Table of Contents

Poetry:

1. The Anger of Love, Danny Rendleman
2. Coconut Chicken in California, Jan worth
3. Wendy's Flowers in Full Bloom, Jan Worth
4. Naja Karamaru in the Bath, Jan Worth
5. At Wayfarer's Chapel, Jan Worth
6. Why I Want to be Pam Grier, Collin Kelley
7. The Clarity of Loss, Collin Kelley
8. Romance is Fatal, Cammy Thomas
9. Vacation, Cammy Thomas
10. Planting, Cammy Thomas
11. Separate Vacations, Miriam N. Kotzin
12. Worm Rain, Miriam N. Kotzin
13. The Remnant Shop, Jennifer Wheelock
14. Two Socks and Peace, Jennifer Wheelock
15. It's Best to Have a Name When We Pray, Jennifer Wheelock

Illustrations:

1. Edith, Jennifer Wheelock
2. Gryff, Jennifer Wheelock
3. Stormy, Jennifer Wheelock
4. Retriever, Jennifer Wheelock

Bios

Info & Submission Guidlines

Editors

Links

Archives:

Danny Rendleman

THE ANGER OF LOVE

Largish shoebox of old photographs I paw through, in search of what?
What, in the bowels of this coldest of nights, then this bowl of blue sky
Where nothing can possibly be wrong with the world, could have happened?

Already, 2:49 in the afternoon, the light changes, aiming for dusk,the shadows
Of writhing trees, snow the squirrels knock down, the brevity of my neighbors'
Lives and loves.   Mine. Mein.

I love to feel the corrugated edges of these old photos, take off my glasses to look
Closer at the little grim smiles, guess at what lake is just beyond my father's rakish
Straw fedora, my mother's babushka, my brother's handsome eyes.

It would seem...and now I have to answer an email, take a call, plan for something,
Maybe love me and mine to death.  And/or check out that sky, that excuse, cliché,
Delft-blue sky, those sweet trees doing their damnedest, if that's a word,

To get my attention.   Isn't what we do best a shoving out into this world
A request, an anger when it doesn't respond, a love? Replenish the thistle seed,
Offer up to the gods this little body to have sport with, say we are sorry to everyone.

What we call our bodies are only rooms we fidget in, wanting other, wanting out.
And so love wanders in, checking the price, eyes fixed on yonder horizons: That.
And so we surge outward, More in our spleens, Desire in the bones, like marrow.

And so I stuff all the photos back in the box, twine it shut, and shelve it.
Those inside remain unchanged, do no more harm or good.
Eyes wide open or squinched in the sunlight, smiling like there's no tomorrow.

Jan Worth

COCONUT CHICKEN IN CALIFORNIA

I need to make something
with at least a dozen steps,
a dish requiring ingredients
not on any ordinary shelf,
nothing from past lives
nothing passed down
from anyone's anybody.
A recipe with no mother
behind it.

I need to make a list with
nothing on it that hurts,
to navigate unfamiliar stores,
course aisles not knowing where
to find a thing. To come back,
my little car banking stoutly around
coastal curves, the gray ocean opening up,
and my little bag of trophies, coconut milk,
Asian sauces, water chestnuts and
a tiny tin of tumeric, snug
at my unencumbered side.

I need to take pains and
take my time, in California,
which is not my state,
and in June gloom, fog
swirling east from Catalina,
my bare feet cold on old
tile floors, I need to dredge pink cubes
of chicken through coconut
and brown them in peanut oil two by
two, and simmer them in rich milk,
and when I'm done pile them on a
platter over plump rice for people
who barely know me, but who will take
my coconut chicken and smile and
eat it and say it tastes good.

Jan Worth

WENDY'S FLOWERS IN FULL BLOOM

Stop! Please do not pick my flowers.
Thank you.   Wendy.
(Sign on Paseo del Mar at Barbara San Pedro, California)

Wendy knows the human heart,
how, when we walk by her
luscious cascade of color
at the corner, we can hardly
resist. Our senses are already
dancing the bossa nova, our
noses flared with the musky
sea air, and what with the
pelicans gliding silently back
from their daytime fishing
grounds, and the sun sinking
over White Point, leaving
parfaits of red and pink and
gold like bolts of satin, and
when we have our arms
around each other and we are high on
wild anise and a little bit of grass,
snuck behind closed doors
in the roomy beach house, it's
hard to say what we might do.
Behind the overgrowth of brazen
roses, Wendy's redwood house
hides like the secret in a fairy tale,
dark vagina in a psyedelic bush
of jasmine and hibiscus, flirty
fan palms, peignoir of willows.
bewitching tree ferns and red azalea.
Frankly, we want to get swacked.
We want to take Wendy's flowers
home, but not just the bawdy blooms,
the whole house, the wet stone walk
arrowed with birds of paradise, the whole
aphrodisiac corner, its full green goblets
enough to keep us drunk till fall.

