Atlas Poetica Journal of World Tanka Poetry 36

Home , Alice (Per Elisa), Sabbath (Doctor Who)

ATLAS POETICA A Journal of World Tanka

Number 36

M. Kei, editor Grunge, editorial assistant Kira Nash, technical assistant

2019 Keibooks, Perryville, Maryland, USA KEIBOOKS P O Box 346 Perryville, Maryland, USA 21903 AtlasPoetica.org

Atlas Poetica A Journal of World Tanka

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers and scholars who may quote brief passages. See our EDUCATIONAL USE NOTICE.

Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka, an organic print and e-journal published at least three times a year. Atlas Poetica is dedicated to publishing and promoting world tanka literature, including tanka, kyoka, gogyoshi, tanka prose, tanka sequences, shaped tanka, sedoka, mondo, cherita, zuihitsu, ryuka, and other variations and innovations in the ﬁeld of tanka. We do not publish haiku, except as incidental to a tanka collage or other mixed-form work.

Atlas Poetica is interested in all verse of high quality, but our preference is for tanka literature that is authentic to the environment and experience of the poet. While we will consider tanka in the classical Japanese style, our preference is for fresh, forward-looking tanka that engages with the world as it is. We are willing to consider experiments and explorations as well as traditional approaches.

In addition to verse, Atlas Poetica publishes articles, essays, reviews, interviews, letters to the editor, etc., related to tanka literature. Tanka in translation from around the world are welcome in the journal.

Published by Keibooks

ISBN-13: 9781795511230

Also available for Kindle.

AtlasPoetica.org TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial Matsukaze ...... 60 A Long Winter, M. Kei ...... 5 Michael H. Lester .....62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68 Educational Use Notice ...... 92 Neal Whitman ...... 69 Patricia Prime ...... 70, 71 Poetry Paul Callus ...... 71 A. A. Marcoff ...... 7 Paweł Markiewicz ...... 73 Alexis Rotella ...... 9 Richard Grahn ...... 74, 75 Amelia Fielden...... 9 Richard Kakol ...... 76 Anne Benjamin ...... 10 Richard St. Clair ...... 76 Autumn Noelle Hall ...... 10, 11, 12 Roman Lyakhovetsky ...... 79 Barun Saha ...... 13 Ruth Holzer ...... 79, 80 Bruce England ...... 14 Sean Reagan ...... 80 Carol Raisﬁeld ...... 15, 16, 17 Steve Black ...... 81, 83 Charles Harmon...... 18 Tanja Trček ...... 84 Chen-ou Liu ...... 19, 20 Dave Read ...... 21 Articles Debbie Strange ...... 23, 24 Looking Both Ways, Peter Fiore ...... 85 Elizabeth Howard ...... 24 Review: These Purple Years by Amelia Fielden, Elizabeth Moura...... 25 reviewed by Patricia Prime ...... 85 Genie Nakano ...... 25 Review: under raintrees : cherita by ai li, Gerry Jacobson ...... 26 reviewed by Patricia Prime ...... 87 Grunge...... 26, 27 Review: Squall Line on the Horizon by Pris Jackie Chou ...... 28, 29 Campbell, reviewed by M. Kei ...... 88 Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 Review: Light on My Heart: Four Tanka Sequences Jan Foster ...... 10, 76 by Richard St. Clair, reviewed by M. Kei ..89 Jenny Ward Angyal ...... 34 Joanna Ashwell ...... 35 Announcements ...... 90 John S. Gilbertson ...... 34 John Wisdom ...... 35 Joy McCall ...... 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 Julie Bloss Kelsey ...... 42 Kath Abela Wilson ...... 43 Kira Nash ...... 43, 44, 46 Larry Kimmel ...... 46 Laurinda Lind ...... 47 Lee Felty ...... 47 Liz Lanagan ...... 48 Lorne Henry ...... 48, 49 M. Kei...... 51 Marilyn Morgan ...... 52 Mark Jun Poulos ...... 53 Marshall Bood ...... 58 Mary Ellen Gambutti ...... 58 Maryalicia Post ...... 60

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 3

reflects on miniatures and the delicacy of the A Long Winter tanka moment, while Tanja Trček harnesses the power of tanka’s specificity to convey the horrors It has been a long winter. My health of war. problems continue, but I was able to avoid a trip In ‘Unpoetry,’ I reflect upon the value of to the hospital. New medications, new accepting challenges to find something of value treatments, new diagnoses . . . We think we in the most mundane of objects and express it discovered the underlying cause for the repeated with the luminous power of tanka. Mary Ellen illnesses. I am slowly recovering. In the Gambutti offers a zuihitsu that combines sedoka meantime, I continue to work on Atlas Poetica and with multiple kinds of prose, including other projects, albeit more slowly than before. transcripts, building on Charles Tarlton’s Donations have continued to come to previous works of tanka prose written as movie Keibooks at PayPal, and I am grateful for the scripts. Autumn Noelle Hall offers us a tanka support. That so many people have volunteered mandala that rearranges five tanka into a matrix their support of the poetic mission of Keibooks of meaning which combines found tanka from and Atlas Poetica is moving. It means a lot when the news with her original expressions to create a the technical challenges combine with the health gestalt that can be read in many directions. The problems to complicate my literary life. center tanka serves as the linchpin that holds it all Your donations enabled me to purchase a together. much needed new keyboard and office supplies, The increasing complexity of the techniques and are funding the redesign of the website. It is and tools brought to tanka and its literature a major undertaking to redo the website because capitalize on the multivalency that is an innate the software running it is so very old, but once quality of tanka: the ability of tanka to imply completed, it should load much faster, as well as more than they say links with various forms and being accessible via cell phone. formats, harnessing their ability to express I thank Denis Garrison, Carol Raisfeld, different kinds of content in different ways in one Michael H. Lester, Joy McCall, Autumn Noelle harmonious whole. Yet the craftsmanship of Hall, John S. Gilbertson, Charles Harmon, and tanka should not blind us to the role of intuition. Peter Fiore for their donations, on top of the Several items, some quite long, read like stream- donations acknowledged in the last issue. of-consciousness works of the Beat period, but The challenges continue. Brexit uncertainty carry the discipline of a tanka mind. is impacting the website. Kira Nash, our Matsukaze carries the traditional, intuitive technical assistant, who formerly lived in France, lightness of tanka into an extensive collection of is now moving to Italy. We wish her the best in sedoka. Some of these read like extremely short her new location. In good news, our friends in tanka prose pieces, while others make use of India have finally been able to find a way to parallelism that is not easily accomplished in purchase ATPO in spite of the reduced tanka. Previously, cherita is the six-line form that international support of the technical changes. has carried tanka’s expansion, but perhaps When you edit an international journal, events sedoka is finally finding its place. everywhere in the world have an immediate effect. ~K~ Contributions representing sixteen countries span the globe and the range of human M. Kei expression and tanka innovation. Tanka are Editor, Atlas Poetica accompanied by kyoka, cherita, and sedoka, with sequences, tanka prose, and responsive tanka side Cover image courtesy of Earth Observatory, NASA. by side with more experimental works. Also in Ardar, Algeria. experience of poets in writing tanka. Peter Fiore

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 5 spring and I heard the robin before I saw him: A. A. Marcoff this is the sound of the sun rising

it is a wonder to be here, by this river, as light mist on the air and a brightening sun on things become a kind of knowledge, burgeoning the verge of morning, breaking through the and green: our song is the song that drives us — it silence of trees, touching the running waters of is immediate: a heron is on the pond, a grey this lucid river that flows on and on towards the deliberation, concentrating on its prey, and sea: this really must be spring now, sprung as it is daffodils scatter like gold through a dream: the upon the branches of blackthorn trees, the grass is covered with dew as it receives the day, coming of bud and blossom that is white as the glimmering with time itself — and then comes advent of the sun and its collaboration with the crow: there is a latent knowledge in the wings of day . . . birds — they build their nests: daffodils have come into their own, delicate and gold with the breaking light of petal: no-one has ever seen all this quite the confines as it is now, because this is the present moment in of the mist the innovation of the world, and it goes like water sunrise right through, and on into the flowing sun: birds in a land of light flit about singing like oracles: there is a meadow here where we walk — it could be Monet, or the these grasses have a real spring to their stalks canvas of the sun: and we must sing, and we must — and we could sing of spring now as though we sing, as brimstone butterflies move among us, are ourselves flowing with morning and light: this touching us in auras of light and wing . . . is pure being, translucent and fulfilling, our song lifted towards the sky, the clouds a passing of it is moments that dance before the coming sun: yes, a butterfly silence the sun is truly rising in our joy, and we are here, within which a white blaze of blossom over the river, our a whole world moves thoughts like blossoms of the mind: there is a on the wing streaming of light and a dance of water and shadow, as ducks fly overhead with sudden and we too are floating with dream, we are urgency . . . celebrants of lilting breezes: and we become what we are before the white countenance of walking to a light mist blackthorn, its blossom sprung and fragile in the we follow the river morning, we ourselves alive in this flourish or into spring dispensation, our eyes tending green, or violet: sparrows peck and drift along the ground, within our river is a slow green and goes with these this weather: a hillside appears, a plantation of swans of the sun, birdsong intense: it’s all infused elderflower bushes, and time is a moment grown with the sweet song of a robin, its red breast like from seed: we are walking to the farm across the sunrise itself, as it breathes and sings of being Mole Valley, along the river first, and then across alive . . . the fields, where butterflies flit through longer grasses . . .

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 7 fragrance their buds packed with new horizons, of colour of the spring breezes and luminosity, a haze over the vast valley echo beyond, at a distance where sounds are faint, and of daffodils seem like little suns in their own light butterfly wings and petal: we pass through slender woodland — thrilling with bird life, and song . . . and the whole earth seems fresh now and sudden and radiant with morning: this is our lost and forgotten emotion, our daffodil light: Solzhenitsyn spoke amongst the grasses about being amongst shadows, how these vanish, a kettle so long as we can stand and breathe beneath an turns apple-tree in blossom, so we may survive a little slowly wild longer: and we are alive here in the living of the spring, the sky above white and blue, the blossom and we pass hedgerows in the breeze, we see everywhere a scattered architecture of light and a church — old and visionary in stone, and petal and air: there are wagtails by the shallows faraway — and trees rising up over the land in on the bare riverbed, darting among stones, the rugged displays that foreshadow new worlds: this sound of geese in a meadow nearby, and horses is our land, this is the land in which we joy and standing in an open field glistening with silence, hope and walk now, real as dreaming, touched and willows flow greener and greener, falling to today by a violet dawn, as the river flows on into the green river that is their echo, white violets earth and mind, and inasmuch as we have here now and a long line of poplars halfway meaning, we are speaking in the language of the across the valley, the valley open and slow with sun . . . distance: the sun seems its own raw concordance of nature, the land a streaming and a glow and ~Leatherhead, in the Mole Valley, England an essence, a light that strikes the hills like thought: at the farm, chickens run for food, and geese, even crows, and sheep bleat upon the hill A A Marcoff — Tony is an Anglo-Russian poet, born in Iran, and has lived in Africa, France, Iran and Japan. He has been a — the coming of lambs to be born in time, and university library assistant, a teacher, and has been in charge of poetry we sit near a flint-stone wall, near barn and herb- and creative writing in a large psychiatric hospital. A main-stream poet garden and the playground where children play, as well as a tanka poet, he has been widely published in journals such and all of this encompassed in the sun: and at the as ‘Poetry Review’. He now lives near the beautiful River Mole. farm, I taste an apple, crunchy and rounded with its sharp tang, and a taste of stilton, and onion, and chutney and grapes, and all that solid farmhouse bread, and then sipping tea, black, strong, a sipping of the essence of the sun: we can see a whole monumental landscape of time and breath . . .

a vision of hills the consecration of the sun — letting go of the butterﬂy

celandines with a yellow mystery here and there along the way, and Yoshino cherry-trees,

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 8 Alexis Rotella Star Pupil

A cupboard filled Amelia Fielden with jellies and jams from people a school field whose names dotted with wild yellow daisies I don’t remember and with students in grey green white uniforms, eating sandwich lunches Mother in her coffin the mortician’s wife Helen was bright. Very bright. All her baking on the floor above teachers acknowledged it. But for one in the smell particular, she shone. Five years I sat beside of hot cross buns Helen in our French classes, witnessing as her delight and prowess in the language bonded a star pupil to a dedicated instructor. He tells her In those days foreign travel from Australia, he took a tramp even for study, was prohibitively expensive. And in the woods so dear Mrs. R, school teacher, wife, and mother, and his jealous wife had never been to France. She spoke of it to us thinks the worst as a dream, perhaps to be fulfilled on her retirement. When Helen topped the state in French in In a tea-length the Higher School Certificate examinations, and black dress subsequently won a scholarship to the Sorbonne netting over in Paris, Mrs.R was over the moon, I heard. her swollen eyes During the many years which followed, the young widow star pupil — who became head of modern languages at a prestigious institution in another ~Arnold, Maryland, USA city — and her old high school teacher, kept in regular and fond contact. Alexis Rotella is an award-winning poet and mobile artist. In 2018 At the funeral for Mrs. R, her daughter she edited and curated Unsealing Our Secrets, MeToo experiences from snubbed Helen. women and men written in Japanese poetry forms in English. In 2007 Rotella was awarded the Kusamakura Haiku Grand Prize as well as winning second place. In 2018 her haiku was awarded second is blood always place . . . “Mountain town / old people watch the wind / carve stone.” more binding than passion — at New Year my thoughts spiral back over half a century

~Canberra, Australia

Amelia Fielden is a professional translator of Japanese literature and a keen writer of tanka and associated forms, in English. Her latest published collection is ‘These Purple Years’ (Ginninderra Press, 2018).

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 9 Anne Benjamin writes poetry, ﬁction and non-ﬁction that has appeared Deep Water in international publications. In 2016, she edited Gemstones, a collection of tanka sequences written in collaboration with poets from Canada, UK, New Zealand and Australia, and published by Skylark. Anne Benjamin & Jan Foster The same year, her memoir, of living in India, Saffron and Silk, was also published. Anne lives in Sydney, Australia.

