Stone by patient stone
Bruce Hodder
Stone by patient stone,
the Buddhas of Bamiyan
return,
rising up
out of the dust,
with careful labour
and determined will,
to watch again
over Afghanistan.
Their centuries of calm
abiding, carried
in each stone,
might give comfort
to that shattered world,
believe his words
or doubt them.
The healing,
when the armies go,
will need the longer
view of faith.
And he came back.
That must be something.
A pretty metaphor
for hope, at least.
_________________________________________________
Memorandum
George Freek
Banking is a sullen art.
I make more bones
than money,
and then I make more poems.
And the day is a string,
unraveling at its ends,
and the moon’s a conventional thought,
diffusing as it descends.
The sum of what I know
is nothing.
The sum and total of my days
is less than something.
And here is what I see:
ancient philosophers
at a Grecian fountain, drinking.
They know not who they are—
Or what they’re even thinking.
_________________________________________________
The Open and Shut, or;
Simsim Salabim
Bryan C. Henry
Open, O Simsim!
There you have it,
a turn of phrase to turn monolith gates
as the Earth opens to the worthy.
There you have it,
the mountains part
at the edge of the world,
And inside,
winged angels call the worthy
to live their death in glory.
So claim the caregivers.
So claim the soothsayers,
If God is love as god is cruel,
then cruelty is love as love is cruel.
So go the God players,
creating order from chaos
and back again.
To live is to experience magic,
universal sleight of hand,
To conquer adversity
with but a wave of the will.
Death awaits those who will fail
as death awaits us all.
But to die trying
is to die living, after all.
So treasure life
if you must treasure.
Treasure the magic in the air
that binds us far and near.
Treasure the magic of experience.
Treasure and wonder,
you who set to wander,
To wander in your ways
and wander in your deeds,
You, line leader,
You, world follower.
I pray thee, take heed, traveler.
Tread carefully in your freedom.
For death is patient
and forever close at hand.
So treasure the moment
if you must treasure,
and live for it,
For the moment is precious
as the moment is fleeting,
and so meant to be lived for.
Your life is yours to live
as it’s yours to lose.
So rip it up
and tear it up
and laugh it up.
Make friends, make music, and make love.
The treasures are yours for the taking.
The magic is yours
as the magic is you.
And so to death,
for now,
I say,
Shut, O Simsim!
_________________________________________________
Module 5
Felino A. Soriano
who of the burgeoned
styles
lackluster (or, self of the personal intuition recreating burn of the forgotten before?)
timid then warmth of the palm’s reinforced purpose—
slashed trigger reform classic engage this cultural nonchalance (interpreted: popular)
laughter unheard by the thought thinkers of critical disposition—
?
_________________________________________________
Module 6
Felino A. Soriano
Prior (and so before follows excavated meanings of meandering triviality
) vocal your motionless language
languid
lackluster
range of immobile bankrupted mirror, self. Recent
or
as
youth
professes: __________
signature of the wayward
decapitated logic.
_________________________________________________
A Tale
Bryan C. Henry
Perched atop the granite stalks
sits a moment, alone
among a million faces.
Trading favors with the clouds,
the moment lingers
to usher in a circumstance.
Circumstance is beyond control,
and tears the moment
into a million pieces
of a million faces
beyond control.
And so a tale unfolds,
or so the story goes.
Time is but a dream.
It won’t be long
before the clouds give in.
_________________________________________________
I Cut Myself While Shaving
George Freek
I sink under weighty clouds
and the elm’s sensible despair.
November is in the air.
Overhead sparrows whirl like toys
careening to nowhere.
But that’s a false impression.
They form again and swing
toward the fading light.
I’m bored. I look in the mirror,
and speak nonsense to myself at night.
Autumn leaves seem to tremble
in the grip of an iron will.
The sparrows disperse like lovers,
who have loved their fill—
And suddenly they are still.
_________________________________________________
The Last Astronaut
Brian Kraft
On bad days he felt like he was orbiting in a massive floating sarcophagus, the corporate logos and technical inscriptions covering the outside of the craft no more than expensive hieroglyphs, exciting hoodoo for the alien civilization that would discover his freeze-dried corpse a million years after the inevitable first hail of nuclear bombs cut off his contact with Houston.
At least he would get to see it all from above, the big clouds blooming in the atmosphere, puffing up silent and brown-yellow like underwater explosions. He did a mental run through of this now familiar doomsday scenario as he drank his coffee and stared out the porthole at a ragged looking bank of clouds hanging over northeastern Africa. He would be okay for the three months until his next shipment of oxygen and food was due; Houston wouldn't be there for docking coordinates, would be crouching in a government bunker somewhere or blasted to poisonous chunks of hard powder. He would watch the capsule whiz by in the distance, a tiny metallic shiver reflecting the sun. He would have more than enough time to find a sizable dose of mercury to swallow or dream up some other escape plan. One crucial chore to put off for ninety days; one long, apocalyptic Lazy Sunday.
