Hard times relieve the roses of technique,
unmingle their sources,
call out to pre-graft roots.
New canes wind and sprawl
under the open candelabra
of hybrid branches
pruned by the book.
Throwback canes sprout floribunda bouquets,
medieval canes ridiculously thick with thorns,
a flashback of petals lying flat and single,
no Fibonacci array of petals
surging clockwise, then counter,
ever increasing.
A continuity of roses,
Before Homer, before history.
Petals darker than royal blood,
always the same deep red,
no matter how the plant was remade
Fed up with all that inbreeding,
revealed as Rosewood.
A rose is rosy as a rose.
Before there were words, there were roses.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired clinical psychologist, German Lit major, and Pushcart nominee, no longer lives for Art, but still thinks about it a lot. She has lived in Claremont for 30 years, during which time her camellias’ blooming has moved up six weeks, and squirrels have moved in, reliably eating all the apricots and peaches. Her poem “Real Poem” received Honorable Mention in the 2013 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Contest. Kattywompus Press published her chapbooks Burrowing Song andEggs Satori. Links to on-line poems at www.cloudslikemountains.blogspot.com/ and to on-line photos at www.flickr.com/photos/pieplate/
That record winter
bitch-punched me
across Manitoba
froze me to totem
spun me downward
in a wake of wails
Now expatriate
no more crocus promises
no birch, fir, hint of evergreen
no promise of fecundity
Here, beside an empty river
bank, all folklore renews
Time to decipher
graffiti, sweating highways
palms, malls, stone gardens
California
Lovely, (as the say of the plain)
In her own way
hospitable, impulsive, naked,
flinging orange blossoms
white as snowflakes
Often kind, and
oh, so very warm
“Defrosting” also forthcoming in the Autumn 2015 issue of Chiron Review.
Rowena Silver, a native of Winnipeg, Canada, now living in Riverside, California, is a founding editor of Epicenter Magazine, A literary publication. Her work has been widely published in such journals as: Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, European Judaism, Writer’s Digest, Ariga, Standards: University of Colorado, Pudding House Publications, Guardian Unlimited, Heyday Books, The San Fernando Journal, and Dissident Editions.
“…where we came forth, and once more saw the stars” (Dante, 373).
Upon seeing the gleaming points of light,
My heart was refreshed, the remnants of the
Wearying journey left in the inferno’s night.
“Those who are blessed with life,” said my master,
“May see and appreciate the distant suns
Which permeate the beautiful night air
Of Earth; however, remember well – you will not
Be on Earth forever. We all will face judgment,
After we’ve become weak of body and thought.”
I reflected on this, recalling the jealousy
Of those living their death in that fetid place, who
Will never again see the stars, or feel the breeze.
“Come,” called the guide, “before I show you the other
Two sides of the afterlife, there is one
More task which must be fulfilled; I assure
You, it will not delay us for much time.”
Curiously, I followed him, for he
Had drifted, while we were speaking, to align
Next to a nearby copse of trees. Upon reaching
Him, I spied a faint figure, seemingly outlined
In small points of light; when it moved, its gleaming
Build shifted in such a way to give the
Appearance of moonlight off a body of
Water. It was mournfully kneeling by an
Imposingly gigantic tree which seemed
To be grasping at death. Its branches, all blackened,
expelled an aura of blight, and the trunk displayed
A similar state of sickliness, being
Riddled with an array of chips and holes – though, most
Decrepit were the roots on which the spectral thing
Was kneeling. Through them, to my amazement,
Lava and fire seemed to be bleeding;
The cracks in the charcoal leaked bits of the hell that
I thought I had forever left behind.
After a moment of silence, I inquire:
“What, dear mentor, Is that being that shines?
And the tree: it seems to have planted its
Roots in The Inferno itself.” “These mysteries,”
My guide responded, “Are secrets, which sit
On the shoulders of those of us who have
Been imbued with the knowledge of the domain
After death – but, as your guide, I will give
You all the wisdom which I have the ability
or right to bestow. Regarding the tree, you made
a correct assumption. It comes directly
From the seventh circle of hell. So, yes,
To confirm the cause of shock in your expression,
This tree is indeed a soul, though his name is less
Important than the deeds which were committed by
the wretched thing. After being tormented since his
youth through the cruelty of his brother, to die
Seemed preferable to him – in contrast to living, and
extending his bitter existence.” And, with
an ample amount of pity, a strand
Of the experience in the abyss was
Remembered by me: violence of any sort
Concludes in hell. On this bitter thought,
The spectral guide continued. “He was sent
To the layer reserved for those who
partake in harm to themselves. As the harpies rent
This boy’s body in the form of a plant,
His brother, for once, felt an intense guilt.