Jan Foster, a former English teacher, lives in Geelong, Australia. Her sunset tanka, tanka prose, haiku, haibun and responsive sequences have been settles over the harbour published in journals in Japan, USA, New Zealand, Britain, Canada and Australia, as well as online. She is the founder of the Bottlebrush in a briny glow Tanka Group (Sydney) and a member of the Phoenix tanka group ﬁshermen turn their boats (Geelong). Her favourite things, apart from writing tanka, are a good seeking deeper water book to read and a cryptic crossword to conquer.

man-made electronic light show Autumn Noelle Hall paints the town . . . aurora australis fills the southern sky grey and dripping mid-day hangs in gauzy rags on the promenade from the ridge-line bare-legged teenage girls late October airs sashay in the dusk — her dirty laundry evening star Venus flickers in their eyes trojan piñata splayed feet skidding peers over the border wall — a squadron of pelicans comic relief touches down or a hollow warning ruffled feathers settling of the serves-us-right to come? our awkward moment passes in the bay leafing through dolphins my stack-o-tanka-journals leap and frolic like Picasso . . . submerging I find many artists turning me in your ocean the sun into a yellow spot drifting along with your tide if joy I wonder is your carrot if I will ever find perhaps my way back I am your stick ~Australia ~Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 10 The professor protests, as this was not part Group Therapy of her planned curriculum. I assure her I am an excellent swimmer. With a snort, she demands we Autumn Noelle Hall part with a second possession. Instruments, Holy Books and high tops disappear overboard into the drink. It’s daggers as she dares me to choose “A Flash Flood Warning has been issued. All between my children. residents in your housing area have been ordered to evacuate. You’ll only have time to gather three “My husband gets out of the boat.” items from your home. Please collect them now and proceed to the evacuation boats in an orderly Now the whole class is in an uproar, fashion.” challenging me to defend what seemed to me right and obvious choices. But I’ve Aced enough I recognize the professor’s exercise is psych prereqs by now to be familiar with intended to teach us about our own priorities — projection. an important objective in a psychology class, where we are studying to counsel others. She The professor interrupts the fracas with the requires we write down our choices, presumably reveal that she faced this situation in her real life. so that we can’t cheat or change our minds about We all fall quiet, eager to learn what this 60- them post-evac. Once the boats are loaded and something Doctorate-holding woman chose to safe passage is underway, we are called to share save from her memory-ﬁlled childhood home. our lists with one another. the wink “I brought my Bible, the family photo of her AA pin album, and my great grandma’s silver,” one as she admits student shares. she grabbed the handle of Wild Turkey under the sink Another volunteers, “An electric guitar, my Air Jordans, and a Swiss Army knife.” ~Aurora, Colorado, USA

One by one, treasured objects, odd necessities and the near-ubiquitous cell phones are called out. Then it is my turn.

“I brought my husband and our two children.”

Silence. A few eyeball rolls. And a superior smirk from the professor, who now informs us, “The boats are overloaded and in danger of sinking . . .” then orders us to, “Throw one of the items overboard.”

Everyone looks at me.

“I get out of the boat.”

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 11 Allan Nairn: The U. S. Is Facing Incipient Domestic Fascism, But Rightist Revolution Can Be Stopped

Autumn Noelle Hall

“You have to . . . unbelievable! vote in the warmongers I think to myself again who will preserve democracy as I listen to block the warmongers wondering whether Nairn who would abolish it . . . * is listening to himself

when will we learn there is no “lesser evil” both devils dance in Brooks Brothers suits all the way to Wall Street

the left wing you can’t really say and the right wing lift the same that you were working toward predatory bird . . . an anti-fascist goal Deng Xiaoping’s black and white cats if you’re not mobilizing catching the mice that we are for the Democrats right now.” *

~Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, USA

* Italicized/quoted material from: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/1/allan_nairn_the_us_is_facing.

The historically autobiographical form of tanka is a ready-made vessel for holding what Autumn Noelle Hall views as the sacred truth of her authentic experience. Her writing is a ﬁght against rising political and planetary tides to capture crises of concern and the people and places she loves. She wonders why, when time is of the essence for us all, any poet would choose tanka as a vehicle for the artiﬁce of make-believe.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 12 Points of Views Cherita

Barun Saha Barun Saha hunted instability by suicidal thoughts for some years now of a newly installed table I keep looking at those heights I rock back and forth I never managed to scale to those lives without I keep staring space through the ﬁfth ﬂoor’s wide window even for a single one at those speeding lights that carry me ~Bangalore, India from a cold bed to a cold desk

~Bangalore, India Barun Saha

minds disconnected November bodies parted ways too after breakup sex Barun Saha I envy the moon returning to the sky again

~Kharagpur, India The universe weaved a magical mist shrouding the small sleepy village. Along the narrow road, a milk-white horse drove a grand fall hearse. When it reached the crossroad, a has touched a feather weathered black horse-cart passed by dragging a of a pigeon shape that once sheltered love. I still remember the nest built with my child our love never shared space & time ~Bangalore, India until in earth we became the earth itself Barun Saha is a researcher and poet from Durgapur, India. He primarily writes tanka and haiku. His poems are published in Atlas Poetica, Blithe Spirit, NeverEnding Story, The Bamboo Hut, and * Prose inspired by a scene from the movie, November. Wales Haiku Journal. Visit for his poems and for more information about Barun. ~Bangalore, India

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 13 Waking up Sedoka in the morning I remember Bruce England some taxi driver said you wanna get home tonight? Were you good at it? some signs, you might notice, a softness in her body She ﬁnally slight open-lip smiles realized how she could lingering hugs and embraces really hurt him her ﬁngers on your penis she threw away his TV remote

In Mainz, Germany, two men too drunk to explain You could see now were found hopelessly locked up, he’s sucking the ugliness with a mannequin out of her dressed as a knight, in a large putting tenderness remote-controlled car into her limbs

The (world) tree of life, We ﬂirt Buddha (once) sat in its shade but we know (and) Jesus hung in its limbs, we will now (it stands) empty not be lovers we need a next, (new) someone in this world for/(to make) another (best) attempt

~California, USA I checked the scabs on my forehead some now falling off frozen death to you pre-cancerous cells Bruce England In the book of life you may want to peek The car stopped at the end, but in a ﬁeld of golden grass it’s just darkness and through the windshield the shoveling of dirt I stood on the blue hood clouds moving beneath my feet ~California, USA

What is so damn Bruce England lives in Santa Clara and works in San Jose, California creepy about a rabbit as a public librarian. Retirement is coming in late 2018. As he once head on a man, wrote: You worked hard / all your life / on your résumé / now what would someone / say for your eulogy? (Bright Stars: An Organic Tanka wearing a suit, and why Anthology, Volume 5. 2014). does it feel so European?

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 14 Eternity to Eternity Morning Curves Rhyming Kyoka Sequence Carol Raisfeld Carol Raisfeld much of life passes without our being in it so many people I press myself whose lives I’ve not entered against the glass hoping nor they mine that he’ll see enticing curves of this and that the questions arousing him for me about voids in my life on a form the door not single, not divorced, is open just a bit, enough not married, just widowed for me to call an invitation to this man calls who seems to want it all of a raven through graying sky I feel his hands my arthritis tells me caress my neck he draws of a distant storm me to his side he rubs my body tenderly going to bed his hands press and glide I dream once again wanting the steamy heat to wake in this world emanates from bodies at least one more day so aligned I ﬁnd myself oh so wet how can I and very much entwined make myself irreplaceable before I die? then he takes the cherry blossoms that one last kiss before return each year we say goodbye I know it’s time to let him go if I left this place with a smile, then a sigh would there be a trace of my soul I see him to come back to walking out the door checking in another life? on the hour leaving me to think about ~Atlantic Beach, New York, USA our lovely morning shower

~Los Angeles, California, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 15 8-Ball, Corner Pocket A Rented Room

Carol Raisfeld Carol Raisfeld

“So you write, what do you write?” The My friend frequents a place where she has an afternoon sun poured in through the long afternoon snack and relaxes. A place where no windows, washing the beige tones of the couch one interrupts her thoughts to talk about with a warm pink. I told her I write articles and “needing to write”. Out and about on a warm, poetry. “You must show them to me, I’m sure humid day, she suggests we stop there for a cool they’re very good, bring them to dinner.” How do drink. I feel quite comfortable in the cool air of I tell her she couldn’t possibly know whether I the pool hall as we chat over her gin & tonic, and can write or not. We only met two hours ago. my ginger ale. I enjoy the ambiance without the usual battery of talkative waiters named Oliver with my door closed — just chain-smoking waitresses and patrons who reading the rejections don’t care who we are. I pour another glass of wine daily bread in the dim room picked up at the bakery for dinners “I don’t want to talk about my work,” I heard at work early, she calls myself say to her, “It’s not something anyone else to check on the hubby can be involved in. You have to do it alone, or it’s not yours.” And this I know bone-deep, that On the big-screen TV a football game in the sometimes there’s no alternative to the panic and third quarter, the sound softer than I would fear. It’s the panic and fear and the isolation that expect. Something exciting must have happened, are the writing. At times desperation creates the as an energy spark seems to bounce from face to necessity to write. I wouldn’t swap the ﬁnal face in a joyful link of circuitry. Suddenly, some satisfaction of a ﬁnished piece for easy comfort. unexplained burps envelop the tattooed, tee- shirted viewers. it never ends all the nights spent Perhaps the pool hall is an arena of Spartan with a friend hardness in which one must prove oneself. They listening to the rewrite exchange their manhood weekend outings of her greatest novel between hitting the eight ball and slugs of beer. As we walk out the door, I hear the never-ending As the clock ticked on, I sensed she didn’t call of “rack ‘em up”, “these sticks are straight want to be alone. Reminiscing about her life, in a and have nice tips” and the crack of balls voice so vague she could have been talking breaking. decades or moments in time. I felt as if one of us wasn’t in the room. She spoke more to herself on a hot day than to me. so many things to do cat in the tree some houses shopping for groceries for all their elegance and mowing the lawn I know are empty and cold ~New York, USA and give off a chill

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 16 The next afternoon, I said goodbye and sorry Van Gogh Sky I couldn’t stay. She smiled. “We must meet again soon. I would very much like to read your work.” Carol Raisfeld But I was already closing the door behind me.

~New York, USA we hear cicadas in the trees in Provence wavy lines of lavender stretch to the horizon

off the beaten path surrounding sunﬂower ﬁelds a perfect place for a tandem-bike-ride The Sculptor after a hug and a kiss

in the shade Carol Raisfeld birds singing overhead you hold me in the woven hammock Shadows of hands, so graceful in my tilted near a flowing stream world. I’ve always wanted to be the chisel, not the statue, because when you chip away at me my a winding road resistance weakens. Surrendering all I have to it’s red-roofed villas tucked give, as the passion mounts, I wonder if this is beside tall willows really happening. Is it a complicated fantasy, or we stroll hand in hand me helplessly succumbing to the madness of on cobblestone lanes love? enjoying in a dream Monet’s garden of flowers so unbelievably intense the sweetness the night hot — of your smile in the sun blossoms wet with dew will be in my dreams touch one another kayaking ~New York, USA in the Sorgue river we floated past the village walls as church bells tolled

late afternoon we ﬁnd an unmarked café on a narrow street the French wine with lunch fuels our romantic fantasies

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 17 wanting Kyoka your body against mine that evening Charles Harmon in the ﬁelds of summer under a Van Gogh sky civilization the last day in Paris a thin veneer my senses overwhelmed dissolvable by you in blood, sweat, tears that night you show me and alcohol the deepest way to love

~France I’ll Depend on you when I’m a hundred and two to change my diaper

Carol Raisfeld lives in Atlantic Beach, a barrier island close to and Honey, I’ll change you— New York City. Her hobbies include sailing, chess, sculpting, painting have wheelchair races, too! and boxing. She holds US and foreign design patents in interactive soft toy design. Her poetry, art and photography appear worldwide in print. Goddamned Murphy’s Law gotta go — toilet’s blocked gotta eat — diner locked gotta have it — empty bar gotta go home — police car . . .

buttering him up before the kill, Medusa face still beautiful smiles with anticipation unwinding her turban

in my next life I will return as a mathematician musician, or magician — is there any difference?

homeless guy in a Superman T-shirt I give him a buck so I can tell my friends I helped save Superman!