Jan Worth

NAJA KARAMARU IN THE BATH

This moment, after a dog-tired day,
everything I need: his touch,
this fragrant bath he drew for me,
these blue candles he lit for me
flickering off the cherished old tiles,
my steamy body open.   Stay here
and talk to me, I say, stay here.

He pulls up a white chair, dips hot
water over my shoulders with the cup
of his hand.

When I was a kid
I used to go see Naja Karamaru at
an old theater on Scolley Square,

he begins in his molasses voice.

She was all woman,
she had curves. I got in even though
I was only seventeen - I was big for my age.
Sometimes, if it was the cops' night off,
the manager let us see it all. Naja
Karamaru would get the sign from
the wings, and take it off, her round
ass facing us, her bright round face
peeking over her shoulder, her black hair
curling down her downy back.  

That was the beginning of my erotic life,

he says,

that spirited woman,
smiling at us, her ruby nailed
fingers finding a path to her
forbidden spots. We all went wild.
We went home happy.

Naja Karamaru, I repeat, smiling,
my eyes closed, letting the teasy
assonance and consonants dance

from my mouth.   They land
in the bubbles: Naja. Kara. Maru.

Each playful pair a one-act play, hot and
soft together, exotic and kind.

Her real name was probably Gladys,
he says,

but she was always Naja to me.

I lift my left leg out of the water to cool
and let it dangle on the porcelain edge,
dripping on his feet.   "I'm glad you liked
Naja Karamaru," I drowsily assert.   

Sometimes I want to kiss his feet,
like Mary Magdalene, an act of grace,
like Naja showing it all in Scolley Square.
I love how Naja's story in my bath
makes me smile and takes away
my gloom, and how that gawky kid, now
my sweet grown love, is still exuberant that
such a thing could happen, that looking
at a woman, and seeing her,
can make such joy in the world.

Jan Worth

AT WAYFARER'S CHAPEL

I am trying to release my past
and this seems like the right place
to do it: glass cloister on a pacific
Ocean bluff, sanguine sunlight on the first
day of the year. If you saw me here, with this
man, the two of us sitting calmly on a stone
bench under the redwood trees, holding hands,
you'd think we'd been together forever. We
show our years, the backs of our hands beginning
to wrinkle, our eyes bright and watery with knowing
too much. You'd think I'd been his wife all
my life, the way I put my arm around him,
pulling his beloved body closer in the
gentle wind off the sea.

But we didn't have a life together.
That was with others, and
those days are gone. Maybe that is why
we can be so still, this blue Thursday,
blinking into the peaceful water
that glitters off the coast. Maybe that is
why we have nothing much to say
this day, except that we are
here in it, and not alone,
surrounded by light.

Collin Kelley

WHY I WANT TO BE PAM GRIER

I want to pull a gun out of my hair
and blow your head off.
I want to wear black leather knee high boots
and plant my ten inch heel up your sorry ass.
I want to flim you and flam you and just say
goddamn you,
while I slit your throat with my knife.
I want to be exploited, overworked
and underpaid, but look damn good doing it,
cause I'm always getting laid.
I want to be an idol, a nobody,
a whatever happened to her,
then put on my Kangol hat, my tight black suit,
look better than I did twenty years ago,
and smoke you one more time good and proper.
I want to cross 110th street with a bag full of cash,
and one last sweet kiss from the man
who actually gave a shit.
I want to drive away into the morning light,
headed for Spain, hurting like hell,
but with my head up
and the taste of him on my lips.

Collin Kelley

THE CLARITY OF LOSS

This year I did not mark
the day of your death.
I let it slip by in an afternoon
filled with music you'll never hear,
words you'll never read,
a chorus of voices raised in protest
at the unwavering passage of time.
I don't need a number
to know that you are gone.

Since you went away, other tragedies
have left their toll, the media
mining the fragile, the exhaustion,
the relentless sorrow of things we cannot change.
We have made high art out of twisted cars,
planes crashing, buildings falling.