He saw his dead sibling, and in turn saw the rat
Which he had become. He dedicated his life
To remorse, every particle of his body
Focused on compensating for his brother’s strife –
His compunction was so great, the soul separated
Itself from the body, and became the
Stellar being you see before you: Not dead,
And not alive.” In my exceptional pity,
My heart felt as if would burst
For the tortured souls standing across from me.
Gravely, my master went on: “This spirit
Continued, in its spectral state, to do penance.
Even in hell, the young boy could hear it:
His brother’s sorrow, echoing through the
World of the dead like a fog horn
Sounding in a misty night. As eras
Passed, the boy found that he had (for the first
Time in his existence) a direction. He
Wished to once again see his brother on Earth.
His will to do this was so great that he grew;
He forced himself upward until he had
Overtaken even The Lord of Hell; and then drew
Upon every last ounce of his strength, and
Reaching up with his roots, pulled himself
Through the ceiling of The Inferno, the third
Soul to ever return to Earth from Hell.
Upon breaking through, the stars once
More shone their light on the child who prevailed.”
However, all that the young boy cared for was
His brother, a glimmering spirit of remorse,
Who had waited upon his arrival for millennia.”
After hearing this story, I looked upon
The boy who resembled a dying tree
And the brother who resembled a fallen star
Reflected upon the world,
And let Virgil lead me onward.
David Schwitzgebel is a student at Riverside Polytechnic High School, in which he conspicuously spurns the book and poetry clubs because they are terribly dull. He spends his free time writing, reading, and sleeping (during which his subconscious mind considers what next to write/read).
Everything I Need to Know about Men I Learned at Band Camp
.
Sometimes, boys at Arrowbear Music Camp chose a girl they thought was prettiest during the two weeks everyone would be together, and she became the girl of the fortnight.
Sometimes band kids were kind of nerdy, but these eight boys belonged to a club called The Cynics and wore light blue sweatshirts with a capital C, an arrow cutting downward through it.
Sometimes–once–one of them chose me, and he was the best horn player I ever heard, except Dennis Brain, but he was famous; besides, he’d never met me and he was at least 40, ancient.
Sometimes Jack wore dark rimmed glasses like Buddy Holly and when he flipped his long hair out of his eyes, he seemed much older than the 15-year-old boys I knew—maturity, a plus.
Sometimes, he quoted Shakespeare, Kerouac, and Kafka as easily as my father quoted scripture and with a passion for the word I’d never heard from anyone else, including my dad.
Sometimes, he led me to imagine things I’d never thought about—like what it would be like to kiss his lips, and stuff involving tongues. It was hard to concentrate on notes or counting rests.
Sometimes I forgot the boy back home who had never even tried to kiss me though we spent hours parked in his father’s car, listening to KFWB channel 98, outside my house.
Sometimes, Jack caused me to do things that excited yet frightened me, like sneak out to Happy Gap alone, talking, holding hands, cuddling till midnight.
Once, when we tiptoed back from Happy Gap after curfew, he kissed me in front of the girl’s dorm. I thought it was true love.
Once warm honey ran through my body and my eyes closed, so I didn’t notice the spotlights that came on — caught in front of the whole, entire camp.
Sometimes, I still want to believe like that.
Marsha Schuh earned her MFA in Poetry at California State University, San Bernardino where, until last year, she taught English. Retirement as given her the chance to spend more time with her family and enjoy reading, writing, teaching, traveling, and most recently, long-arm quilting. In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, she believes that life is good.
Marsha’s work has appeared in Pacific Review, Badlands, Sand Canyon Review, Shuf, Inlandia Journal, Carnival, Found Poetry Journal and other publications. She also co-authored a college textbook, Computer Networking, published by Prentice-Hall and finally figured out how to turn the appendix about converting decimal to binary into poetry. Marsha and her husband Dave live in Ontario, California.
What is it to be made of this custom:
when rivers braid umbilical cords
between lovers when one is
married and with kids? Child play,
go on eat dirt. It tastes like
dry pecan pie, it’ll scrape out
any voice you ever had. How
do we explain some mothers
run like wolves with a pack
of men behind their tail?
Child don’t worry they won’t
bite you, each wolf will
lick your ear wrap gold around
your wrist in hopes you’ll breathe
acceptance into their ear
after your father has left since
his braided cord is cut and
hummingbird whispers in
the wind are his only way to
say hello and goodbye. Child,
go on play mommy and see
how easy it is to entertain other
golden ringed pollen bees.