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 18 he holds up seven missing fingers Chen-ou Liu mumbles “Korea” I give him an elbow bump footsteps fading with what’s left of my arm down the dimly lit hallway of a psych ward my niece’s room of her own four funerals shrinks to black and white and a wedding hope the happy couple have lots of my niece healthy kids curls into some dark space in her mind the wall of silence a jolt of coffee becoming tall and thick a jolt of earthquake a jolt of whiskey ~Taipei, Taiwan a jolt of news we live in jolting times . . . first gay marriage in his family proof that God the fragrance can make a mistake of a cedar closet mosquitos his parents bought for him flies, the rattlesnake but cockroaches take the cake! ~Toronto, Ontario, Canada open-mindedly autumn deepens in exotic foreign cities with a wisp of snow sampling street cuisine . . . on the window . . . open-boweledly these gray-haired years I wake I pay the price, twice alone with my dog king for a day my old dog enthroned in a dentist’s chair follows me from room to room I get a new crown ten years of life good for the rest of my life as an immigrant or until I abdicate packed into fifteen boxes ~Los Angeles, California, USA ten years Charles Harmon, science teacher, lives and works in Los Angeles, under the same roof California and enjoys cooking for his wife and three children. Charles between us has spent more than five years overseas in over sixty countries traveling, this invisible wall travailing . . . of white lies

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 19 alone Nothing New under the Sun as the scent of croissants lingers Chen-ou Liu sunlight climbing toward our wedding photos Sunlight slants in through the study window, reaching the front page of today’s newspaper on my dog, me my coffee-stained desk. The headline story details and the drunken shadow . . . the latest Auditor General’s report. His report as the night falls states that the socio-economic gap on reserves her absence deepens hasn’t improved in the last two decades, and the the silence between us gap in high-school graduation rates has actually widened. According to the reporter, things got a little a ghost moon nasty Monday afternoon at the Indigenous in the midnight sky Affairs meeting as MPs grilled civil servants over one loud creak the gap. One MP even warned, “heads need to after another coming roll if bureaucrats don’t shape up on First from the foreclosed house Nations education.” His warning becomes today’s eye-catching headline. the hum sixth graders of far-off trafﬁc in the windowless classroom I lie in bed on the reserve thinking how to spend a new teacher talks about my ﬁrst day out of work thinking outside the box

~Attawapiskat First Nation, Ontario, Canada watching sunlight crawl up the whitewashed wall . . . Time has a logic Chen-ou Liu lives in Ajax, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of ﬁve books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First of its own Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition in the waiting room and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition), His tanka and haiku have been honored with many awards. how many ways of coming face to face with loneliness? a room of books ﬁlled with dead voices

~Ajax, Ontario, Canada

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 20 smog filters Dave Read the yellow from the sun I kick a piece of someone else’s trash 3 a.m. unable to sleep I fumble a bike path through the darkness skirts the edge of my mind of the city — wildflowers: pedal by petal reading outside by the light of my iPad after a hundred a brief affair backyard moths with the actress I shut my browser down unable to dump his loneliness last night’s rain the man in pools around the gutter — the pick-up truck I remain unable to clear these murky thoughts walking through the morning fog more ads than music your ghost returns I turn off the radio you to me listen to the whistle of the wind outside sipping lemon tea this grey September day the promise all those plans of sunshine I’d made for my life — empties with my cup the light of a dead star burning at night from under the shade of a cowboy hat drifting in he shoots a crow the cool September with his finger wind the clouds of a jogger’s breath

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 21 bent playing beneath the early outdoor hoops snow at night yesterday’s the long arc sunﬂower of the moon the breadth a night owl of starlight crossing calling time — who, Who, WHO we count our days left this mess on our ﬁngers in my kitchen?! ghosting as quickly the boy he used as he blows out to be the candles my friend with thin he spends grey hair his birthday cash havin’ faith each autumn ain’t the same day grows shorter as believin’ — than the last . . . a truck spins gravel shadows of the dead in the church parking lot marigolds that mythical not quite gold moment of these dying leaves enlightenment — of grass — how soft how poor we grow my Buddha belly as summer passes a tap spraying on my shoulder a plastic plant while I pray with Febreze — my kid requests the judge’s testimony a cookie doesn’t smell right the hail that a sparrow softens into rain — crosses the cold slowly grey sky — I am learning how the arc of a life to use my gentle voice spent alone

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 22 last night’s drunk sleeps on a bench — wintertide the gathering shadows Debbie Strange of crows

glissading down another round steep mountainsides . . . of Monopoly we are horses I lose with our snowy tails with grace streaming in the wind this autumn every year winter casts its spell . . . the brightness like children, I’ve overlooked we are bewitched anew in autumn — by the signature of snow I add red highlights to my greying beard ~Vancouver, British Columbia

ﬁltering my words for this conservative audience all of the f-bombs explode in my head the length of night Debbie Strange brushing dust off an old favourite book yet again, the words of sleep eludes me . . . the young man I was an owl and I ponder the eternal ~Calgary, Canada question of identity

insomnia . . . Dave Read is a Canadian poet living in Calgary. He primarily writes mice at play short poems with an emphasis on the Japanese genres of haiku, senryu, tanka, and haibun. He was a recipient of the 2016 Touchstone inside Individual Poem Award for haiku, as granted by The Haiku the thin walls Foundation. His work has been published in many journals (including of my dreams Atlas Poetica, Presence, Modern Haiku and Acorn), and anthologies (including old song: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, 2017). ~Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 23 girlhood Neon Eclipse

Debbie Strange Elizabeth Howard we brew tea This is not a fairy tale. Tillman is real. I have seen the from the dark leaves tiny star in his cardboard window. — E. H. of cat’s whiskers but first, you tickle me You who perch in your snooty mansion, with their stamens aglow with blinking lights, Santa Claus ditties blaring, we chase do you know Basil, the hoot owl that roosts each other across on your right turret when the moon is full? cloud shadows, nothing under our feet Do you hear him calling — who, who? but this prairie sky He’s looking for his friend Tillman who lived in a rickety hovel we once played where you’ve anchored the giant hemlock, in this tangled garden, its neon defiling the night enchanted by the quiet fireworks Tillman, fearful of mankind, of bergamot and butterflies lived alone boarded his windows with cardboard, ~Rosetown, Saskatchewan, Canada a tiny star of candlelight blinking at the outside world

Debbie Strange (Winnipeg, Manitoba) is a Canadian short form poet, He ventured forth at night, photographer and haiga artist. She is the author of Warp and Weft: joined Basil to watch the stars Tanka Threads (Keibooks 2015) and its sequel, Three-Part Harmony: Tanka Verses (Keibooks 2018). Please visit her at http:// shoot rainbow sparks www.debbiemstrange.blogspot.ca. hither and yon, their heads bobbing in adoration.

Elizabeth Howard lives in Arlington, Tennessee. Her tanka have been published in Eucalypt, red lights, Mariposa, Ribbons, Gusts, Atlas You have razed Tillman’s home, Poetica, Skylark, Moonbathing, and other journals. his cardboard star blazing like a roman candle, his sleeping pad swirling cinders, Elizabeth Moura lives in a converted factory and works with elders. She has had poetry, ﬂash ﬁction or photographs published in The Heron’s nothing left but soot and sulfur Nest, Chrysanthemum, Atlas Poetica, Presence, Shamrock, Flash, Paragraph Planet, Flash Fiction Magazine, Occulum and O:JA&L. Your neon has shrouded the stars. She is currently planning or assembling three manuscripts: a collection of haiku and tanka, a book of longer poems, and a collection of very While Basil searches the night short stories. calling who, who, Tillman wanders on a divergent path, lost in outer darkness.

~Arlington, Tennessee, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 24 Elizabeth Moura there are days like this . . .

Genie Nakano i’m missing the dawn once again knowing my failing the weather the old pine has changed to misty grey taps my window summer held in check and global heat is swept under cover I spend my sick day throwing dirty tissues that is . . . all over the floor until the fires sweep again the cat spends my sick day strange things rearranging the house happening to our air, waters, soil stirring doubts at tea parties Jesus gives me a cup why bear children filled with black coffee in a world that won’t behind my eyes be around are all the prayers much longer I haven’t had time for so the prophets claim

I still have hope today your mother I guess — maybe — who cares didn’t know you let the future I give you my pillow take care of itself and curl around you I’m retired with my tears sirens blow every hour day and night line in the sand heart attack a ﬁve-year-old girl robbery, murder, rape tries to scratch play it louder — I’m deaf the number off her arm waiting for the aliens to come ~East Taunton, Massachusetts, USA and teach us show us humans how to live another way

~Gardena, California, USA

Genie Nakano lives in Gardena, CA, where she teaches yoga and dance at the Japanese Cultural Center of Gardena. She has a regular column for the Rafu Shimpo where she shares her tanka and short stories. She has written three books of tanka available on Amazon.Com and can be reached at [email protected].

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 25 The Major General * Second Amendment

Gerry Jacobson Grunge blooded So, I’ve worked for a gun and pawn shop at Gallipoli here in Broward County, and have family and Captain Bennett friends in the business. I don’t have any ‘special rises to command insider knowledge’ into the Parkland massacre or a battalion, a brigade anything like that, but I wanted to write about some of my more notable experiences down second war . . . here, concerning the 2nd Amendment and school with clipped moustache shootings. and prickly . . . he defends Singapore to protest the violence but the Japs break through in parkland the man who sold cruz taken prisoner . . . the gun legally is fifteen thousand sent death threats Aussies sent to hell would-be thief slaves on the Burma railway at the gun store door thinking no one noticed they won’t catch me the AK-47 he stuffed alive says B . . . down his pants commandeers a fishing boat customer requesting sails away to Sumatra to examine a pistol the Major General before he buys it — is then flown home . . . puts it to his temple promoted . . . pulls the trigger lives out the war in Western Australia the felon could have bought a gun some men come back privately and legally traumatised, emaciated if only he hadn’t there’s an enquiry . . . mentioned his record was it a gallant escape or did he run away? 15 minutes of fame for the brave students ~Australia, 1940s falsely accusing “freaks” of planning a shooting * Later, Lieutenant General Henry Gordon Bennett (1887 – 1962) a month after Columbine Gerry Jacobson lives in a Canberra suburb. He has been writing tanka daily for ten years now, and enjoys the challenge of tanka sequences and ~Florida, USA ‘tanka prose’. He loves how it enables him to write about his experiences, memories, and feelings. Gerry dotes on four young grandchildren and visits them in Sydney and in Stockholm.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 26 Desk Lord Grunge

Grunge time bomb: my cat’s culinary palette fan knocked over far exceeds onto the water dish his digestive skill drenching the tv the cat is playing at dominoes “your dog eats hay! that’s so ridiculous,” eating kibble says the owner without a care of the cat in the world that loves bean sprouts he’s dry while i try to mop we were angry young and poor reminding myself but now we’re realizing i still rule the anger’s turning to depression this house and we’re not young anymore because my desk is but poverty remains the same weiufhwekjdn

~Hollywood, Florida, USA running from the crime scene — released a baby rat into the bushes that i couldn’t bear to kill Tanka Pair

Grunge in mourning that i cannot have a once happy sky burial to cry the catharsis of not bottling it doesn’t matter everything up if what i write is good now worried as long as i get that the bottle words on the page has a hole through which every emotion is spilling

~Hollywood, Florida, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 27 like a mad dog Rhyming kyoka i chase down a moment of Jackie Chou happiness

my sister’s Shih Tzu but when my won’t ﬁt into an igloo jaws snap shut meek like a sheep it’s only air boy does he love to sleep and the ﬂeeting and eat rice with tofu memory escapes ~California, USA ibis with a broken leg i just wanted to remember him and wish him well Cherita cleaning off Jackie Chou old patio chairs to make the perfect sunning spot for someone who is no longer here after the party

foil balloons dangle searching the sky from the ceiling for black dots — the high-flying our friendship vultures that slowly deflates make me happy as we find ourselves

~Hollywood, Florida, USA

day after day

Grunge is an Indo-American member of the LGBT community, who waiting for him specializes in urban tanka. He is currently the editorial assistant for Keibooks, and lives in South Florida with a collection of pet arthropods, to drop by an ancient cat, and a pudgy leopard gecko. a vagrant dog barks lugubriously in the quiet dark

~California, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 28 Jackie Chou Under the White Ceiling

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah ripples on my red velvet sheet last night’s dream ﬁrst time of riding naked in a roadster across time in my life a message of hope falling notes to accept of a street musician who i am I gather each in your metal mirror to write a poem prompted by jazz what a worthy reason to get nearest to myself may this transmits brief blooming messages from shifting of the night cactus ﬂower to meshing in a galaxy my mother’s beauty and its suns restores once again in a recurring dream the doublings here are a chance in the mess to hear myself again cat licks morning mist in the crowd smouldering on the windshield the remnants at the group home far out of sight neither do I eat with proper dinnerware adrenalin is

adopted for awake in the night the aftertaste by the sound of rain your imprint on me i ﬁnd you washed away to be a guessing game with every soothing drop and you must in the outcome ~California, USA ~Cartagena, Spain

Jackie Chou is a poet residing in sunny Southern California. She sometimes gets her inspirations from common city birds and ﬂowers. Her works have been published in Atlas Poetica, Skylark, Ribbons, the cherita journal, moonbathing, ephemerae, and others.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 29 Honking Midnight, Salt-upon-Street

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah watching Late, your back, walking toward home from the river mouth, the dew is finished I shorten the distance & worn down to a full dull red by allowing something to happen. promoted by heaped metal scraps, No ambient light, no running amok. you’ve promised your second The street is empty coming and the sea roiling, in a cart-horse, which roars I keep my amigo closer, the capital, that plan, laid and the deed done, built with floods, you push the sky I catch wide eyes in the flare to a place and the fear is everything I touch for the fit, beyond the norms the faithful fever shifts to reclaim the soil from able miners around into the sea beach to complete among the gentle murmurs. all things frantic light, ~Palma de Mallorca, Spain I glance over at him with no license plate.

~Bilbao, Spain

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 30 A Frame A Steady Hum Like the Mantle Lamp Above the Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah Twinkling Steel in the North Plankton States I am mixed up. My father is a Native American-German, my mother is a Spanish-Basque-Catalan- Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah Chinese-Fanti, I am a few craft hugged to n-dimensions, available from a corner in the translated world, Near the end on a shoestring. from committing an act, his gaze, In the ditch like in the history, I dress the lake the skin reﬂecting the glare with your shroud. of the looted sun, I cross from right to left She ravels her day, to start for the other shores. I accept human love and pass through Behind the studio where a couple is sacriﬁcing the door in her body. the future, the glorious memories are carved and pedestrians ~Turtle Mountains, North Dakota, USA look thrice at the dummy whose hands are a little afraid of its ears, eyes and mouth, I keep its manhood, I keep my seven-blood babbling alarmingly about in the wind.

~Jerez de la Frontera, Spain

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 31 Fall

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

My first neck is Mongolia, my second neck is typhoon, my third neck is Grunion, my fourth neck is neolithic flood, my fifth neck is an alignment of menhirs, several necks inhabited as long ago as Kangaroo years, I am to congregate around bodies of water, I am fall and unable to move because of excessive consumption of rains.