This grim meditation subsided and for a few moments he was able to bask in the simple, sublime wonder of the fact: he lived in outer space. He was a rock star, or a dictator, one of the impossible few who had been selected by the lottery of fate to live lives completely unspoiled by the tedious compromises of the grind. He was as pure as a character in a book, as utterly of himself as mythology. When they got around to adding a new tarot card to the deck it would look a lot like him, blonde and buzz-cut, boldly peering out of his shuttle window. He was The Astronaut- cultured, cut, and tanned, the perfect Aryan ambassador chosen to be shuttled off to the heavens. A human piece of awe. Maybe they really would all crumble to dust under him, and he would be left alone in this tomb, preserved with this stash of technological riches. There were worse things to end up than a mummy.
"Fuck all y'all," he muttered softly over the rim of his metal mug. He laughed but stopped once he heard himself, alarmed at the sound of his voice- a faint, corroded cackle.
The universe had no shape but lately he felt sure we were near the bottom of a great pit. Each new foot of space he passed through told a story of billions of years of silence and black. The vessel cleaved on through the endless night like a perverse representation of matter itself, the ugly fascism of existence exposed to the placid expanse of infinity. The holiest monk would have shivered like a cretin.
He thought: This is a job only an American could do.
He thought about Bruce Springsteen. Maybe if he had been up here in the late nineteen seventies he would have been able to see, floating over the North American eastern seaboard one night, the dust trail blowing behind a pickup on some lonely stretch of highway. Or maybe he simply would have towered Paul Bunyan-like over the low lying clouds, grinning agreeably and shrugging tough jovial shrugs in the atmosphere.
"Fuckin' Bruce Springsteen, man, fuckin' Bruce motherfuckin' Springsteen, that's who," he said. "Nonna you fucks are any match for The Boss...." For some reason he said a Hail Mary.
Something soft bumped him on the back of his hair. He reached back and found a lemon. He nudged it around in front of him and played with it for a while, tapping it with his palm and watching it spin and bob. He plucked it from the air, positioned it between his thumb and middle finger and flicked his wrist. The lemon whirled into a blur. After spinning for a while it stopped and, as if having no other trick to present him with, hovered slowly away towards a far corner.
He spent an hour and forty-five minutes looking for his copy of The Odyssey, reducing a storage room to a three dimensional tangle of floating debris. For twenty minutes he violently cursed Eastern Europe as it passed underneath at a molten pace. He drank a whole pot of coffee, scanned the planet for hours like a pharaoh in a majestic trance, and rode the caffeine hangover out in a corner, his thoughts muddy, his head heavy in his hands. He mentally sifted through memories of long ago days and friends he hadn't seen in years, finding them disconnected and unfamiliar, like strange shadowy figures moving in and out of dark rooms. His childhood in Alabama seemed more of an idea or a notion than an actual collection of years and experiences. He avoided mirrors and reflective surfaces, fearful of the grinning cipher who tended to appear when he glanced at them. After this passed he listened to Houston read off safety statistics, miming microphone contact for his own weary amusement.
"Quadrant 40, axis read- cleared. Quadrant 42, axis read- cleared."
"Your mother is a donkey fucker, Houston, do you read? Repeat- your mother fucked a donkey on my birthday. Over."
"Quadrant 46, axis read- cleared. Quadrant 48, axis read..."
He rode the crest of dusk across the globe the whole day.
Around dinnertime he pulled the plastic sheath off of a microwavable Taco Bell meal and let it join the collection of trash currently clogging the kitchen area. A few days ago he had forgotten to close the lid on the sleek looking receptacle under the pantry and the trash had spread all over the place, slowly shimmying out of the tightly packed cylindrical can overnight. The air had been growing thicker every meal since with slimy utensils, torn aluminum cans, and crumpled pieces of paper. Plastic bags swam through the air like melancholy specters.
The meal cooked for a while in its black plastic tray, silhouetted against the condiment splattered yellow glow of the microwave light. He meditated anxiously before pulling the dish out, hot and hissing. He snatched a clean plastic utensil from the air and buried it deep in his food. Stepping over a heavy bag of garbage undulating on the ground in the doorway, he made his way back to the study. Sitting down at the computer, he took huge bites of his food, the half melted ingredients stretching in a gooey bridge from the plate to his mouth.
He logged on to the Internet.