I have dissected my past into little pieces
and put them in their proper places.
I have begun the process of growing up
and older, of stripping down memories
to their essence and casting off the extraneous.

Even without a calendar, we will be born
and die, clock work beyond our control.
And there is a clarity in loss because
it reveals the true path, the one common
experience, the thing we all share.
You have died and I will join you, and time,
which we have enslaved ourselves to, will snap,
and in whatever an instant is,
it will be as if we never parted.

Cammy Thomas

ROMANCE IS FATAL

not just to oneself
the hectic flush not covered
but removed, a surgery
a change of view

dream horses and dolls
she snatches to show us
our willingness to bribe
ourselves away

the properties and ponies
our lives lie upon

she says all winter fevers must be iced

only to keep our havoc from ourselves
keep the world sweet and wondering
for children nice as these

Cammy Thomas

VACATION

my sisters come for dinner
of lobsters cracked with a hammer

when it rains we swim in the pool
where a few toads die every night
mornings we get the skimmer
and flip them into the woods

all night the fan goes
sounding like a highway

under boiling white clouds
the orchestra plays
Overture to "The Wasps"

in the fields bees refuse
to return to their tiny cells

Cammy Thomas

PLANTING

Appetite quite gone,
last time I weighed this
I was twenty.
Can't walk
to the end of the driveway
to see the bulbs I planted last fall--

small white narcissus,
red tulips,
not the tulips
that bloom in my gut.

Careless waving of trees,
bendy birch,
the crows who come
to eat the seed I throw
don't know I'm dying.

And look:
the sun curves round the world
as if it matters.

Miriam N. Kotzin

SEPARATE VACATIONS

Sleeping, you travel
without me to places
we have never been.
You hug your pillow,
burrow, ignore the tug
of morning light.

Our room is strewn
with your unpacked bags,
left where you dropped
them from your sleep.
Or have you traveled
light, one flash blue bag slung
over a shoulder. I stumble,
tripping into your sleep.

Some nights I travel, too,
clamber, nimble as a goat,
up hills where the white
stone in August noon
is dangerous as snow.
"Sunblind," whispers a woman
in black beneath an ancient
tree whose silver green leaves
cast blue shadows on the
terraced hillside. She will
not look at me, but I know
she is the old woman in
the snapshot where
you clutch her skirt and
hide your face in long
dark folds of cloth.

Or travel to water,
find a garret room
with a narrow bed
by a wall with two windows
overlooking the sea.
Or I find my way
to the old hotel
on the far shore
of the lake of dark water.
There, on a wide porch
silent men and women
sit on rocking chairs.

The chairs creak,
an ant makes its way
across the concrete floor.
The woman who leans
against a pillar
near the stairs
could be your sister.

Sometimes, travelers
waking, we come so
close to one another,
we almost touch.

Miriam N. Kotzin

WORM RAIN

All night the rain poured my dreams.
The gutters were wild with water
and freshets fell into storm drains.
So we woke into the morning
of the worm rain.

The earth is sodden with the long warm rain
that covers the pavements with worms.
At every step a slaughter
of pink and brown wriggling.
Some, half-crushed, survive for a time
stuck to the cement; while others, whole, move
in blind and silent undulations.

Jennifer Wheelock

THE REMNANT SHOP
for my mother

In a windowless room that billowed
and tilted, where lint scampered in winds
from industrial fans: ticking for pillows,
hundreds of naps, yarns, heads of bobbins

peeking at ladies, who, reverent
and silent, touched fabrics like cheekbones
of corpses beautifully clothed, imagined
A-line, stitch, collar, hem, a pattern sewn,

while I like a ghost, unloosed, on my own,
crawled under tables, sneaked off with the shears,
fingered the buttons and buckles that shone
as workers stretched fabrics out like the years

for women who stirred at each lusty tear
and thump of bolt, a clumsy refrain,
and you plopped down poplin humble as prayer,
counting on sturdy, thin-ribbed, and plain

as the weave in your now unsteady hands
that knit as I note how the yarn dwindles
like your breath fraying into strands
that could fit through the eye of a needle.