I am menhirs. I am wandering around the same sand you spawn by laying your yellow eggs, I am the sand at high tide near midnight

I am fall, crawling in the music of this time and now the seventeen necks are the formulae of light, the whole earth cries, wanting its stomach to be restored again because it is tired of dying and welcoming your loved ones, I cannot sleep though my eyes, too weak and swallowing themselves, I am fall with empty hearts still squatting elsewhere l do not know, I am waiting to see myself as a true leaf looking at the sun someday, I am ﬁve-necked lizard perching high on a tree stump above a pool of water after rain.

I am peering at the little world below with perplexed eyes, one neck is a torpedo, one neck is a Celtic knot graph, one neck is a furnace ﬁlled with cold and wet.

~Girona, Spain

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 32 Worst Clothes of Absence over Expedition, Forward: #1

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

This your poetry is a border between US of America and Mexico. I carve it. It turns many subjects in a garden belonging to an immigrant writing his first poetry I do not feel shy to stop him. He builds and defines my doubts, dreams, and uncertainties in the street I walk with the legs of a fellow who is resting in an underground pipe, I wander through London streets with the eyes of another fellow artist I mark the float of Thames to hear you now.

I have heard your cry and I am sharing it with loved ones who have yearned to see you, we wait for the morning to settle and take my body as your logic. Please do not ask me why my bodies are too large without deﬁnition. You have them but you have failed to use, I have added to the future. Do not destroy your mind by only eating and drinking when I put the bodies in check and shape, all my bodies follow the same formulae.

train your eyes, train your mouth, train your hands, that this body is poetry in London streets and yours in America

~Trafalgar Square, City of Westminster, Central London, UK

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah (also known as Sitting Mountain in the Turtle Mountains, North Dakota, is the author of new hybrid collections, The Sun of a Solid Torus, Conductor 5, Genus for L Loci and Handlebody. His poetry has appeared in more than 70 journals and anthologies including North Dakota Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, Strata Magazine, The River, Cordite Poetry Review, Atlas Poetica, Ginyu, Eucalypt, Ambrosia, Shamrock, Moonset, Frogpond, World Haiku Review, South by Southeast, Autumn Leaves, Simply Haiku, red lights, Heron’s Nest, NOON, Modern Haiku, is/let, Acorn, Otata, Skylark, Ribbons, Hedgerow, Botsotso, New Contrast, Voices Israel, Reader Digest, World Haiku Anthologies, Sun & Snow Anthology, Haiku 21, Catzilla, Albatross Haiku, Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Bliss, The Whole Desolate Day, First People, etc. He is currently editing Pkankmaton, Senryu Vendor Journal, The Rough Sheet Tanka Journal etc. Ayiah Mensah works as algebraist, freelance journalist and artist. He blogs at Goal Stream Review (goalstreamreview.blogspot.com), Ekusen Journals (ekusenjournals.blogspot.com), Eat Books, Talk Books (eatbookstalkbooks.blogspot.com), etc. He lives mostly in southern part of Ghana, Spain and Turtle Mountains, North Dkota. His twitter handle: @byiypublisher, pinterest: @byiypublisher, tumblr: @byiypublishercollectionparadise

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 33 an otter Ériu brings the salmon’s wisdom to a barefoot monk Jenny Ward Angyal where rivers join the old ways and the new the dolmen ~Republic of Ireland stands silent over bones buried before history began . . . Jenny Ward Angyal lives with her husband and one Abyssinian cat on a small organic farm in Gibsonville, NC, USA. She has written poetry harebells blossoming since the age of ﬁve and tanka for about ten years. Her poems have appeared in many journals and may also be found on her blog, The Hill of Tara — Grass Minstrel. Her tanka collection, moonlight on water (Skylark an Otherworld Publishing), appeared in 2016. She is Reviews & Features Editor of Skylark: a Tanka Journal. vanished deep underground, no trace but in music under the walls of a Norman castle, the notes John S. Gilbertson of an uilleann piper . . . sparks ﬂy up lying in ditch Yeats’ initials covered with clay of life carved in the trunk I shook and twisted of a copper beech to liberate myself at Coole Park till conformed to a shape wild swans still rise racehorses unforgiving blade bred by star signs across back side of hand and moonlight — blood tries escaping the warm breath of magic as bandage covers unknown in the palm of my hand biopsy in two weeks a beehive hut ~Greeneville, South Carolina, USA at the edge of the sea, nettles before its door — John S. Gilbertson, living in Greenville, SC, traveled extensively in Japan and has written poetry over the last thirty years. Two books of the depth of sky within poetry have been published: Two Ends of a Loose String, Beyond the Morning Sun. plunging sea cliffs — in the meditation room a troubled soul listens to the sound of water over stone

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 34 Joanna Ashwell John Wisdom winter’s bones one button undone of feathered flakes and a pretty smile silently brush glass a Rottweiler we drift together on a taut leash hushed in the earth’s cradle moves in closer our winter breath in the final days lit by snowflakes of nursing care we circle I fed my grandmother finding new prints as she lay, open-mouthed back to our home like a tiny bird heather burns smoke rings across valleys assisted living the season end sing-a-long to the 40s and 50s autumn equinox for a moment a palette of fire the glimpse of a girl in my mother’s face darkness fills the room the quick black the longest days of a dripping nib of a summer drought of shadow and silence one damselfly the earth calling to stars attempts to land on the tiniest stem goodbye hangs around us, above us the midnight call a tightening rope from my spinster cousin we stretch and fall in laughter to sobs the loops of each other and the occasional tinkling of ice cubes I curl into you ~Florida, USA the sanctuary of silence broken by cricket song wings click around me John Wisdom has been both writing and reading poetry, since his found you, found you grandmother mother came over each day when he was three. She was an English teacher and believed that the early exposure would be helpful. ~United Kingdom John has been widely published in several haiku journals, winning several awards, including a worldwide contest. Thelma Marino helped Joanna Ashwell, a writer from the North East of England. Has been a him find a tanka voice, but it is only recently that he feels more at ease Dispensing Technician in a pharmacy, an administrator and a teacher with tanka, and finds joy in writing it. — none of which makes her happy, other than being a writer. Writes haiku, tanka, Cherita and other related forms. Has a BA in English Language and Literature and a Post Grad in Creative Writing (Poetry).

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 35 Old Boys A barn owl ﬂew over the meadow with a rabbit in its claws. Joy McCall We watched the owl go off beyond the hill and out of sight. The landlord said — she’ll write a poem about I was sitting by the village pond watching a that, you wait; thass what she do — she write poems, moorhen nibbling duckweed. The sky was aﬂame about thorns and berries mostly. in the sunset. One of the old boys said — she be better writin’ A pale half moon rose high above the poems ’bout good ale and rabbit pie. ancient church that stands crumbling on top of a bronze age burial mound. the sun went down behind the green hill (the moon we said goodbye above the round tower godspeed to the landlord above the graveyard the old boys, and the sun above the earthen mound above the ancient bones One old boy said — dew yew keep a-troshin my wumman. ** the heavens above the holy spaces I smiled all the way home. above the pews above the worshippers ~Globe Inn, Shotesham, Norfolk, England above the forgotten ancestors

the silent sky * All men are called Boys in Norfolk. If they are past middle-age above the solid ﬂint they are Old Boys. above the hymns ** Norfolk people speak a strange old language. This means and the quiet prayers . . . “keep going, woman.” above the silent ground)

a couple of bicycles leaned against a tree the riders — two old Norfolk boys * sat eating pie and drinking ale

a hawk screamed overhead rabbits ran for cover into their burrows

The landlord brought me broccoli soup. One of the old boys said — dew yew take care of that lass now. The other old boy winked and said — thass rare birds here today.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 36 I found myself singing the song I know so They Called the Place New well — America the Beautiful * and the words England called to me again from that land so many decades ago —

Joy McCall oh beautiful for spacious skies for amber waves of grain for purple mountain majesty I was 22 and finished training to be a nurse, above the fruited plain . . . in Carlisle, just south of the Scottish border. That summer I married my first love and we * Katharine Lee Bates 1895 took a ship to Massachusetts, and settled in Amherst, the home of Robert Frost and Emily Then I read in the history book that New Dickinson and so many others who left their England — the first place I came to when I left mark on America. old England — was almost entirely settled by My first child was born there. people from my East Anglia — from Norfolk and The thing I want to write about is this — Suffolk. when the college and university students had gone home for their summer holidays — the north folk and the south folk the little town fled west grew peaceful to the new land quiet wild as they were as it might have been in times past So, many of those in Amherst, with eyes and skin like mine, were descendants of those who I walked had left my birthplace for a new life far far away. the almost empty streets sat in cafés distant kin wrote poems shared ancestors dreamed of books the north folk who made that journey As people passed by or sat chatting over across the great sea coffee, a strange thing hit me — they left this small I looked at faces neck of the woods so many like my own for the great wide narrowed eyes plains and forests high cheekbones full of hopes and dreams pale skin They called the place New England. I wrote long-lost poems about it. They might just as well have called it New We moved on, to Canada and I forgot it all in Norfolk. the busyness of life and work. Oh, they did — Norfolk, Massachusetts; Norwich, Connecticut . . . Last week I was reading a history of America about the early settlers and their struggles to ~that other Norwich, England adapt to a new land, and new strange ways of living and being.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 37 for breakfast in the post there was porridge with cinnamon Joy McCall she brushed her hair and went outside she woke it was hard that September morning to know what had changed alone in the house more of a sense all was quiet than a knowing except for the wind more of a feeling it was howling she stood at the gate over the rooftops the lane was busy and down the chimney the milkman carrying all kinds going door to door of night voices the postman with his bag it was hard he smiled at her to separate the sounds three letters today one from the other for you, my lady the voice of the sea and he went on, whistling the voice of the woods down the lane she lay still the milkman resting, listening brought a jar of cream knowing some butter something that matters a pot of honey was happening and two bottles of good milk and in all his horse stood the muddle of sound patient as always the wind was bringing the cart lighter now a still small voice the day’s work that was different almost done it called she looked at the letters clear as a bell the water bill her name the coal bill and said, I’m coming, and a long envelope soon, I’m coming that smelled of cedar she slept again the paper inside a little while three-times folded and when she woke was blank the sun was up on both sides — the air was still puzzling

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 38 the old clock Ahead of me there’s a tree with a long on the mantlepiece groove in the bark, a deep mossed hollow. was ticking As I look, it seems to open, the bark peeling minutes were passing back. A man steps out. He smiles. she stretched and yawned he holds out his hands she left the paper to me and says come laying on the table I step into his arms and went out and rest my head into the busyness on his chest of the day He has long grey-brown hair, the colour of ~Norwich, England the bark, and skin the colour of summer dusk. His clothes are the colour of autumn leaves. He has brown sandals on his feet. I can hear his heart beating where my head rests. It is slow and the beats are long and deep.

when he speaks everything his voice is like distant rumbling thunder Joy McCall I know that he knows all that there is to know, and more. I’m dreaming, wandering through an old evergreen forest of pine and ﬁr and cedar. It’s a I ask him the one question that has puzzled warm day. me all my life. The sunlight is shining through the leaves and needles above me. I say — is there a God? There’s a smell of damp earth after rain. A small clear stream is running nearby. There’s he laughs distant bird song from high in the trees. it’s like the sound A grass snake rustles by through the leaf of a great waterfall piles. A red squirrel runs up a nearby tree. landing on rocks The trees are old and straight and very tall. far below I come upon ﬁve stone steps going down to a deeper part of the forest. Listen, he says, the answer is this — They are worn from the treading of many feet, and many rains and many seasons. Everything is God. God is Everything. At the bottom of the steps is a small clearing. He lets go of me and turns away. I don’t I stand want him to go. He moves back into the tree and looking around the bark folds around him and he is gone. wood mice scurry past it’s very quiet I sit on the bottom step and cry for a time. still, and shady Then I go back up the steps, along the worn path, and back to my home.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 39 there is dust everywhere colours as if my house a ryuka sequence has been empty a long long time Joy McCall

My face is sticky with tears and cobwebs. With my ﬁnger I write on the old dining table suffering, I asked of God in the thick dust — you are love, why don’t you save me? I heard nothing, but saw red threads Everything is God, God is Everything running through the brown earth

and I wake in my own bed, in my strange, now and then a yellow flash clean house. from the wings of a goldfinch flitting across the blue sky ~Norwich, England lit by the orange sun

I wept all night as the pale moon made its way across my window taking with it the silver stars Ryuka: For Brian Zimmer and still, I called to God (1957 – 2014) in the dawnlight I gathered wool left from scarves and shawls and bags Joy McCall and began to knit the long strands not knowing what I made a single magpie is sitting in the mint patch, head in the air there is a madness comes with pain long blue-green tail on the red bricks — that makes the vision clearer — what brought him here today? I saw that God was just a thread among the coloured strands I sit with the book of words my friend wrote, in his tall house ~Norwich, England where he died by his own hand his gentle heart broken tears are falling; I stop reading and wonder — where is he now? can he see his name on this book? does he know I miss him? the magpie squawks, disturbing me and ﬂies up into the small tree and sits long there — one for sorrow . . . a light rain starts falling

~Norwich, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 40 the small girl for Poppy who shared the womb with her dead twin Joy McCall sees the cardiologist for her broken heart

Our pub landlady was expecting twins but next time I see her sadly one died early in the pregnancy. she hugs me and says The doctors recommended aborting both my sister says little ones, but the landlady is made of strong my heart has to beat stuff. for the two of us now She chose to carry on to full term, carrying one living babe and one dead one. I go to the ruined church near the pub and She wanted the dead one to be allowed a pray that her heart will keep on beating, steady proper burial, and not to be thrown in an and true. incinerator, as is usual. It was hard for her, knowing. ~Norwich, England

still —

she sat behind the bar every day till closing time ﬁlling the glasses with ale and cider joking and smiling Truck

