Showing posts with label Issue 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Issue 3. Show all posts
Issue 3: Welcome
Ah, Autumn…
After forty-seven days of no rain, “the backyard is singing, because/ it is raining.”
Two-day rain “makes eyelashes and shoulders, elbows, hamstrings, nipples, toes and tongues…” Rain kisses “Kayakers barrel[ing] through rapids” and ushers salmon up falls to spawn and die and become rain again. Rain is present in “the dark steam of each day lifting/ from the flat table of tar.” Rain in eyes of “rivet and handle.” Rain in the runaway girl with “a porous childhood.” Georgia rain. Oregon rain. Harlem rain. Even in the absence of rain – Nevada and Kandahar dust – we are in the presence of rain. The “man in a rowboat/ before there were roads…” That’s the kind of rain I’m talking about…
Why the obsession with rain? One of my earliest memories of autumn is riding on my dad’s shoulders in the rain as he'd sing: Raindrops keep falling on my head… Dah-dah-dadadada-dah-dat-dat-dada-dat! So, dad, this one's for you...
Welcome to the Fall 2010 issue of Untitled Country Review!
Scot
Scot Siegel, Editor
Issue 3: Contents
Welcome
Poetry
“Aviary” -- Brittney Corrigan
“Riding the rapids” -- Melissa Madenski
“Girl on a Bus” -- Lauren Camp
“what rain hears” --Laura Winter
“Two Day Rain” -- Lex Runciman
“Local Shaman” -- Scott T. Starbuck
“Elevenmile” -- Ray Succre
“The Georgia Slither” -- Ray Succre
“Getting to Work” -- Lucia Galloway
“Hosting the Duke at the Cotton Club, circa 1929” -- Lucia Galloway
“Guilty of You Being More Than I Can Handle” -- Terry Brix
“Afterimage” -- Catherine McGuire
“Unobtanium” -- Catherine McGuire
Issue 3: Brittney Corrigan
Aviary
It is like when I used to visit zoos,
pressing the large doors open
and stepping into the aviary —
humid creation of rain, dripping
like distant static, and all the hidden
voices calling at once. Trees tucked
under ceilings and into green tile walls,
me scanning for colors and wings.
Small sandpipers racing to locate a tide,
black-eyed birds making the crossing
from one side of the room to the other,
sure there is sky here somewhere, the visitors
must have come from somewhere. No wonder
there is so much noise. Today, I open
a window to let in cool air and discover
the backyard is singing, because
it is raining, and the sound floods
into my house — singing, because
it is raining, after forty-seven days
of no rain.
--Brittney Corrigan
Issue 3: Melissa Madenski
Riding the rapids
When you were small I lifted you, still sleeping,
into the car where you curled – an animal hoarding warmth.
Driving a pre-dawn
Idaho straight stretch
the rearview mirror captures
your arm, outside the quilt
as if you'd just released a ball.
It lolls, rolls while we climb
up and up over the mountain
until, far above the Payette River
you wake. It is light.
We step outside.
Kayakers barrel through rapids
hundreds of feet below us.
You lean into me warm
a little sleepy
your head just above
my waist. I take the band
from your hair
brush the sandy tangle.
Wind lofts a single strand
whips it up then down
sends it whirlpooling
across the canyon.
The pull of your hair
resistance and release
resistance and release
you take just a half step away
closer to the edge.
I weave a long braid that reaches
your own waist, gently pulling
you closer to me.
--Melissa Madenski
Issue 3: Lauren Camp
While her folks covered the full distance
of an argument, she entered the station at 2nd
and Main; at the counter, she scheduled
the nervous destination of Hope
because she believed
it might exist. The girl was raised sharp,
spent after-school hours on a rickety bicycle
and climbed fences to tangle with freedom.
She never ratted on the bargain business
conducted in alleys, never minded
the dark steam of each day lifting
from the flat table of tar,
but she’s tired of her parents’ wrinkled moods;
that’s why she’s traveling
through a sepia rendering of tomorrow
on a bus faltering along.
Almost noon,
and Hope is the flat middle of the country.
The polyester seat gums into her shorts,
then pops when she leans forward.