Orlinda Pacheco is an MFA Candidate at Cal State University, San Bernardino whose poetry embraces the tongue, plunges words with her lips into your sex, and meshes the sacred and profane. Her poetic moans grope at the reality of infertility and expand the walls of being female. Her work has appeared in the Pacific Review and Quake Song: New Voices of Southern California and forthcoming in Badlands Literary Journal. She currently resides in Apple Valley.
On a hill nearby
stands an old, rugged tower
of steel pipe and rust—
sunk in parched ground
of tumble-dry scrub,
of sand-rock and dust-
swirled devils, pirouettes
of fleeting grace, amid
the howl and gust—
heavy, rigid and erect,
arms stretched in silhouettes
of dish and drum, zag and bolt.
The silent signals echo in the void,
and on the cross-
bar, almost unseen,
the sparrow sings.
Michael Orlich began writing poetry in 2011. Since then, he has hosted a small monthly poetry group in his home in Reche Canyon, in Colton. He has lived in the IE since 2008 and works at Loma Linda University as a preventive medicine physician and researcher in nutritional epidemiology.
Gary Keith graduated from Claremont Graduate University with an MFA in Painting. He continues to make art, mostly collages. Keith started writing poetry about five years ago. Both his visual and written work have an economy to them that allows him to completely grasp them and play with their form, rhythms and ideas and give no quarter to filler.
The Windmills of The San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farms in Palm Springs California
.
In celebration
giants stand
tall and proud
gathered together
in endless rows
atop jagged stone mountains
and on the dusty scrub-covered
valley floor
Slowly
steadily
they whirl their arms
in a rhythmic ritual
sinuous dance
overlapping hundreds of hands
to the hum
of the turbines’ chant
As wind transforms
and current invisibly flows
the tribal reverence for earth
Is finally heard
Lullaby Death Valley National Park
They come
in hordes
awed
by my angles
edges
salt flats
dunes
high canyon walls
They look beyond
the grey
to see the contrast
of my bright orange and aqua cliffs
and dark jagged peaks
against blue sky
and rolling billows of white
They don’t see
that like an oversized child
I only appear
to be old
and have millions of years
before me
when those edges
and peaks
will wear down
The crust
of earth
its moving plates
will rattle
crack
and fold my bones
Arid hot air
will blast me
with sand
Flash floods
dragging tons of debris
will scrape
my walls
and floor
But every day
in the late afternoon
when the sun shifts
before sunset
it offers me blankets
of dark purple shadow
whose softness unfolds
into crevices
and river carved bowls
as snugly
I welcome
its soft glow
of pink
and gold
till cradled
in the deepest of blues
safe
beneath
the nightlight of moon
I drift
into sleep
to the silent rhythmic tune
of blinking stars
Joan Kantor is a poet and educator. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals and she recently took first prizeIn the Hackney Literary Awards. Her book SHADOW SOUNDS was a finalist for The Foreward Reviews Book of the Year Award and she has just had her second collection FADING INTO FOCUS, a memoir in verse, published. She has been a poetry consultant for The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival as well as a mentor and judge in its Fresh Voices poetry program for youth. Joan also does writing workshops with the elderly. Her work has been in several ekphrastic shows and she performs in Stringing Words Together, a music and poetry experience.
Bordering a walk between two buildings was a low wall where we sat in a ring of light to have the conversation we’d agreed to. To talk it out. Low wall beside a walk between two buildings, your shiny bicycle just there. In front of us while we had the conversation we’d agree to. People walked by, glanced at us in our conversation, dodged the bicycle—its fat tires. Under the light, we were prize fighters circling each other in the ring? We were dancing partners wheeling warily, listening for the end of the last reprise? These are tired metaphors not up to figuring what we felt or said. What anybody saw. Everybody saw the bicycle—its fat tires. That frame, those spokes and tires. These alone were witnesses to what went down that night beside the walkway in the ring of light.
Meditation on a Line from Martha Ronk’s “Quotidian”
Scape: An act of escaping. A thoughtless transgression.
A representation of a scenic view, as in landscape, seascape,
cityscape, etc. The shaft of a column.
–The New Shorter OED
Under a tangle of dark canopy, a scrappy understory,
in a surge of shrubs and stems and leaves, the air cools, and my skin grows expectant. It waits
to join my other senses drinking in the wilderness.
High in the trees a tht,tht,tht,tht,tht … dry and insistent
as the rasping whir of an electric fan slowing to a stop.
Down the path, two birds scissor across at knee-height,
swift and bright, snipping swatches of air.