When the time came, the two babes were Joy McCall born and the dead one had the good burial her mother and father wanted. I’m watching the news. A dark-skinned man They chose not to tell the living one about is standing, looking into the back of an open her twin until she was much older, but when I sat truck. by the pub ﬁre — In it are piles of canvas sacks, covering the bodies of 33 children killed in an air strike while the little one going to school in their bus. sat on my lap A soldier is pulling back the sacks to show the and whispered in my ear faces. don’t tell, but The man starts sobbing, broken . . . my sister is here Yusef Time passed and school time came and the Mohammed little girl struggled. She would faint in class and in Ali — the playground. my sons The doctor sent her to see a heart specialist my sons who gave them grave news — her heart was in bad shape. He falls to the ground and begin to wail and weep.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 41 for a man looking at his children Julie Bloss Kelsey lying dead there can be earthworms no comfort have an IQ of seven — Men stand around the truck, breaking, the best ﬁshing tale unable to grasp the horror. my grandpa ever told the bombs that fell ~Meramec River, Missouri, USA were made in England in my land . . . innocent of it yellowjackets yet I feel a heavy guilt nesting inside a brick wall at a sporting goods store the wheels of trade I try on a new pair keep on turning of running shoes careless money changes hands ~DICK’s Sporting Goods, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA there is work for men

dead children at my childhood home broken fathers peeking through the back fence corruption instead of mother's roses what is this world an inﬂatable swan drifts we are making? in an above-ground pool weeping ~Santa Maria, California, USA I watch a bee on a ﬂower I touch a mossy stone — a miniature rose bush I don’t know what else to do a pack of gum and a box of condoms . . . ~Norwich, England his wistful smile at the grocery checkout Joy McCall is glad and sad to be English. But would anything else be any better? ~Giant Food, Germantown, Maryland, USA

Julie Bloss Kelsey enjoys writing short poems from her home in Germantown, Maryland. Her tanka have appeared in The Bamboo Hut, Jersey Devil Press, Scryptic, ephemerae, Grievous Angel, and other ﬁne places. Along with Susan Burch, she co-edited the Special Feature at Atlas Poetica on 25 Science Fiction Tanka and Kyoka.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 42 Kath Abela Wilson Kira Nash

Kira Nash, French-English lone migrating goose we ﬂy free as birds Translator / traductrice français- forgetting anglais how cold the sea perhaps we’ll never land le vert foncé de la forêt change à l’or rayonnant if your blue bowl en même temps had not broken la lumière vive de l’année I would never devient lentement plus pâle have known . . . your pink insides the dark green of the forest changes to radiant gold at the same time one giant eucalyptus the bright light of the year washed up on the shore becomes slowly more pale of my mind twenty years ten thousand miles full of desire mon cœur est chaud mon corps est froid peut-être c’est possible when the moon pour les deux être chaud ensemble a thin crescent holds sinon, je le préfère comme ça the sky inside of time my heart is warm the dark is almost full my body is cold maybe it’s possible for the two to be warm together magniﬁcent maple if not, i prefer it this way deep green have you forgotten I feel the chill of what je pense was and is to be ou je crois la préférence pour l’un ~California, USA et pas pour l’autre nous tue

Kath Abela Wilson has traveled with her husband Rick Wilson, i think mathematician, historic and world ﬂute player, around the world this or i believe year. Their trips from their home in California to Japan, Portugal, Singapore, New Hampshire, Chicago, and China in 2018 included the preference for one Kath Abela’s poetry readings accompanied by Rick on world ﬂutes, and over the other Rick’s lectures on Combinatorics. They host three weekly poetry is killing us meetings when they are home, including one at the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden, in Pasadena.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 43 l’arc-en-ciel entre nous a besoin du soleil Kira Nash de nos âmes pour compenser les nuages scattered pinecones de nos pensées opening and closing with sun and rain the rainbow between us a quiet clock needs the sun to calm my time of our souls to balance the clouds of our minds church bells singing half a mile away prayer flags flutter je suis désolée in their soft breath petite moi and we exhale the day mais ce monde ici n’est pas celui qui nous comprenons night air whispers of woodsmoke i’m sorry and flowering mint little me while cicadas hum but this world here the world to sleep is not the one that we understand removing ticks ~France from the neighbourhood cat who has an owner that feeds him and nothing else

man layers stone on stone but god’s cathedral is surely a forest where golden light dances through branch-framed windows

october’s alchemy green world changing to gold, copper and bronze tinged with crimson of summer’s dying ﬂames

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 44 delicate moonbeams little lizard wavering over hills without a tail as a dark curve of pines whatever it was becomes the soft rise i hope you’re not suffering of mountains from ptsd real-life postcard i no longer write chafﬁnch perched on the computer in the dwarf apple it’s not really writing day’s stress disappears and i kept forgetting through a little window to see the world old dog next door there is thirst walking on his ankles only relieved would they notice by summer rain if i jumped the fence and longing and trimmed his nails eased only by the sea mystery ﬂower palm-sized cloth doll now two feet high handmade in soft cotton i hope you show your face fuchsia and peachy-rose before rain and frost a gentle friend make your winter bed to soothe my heart please mister gnome the full sturgeon moon would you mind if i hid glides up velvet black safely down here while i wonder till the storm above how a year passed by has passed when i looked away if i understood magnolia begins positive purpose to plan for spring behind pain i gather myself would i still and vow wish it gone to try again

~France in september’s wild lullaby autumn nights deepen and tawny owls return singing softly to the rising moon

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 45 Cherita Larry Kimmel

Kira Nash a ceiling fan pinwheels in a serving spoon bah the tingling taste my foot of a fresh infatuation it’s been two years why her unimaginable death are you still found alone with a glass of wine hurting carefully placed on the stairway beside her quiet reflections over espresso and wrought iron table weathered wood a friendship dying under water of an unspoken agreement while grey sky lies down to rest short & plump red-faced with a frosty mustache and always puffing a tomato of a man about town deeper no more in the wood green reigns still a coin of reflected light but nearer jitters on the ceiling to the sun the coffee is bitter and your tee reads mabon gold I ♡ Nikola Tesla

~France ~Colrain, Massachusetts USA

Kira Nash lives gratefully under the sun and stars on the southwest Larry Kimmel was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He lives quietly coast of France. She ﬁnds joy in cups of tea with her husband and in the hills of western Massachusetts. His most recent books of tanka cuddles with her cat, sometimes both at once. When the water is warm and cherita are shards and dust; outer edges; and long-stemmed roses. enough, she surfs; the rest of the time she walks, and talks to trees. They usually reply.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 46 Laurinda Lind Lee Felty

Tonight the dark lake cherry blossoms takes in light from where it can, ﬁlling the streets from the spines of ﬁsh with change or from the spent cents of stars: in our pockets moon that has no medicine. for coffee black

From the gorge’s rim snow ends it’s so far down to the stream — midnight blue I dig my feet hard at the kitchen table against the dry sandstone ledge she writes: but dream of the fall forward. young Alice green

Arrowheads in sand at the river bend tell us who sat here so long she became and listened to waves Comfort as they sharpened themselves too to his the same as we do this day Ernest

~New York, USA listening from bed to the glistening Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some poetry birdsong acceptances/ publications have been in Amsterdam Quarterly, Blueline, Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Paterson Literary Review, and red to day, she thought lights; also in anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and to day Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press) and AFTERMATH: Expressions of Loss and Grief (Radix Media). In 2018, she won both the 2018 Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry and the New York State Fair poetry competition the red potato garden where she would forget loving another

~New England, USA

Lee Felty is a New England, USA, poet who has been published six consecutive times in hedgerow: a journal of small poems. And is also published in From Whispers to Roars - The Climax Issue, Literary Yard and elsewhere. She has found her greatest successes writing different forms of Japanese poetry.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 47 snickering Discovery a kookaburra snatches Liz Lanagan a robin’s clutch . . . poached eggs for breakfast down escapes ~Australia through a hole in her mattress . . . my need to ﬁnd out Born and raised in Lancashire, UK, Liz Lanigan has lived in Australia for most of her adult life. Her writing group, Friday Writers, what’s going on inside drew her into the tanka world and now she’s hooked. Aunt Edna threads a wide-eyed needle with strong twine . . . you’d better learn to ﬁx up your mistakes

~Australia Canadian Cold

Lorne Henry Liz Lanagan northern Canada a roadside toilet stop sea mullets behind a bush frolicking with every wave a fresh bear track embrace in virgin snow their roller coaster ride . . . why can’t I? a moose stock still in the roadway gazes strands of metal at the interlopers meshed to form a gecko he moves in his own time on my veranda a spider weaves driving a web to net a ﬂy behind a huge semi in a snowstorm close enough to see there you are the cleared highway forever at the helm cruising by the roadside unknown oceans of each steep hill beyond the end large drums of sand against ice far better than salt

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 48 the shock of colour of a bluebird Not Far As the Egret Flies settling in pines all the ground is white Lorne Henry hunters in scarlet long icicles a great egret hang from eaves flies back and forth each tip with materials a drip of water I think the female builds for a moment the male beautifies himself snowflakes for a year the size of dinner plates I lived by a billabong slowly eddy where the male lived down through still I watched him change his feathers dry prairie air he flew off with his mate startled ~Australia by the loud crack as ice on the river begins to melt ~Australia Lorne Henry

in the city I thought the radio My Gran grew louder at night as noise ceased Lorne Henry in this quiet it’s the same

a slight rumbling tiptoe from the mountains I curl up in an armchair the downpipe frogs my gran leans back croak — ﬁrst time this spring to gaze at the sky followed by tree frog cheeps as she plays her piano ebony elephants we pass diminishing in size on the escalators march across an instant the marble mantelpiece of joyous recognition past a black and gold clock but why do I know him ~Australia

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 49 French woman waiting in the vets’ pelicans I tell her have left the river I’ve just read ‘Left Bank’ again she says she’s in it Lake Eyre is ﬁlling thousands of miles away four hundred head of cattle a rat driven ate my orchids along the bush road I plant what’s left the way home is slow in baskets from the rafter along the balcony thick reeds ~Australia fringing the farm dam burnt grey day after day Lorne Henry started writing haiku in 1992 while living in a village in Czechoslovakia now Czech Republic. She was introduced to tanka in of heavy frost 2005 while in the Hunter Valley, Australia. She now lives in an old farm house in the Manning Valley, countryside Australia. She occasionally writes Haibun and tanka prose. all day long trucks of hay and water travel up the valley to farms coming down — loads of timber

I read my book of Aboriginal Dreamtime as the sun shines a ghost quarter moon climbs the cloudless blue no politics should be mentioned in tanka yet still I wonder why humans can’t be friends smart phones ban them from school rooms? in my day it was ballpoint pens we had to use nibs and ink

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 50 Unpoetry prompt: mud low tide M. Kei rising from the mudﬂat, a statue of a horse swimming up from the depths of history Everything is tanka. I’ve said it many times. I like to set myself the challenge of ‘unpoetic’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-norfolk-45175916/ topics to hone my skill. I sometimes ask Twitter lifeboat-horse-swims-for-norfolk-coast-art-trail to provide me with prompts and compose a tanka on the spot in response. Twitter followers suggest prompt: sweat socks the least conventionally poetic topics they can think of. You might be surprised what happens the sailor’s dufﬂe when you step outside your expectations. Here packed for winter duty: are a few. sweat socks, Kindle, and a sweater comfortable enough to wear while sleeping prompt: storm drain the wedding ring prompt: enema bulb slipped from her bony hand into the storm drain I was a child, she sat on the curb and cried so I believed my mother for now she had truly lost him when she said that was an old-fashioned hot water bottle — big red enema bag prompt: aglet

I ought to be prompt: mammogram machine proofreading my latest book, instead, I’m reading Twitter growing old and ﬁddling with the aglet was supposed to be on my oldest pair of shoes about power surges and freedom from pregnancy not breast sandwiches in prompt: tourniquet the mammogram machine late and night and very tired, prompt: toenail it’s time to put a tournequit sitting through around the Internet his meeting was a lot like watching somebody clipping their toenails in public

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 51 prompt: pustule Marilyn Morgan politics another demoralizing day — walking from the river it’s hard to remember her tangled hair that every pustule blows in the wind . . . is eventually drained ghost music ripples across the water prompt: dress the way my mother had thought an old lover returns her handmade dress and opens his arms quite presentable, his voice but she came home crying music and poetry and it hung forever in the closet

a cold wind prompt: ants blows through the open door a whole city you disappear within my walls — into the darkness carpenter ants working harder all day than I am the dog crazed with barking . . . tonight prompt: toilet brush the full moon spills over the yard I spend a lot of time standing in the corner like the toilet brush a thief nobody wants to look at in the garden . . . but they won’t get rid of the squirrel scampers away his mouth bulging ~Chesapeake Bay, USA with marigold blossoms

M. Kei is a tall ship sailor and award-winning poet who lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He is the editor of Atlas Poetica : A ﬁrst star Journal of World Tanka, and Stacking Stones, An Anthology of Short Tanka Sequences. His most recent collection of poetry is January, A I see tonight Tanka Diary. He is also the author of the award-winning gay Age of a child again Sail adventure novels, Pirates of the Narrow Seas wishing hard (blogspot.narrowseas.com). He can be followed on Twitter wish I might . . . @kujakupoet, or visit AtlasPoetica.org.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 52 take me in the river Mark Jun Poulos we’ll swim the lower depths among the branches face lowered a lovely woman stands in a golden ray of setting sun — poems long purple skirt arrive in dreams rippling in the summer wind in darkness when hot summer sun — there is no light cooling off in an Ezra Pound canto evoking the sea black beady eyes the glass-glint, lithe-sinews of waves watch me watching you a deep depression a mink dangles the mouse overwhelms my heart — in its clenched jaws how I wish to sleep it off drown it in the blankness of a dreamless slumber chunks of claws shards of shells pleasant litter on the dock to read a book remains from outside the dim confines of the cafe — the night visitor to listen to the swoosh of cars to bask in the warmth of the sun . . . and then me alone there you are . . . reading a book chicory in the field outside the cafe shivers and one red dragonfly threading its way in the wind above the flow of traffic

driving up PCH — river song I see Catalina Island singing for me through the spring haze all night long lying like a shield on the deep the bed is empty like Homer’s Phaeacia my pillow warm all of us kids ~St. Lawrence River, New York State, USA gathered in the rotunda of the group home Marilyn Morgan is a retired English teacher. Marilyn’s poetry has where I had resided for a month appeared in Atlas Poetica, Bright Stars, Skylark, Ribbons, American to talk about today’s Jewish holiday Tanka, One Hundred Gourds and others. Her prose has been published in Edge, Motif, Minerva Rising, KYSO Flash, Thrice Fiction and others. Marilyn lives in New Hartford, New York USA, in the wintertime, and she spends summers on the St. Lawrence River.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 53 we were all they’re human too. required to attend they deserve a country. the group home’s they’ve been oppressed for so long large, beautiful synagogue I said on the Jewish Sabbath timidly the group home Simon said nothing originally founded as a in response — Jewish orphanage the meeting was brought to an end had existed for almost a century no one else dared in Los Angeles’ afﬂuent west side speak on behalf of the Palestinians

Simon a counselor a tall, black-haired British Jew a middle-aged black man the eldest of us patted me on the back smiling — was the first to speak — it took you a lot of courage he immediately spoke of Israel to say what you said we Jews depend on Israel a moment later for our survival — I hear at my back the Palestinians jeopardize get in my office right now! that survival I turn around they’re remorseless killers it’s the psychiatrist, finger pointing down they’re heartless, cruel do you know where you are? blowing themselves up a former Jewish orphanage where civilians gather she said angrily so that they can terrify us seating herself — into leaving Israel how dare you say such things!

