Bart Edelman: Three Poems

Whiff

Not that you need
To be glad if you do,
But what’s the harm
In missing the ball,
The girl, the test, the job?
It’s bound to happen—
Every now and then—
When stale air needs a breeze
You can easily provide
To break each day’s monotony,
Or night’s thick black line;
Produce a ghost or two,
While you’re at it, of course.
Yes, the heroic nature,
The challenge at stake,
Makes the act more noble
Than what’s been undertaken,
Long before any fall
Calls itself a failure.
And should nothing else ensue,
Simply smell the sweet mint—
Summer’s cocktail afternoon.

Howie Good: Funeral Music

Funeral Music

Pushkin was killed in a duel with a French chevalier over his unfaithful wife, as only befits the greatest Russian poet of the Romantic era. Every morning I wake up that much closer to the black river. Grandma believed that eating six rum-soaked raisins a day was the secret to her longevity. After a noisy night of rain, grass reappears, astoundingly still green, from under the brittle old snow.

 

The C Word

I’m a cancer survivor – for now, anyway. Every three months, I must have half a dozen tubes of blood drawn, and my chest scanned, to determine if any cancer cells have migrated, nomads in search of grass and water.

William Egginton: The Rigor of Angels

Group biographies are having a moment as of late, but it’s unusual for them to connect disparate fields of study, expertise, or creative pursuits. More often than not, they focus on a group of contemporaries, friends, rivals, even lovers, who share space within a city, a university, even a building, so there is already a built-in physical connection as foundation. In William Egginton’s fascinating book, The Rigor of Angels, we see new links between literature, philosophy, and science that may not have been apparent to us before reading this history of ideas. But the three stars in question, Kant, Borges, and Heisenberg, never met, at least in this universe.

Patrick Ramsey: Two Poems

ENOUGH
from Reflections on The Great Defeat, no 17

Tired of trudging on a road of ancestral bones from one worthless place to another, I fell down on the snow-covered verge secretly waiting for my mother to pick me up. Or at least exhort me to make one last effort to get up. ‘Stopping is not for us. Do you not see? Howl like a banshee all you want – they don’t care. No one is taking notes. Do you hear me? Our portion is but to forebear.’

Minutes passed. And then hours. This time she didn’t drag me up, though I just lay there helpless beneath a bowl of snowy grey sky, watching from the other corner of my eye others much like me slouching into their own swirly dusks.

New Fiction, Poetry, and Paintings

Spinozablue welcomes new fiction by Changming Yuan and William Kitcher, plus new poetry by Stephen Mead and John Grey.

Arctic blasts and snow on the ground lead to thoughts about contrasts and contradictions, frozen limbs and warm rooms, then and now. I’m reminded of the ecstatic joys of childhood, sledding down a hill-street, custom-made for such a moment. Custom made for the shouts and echoes, the smell of new snow, and the feeling of frozen mittens stuck forever, if not for Mom.

Perfect in its winter form, as if its designers had checked with neighborhood kids before paving, our hill was a fine old sledding hill, even when I went too fast to avoid crashing into a car tire.

John Grey: Talking in Your Sleep

 

A FAMILY GATHERING AT THE HOUSE OF THE ONE WHO MADE IT

Yes, it’s an uncomfortable experience.
And you’ve already asked yourself,
many times over,
“What in hell am I doing here?”

But it’s a big house on a large estate
that pulses with the mix of generations,
and your choices are many:
you can swim in the generous chlorine green
of the backyard pool,
play the violin to a gathering of cousins
in the daunting formal parlor.
cradle a new born in your arms,
welcome a nephew home from the battlefield
or flit like a breeze between the various moods,
the disparate ages, as they sip their wine,
nibble on cheese and crackers.

William Kitcher: Frozen Romance

Frozen Romance
by
William Kitcher

     They exited the over-heated bar, arms around each other, into the winter freeze.

     Steve had forgotten how cold it was, and he extricated himself from her, pulling his parka zipper up to his throat and pulling his toque down more firmly over his balding head. He immediately felt more sober, and he didn’t like it.

     Maggie looked up at him and smiled. He wasn’t that bad-looking, she thought. She didn’t mind that he didn’t have much hair – lots of men in their late thirties had little hair – but he’d have to do something about that fringe of hair emerging from underneath his toque.

Stephen Mead: Two Poems

 

Isles of Silence

At first I thought it was only the house,
rooms in a vacuum & people the same,
the people having mouths any statue would envy.
Yet all the conversations withheld burned
from their eyes & every street streamed
with something near to humming,
but not humming yet.

I thought:
I am speaking the wrong language.
I thought:
these signs I give are wrong.

Yet my riddles became plainer & my voice clear as glass.
Yet my paintings became circles & all of melting edges,
& all very transparent.

I entered cove after cove only the colors said: stay.

Thoughts on Peace, Holidays, plus new Paintings

They say. They say tis the season. They say keep this or that Special Time close to your heart, always and forever, but few of us do. Especially the heart of hearts. Most especially the easiest thing to create, ironically.

Presents, stacked to the ceiling. Bright lights and tinkling, jangling sounds of youth and hope. A cornucopia of food and drink to suffice and satiate. With or without chimneys, there’s Santa, and the mystery of all that. And there, again, is Charlie Brown’s lonely little tree, revivified, lingering in our rooms and memories.

The call goes out to give and give self/less/ly.

Sublimation, by Changming Yuan

Sublimation

     “The meaning of life, if any at all, is to create one out of it,” you texted Hua, your long lost but recently re-found soulmate currently living in Melbourne.     

      “Looks like you’ve created one, but how did you do that?” she typed back.

     As circumstances didn’t allow you two to video- or even audio-chat with each other online across the Pacific Ocean, you had to send her a long email to answer her question.

     It started out on the evening of August 2, 2004, the day before you returned to Vancouver after your first and only family tour to Banff.

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