Showing posts with label Issue 1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Issue 1. Show all posts
Issue 1: Contents
Poetry
Review of Notes from the Committee by Catherine Kasper (Noemi Press, 2009), and interview with Catherline Kasper by Untitled Country Review Editor, Scot Siegel
Welcome, no boarding pass required
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
– William Stafford
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Untitled Country Review. The response to our first call for submissions was outstanding. We received over two hundred poems from the United States, Canada and the UK. Thanks to all who submitted their work!
Issue 1 contains new poetry from award-winning authors, emerging poets, and one writer for whom this is his first publication. I am also pleased to present a review of Catherine Kasper’s brilliant book, NOTES from the COMMITTEE (Noemi Press, 2009).
The poems in this inaugural issue, both individually and collectively, embody the vision that I have for the journal -- an untitled country where "ownership" is as simple as looking around and seeing the world in a new light.
All the best,
Scot Siegel, Editor
Issue 1: Barbara LaMorticella
In the Spaciousness of 3 AM
Some people’s poetry only comes when
they’re sleeping. Poems trapped here
are an underground network, cloudy onyx,
coal unburned yet, roots that rise up in
office buildings and in rain.
At 3 AM things become more themselves
by leaving themselves:
The chair and the river fall happily
into each other, because the chair
has always wanted to be a river,
while the river, for its part,
would like nothing more than to just
sit a spell.
Standing in their windows at 3 AM,
poets cast shadows like celestial luminaries.
There’s no need for translation, because
the night sun loves flickering.
Even the silence in the 3 AM grasses
is pregnant like an egg or the moon.
Issue 1: Pam Uschuk
One Theory of Poetry
for Bill
It’s the solace of lazuli buntings
and chipping sparrows I hear
while nuthatches laugh, scaling the pine
in full view of the overweight cat
who bats at remnant moths bumping glass.
This is the hour before owls take the trees,
hour of snake retreat, of the tarantula’s
return to the gravel yard, panic hour
when trees are not what they seem, gray
hour when the dead look for sustenance
in a set of misplaced car keys.
Even now I long to see her, gorgeous Figure in the Flame,
hear her tap those ashy feet, impatient with
Ovid’s sniveling
into the meaning of life.
I must get on with my burning,
her white lips sizzle as she steps
back into that inferno of suffering she adores.
Alone I watch car lights bounce
through the dark mood of branches
comforting as luna moths on fire
tattooing the road to home.
Issue 1: Maxima Kahn
St. Martin in the Fields
this morning my body wrapped like a cord
like something caving in on itself
the little stone in my chest knocking in its cavity
and though the sun strikes white-gold
on the evergreens and a man on the radio
mentions the Academy of St. Martin
in the Fields, and i think how nice it must be
to stand in the fields, how all our academies
ought to be in the fields, where we might
consider the lilies and learn––
now another man is speaking of “last night’s
massacre,” as if it were a nightly occurrence,
and then the music comes on, the fierce beauty
of an orchestra, the luring cry of an oboe
and i am lost–– the little stone grinds down
there is something i cannot recover from
something like knowledge, or blindness
something like wandering while the world
keeps flowing past my door
it holds me in its teeth like a riddle
write me, tell me the answer
Issue 1: George Bishop
Leaving
She didn’t say anything
that hadn’t been said before.
However, this time more roads
had been closed and the animal
in me began to look up, take notice,
through not so innocent eyes.
We’d both seen it coming
though from different directions.
In the end it didn’t matter,
all the answers had long since
pulled over and begun the endless
walk home.
She asked if I wanted anything
and I said nothing because
I wanted everything—
I could only think of
door and window locks,
the roof, foundation and walls
that once made leaving
something staged, an event
that took us to the far reaches
of another room, a drama
we both tried to direct
but only produced.
We’d become our real names
and that’s all we knew
one another by, individuals
neither of us would think
of stopping to ask directions
or even the time.
Issue 1: Judith Terzi
The Children
-after "Iraq's Grown-Up Children,"
Los Angeles Times, October 2008
Zaid quit grade four to work the slums
of Sadr City from dawn to dusk.
His father's old and bent, so he's the son
who rides their tractor collecting trash,
not working land they'd planned to till
before the war. From dawn to dusk,
his friend Majid, with the family mule,
sells rationed goods near Baghdad now,
not crops from land his family tilled
before the war. Majid can't read signs that show
the wanted men or call Iraqi souls to prayer.
He sells rationed flour near Baghdad now.
Another friend, Farid, repairs old mufflers.
He no longer hunts tin cans on risky roads.
Farid can't read the posters that call to prayer.
His agile hands are worn at ten years old.
He watches other children walking home
from school with books on dangerous roads.
In dreams of soldiers in their solemn uniforms,
he likes the way they tilt their guns the most.
He watches schoolchildren walking home
with plans and fairer destinies not lost.
Zaid quit grade four to work the slums.
Farid likes the soldiers' guns the most.
Fathers are as old and beaten as their sons.
Issue 1: Lucia Galloway
Chinese Mother to Her Son
There is a farmer who uses his tractor as a village shuttle
in order to earn enough money to buy meat.
--Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2000
I’ll sing you a song, Little One,
while I shake out the comforters
and fold them at the foot of our cots.
You dig with your stick on the floor near the hearth
where the hard ground gives a little. Beat upon it––
your drum!
Steam swirls off the porridge pot,
and my breath makes little clouds.
I sing for all of us–you in your padded tunic,
your red cap. You still have pink cheeks,
my Little Turnip!
I sing husband out the door
as yet again he goes to look at the fields,
frost-hard, for signs of thaw.
Farmer Li drives his tractor, scattering
pigeons. Exhaust clouds hang above the road
with the smoke of our fires. From the meat
in his soup, Li’s cheeks grow rounder. This
and that he hauls. Brings people to our village
and takes them away. They pay him money.
Husband says they come to teach us
to plant kale and grow cabbage.
Your father does not own a tractor, Little One.
We have no meat to flavor our broth
with islands of fat. Our soup is cabbage.
Under its pungent cloud my song grows thinner.
Husband says that farmers must keep planting wheat.
If no one will buy it, we’ll eat it ourselves
and raise pigs and chickens.
What do we care for kale?
Little One, we will not go hungry.
We will yet have meat in our pot!
We will yet have meat in our pot!
Issue 1: Karen Braucher
My First Job
Over steaming pots, the cooks were ornery,
flushed. In uniforms and hairnets, we constantly
scuttled—placing orders, delivering food. The boss
with pursed lips often screamed. Those first weeks,
at night I’d collapse on my schoolgirl bed, my arms, legs,
back ached. A few times I cried. Early on, I had trouble
remembering, brought the wrong dish, apologized.
A customer snapped, “This soup is cold. Take it back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied and lifted the hot bowl. I can still
see the steam rising from that fragrant chowder.
Some people were kind though they didn’t have to be.
Soft, gentle words and smiles. Origami birds and coins.
During lulls I read Plato’s Republic and studied
an aging redhead who spat: “Yaw just heah for the
summah. Ya don’t know what this life is like.
I raised my baby in a cahdbawd box,
couldn’t affawd a crib.” At sixteen, I served all kinds,
learned to swallow the good with the bad.
After a while, I hit my stride. At the end of each day,
I poured a heap of tips onto my bureau,
breezed out to the movies or on a date.
Decades later, when my brother-in-law barked at a young
waitress in a little café, I wanted to climb under the table.
Plato understood: A petty tyrant beholding his own
soul may behave unrighteously and deteriorates his lot.
The waitress didn’t get angry; she just brought the order.
You learn a lot bringing food to people.
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