I can’t stand them I had spoken to her and the American liberals brieﬂy in the past — who support them! pale, smooth-skinned he continued she had dense bushy blondish hair breathless with rage unique to many Jewish women everyone I was dumbfounded, intimidated including the counselors unable to utter a word and psychiatrist in response — were dead silent as they heard him truly not knowing denounce the Palestinians what offense I had caused sixteen years old a week later politically unsophisticated I’m told I have to meet her in her ofﬁce — I was nonetheless that I was being prescribed disturbed by his words new medications of anger and hate for my OCD and depression

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 54 since puberty but a month into treatment I’ve hated my body — she resigned coarse hairs announcing she was pregnant — overran it like a cancer heartbroken like an unsightly leprosy I felt I had no one to conﬁde in

I couldn’t check when I saw her next the inexorable changes to my body I tried to embrace her it was as if to congratulate her on her pregnancy — it had revolted against me — she shrank back my self-esteem was torn to shreds don’t you know how I feel! she said but it couldn’t I think now have been otherwise that she did not speak these words to someone like me — because I was about to hug her — someone who loved to look upon photos but because she truly of smooth-skinned Greco-Roman nudes did not want to be pregnant

I thought it would stop I never mentioned that I would be spared to anyone else from further shame, self-loathing even to my next therapist but it wouldn’t — the struggle I had with body image — what I saw was not the body I once admired I was alone with my pain my body I ceased to wear once smooth, moleless, white t-shirts, shorts — was covered in dense black hair — I wore layer upon layer it had become of clothing over my body nearly unrecognizable to my boyish eyes trying to conceal it from others

I told my therapist it was hard a sweet-voiced Japanese American woman to keep my body concealed all the time — it caused me more distress especially than any other event in my life during the months even than my molestation when the weather in L.A. could be brutally hot

I had made when I entered her ofﬁce this disclosure to one no else — my psychiatrist feeling deeply ashamed wore a demeanor of staid professionalism — for the abhorrence she told me about the new medications I felt toward my own body prescribed to me

Mark, I knew a girl she began to read off I was treating from a long sheet of paper who was deeply ashamed of the hair all the side effects of the new drugs on her arms clearly enunciating even though she was blonde each one

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 55 drowsiness, dry mouth, that smirk of mockery heart palpitations, blurry vision that concluded her remark oh and this one remains etched in my memory I think you’ll like this one: hair loss ﬂooding me with she said smirking bitterness and resentment

I was disquieted — this was not the last time thinking that nothing that someone was less desirable in the mental health profession than losing your hair would belittle, agonize me in your teens with harsh, callous words

I did not understand mild spring night — why I should take pleasure I was turning left in something like that into a grocery store parking lot or why she had said what she said suddenly the car behind me turned left too with a smirk nearly colliding with me it took me when I parked a decade to understand I got out of my car what motivated her to say what she said — and approached the other driver — I was a very naive teen an old man with hair relatively free of malice, guile dyed jet black she knew didn’t you see my car? from reading my therapist’s notes what made you do what you did that being hirsute it was dangerous! afﬂicted me I said feeling emotionally the blood rush to my head it was not the hair a pause ensued on my head as I waited anxiously but the hair on my body to hear what he had to say — she meant hearing nothing I would like to lose I walked away

I wonder now: then all of a sudden did she say what she said I hear at my back: to take revenge on me you’re ugly, for speaking in defense of Palestinians mentally ill, stupid! something she found deeply offensive? you’re biologically defective! knowing now just look at the way what I know of human nature you walk I’m not surprised you’re biologically defective she did what she did something is wrong making light of something that caused me so with your genes! much pain

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 56 he approached me olive-skinned fist up to my face — wide nose curved no one talks that way to me he was probably seventy you fuck! he said and looked Italian in his heavily accented English like someone from Southern Europe spit fell on my face but the accent I smelled which I couldn’t at first identify at each word he uttered sounded Israeli — his warm foul breath Hebrew being a language rising up my nostrils with highly unique sounds at first I was stunned was this old man perhaps not offended taking revenge against non-Jews by this stream of insults — by ascribing to them attributes I hardly knew the man that Nazi propaganda yet he seemed prepared for a quarrel ascribed to them during WWII?

I walked away the thirst for revenge then turning around is hard to erase I frowned and said from our primitive human hearts — are you from the Maﬁa? so deeply ingrained truly perplexed by his savagery as to be almost instinctual minutes laters I would not be surprised I exited the store — if this man bracing myself for more insults having little acquaintance with non-Jews from this old man would pounce on one whose nationality I could not identify with such insults if he felt offended old fuck, I yelled I almost feel compassion stopping alongside his BMW — for this stranger — I threw my super big-gulp how long has this hatred at his windshield toward the goyim Coke splashed over the glass eaten away at his heart? he raised his hands ~California, USA a vague smile on his lips — trying I think to feign unconcern at the outrage Half Okinawan-Japanese and Greek American, Mark has learned through Atlas Poetica to take delight in reading the work of other I just committed on his car contemporary tanka poets. Living in L.A most of this life, he feels starved of nature, and would rather write about its beauties than about driving home his childhood experiences. But he thinks they're something cathartic I thought his insults about what he's doing and hopes he can connect with readers of his tanka. He feels that his confessional tanka have precedent in the world sounded vaguely anti-Semitic of traditional Japanese waka, since many of its poems of love and almost like those Nazis longing display an acute self-awareness. They're stunning works of used to denigrate Jews psychological realism and acumen, which he has appreciated more as he's grown older.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 57 Marshall Bood Zuihitsu: Remembering Agnes locked room — in Emergency Mary Ellen Gambutti I hear my diagnosis second-hand: “That guy’s a schizophrenic” Agnes, my mother, turned ninety-six this August. The elder of her two adopted daughters, it’s fallen to me to keep connected with her and the woman who talks to squirrels the nursing home staff in Pennsylvania. I’m ﬁne outside the care home with this obligation to the only mother I’ve ever warns me known. not to step on the peanuts Mom’s cousin Janet taped Mom on her ninety-fourth birthday. ~Saskatchewan, Canada Tape clip 1

Marshall Bood lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He is “Dad’s family had a dairy farm in Saltillo, currently beginning CBT for OCD. He hopes to write about those experiences as well when he has some distance from them. Pa. I remember a cave in the hillside where they stored milk and jarred goods. A stream ran through the cave.”

I remember Agnes

1. sat on the ﬂoor and played picture card games with me — Rustler, Old Maid, Go Fish 2. sewed my clothes and my dolls’ clothes 3. was a child at heart. She loved nature’s creatures — insects, animals, especially dogs. When we lived in Tokyo, she put jam and bread out for a rhinoceros beetle, which it seemed to enjoy.

Tape clip 2

“Mom, Dad, my brother, Vincent and I lived in Orbisonia. Vincent, was afraid of Dad’s horse. Vince had a nightmare the horse was down in the yard eating the dog. Once, Dad brought the horse into the house as a joke. It scared Vince to death . . . . My mom canned fruit in Orbisonia. We lived in the country until I ﬁnished ﬁrst grade. I remember riding to school in a horse-drawn sleigh.”

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 58 I remember Agnes I’m sipping a diet chocolate shake I just blended down here in Florida. Wonder what she 4. gave up her nursing career to be an Air had for lunch in Pennsylvania. In two weeks I’ll Force officer’s wife and adopt me visit Mom for two weeks. My childhood wasn’t 5. ice skated with me when we lived in New easy. So many moves and transitions in an Air Jersey Force family. 6. used a flyswatter on me when she was furious. She had a cruel streak. I learned I was adopted at age six. Wondered who my “real” family was until I searched and Tape clip 3 found my birth mother when I was 40. She died a year later. Last year I learned by DNA testing “We moved to New York City on West and determination who my father was. Now I Broadway in the Village, when the coal mines have connected with two maternal half-sisters closed in 1928. I went to school near Washington and three paternal half-sisters and half-brother. Square Park. I jumped rope in the street, played My parents, Nana and my younger sister left on the roof of Dad’s auto repair shop across the our New Jersey home for California in 1976, street. We moved to W. 58th Street, across from when my daughter was four, for my father’s Roosevelt Hospital, when I started high school. It second career with the C.I.A., and a deaconship was nice to live so close to Central Park.” in Los Angeles diocese. Mom and I kept intermittent contact until Dad died, when I I remember Agnes packed her up, sold her home of twenty-seven years, and brought her and my ninety-seven year 7. was lonely when Dad was away on duty old Nana back to Pa where I’d lived since 1983. I 8. played popular music on the radio might have kept her with me after Nana died, but 9. laughed out loud at T.V. comedy she wanted her independence. My brain hemorrhage at age fifty-seven made it impossible Tape clip 4 for me to care for her as her needs increased. We all do what we can. “My diary is falling apart. Kept it from 1939 – 1941 when I was sweet on Al and when Sedoka we were courting. Not easy to love a seminarian. He left the Paulist Brothers in Baltimore to marry a role model for impatience me. His mother pushed him to be a priest. You Mom dreaded cooking and gardening have no idea what a vamp I was! I went down to so, I learned both from her mother DC to visit Cousin Elsie and Aunt Katherine, and we took him out to dinner. But I never kept never a good listener, Mom wears hearing him from doing what he wanted to do. We aids now — married after the war, then he enlisted in the Air “Don’t forget to call me!” Force.” but she rarely picks up the phone ~Sarasota, Florida, and Nazareth, Pennsylvania, I remember Agnes USA

10. inﬂicted wounds. She told me she’d never Mary Ellen writes about life as adopted Air Force daughter, understand me, was rarely affectionate. reunion with birth family, and stroke at mid-life. Her stories and poems 11. had a great laugh, was witty; sometimes appear in Remembered Arts Journal, Modern Creative Life, A Thousand and One Stories, Halcyon Days, Memoir Magazine, biting. HaibunToday, Contemporary Haibun Online, Amethyst Review, 12. her mother, my Nana, was her best mac(ro)mic, Soft Cartel, FewerThan500, Bella Mused, Writing In A friend. Like Mom, she knitted, sewed, quilted. Woman’s Voice, Quiet Storm, and many more. Her book is Stroke Story, My Journey There and Back.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 59 Visiting Hour Sedoka

Maryalicia Post Matsukaze

Brother and sister, backseat of a taxi . . . adults separated by life headed downtown and the width of their mother’s bed: everything a blur The sister, lifting her head i remember the ﬁrst from her iPhone, says ‘I can always . . . ’ man i ever met ‘Or I could . . . . interrupts the brother in that seedy hotel as he takes a call on his mobile and leaves the ward submerging them timely as tide in water overnight well-wishers arrive these pinto beans a surge of health will be placed in laps round the beds the crockpot to simmer ebbs into silence while i’m at work

~Dublin, Ireland knowing that there’s something Maryalicia is a travel writer based in Dublin, Ireland. Her long poem wrong with him — After You — on the journey through bereavement (one of the hardest journeys she ever took) is published by Souvenir Press UK and is i watch him available through Amazon. washing his military shoes with the water hose

taking a break i light a cigarette and contemplate calling the dude i exchanged numbers with at the laundromat

i walk along chewing gum i am always lonely being of mixed blood — a sudden drizzle from the east

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 60 invented showering so many mythical scenarios i wonder about my father . . . what life would’ve i was fifteen been when he was murdered had i been born by a close friend a woman moon and safflowers in a sudden fit on the vendor’s of desire cart . . . i place a phone call eating a bag of chips to a local florist i make my way through and order myself the downtown bazaar red spider lilies high afternoon sun — today enjoying sliced pears i take a long walk with the lover through a rice paddy talk turns to us full of sake and what is intending to purchase to come next a koto is anybody really free? fingering all the people my aunt’s scarlet comb in this city of bone it is made out of pearl walk sideways and ivory . . . heads down in some sort of i feel like a captive dance woman-of-the-night striking a match my dead aunt’s to light his cigarette — scarlet comb i can’t recall his name sits on the dresser — i’m not even sure this house cold and impersonal he remembers has never known mine the warmth of love my father left us what is this burning red for another woman — resentment in the interim glowing hot a black hole emerges inside of me? where memories my overheated body should’ve been in the bath

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 61 tonight my body will be open and bare A Metamorphosis of Sorts before your eyes your work-roughened hands Michael H. Lester will cup my breasts and part my thighs For most of my life, I have been an introvert, lacking in self-conﬁdence, afraid to share my i grow sleepy . . . innermost thoughts, dreams, hopes, and ideas heading to the bedroom with others for fear of ridicule. unfolded clothes and discarded shoes For years, everything I wrote was to amuse litter the ﬂoor myself. I would say for decades, rather than years, there’s a poem in here somewhere but I did so little writing for pleasure during that time it does not count — there is no record of it anyway. my right now is the only time that the introvert i feel this certain freedom . . . emerges from his shell outside in the dark as an old man everything wet spilling decades of dreams and freezing cold into the great void

Now, I want people to read, to hear what I again my email friend write — the good and the bad, the successes and tries to get me the failures, so they can truly know me, and to get out of myself — through these truths, know themselves. again i’m distracted by someone knocking This does not mean I write for an audience on my neighbor’s door upstairs — I write for myself still, but now I want to share it with the world. ~Texas, USA let them laugh Matsukaze enjoys both the immediacy and lasting resonance of English it no longer matters Language short verse. Matsukaze lives in Texas, USA. I am old — like the brittle oak tree I have weathered many storms

~A stuffy ofﬁce on the west wide of Los Angeles, California, USA, where the windows don’t open

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 62 A Fisherman’s Catch Chalk and Cheese

Michael H. Lester Michael H. Lester her breath lie still on my whiskered cheek on the soft green grass invigorates ponder like a salty sea breeze the vastness of space whipping a tall ship sail the twinkling of stars in the galley consider too she flips burgers and eggs the teeming worlds beneath for the boys your body still half asleep at dawn insects prancing about yawning and scratching oblivious to the cosmos after breakfast what common thread she cleans up the kitchen connects us to each other? and takes the helm creatures the clouds grow darker every one born of stardust as the trawler churns the sea to which we must return she winks I see at all the fishermen the twinkle of distant stars but when night falls in your flashing eyes she beckons only me the wisdom of the ages to the captain’s quarters in your wrinkled brow next morning tell me when the livewell is full my lovely concubine we turnabout you and I I breathe the salty sea breeze are we so different wondering if it has a name as chalk and cheese?

