Spinozablue

An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Month: October 2022

Fall Additions to Spinozablue, and More Paintings

By SpinozabluePosted on Posted in Art, Blog, Fiction, PoetryTagged , , , , , ,
Fawn at Noon, by Douglas Pinson. Digital painting, 2022.

Spinozablue welcomes new poetry from James Croal Jackson, Mitch Corber, and Howie Good, plus new fiction by David M. Rubin.

If you’d like to submit your own work, please go to the Submissions Page, and fill out the contact form as per instructions. You can bypass that form once we’ve made First Contact . . .

I recently experimented with horizontal usage of the Waterpaint Soft Edges brush from Krita. Had been using it primarily in a vertical way. I like the results. As before, using the brush(es) freehand, trying to incorporate more color selections and different textures to augment the background.

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New Poems by James Croal Jackson

By SpinozabluePosted on Posted in PoetryTagged , ,

On Sassafras the KEPT ONES

In the alley toward the strip yellow
plant caution tape walking through trash

valley to Iron City Beer no one
needs to pack bags stepping on

white rocks on Sassafras the KEPT ONES
under clouds. Wonder who makes

it out alive. Plastic bag with Lysol
wipe flapped in the wind when tossed

in the trash. Another event stupidly
beautiful to admire. When I look away

I could crash into sunflower NO PARKING
signs. What masochist places

these in the middle of a long busy stretch
of sidewalk? Now bees won’t leave

me alone in this heat

 

Write Everything

write a waterfall eroding the sediment of past
words to drip off tongue burn in the crinkle
crackle of sandpaper rocks white walls you speak
against refuse to listen ears plugged with pink
plastic unsustainable their space your space

 

OK Google

is your volume at two

what
is

my mouth my tongue

a computer can’t play stupid

what
is
a bad
sign like your tongue itching

let me ask again

tongue itchiness cannabis

I think you want to play it again

what

should I be worried

 

—by James Croal Jackson

Copyright © 2022, by James Croal Jackson.

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Surfaces: New poems by Mitch Corber

By SpinozabluePosted on Posted in PoetryTagged , ,

SURFACES

Domesticity reigns supreme
in bedroom foreplay
and kitchen kindnesses
as stress dissolves in liquidity.

Past implosions irk the cautious
nurse, her very livelihood
threatened by a weapon-wielding
boss man who … don’t ask.

Free again, I’ve found
my downed wingspan rising
as buried heretic ledgers
adjourn to the surface.

 

TACO TUESDAY

A Bingo of elation, frayed jeans
and Led Zep in the form of a scar.
Your lieutenants all beg mercy
for a goodness-caress of rich passion.

Diesels spew the rooftops off of squatters
doffing their cinder-caps for loosie-goosie
ladies of sidesaddle majesty. A crowbar
awaits the faint of heart.

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Annie Ernaux wins Nobel Prize for Literature.

By SpinozabluePosted on Posted in BlogTagged , , ,
Ernaux in the 1960s. Photo by L’Inventoire.

The 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Annie Ernaux, the author of Happening, and The Years, among more than twenty other books. Born in 1940, in Normandy, she published her first book, Cleaned Out, in 1974. Several of her works have been made into movies.

The Swedish Academy said this about her writing, in announcing the prize:

“Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.”

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Howie Good: Being Me

By SpinozabluePosted on Posted in PoetryTagged , ,

Being Me

There’s bad shit going on. Supply chain problems are said to be to blame. Often one has to make things oneself in order to have or see them. Just ask meth cooks what that means. I’ve been following a long, confusing route, down streets that twist and turn like Nietzsche’s enigmatic aphorisms and then in and out of rooms where people repeat phrases in the mindless manner of a talking doll: “Thank you,” “I love you,” “Awesome!” It’s all part of the inconvenience of being me, father of orphans and foster children, inventor of the fingerprint smudges on touch screens.

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Fall Poetics III

By SpinozabluePosted on Posted in Blog, PhilosophyTagged , , , ,

Something missing from the previous two posts on this topic, this vagueness I’m calling Poetics. A heart-place, of sorts, for lack of a better term. And that term is woefully inadequate. So I’ll work on that . . .

Everyone has one (or myriads), even if it’s the absence of that home, that heart-place, that sometimes warm, welcoming, well-lit cave inside one’s unknown core. Absences are presences, at least to a point in our lives, especially when we’re on the younger side of the journey. I suspect that one day, however, if we live long enough, the absence fails to complete the circle into a presence, and remains a null, and then it’s truly time to bid adieu.

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