The girl’s eyes are rivet and handle
on a porous childhood:
the kind that don’t often matter.
This yellow bus rearranged her future,
and now she thinks
she’s getting somewhere. She traces
the journey on her leg, then pinches her skin
to put in a mountain, to climb over something
other than her heart. In the bus,
she almost feels buoyant.
--Lauren Camp
Issue 3: Laura Winter
what rain hears
through
half a window
clustered
green of
beaded
curtain bamboo
plum
early blossoms
drip
to the heart
beat
stones
there
flexing its wings
a song
--Laura Winter
Issue 3: Lex Runciman
Two Day Rain
This our river began
as black night, dust, gravity, cold, and distance:
it began as time unconscious of itself
and atoms clustered for company –
beyond telling how much later, it began
in immeasurable heat, and by a mechanism
or serendipity it can no more explain
than recreate, elements became water,
and earth a place rounded under blue.
Thus from this our sky water makes fear,
anger, gratitude, violence, regret and love,
skepticism, irony, unwillingness and distrust.
It makes eyelashes and shoulders, elbows,
hamstrings, nipples, toes and tongues,
wheat, and every sequoia, newt, violin,
salmon, foxglove and wing.
All that water has seen and done it says
as it eddies and turns, pools and is by wind
shoved, as it becomes cloud again,
as for two days it has fallen sideways, loud,
then merely down. Just this morning
I watched seven-year-old David next door
as he splashed in slick boots and fished worms
out of standing water. When it rained harder,
he looked up and opened his mouth.
--Lex Runciman
Issue 3: Scott Starbuck
Local Shaman
I tell the diesel mechanic, Bill,
The Starfisher’s engine is cutting out
due to a hole in a line,
a torn flange in the pump,
or a shot of bad fuel.
His instructive silence says
my labyrinth mind
must fall through a trap door
to a fishing memory
on the Siletz River
where Coyote,
in his butterfly-colored beads,
laughs like Chaplin
directing Limelight
or a man in a rowboat
before there were roads.
--Scott Starbuck
Issue 3: Ray Succre
Elevenmile
Birds above, in salmon pool
are as foreign agents; better odds catching this fowl
than Elevenmile brook trout.
How my father miscalculated fish.
Pole and reel all day, a tree on the bank.
Birds sick of soil raise. Fish fed up with air dive.
They'd leave us in the middle, cold, tired.
Our mountain excursion through empty space,
swilling the air until I dangled from the world's roof,
was everywhere river fish were stretched,
up tall like ants on gallows,
freezing in flight,
to lowest ends like an inevitable moan of pain.
Fish and birds. Fathers and sons.
With every new reap melts away yet more flourish,
army against army,
as the evening Sun shimmers to the ridge.
--Ray Succre
Issue 3: Ray Succre
The Georgia Slither
The young Californian boy learned his Georgian welcome
in a creek near the trailer rows,
and his west coast father wanted Georgian fish,
so the slow off-road Lindsay creek was settled their day.
The father sat on the bank, playing line
while his son waded out, disturbing the fish.
“It's hot here,” the boy muttered.
“Muggy,” the father added.
“When are we moving back to California?”
“Not until your mother's out of the ARMY.”
The day would be bunk, nothing caught.
What catfish would eat near a splashing, homesick boy?
The two did not mind; it was better to swim or sit
than to fish, though the line was still cast.
A resident of Georgia approached on the surface,
visiting the boy in swift turns.
The father shouted and the boy mooned, still,
luminous and cauterized in too-near black motions.
“Out of the water! Get out!” the father shouted.
The boy exhaled moving back, one Californian foot
behind the next, the water moccasin nosing
his small wake, following, smelling the surface,
flitting a two-point tongue.
It haunted the boy's backside to the edge of shore,
where the warm bank was made, climbed,
the boy rushing up to his father.
Was it human or heat that summoned
that venomous, black spine,
that Georgian water slither?
The boy pleaded and his father backpedaled,
ice-chest in one hand while angrily beating
the water and Georgia snake
with his fishing rod.
Whenever the boy left a place, it did not exist.
Whenever he reached a new one, it always had.
--Ray Succre
Issue 3: Lucia Galloway
Getting to Work
The captain mans a joystick, flies a drone.