~Paciﬁc Ocean ~California, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 63 Wild Horses Couldn’t Stop A Monk and His Muse Her Michael H. Lester Michael H. Lester as the moon drifts behind the mountain armed with my thoughts of you little more than a smile fade away in the darkness and a six-gun of a tearful slumber the little cowpoke practices her quick draw the morning brings cheerful birdsong the sheriff and bags of rice of this lawless town some kind townspeople needs a deputy have placed at my hut’s doorstep and he’s had his eye on her since she broke her first mustang shuffling these tired aching feet she blows over rock and thorn the smoke off the barrel I pick berries and roots of her pistol for tonight’s dinner and strolls to the target — six holes in the bullseye I suffer much over the news of your illness Sunday morning for you, yes when most folks are in church but also, selfishly the little cowpoke for myself checks the local saloons for drunken cowboys I await word of your planned visit she empties perhaps you will come a bucket of cold water before the first snowfall on the vagrants when the mountain path is clear and points them in the direction of their wives or horses ~Ryōkan’s hut on Mt. Kugami, Japan she isn’t much for gospel or religion her only truth that polished metal Colt tucked in her rawhide holster

~a lawless town in Old Tucson, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 64 flush with cash Taking a Licking from my lucrative job as a paperboy Michael H. Lester I purchase a collection of Serbian postage stamps at age 13 I keep up I engage in my first the stamp collection obsession — for years a postage stamp adding first-day covers collection blocks, and sheets of stamps my parents I stop collecting buy me a two-volume only after I get drafted stamp album I enlist instead complete with pictures and spend the next four years of stamps of the world in the Air Force

I learn after my discharge how to apply stickers I discover that someone to mount the stamps stole my collection in the proper section I am still waiting of the album for their tearful confession

I discover ~the dining room table in my childhood home in Detroit, the world of approvals — Michigan, USA, circa 1958 companies send me stamps to approve on the honor system

I am to pay for the stamps I want to keep and return the others in a prepaid envelope sometimes I forget to return the approvals apparently, no companies bother to sue children

I tire of licking stickers for hours on end — at $.25 an hour little sister helps lick

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 65 Request Permission to Abort I Am Fire

Michael H. Lester Michael H. Lester

flying low I am fire over the Mekong River I ride the north winds in our spy plane through forests an engine catches fire — towns and villages a fisherman looks up turning all to ash on the bank the north wind thick with jungle brush my unwitting accomplice the murmur my companion of Viet Cong soldiers takes me hither and yon moving supplies south over the hills and far away the pilot I am fire shuts off the engine rising high above leaving just one the tall trees to get us safely home my flames licking out to our base in Thailand to burn flesh and stem vague traces I am a raging of death and disease unstoppable force leave their mark — no mountain slowly eating away no river can quench at our consciences my thirst for destruction the crackle I am fire of static electricity animals flee from me reminds us in panic we are still alive but for many of them at least on the outside it is much, much too late

~A window seat on a C121 over the Mekong River, ~The tinder forests all over the State of California, USA Vietnam

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 66 Danger — No Road Ahead Slave to a Southern Drawl

Michael H. Lester Michael H. Lester

Nearly all my personal brushes with death have come on a motorcycle — running out of Something about this girl from Kentucky road on a slick and narrow mountain pass at high excites me — I think it might be her syrupy speed, or finding myself sandwiched between two southern accent or the come-hither batting of crusty sixteen-wheelers inexorably closing the gap her eyelashes. I don’t remember how we got from on my directionless life. the local drive-through to her bedroom, but I do remember the honeysuckle scent of her breath people say on my neck. it wasn’t your time but I know a warm wind that was the only time blows over the cotton fields I felt truly alive back home ~The rain-slick mountain roads of Taiwan and the where the boll weevils killing fields of Detroit, Michigan, the late 1960s bore into the soft buds I have great expectations — much like the Oklahoma dust bowl family in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Like that family, I suffer the harsh The Scent of Lilacs realities of a long migration. Instead of allowing me into her bed, she shoos me into the closet to Michael H. Lester hide from her grandfather, whose footsteps pound the hardwood floor like thunder. I recall few details of the visits to my grandmother’s house in Rochester, New York — as I trudge the door to the root cellar in the backyard and from one dry water hole the heady scent of lavender-colored lilacs, my to another mother’s favorite flower. I remember a tall, gray- I choke on the dust haired woman who looked vaguely like my of the great depression mother. I remember the crystal dish on the dresser in the bedroom where my younger After more than one hour, I finally realize brother and I slept, filled with coins and candy in that Miss Kentucky will not allow me to leave the the morning. I remember standing by her bedside closet, even after her grandfather’s thunderous in the semi-private room at the hospital, holding footsteps abate. My dreams shattered, I decide I my mother’s hand, wondering about the meaning have no choice but to exit through the bedroom of death. window. I bid my would-be paramour a fond goodbye along with a parting gift in the closet. the mirror seems unkind to me ~some southern belle’s bedroom closet in Detroit, this morning Michigan, USA, circa 1968 I really should try to get more sleep

~a semi-private hospital room in Rochester, New York, circa 1950

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 67 my ﬁngertips Michael H. Lester tingle still this morning from last night when the moon and I every time washed over your body the math professor counts his toes he invariably comes up just barely with a different number out of her teens I dare not ~an accounting ofﬁce in Los Angeles, California, USA take her hand in mine lest I cannot let go a wounded bird breathing heavily build, build, build on my doorstep one house at a time where I put the milk out until for the local tomcat you have a city then feed your people ~Detroit, Michigan, USA, circa 1972

watch out a worm they say, that girl peeks out of an apple is trouble — as I search just the kind of trouble for a graceful way I am looking for out of this marriage

I am not I open going to get my panties a bottle of water in a snit to slake my thirst over what the church ladies yet this desert of a home think is appropriate keeps my body bone-dry

a muddy path would that I where familiar footprints with parchment and quill fill with sludge could bend words how can a struggling poet that you would cherish gain a lasting foothold? as I cherish yours ~a medley of tanka from a stuffy old office in Los Angeles, California, USA flowers wilt in this summer heat Michael H. Lester, currently resides in Los Angeles, California, where even flies he writes a little poetry every chance he gets, and hangs on to the slim too lazy to move hope that someone, somewhere, someday might read it. You can find his book of poetry, Notes from a Commode: Volume I, on Amazon.com. fall victim to my swatter twitter: @mhlester.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 68 east and walk three blocks to the Manjushri In Silence We Trust Dharma Center where every Saturday morning a Tibetan monk, Khenpo Karten Rinpoche, leads Neal Whitman a one-hour silent meditation usually attended by 15 to 20 individuals. Some are Buddhists, but I am not, and whoever arrives is made to feel she leaves a lamp on welcome. There is a small donation box on the when I go out for a night walk side of the room. Though no one asks for it’s understood contributions, I always make one: $5.00. this is a place of peace . . . warm and restful inside the hour is up but our monk remains seated My wife and I live in a cottage in Pacific he smiles Grove, California. One early autumn Friday we smile, in return — evening, I walk out our front door to the street, no one wants to leave first turn left to the west, and walk one mile to the Asilomar Conference Center to watch the sun set ~Pacific Grove, California, USA over the Pacific.

I arrive just as a group of people begins to Neal Whitman lives in Pacific Grove, California, with his wife Elaine, practically in the shadow of Point Pinos Lighthouse where Neal exit a meeting room in single file. I take note that finds inspiration for his poetry and Elaine for her photography. Neal is they are walking in silence and dressed mostly in Vice President of the United Haiku and Tanka Society, haiku editor for white . . . they are primarily women, many Pulse : Voices from the Heart of Medicine, and editorial board member wearing white scarves or kerchiefs. Soon over 150 of Haiku Revista in Romania. of these folks are seated in rows of chairs set up by an outdoor fire pit.

A leader invites each person to write a “personal intention” on a piece of rice paper and toss it gently into the ﬁre, also asking everyone to chant a single word. When I get home and look up the word on the Internet, I discover it is svāhā, which is Sanskrit for “well said” or “so be it”.

More online research reveals that this is the annual 5-day “Silent Awakenings” retreat with the well-known speaker and writer, Deepak Chopra. I confess I am startled by the fee for this sold-out conference: $6300.00.

what does it mean to be a non-believer? I know for a fact that when the power goes out it is only the wind

The next morning, I again walk out our front door to the street, but this time turn right to the

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 69 Bethell’s Beach Garden Produce

Patricia Prime Patricia Prime

end of summer eating an apple each day less light while he waters the garden more beach buggies my neighbour — between rocks in the tidal pool a shared smile purple sea urchins ﬂickers between us

“How many times have we been to Bethell’s unbroken heat Beach?” asks my daughter, tossing a frisbee to my bees inscribe their flight granddaughter. “I never get tired of coming among the flowers . . . here.” The stilts run out with the sucking tide, from over the fence gulls circle patiently. Her husband lets out a shout comes a baby’s cry as the frisbee passes him and lands in the water. She gives him a shove as she runs past, and they My son is at the back door pulling on his old fall laughing on the beach. The waves deposit mud-caked gardening boots. Through dappled green seaweed, and I continue my walk along the leaves I watch him in his faded LedZep T-shirt shoreline looking for unusual shells. and baggy shorts bending to pick a lettuce or a tomato. There’s a glut of marrows this year so rounding the rocks through the kitchen window I ask him to bring a under shrieking gulls marrow that I can stuff with beef mince and I come across herbs, topped with golden bubbling cheese for a slope of pebbles dinner. thinned to gritty rubble Unlike the calm of the garden, the lounge is How serene and deceptive are is the fall of wild with sheaves of paper. My printouts and the tide towards sunset. When you have nothing poems filling files and shelves and sacked in boxes to say the beauty of things speaks for you: poetry, on the floor. The cat rushes among them creating memories, bird song, a single white cloud. chaos. Books are bursting from the shelves, piled on the table or littering the coffee table. humid stillness of the summer evening in the evening waiting I lie on the couch for the green flash reading Ashbery’s poems between sky and sea despite the cat trying to scale the curtain ~New Zealand ~New Zealand

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 70 Traces Paul Callus

Patricia Prime Paul Callus, Maltese-English Translator / Traduttur Malti-Ingliż

summer afternoon Black Sabbath plays in a cornﬁeld on my son’s stereo I call out echoing around the room to the silence around me although he’s not in there my voice echoes from ear to ear I watch as he walks in with the sun through the open French windows. He sits down with a f ’għalqa bil-qamħ smile, unshaven as if returning from a long insejjaħ journey. He pours coffee, adds sugar and stirs in lis-silenzju ta’ madwari the milk with work-worn hands. “How have you leħni jidwi been, all these days and nights in a different minn sbula għal sbula world?” I ask.

