life and asked me to ask him if I could take a photo of the two of them together. Boy said of course and I trained my pocket Hanimex on them, snapping what was to be my first “celebrity” photograph. Boy kissed my breathless grandmother on the cheek and exited with his invisible bouquet of sweet flowers. I ran up to Boy in the lobby to thank him. Right then another member of Culture Club walked up and looked at me with a mischievous look. Then Boy asked me if I wanted to join him and the band for a drink up in his room. They all giggled flirtatiously. I kindly declined and wandered back to my grandmother’s store as Boy and the band headed to the elevators.
“A nice man,” my grandmother said, “even though he dresses and smells like a girl.”
“Yeah,” I replied, my eyes trained on a white poodle that was being led through the lobby toward the elevators by a tiny bellhop in a silly outfit. The bellhop and the poodle followed a giggling Boy and the band into the elevator.
“But you can’t judge a book by its cover,” I added, just as the elevator’s doors closed with a ding.
–Andreas Economakis
This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.
How potato of you,
noticing with your many eyes
the hunched and gloveless scraping of frost
from the windshield of my car. Omniscient
of you. Or perceived from your closet
window. Maybe the crack of your door.
And then to bring me a pair
of your own—worn, leather and for the garden.
How warm and hearty,
how rich and filled with starch.
Or Summer in your lawn chair.
My arms filled with groceries
or school books, how you tilt yourself
so your skin appears the most rough and brown,
bruised from the heavy handling
since before you were pulled from the unforgiving earth
by Jesus—who must, from the sounds of it,
live in the apartment
on the other side of you.
How you vegetate so,
arms like vines lifting to light
despite the dark knots
in your stomach, how you manage
to forget the heavy smell
of warm coffee soil,
down here where I live.
Below.
How like a potato,
to sit away from the birds, smiling,
all ready to fry.
(“How Like a Potato” was originally published in Poetry Bay and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Keith Wilson Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian poet and Cave Canem Fellow currently living in Kentucky. A graduate of Northern Kentucky University, Keith’s work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Mobius, Evergreen Review, The Driftwood Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, Kudzu, and in the anthology Spaces Between Us. Keith is an editor for the multilingual online journal Public-Republic and co-editor for the culture blog We Who Are About To Die.
Editor’s Note: How clever of Mr. Wilson to compare a person to a potato in such a skillful manner. To create layers of meaning – the potato-like characteristics of a person with their many eyes watching and their tendency to act as if they are “rich and filled with starch” – spread on top of deeper, more meaningful discussions that relate to religion and socioeconomic divides. In addition to his clever wordsmithing and ability to relay deeper meaning, Mr. Wilson’s poetry appealed to me first and foremost for his deft ability to manipulate language and create beautiful verse with moments like “how you tilt yourself / so your skin appears the most rough and brown, / bruised from the heavy handling / since before you were pulled from the unforgiving earth.” Given the layers of this poem, I suggest giving it a second and even a third read in order to fully extrapolate meaning as if pulling roots from the soil.
Maybe the blindfold is not meant as kindness for the condemned like the choice of a final meal or the last cigarette, a pleasure meant to block awareness of what’s coming. Instead it keeps the living from seeing how the eyes throttle with light or glaze at the moment of impact before the body empties into death. In this age of performance, even an autopsy, final audition of the body’s efficiency, is theater. A TV doctor explains how the flanges of the famous chest are opened like curtains, the routines of the reliable duo, systole and diastole, the shuttle cocking of artery and vein, the blood’s drifting clouds of toxins all are measured and named, no chance for curtain call or final bow. In the film I found on the internet and watched because I started and could not stop, the killers, not the condemned, wore masks. He knelt before them as they read their proclamations in a language he was captive long enough to know in fragments. His face a blank of pure misery, glossed with sweat, his hair twisted and on end, some composure kept him still. Perhaps he’d seen enough movies, American enough to believe in last-second rescues, the hero who kicks in the door, guns blazing. Maybe he believed this moment a routine humiliation between tea and afternoon prayers, a ritual meant to be so frightening that when water was thrown on him or he was kicked, their laughter let him breathe once more. But the reading ended and one of the masked men produced a long knife. There was nothing swift nor spectacular about what followed. Bodies wrestled across the floor. Deep inside the scrum started noise too high-pitched to be a scream, noise I’d never heard a human make. When the head was displayed, it was no longer human, but something molded from plastic and left too long in the back seat of a car on a hot day. If you watch this once, you will not watch it again. In this world, beauty and terror coax the same tears, the voice of fear has no words, the victim’s face, a trophy. But morning still happens. I get up, make coffee, walk the dog, things I can do with my eyes closed. Not until I read the paper or listen to the news does the world take shape. Some refuse the blindfold, but most are grateful for a darkness granted by a cloth so ordinary it might have dried last night’s dishes, then wiped the empty table free of crumbs and ashes.
Al Maginnes is the author of four full length collections of poetry and four chapbooks, most recently Ghost Alphabet, which won the 2007 White Pine poetry prize and two chapbooks, Between States (Main Street Rag Press) and Greatest Hits 1987-2010 (Pudding House), which were published in 2010. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Southern Review, Georgia Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cloudbank, Salamander, and Solo. He lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife and daughter and teaches at Wake Technical Community College. The above poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
WHEN I WAS NO LONGER MY LEATHER JACKET by Lyn Lifshin
Something he’d picked up
and gently carried to the
closet. When I was no
longer something he half
wanted to wear, held so
delicately, smiled at like
when he came in later to
the reading, said he would
have brought the Margarita
but he didn’t know if I
liked it on the rocks, how I
felt about salt. Before I
was no longer my jacket,
darkly mysterious, soft but
with a musky smell, flexible
enough to do what he
wanted with. Before that I
was all animal, wild. I was prey
he was on a safari for, caught
in his crosshairs. He could
taste my hair thru e mail.