A sycamore, whiter-of-trunk than the others in its grove—
their patchy, brown and khaki bark still clinging—seems
necessary, like the steeple that focuses a landscape.
And yet, I find that I’ve come over-fed to this
botanic garden wilderness—no hunger rising.
I’ve brought language with me like a lunch, like a camera
with its set of lenses: the tropes, the images and meters
of Wordsworth’s inscape. The calendar photos,
travel folders, and letters from the Sierra Club. I am
no Annie Dillard, unburdened pilgrim on her daily trek.
My shadow startles me when I break cover into sunlight
at my back. My legs have become pillars, grand in the
oblique morning sun. They support a shortened torso,
totem head. No expectancy, no more waiting under
verdant cover of old trees for wilderness to speak.
Only this striding forward in a gray and shrinking skin.
Of Petrarch and Cigarettes
My thoughts are fresh today,
missing that sexy idyll
of flip-flops and bare legs
caressed by summer’s sun.
Missing that sexy idyll
of Petrarch’s Laura
caressed by summer’s sun,
I smoked a fag, but still I think
of Petrarch’s Laura.
Too much already.
I smoked a fag, but still I think Petrarch. Is that sexy?
Too much already
about books and reading
Petrarch. Is that sexy?
Let’s talk now of smoking.
About books and reading
generally, not enough is said.
But let’s talk now of smoking
cigarettes, their glowing tips.
Generally, not enough is said
about the gift of cool white
cigarettes, their glowing tips.
(don’t even think of sex!)
About the gift of cool white
sheets, I’m fantasizing now,
not thinking, not! of sex.
My thoughts are fresh today.
Southern California poet Lucia Gallowayearned her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her published collections are Venus and Other Losses (Plain View, 2010) and a chapbook, Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005). Poems appear widely in journals, including Comstock Review, Midwest Quarterly, Tar River, Centrifugal Eye, Innisfree, and Inlandia; in the anthologies Thirty Days (Tupelo, 2015) and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque, 2015). Her poem “Open to the Elements” was a top-prize winner in RhymeZone’s 2014-15 Poetry Contest. Galloway’s manuscript “The Garlic Peelers” won the QuillsEdge Press 2015 Chapbook Competition and was a Finalist in Tupelo’s 2015 Snowbound Competition. She co-hosts “Fourth Sundays,” a reading series at the Claremont Library.
Suspended in anticipation,
I’ve taken two duffel bags
out to where they made the desert sprout with kitsch
I’ve been discouraged
The sign says IDEAL MALL
The stores sell golf carts and iron doors
Driving tipsy down Frank Sinatra Drive
along a colonnade of dead palms
I avoid detection
The ripples start to the south,
the home of sullen seas and fresh catastrophes
and I wait in the earthquake, for the punchline
Indio, California
The highway sign read
Indio and other desert cities
as if they were already an addendum
to a Biblical catastrophe
The sky became naked, merciless
The highway narrowed, lost lanes
Loneliness became a cosmic affair
By a railroad graveyard,
the date farms die, the houses sit unfinished
and the noise overwhelms the signal at last
A man, maybe not old, but ill-used,
bicycled over to beg a dollar
from the only other man for miles
outside his car or home
The dollar, he said, was for a Corona
to shelter him from the stars,
distant mountains and blind eyes of cars—
His eyes black as snakeholes
under a baseball hat, he let a silence hang
over the man with a dollar, who shrugged,
got in his car and moved along
Yucca Valley, California
The sun blasts the paint off a luxury car
from a million miles away
The sign says a fire could start a flood
The wind hollows out the rock
The bright yellow moth explodes
on the windshield
It’s the never-ending way of matter:
Everything against everything else
The kangaroo rats and desert rats sprint
under the tires of the car
I sigh out their weight in prayer
Needles, California
In Barstow, they’d named a meteor
after an old woman
A distant valley of amusement parks
became a vast animal feed mill
The land emptied out
all of it FOR SALE BY OWNER
A double-wide trailer
sat a quarter mile from the road,
one wall kicked out in disgust
At night, the parades began—
the big trucks driving in clusters
The dark was so dark
that driving was like falling through space
A lit number flashed in the darkness
And I puzzled for miles if it was the price of a room,
the temperature of the air, the speed limit or an exit number
The highway impersonated the sky—wide swathes
between headlights, gas stations and traffic lights
The night impersonated eternity—silent, absolute,
yet broken by human habitation
Colin Dodds is the author of Another Broken Wizard, WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” His writing has appeared in more than two hundred publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Poet and songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Actual Air) said of Dodds’ poetry: “These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.” And his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Colin lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife Samantha.
Inlandia: A Literary Journey 