Through windswept desert, on H 85
he drives an SUV to work 10 miles from home.
In his office-cockpit, he takes the Naugahyde throne.
He studies monitors that show the villagers alive.
The captain mans a joystick, flies a drone.
Vegas glitter and Nevada’s barren stone
recede, along with barbeque and soccer, from the lives
of men who drive to work 10 miles from home.
Almost audible, a cyberspatial moan
that follows “3-2-1, rifle” and a missile’s dive.
The captain mans a joystick, flies a drone.
Crumbs on the kitchen floor, a jangling phone
he pulls himself away from his domestic hive
for duty in a land 10 miles from home.
He cites rewarding moments helping lone
compatriot ground-crew near Kandahar survive.
The captain mans a joystick, flies a drone.
He drives an SUV to work 10 miles from home.
--Lucia Galloway
Issue 3: Terry Brix
Guilty of You Being More Than I Can Handle
You’re an octopus, eight arms & a myriad of lovely suction cups,
hang adeptly from any ceilings, infinitely mobile,
gymnast agile, lotus position, Kama Sutra, even rollerblading,
You squeeze your body into bottles, crannies & odd hollows
when trouble or moods attack, hide in the clouds of your own ink.
I am clam sometimes less mobile yet, like an oyster.
So firm in my stubbornness, rocks seem like Jello.
Content to pump, pump seawater, tide pools, filter out sand,
strain out micro algae, unicellular crumbs. Anchored.
Visible, can’t hide. Big sign says, “shuck me.”
Guilty.
You are bird. Feathers, colored plumage, osprey high flight,
plummet talon drop, long-necked blue heron in low-river swoop,
mergansers with against the current motorboat whir.
Words on paper, film clips, books oozing from pores.
You nest, let me come & nestle play goddess watcher.
I am an ostrich. No, sometimes not even that, just an emu,
couldn’t conceive of flight not even flap stumps to imagine.
Adept at high speed running though, swallowing bright
objects––Coke bottles, golf balls, watches, fifths, pride.
Guilty.
You do projects logically: idea first, think, check-off
with friends, solicit resources complete with facts.
Then step by step pause for flowers, food, sunsets.
Idea microwaves & you popcorn explode, blossom,
exude enthusiasm, joy sticks out of you like a porcupine.
Compelled to share––a prickle of quills tickling,
inoculating me from boredom, sameness,
popping hard-line jaw frowns with endless smiles.
I do everything illogically: splats, huge polka-dot bursts,
like Chinese fireworks except rockets glare inside.
I pull the pin & then leap on the exploding grenade.
Pieces fly, phones ring, emails hail––feel pregnant.
Then I give birth to in-animates like rocks,
many small, some massive like juggling
pyramids & molehills, tombstones & wedding rings.
After going from A to Z, years spent back-filling.
Long-term secret energy comes from Montana.
Mountains grinding inside me, sifting gangue from gold.
Guilty.
--Terry Brix
Issue 3: Lucia Galloway
Hosting the Duke at the Cotton Club, circa 1929
Never seen the club so jammed.
Not a dime-size spot out there
on the dance floor. What a mob!
A real Hades in Harlem!
What’s that? Ah yes, little gal
at the ring-side table wants
us to play “Going to Town.”
You there in the catbird seat!
Your dress hikes up a tad; you
cross one leg over the knee,
unfold it in the humid
dusk of the sidelines to tease
the toe of your dancing shoe
into the pool of cool light.
I own the night on this floor
where folks join “The Cotton Club
Stomp.” Jungle music! Timid
of their shadows, if you ask
me, an emcee in garters
to hold up his socks while his
tuxedo flashes black, white.
How you people like to do
things, go places, see people!
Marvelous, the way you’ve all
warmed up to our little show!
I do love applause! Dukie
loves applause, whistles kisses.
So! “First We Freeze, Then We Melt.”
We melt into reflections
in a Macy’s plate-glass pane.
--Lucia Galloway
Note: Material in stanzas 1 and 4 closely follows the emcee’s monologue found in the 78 rpm recording “A Nite at The Cotton Club, Part 2,” Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra, RCA Victor, 1929.
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