Once he tracked me as far as
San Antonio, couldn’t
find me. This time I was the
lure, the flash of a few verbs and
he canceled classes, took off
work. I was something he
couldn’t stroke like the leather.
He was used to things being
fatal, leaps and cracks. He was
a journalist, wanted no
emotion to get in the way
of the facts.
(“When I Was No Longer My Leather Jacket” was originally published in Poetry Bay and Lyn Lyfshin’s book Persephone printed by Red Hen Press and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Lyn Lifshin has written more than 125 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A, and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction “Queen of the Small Presses.” She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as “a modern Emily Dickinson.” Her prizewinning book (Paterson Poetry Award) Before It’s Light was published Winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow Press.
Editor’s Note: It is an honor to share with you the work of Lyn Lifshin today. A renowned poet, Lifshin has earned her reputation as a true wordsmith. With moments like “how I felt about salt” and “flexible enough to do what he wanted with, ” today’s poem at once delves effortlessly into a vignette of a relationship and simultaneously tells the story behind the scenes.
When you put your arms around me and I close my eyes, everything except your body disappears. I press my face against your chest, my eyes all wet, and sometimes I pull away and see that I have left satisfying evidence of tears on your shirt. I will admire the evidence covertly. It looks like a Rorschach blot or a foodstain. When I close my eyes, you could be anyone. Sometimes I forget your name. I can even forget who you are while you are speaking to me, if I want to, if I keep my eyes shut, if I try hard enough. It’s not just you who disappears when I shut my eyes. The ones before you disappeared too. All of your arms, your t-shirts, your reluctant acts of comfort, all of you feel exactly the same and it doesn’t matter to me anymore who any of you are.
HOME MOVIES
the way flesh swarms like ants the stuttering thumps embedded
like morse in our bones forever a history of fingers glistening
like butter the way memory is sort of a stain
in the cloth
like grease or like blood forever there you are unbleached
how you let them touch you forever your breasts fleshed guppyfish
eyes straining toward opposite points in the air forever the arch
of your skin
and the slip of a fisted hand tanned like leather forever the wormy
brown nylon of twisted rug the way it holds the imprint
of swarmed bodies forever the muscle of thighs
the baby
soft skin of the wolves forever the circling throb of impatience
the impermanence of movement the impermanence of face
of the bodies of ten white socked men forever the clutch
like a balled baby
fist forever the way you pressed your self down into the love
ly brown floor forever how your face bleeds forever into the white
round white lights
forever how I wondered if anyone would ever love
you how I wondered how
you would make them
(“UNTITLED” was originally published in PANK Magazine, and “Home Movies” originally appeared in Tarpaulin Sky Press. Both poems are reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Andrea Kneeland is the author of The Birds & The Beasts (Cow Heavy 2011) and a web editor for Hobart. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including Annalemma, DIAGRAM, Barrelhouse, Caketrain, American Letters & Commentary, Wigleaf, The Collagist, 580 Split and elimae.
Editor’s Note: Don’t let it be said that I don’t know how to ring the new year in with a bang! I must admit today’s poems are some of my favorites that I’ve had the pleasure to publish on this series. If you’re an avid reader it should be clear to you why these poems are right up my alley. Working strongly within the theme of relationships with an overtly sexual drive, these poems are a one-two-punch to the gut of America’s Puritanical backdrop. With moments and killer end lines like “And this will be proof that I know who you are and I mean it when I say that I love you,” “All of your arms, your t-shirts, your reluctant acts of comfort, all of you feel exactly the same and it doesn’t matter to me anymore who any of you are,” and “forever how I wondered if anyone would ever love / you how I wondered how / you would make them,” Andrea Kneeland is a poet after my own heart, and the perfect start to a new year of poetry!
Image from the Tom Corbett television series in the early 1950s. Command cadet Tom Corbett is flanked by Martian astrogator Roger Manning and Venusian rocket specialist Astro. Photo source: IMDb.
Art Lessons
By John Unger Zussman
One day in fourth grade, our art teacher passed out crayons and asked us to draw a picture of the most beautiful thing we could imagine.
I started with a verdant forest beside a lush green meadow. Above it I added a blue sky, wispy white clouds, and a yellow sun. And in the middle of the meadow, I placed a sleek, gleaming, silver rocket ship, pointed skyward and bearing an American flag.
It was 1960. The space race was in high gear. The Russians had launched two Sputnik satellites in 1957 and the U.S. was trying desperately to catch up. Both countries were rushing to put astronauts in orbit. The excitement captured my nine-year-old imagination. I had even abandoned my beloved Hardy Boys books to pursue Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.
Only now does the sheer phallic audacity of that picture make me chuckle.
The art teacher, roaming the classroom, finally stopped behind my desk. “Is that really the most beautiful thing you can think of?” she sniffed.
I got the message. Since that day my artistic endeavors have been limited to doodles and scribbles. And my brilliant career as a rocket artist was snuffed out before it began.
As It Ought To Be 