YOU HAVE (1) NEW MESSAGE
the computer informed him. It was Bernard, a friend of his from the French space program. A few weeks before the start of his mission the two had gone drinking in Savannah, Georgia, stumbling the loose cobbled streets and gawking at the warped countenances of the locals. Bernard had been in that night, telling jokes to the other bar patrons as they huddled over their drinks and tried to ignore him, trading life stories with the few who would talk with him, and delivering impromptu lectures on any subject that happened to wander in the path of his train of thought. The night had ended with the theft of a tray full of utensils from the place's kitchen and the immediate disposal of the load in a nearby pond.
There had been a moment, walking to their hotel- the pimps and other creatures of Saturday night gaping and sneering, forming a stretched out Bosch mural along the sides of the street, the suction haze of intoxication having momentarily yielded a state of advanced, animal lucidity- when Bernard had pulled him close and muttered in his ear. Muttered softly, dreamily, like a lover. The memory of those words came back to him all of sudden now, blowing in from somewhere chilly but familiar, like an October breeze; the memory of the words and the mouth they had come from, pressed close to him and rasping, wet and perverse as any orifice could be:
"Make no mistake, my friend, the old stories are all true... the Heavens are up there somewhere, waiting to be found. We will be the first to discover them, you and I, and when we do, we will storm them, for this place we come from is almost certainly hell."
He stared entranced at the message screen, bewildered at something so crucially human locked within a fluorescent bar and laid gently across the electric milkiness of the computer screen. He clicked to open. The screen winced and flickered, went white, and displayed Bernard's message:
Living in New York City is like living on the moon.
The letter was one sentence.
"Bernard, Bernard... you dirty, cum guzzling slut," he sighed to himself.
The astronaut smiled faintly and leaned back in his chair for a better view of the ceiling. A while ago he had pinned a map of the world from a 1940's era children's adventure book up there with plastic tacks. The non North American continents were depicted as primally misshapen, mud colored wastelands, the stretches of terrain illustrated with examples of muscle-bound, red pupiled wildlife. In Africa, a trio of gangly, bug-eyed Bushmen huddled together menacingly, while pale, chubby Eastern Europeans waddled across brick bridges in a seeming pleasant stupor. A freckled American farmer grinned hugely over his golden crop. Waves seemed to chop wildly against the edges of every land, and a few vague, tentacled sea monsters with cue ball eyes splashed in the depths.
The astronaut considered his friend's message over and over again, each word unfurling into a long splash of color, that combined with the rest created a secret landscape in his mind, a whole new continent of desolation added to his map. He set his empty plastic tray down on his desk and after a few moments it floated off, the napkin gradually unpeeling from the greasy plate. He leaned back with his feet propped against the legs of the table, and as he studied the world, trash spinning overhead, he considered the beauty, the quiet majesty of it all, he thought of how there were so many places, so many places he didn't ever want to go.
_________________________________________________
Farewell
Bryan C. Henry
Go on dreamer,
You wisher, you griever,
Hopeful admirer, magic’s believer.
For we have many miles ahead,
Many places to go,
And many friends to know.
Go on dreamer,
Go on.
Go on.
_________________________________________________
George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Belvidere, IL. His recent poems have appeared in 'Angelic Dynamo'; 'The Whispering Fire'; 'Talon Magazine'; 'Toucan Magazine'; and 'Jones Ave'. His short play HERE COMES GODOT was recently published in 'Freight Train Magazine'; Other plays have lately been produced by The Laurel Mill Playhouse (MD); Theatre Unleashed (LA); The Auburn (NY) Community Players; Somerset College (KY); and The Fells Point Corner Theatre (MD).
Bryan C. Henry - dreamer born on the California bay, child of Earth, student in debt to N.Y.U., English speaker with an English major, literature seeker, jungle walker, urban hiker, imagination enthusiast, globetrotter, storyteller, true believer, aimless wanderer with sights on adventure.
Bruce Hodder lives in Northampton, England. From there, on computers in internet cafes and borrowed laptops, he edits the poetry blog The Beatnik (http://whollycommunion.blogspot.com). His own work has appeared in Outlaw, Durable Goods, Poetry Dispatch, Basho's Road and the paperback anthology Other Voices.
Brian Kraft is a writer living in New York City.
Felino A. Soriano is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. He has received the Gertrude Stein “rose” prize for creativity in poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review. Over 3,100 of his poems have appeared in places such as BlazeVOX, Otoliths, infinite space, Poetry, Yes, and Fact Simile. He has had 48 print and electronic collections of poetry accepted for publication, including Compatible Aspects of the Disparate Endeavor (NeoPoiesisPress, 2011), Differences of the Parallel Devotion (Desperanto, 2011), and Identities —Upon Variations (Moria, 2011). For information regarding his published works, editorships, and interviews, please visit: www.felinoasoriano.info.