Jennifer wheelock

TWO SOCKS and PEACE
for the dogs next door

come into my yard every day
time to take a walk
with their mom who's a hippie a little bit
of 1960. Peace

looks like he's seen a brawl
or Two Socks has worn him
down and Peace with matted hair
no color or flair is old and tired from trying
to keep up. Two Socks

wears white flags on his front legs
for a moment you think they'll
slide right off
like less lovely names
neighbors call you kike dyke bitch
but they won't

they stay right there
pulled up to his withers
a way to see him in the dark
as I do sometimes when
it's not yet dawn and he comes
into the yard with Peace and love
love love thy neighbor.

Jennifer Wheelock

IT'S BEST TO HAVE A NAME WHEN WE PRAY
Grandma's Sunday School teacher,
before asking the blessing

First and last if possible
because Jesus, there are lots
of Johns, even ones with last name
Smith or Carter, Green or Brown,
and if one's got gout and belongs
to the First Baptist Church in Macon
and one's got AIDS and doesn't know
the Lord then God might go
in order of who's sickest
and help him first with no regard
for worthiness. (God is good like that
and sometimes doesn't have his facts.) Also I know
two sick Thelmas but one's a gossip
and one does Meals-on-Wheels
and anyhow the gossip brought on
her problems herself. Got a bad heart
now, though some say she always did.
If you don't believe a name's
important, maybe I need to remind you
of the Sunday before last Christmas,
when Nezzie Barker had that 24-hour bug
and we asked the Lord to bring Nezzie
back to Sunday School, not mentioning
it was Nezzie Barker we meant and not
Nezzie Cox who was also out that day, not sick
but on a trip to Florida in that new RV
and Nezzie Cox came back in good time
and tanned while Nezzie Barker (rest her soul)
caught pneumonia and was dead
before the mall closed Christmas Eve.
Now, I'm not saying I know
what might have happened to the Nezzies
had we used last names, but I'd rather not
tempt fate, to say nothing about
how since buying that RV the Coxes
have only signed the attendance book once.

So let us pray:
Dear Lord,
Please look after
Fred Light, who has a hernia.
(Fred Riggs came into
money when Fred Riggs Sr.
died. His name was in the obituaries.
Fred Brighton's name was in the paper for DUI
so he needs you too,
but get to Mr. Light first.)

Jennifer Wheelock copyright 2003

Jennifer Wheelock 2003

Jennifer Wheelock copyright 2003 

Jennifer Wheelock copyright 2003

Bios

Danny Rendleman's last book was THE MIDDLE WEST. Recent poetry and fiction can be found in The Isle Review, Facets, Marlboro Review, and Drought. He teaches rhetoric and creative writing at UM-Flint.

Jan Worth teaches writing at the University of Michigan-Flint. Her essays, poems, and short stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Controlled Burn, Drought, Driftwood Review, and many others. Her novel based on her Peace Corps experiences, Nightblind, was a finalist in the 2003 Tupelo Press prose competition. She lives with a beautiful yellow cat named Joey.

Collin Kelley recently published his first book, Better to Travel, which was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Lambda Literary Award. He is widely published in print and online journals. By day, Collin is the managing editor of Atlanta Intown and Atlanta Buckhead magazines. Visit his website, Collinkelley.com.

Cammy Thomas's first book of poems, Inheritance, will be out in early 2005 from Four Way Books. Her poems have recently appeared in the Marlboro Review, 88: A Journal of American Poetry, The Mystic River Review, Pine Island Journal of New England Poetry, and Sahara. She holds a PhD in English from Berkeley and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She teaches English at Concord Academy in Massachusetts.

Miriam N. Kotzin teaches literature and creative writing at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where she is the faculty advisor to Maya, the student literary magazine. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in print in Boulevard, for she is a contributing editor, and, among other places, The Southern Humanities review, The Mid-American Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Online her work has appeared in Drexel Online Journal and Three Candles and is forthcoming in Vocabula Review and ForPoetry.com.

Jennifer Wheelock holds a Ph.D. in English, from Florida State University and an MFA in Poetry from Georgia State. Her poems have been published in several journals, including The Comstock Review, Mississippi Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Atlanta Review. She teaches writing at Georgia Tech. About her wonderful, whimsical art, she says, "Painting informs my writing in strange ways. One of my biggest problems as a writer is letting a piece get messy before it comes together. When I struggle with that, I put on my overalls and start painting. I get paint on my hands and face, in my hair, on the floor of my apt. I use vibrant colors, so the colors and the mess stimulate me to make a mess on paper with words, which of course is how most poems start." See more of Jennifer's work at Jenniferwheelock.com.

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