Together we watch an old black and white lost in thought series of Doctor Who, (11 Doctors to be featured at the kitchen sink over 11 months), even though he was scared of scouring away the Daleks and their weird voices when he was a the stains child. In the series, Daleks are cyborgs made of embittered love from their original forms, extra-terrestrial Kaleds from the planet Skaro, genetically modiﬁed and mitluf ﬁ ħsibijieti integrated within a robotic shell. ħdejn is-sink tal-kċina nogħrok biex inneħħi when he was a child t-tbajja’ I made him an imitation ta’ mħabba qarsa a speaking tube from a cardboard cylinder covered with foil and stars on a rubble wall a speckled lizard Work boots, whiskers on his chin, a fringe of soaks the sunshine . . . long hair and guitar solos — his Glam Rock days I envy her seem like a dream. As we watch repeats on the peace of mind television, the scary series seems so old-fashioned, it is not so much fun. fuq ħajt tas-sejjieħ gremxula ttikkjata ~New Zealand mitluqa għal għajn ix-xemx . . . ngħir għas-serħan il-moħħ tagħha Patricia Prime is editor of Kokako, reviews/interviews editor of Haibun Today, a reviewer for Takahe and Atlas Poetica, and a selector for Gusts and MetVerse Muse. Patricia has written blurbs, critiques, introductions and book reviews for many Indian poets and writers.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 71 the ocean she leaves the calm or passionate confessional keeps returning with misty eyes — to the waiting shore . . . outside, pouring rain the way we love washes the road clean l-oċean hija tħalli kalm jew passjonali l-konfessjonarju dejjem jirritorna lejn b’għajnejn imdemmgħa- ix-xtajta ħerqana tistenna . . . barra, xita qliel bħal imħabbitna tnaddaf għal kollox it-triq they call me Fathers’ Day a hoarder the door to his room of encumbrance . . . is still locked . . . what would I do so many things without my memories! I never got to know jizzikawni Jum il-Missier illi nġemma’ il-bieb ta’ kamartu l-imbarazz . . . għadu magħluq . . . x’jibqagħli jekk kemm fadal affarijiet niskarta t-tifkiriet! li qatt ma sirt naf

~Malta a rainbow quivers and gleams as the sun breaks Paul Callus was born in Ħal Safi, Malta. He is married to Sheila née Ackland-Snow and they have two children. He is a retired teacher, and through the clouds . . . has been active in the literary field for around 50 years. He has a fisherman’s catch published three books, and has had several short stories and poems published in various magazines, anthologies and online sites. His qawsalla preferred writing mediums are Maltese and English. He is also a proof- reader and translator. tkanġi u tleqq hekk kif ix-xemx Paul Callus twieled Ħal Safi, Malta. Miżżewweġ lil Sheila née tfiġġ minn bejn is-sħab- Ackland-Snow u għandhom żewġt itfal. Ħadem ta’ għalliem, u ilu attiv fil-qasam letterarju għal madwar 50 sena. Ippubblika tliet kotba u il-qabda ta’ sajjied kellu għadd ta’ poeżiji u stejjer qosra li dehru f’gazzetti, antoloġiji u siti online. Jippreferi jikteb l-aktar bil-Malti u l-Ingliż. Huwa wkollproof- reader u traduttur.

Paweł Markiewicz was born in 1983 in Poland. He studied both Laws and German studies in Warsaw. He was twice the scholarship- holder of Forum Alpbach in Austria — the village of the thinkers. His more than 30 long poems have been published in German magazines and anthologies. Paweł has written recently haiku in English which were printed in Japan, Australia, as well as in Germany.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 72 Cherita Double Cherita

Paweł Markiewicz Paweł Markiewicz

I’m alone 1 at night I am a bird the loneliness has delicate wings a wonderful owl that enliven my heart what feels eternal with all kinds of imagination I’m fulﬁlling myself in the sunshine and in the cloud of freedom I am happy You are a ladybug in love with poetry enchanted or dreamy butterﬂy over the stars the soul likes romantic your dreams night-touching and eternity of words they triumph in comet dust

I am holding 2 my yearning I am a muse hovering in you I love the world gentle nights conjured up from a rainbow dreaming with a Fox in imagination I like too silver stellar dust and a spell from the comet

I am dreamy you are an elf in my soul is a sail you adoring the brightest I adore the sea star of melancholy in my heart in the red of the evening melancholy is your fulﬁllment and eternal joy ~Poland ~Poland

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 73 Stained Glass Cherita

Richard Grahn Richard Grahn memories come ﬂooding back . . . a squall blowing in morning birdsong across the water, berries in the hay, delicate crystal chirps sunsets through a plate glass window ease me awake

I remember stories I roll over, around the kitchen table . . . wrap an arm around your waist kids playing Chinese checkers, and listen to you snore eating popcorn and laughing at silly things ~Chicago, Illinois, USA beside the fire and fluorescent stones we chanted hymns the postage stamp studied myths is canceled and pleaded for our souls the envelope unopened the world was our adventure inside the perfumed letter the lightness and the dark . . . words that can’t get out castles by the seashore cast their shadows down the streets news she cannot bear we found to wander ~In the Atrium, Chicago, Illinois, USA those bygone trails beyond the garden finally brought me here to stand outside your door tonight in moonlit poems these runes unfold a menagerie of whispers . . . into your ears a song this mockingbird is singing

~Evanston, Illinois, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 74 He’s walking down the street Richard Grahn at 3 a.m. guitar in hand strumming from his soul to the stillness dripping from the eves of the night the last of last night’s rain . . . your sandals ~Almond Street, Chico, California, USA still reclining beside the rumpled bed hello ~In my dreams, Evanston, Illinois, USA she cackled into the well . . . the well replied desert rose hello standing by the road thumb in the air ~At the cabin, Grandview, Wisconsin, USA with headlights on the horizon you still the rising moon fog descends on the bay ~Arizona, USA a horseshoe crab settles in the mud herons pick their way good morning songbird along the shore did you have a good night’s sleep? I can’t remember ~Maquoit Bay, Brunswick, Maine, USA my dreams I just know that you were there Richard Grahn is an American poet/artist born in Wisconsin in 1959, ~On my pillow, Evanston, Illinois, USA currently living in Evanston, IL. He has traveled extensively and has been writing and creating art for over 30 years. He started writing short-form and prose poetry in earnest in 2016 as an outlet for coping with illness. He has since had a modicum of success appearing in such as he recites from his book publications such as Atlas Poetica, Haibun Today, Contemporary of prayers Haibun Online and others. a sparrow rests on a barbed wire fence searching the weeds for seeds

~On the steps of the church, Bath, Maine, USA a spark ﬂoats into the evening sky children’s prayers rise up following the ﬂames

~Camp Lawroweld, Weld, Maine, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 75 Richard Kakol is a poet and playwright who resides in Geelong, A Safe Place Australia. He is a founding member of the Phoenix tanka group. He is a musician, and has worked as a music journalist. His audio drama has been broadcast on Vision Australia Radio. Apart from writing, his Richard Kakol & Jan Foster main interests include playing bass guitar and African percussion, walks along the waterfront, and yoga.

Jan Foster, a former English teacher, lives in Geelong, Australia. Her foreign skies tanka, tanka prose, haiku, haibun and responsive sequences have been glimpsed through the window published in journals in Japan, USA, New Zealand, Britain, Canada and Australia, as well as online. She is the founder of the Bottlebrush at last Tanka Group (Sydney) and a member of the Phoenix tanka group ─ an iron curtain (Geelong). Her favourite things, apart from writing tanka, are a good is hard to open rk book to read and a cryptic crossword to conquer. another boat sinks more precious lives lost ─ there’s no safe place in times of war jf the kitchen’s warmth Cambridge Commencement a refuge for you now . . . staring at the fire you remember Richard St. Clair a home turned to ashes rk in the flames’ dance in this city images form and flicker of many races stirring and cultures feelings once thought sounds a cacophony gone forever jf of oneness hearing your voice sitting reminds me of summer alone on the river New England dreams the boat’s paddlewheel scream churning up the water rk into the silence wetlands teem vaunting with migrating birds the illimitable each year transcending grandchildren visit the unspeakable — our seaside home jf satori on the town

~Australia rejoicing over morning’s Kenya coffee the scent of a road now taken

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 76 soaked this life in blissful tears a garden of pleasure repartee without care myself offered and great buddha by mara’s cadre the beard the brilliance of my being of the sun dusted buddha’s with sorrow’s light flakes of joy outshining off the top foolish of my greying my monkey mind head and thoughts under the great pyramid bordering on relics of truth the heretical whence neurontin comes this bliss a chemical thence warming goes this heart a mind of cruel thorns of melting stone my heart and soul pimping a folly my consciousness seeking joy in all things to star folk animate their eternal and inanimate — coddling songs what cries abound when the world i sit finally ends in grief i will be at the dying world long gone in the comfort unto timelessness of this brainy city burden artificial of age-old karma is this urban comfort a gift apart from the buddha from the steady become goodness holocaust of Arabia where a fork the pure land in the road is led me here my destiny to burgeoning satori is a bumpy ride

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 77 my pulse i stand synchronous on the shoulders with my music of the cosmic wise a curious in this village reality sandwich of the mundane foolish

50 years later where memories my heart yearns inkblots of karma sweetness on fair Harvard and bitterness a hellscape join to bliss folderol endgame my aging thoughts footsteps erased through by unearned a nameless void buddha bliss real meets unreal harsh gain the unawakened and loss in unison toiling reverencing in this amoral and resolving desert of Earth the karma of all friends bliss enemies alike or blitz to resolve the ferocity their disharmony of life through someday with bliss this dark lens a wanderer terminus making tracks life ending in the snow reborn to bliss of samsara am i a sad farewell a restless sojourner to a withering world buddha looking out that wondrous name over the vast ocean light the seashore at the end of eternity of an endless tunnel beckoning betting ~New England no longer — a hundred per cent Richard St. Clair (b. 1946 in North Dakota) has both musical and poetical gifts. His music has been heard far and wide and much is certain: available on YouTube. Some of his songs set tanka of his own and free at last others to music. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard where he graduated with honors in music. Much of his music and poetry reﬂects his faith as a Shin Buddhist. He has lived in New England for most of his life.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 78 Roman Lyakhovetsky Urbi et Orbi

Ruth Holzer raising dust on the Dead Sea highway — is it my all-time low your arm from which they say around a strange boy's shoulders one can only rise? in the bar — trying to make me jealous was what you most enjoyed to bend just like those young shoots how easy to survive — it would have been then oh, and add in some moonlight to reach on wet stones, too . . . for your manhandled body with its secret disease clutching on never again the dry blade of grass to share a smoke an ant rides the wind — in the Roman dawn — why do I always get back the two of us growing old to dreams of quiet life? at opposite ends the earth

so lovely roadside lavender arrogant and rich — with a gentle slap you always got she drives my despair away whatever in the world as wild and beautiful you wanted, but me as she ever was ~Rome, Italy this winter in the desert as others before it so hard to catch the snowﬂakes I imagine falling on the desert

~Maale Adumim, Israel

Originally from Russia, Roman Lyakhovetsky now lives in Israel. He has a Ph.D. in Cell Biology and does his best to combine science and poetry in his life. His haiku and tanka have appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Heron’s Nest, Scifaikuest and A Hundred Gourds among other journals.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 79 Silver Sean Reagan

Ruth Holzer coyote laughs at my old dog no longer giving chase — I wave him on we were quiet saying all the way from Giudecca brother, we’re all headed home to Burano — where you taught him the guitar and I browsed through his books rain turns to snow in April — he paid you always the gift with intricate hand-crafted hides in how we look jewelry — at what is given letting his hand touch yours too long, as we were leaving spring without you — silent again one after another all the way from Burano lilac ﬂorets to Guidecca fall into grass where you bartered his silver I keep forgetting to mow for our austere meals

~Venice, Italy I accept this dandelion as your last letter — Ruth Holzer’s tanka have appeared previously in Atlas Poetica and blow its seeds other journals. She lives in Virginia. in the many directions we all have to take to go home

the river sings to the valley and the wind sings to the hills — between the many notes, this happy awkward dance

I’m not scared of bees — take my coffee by the hive — I never knew sweetness without a little pain

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 80 ora et labora — I sing hanging laundry — Steve Black sparrows in the lilac say jesus’ mother brother, you are almost there and hers by way of instagram at every turn on the camino the little to say la muerte widens to nothing — these empty cow stanchions breathing space are not going anywhere the nurse and doctor sharing a cigarette in the oncology unit what I can’t say garden doesn’t go unsaid — this walk to the river hopeful still takes a lifetime to have some family fun we queue in the rain for the sky train watching ice melt going nowhere every 10 minutes while the horse studies his next step — it’s the unprayed prayers my bed the sofa that save us for company a spider that lives behind the guitar in the corner year after year gazing at stars she doesn’t play anymore adrift in winter skies as if someone — I won’t say god — transfixed gazed back with unblinking eyes by the storm she devours leviticus to see who else watching fireflies gets what they deserve in a light rain — the time left to be born again after the divorce runs out he would cook but there was no love in the food ~Massachusetts, USA so he took night classes learned to love himself Sean Reagan lives, writes and homesteads in western Massachusetts. His poems and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Modern Haiku, Rattle, and Yankee Magazine. He writes online at seanreagan.com.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 81 i’m done the door with killing to the other room it takes 10 minutes locked since 1977 to coax the fly the letter with his name on it from the living room still propped on the tv the woods small comfort where every third wednesday i played war at the retirement home as a child one woman and her dog peaceful now almost human to the bitter end the beautiful chandelier he searches the obituary column cold to the touch with arthritic fingers caught in the morning light to see who else her mother kept the room got the better deal just as she left it in the alley pictures of other people bind weed geronimo upon bind weed steve macqueen — the great escape i’m running on my ego wall out of sky all defeated in the end he kept the news the long day closes of his imminent death to himself i push her back unable to live along the seafront with his mother’s disappointment carry her up the steps to the hotel anymore where she was happy once as a child a sniper back from the war high tide now resettled opposite she became the wave no matter my routine somebody else he says it’s just a matter of time it took 5 coppers before he gets me to restrain her this time the wife took i started a fire the dog with her it lasted a couple of days no one left until i ran out of things to burn to do the talking next time if i’m lucky for him i’m gonna make it last forever

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 82 found in the morning with her song Sedoka she farts again i can’t take it Steve Black anymore

he drilled a hole waving from the window in his head of the steam engine so the big thoughts but no one waved back can roam in outer space what is wrong with people sometimes people stare i’m a fuckin nice person so he wears a hat mutual masturbation at the bus stop she reads me her poem outside the prison i read her mine the man in a dated suit i feel an anti-climax carrying a letter in one hand coming on a painted toy horse in the other before sunrise she sitting on my face church tomorrow i am told she settles early one day the sun will burn itself out ﬁnishes the chapter and take us all with it more scandinavian noir a pastor’s daughter lost long before the ﬁrst snow running the gauntlet of pamphleteers on the high street selling charity what goes on tour salvation stays on tour and other forms of death cover homecoming soldiers with that faraway look ~Reading, Berkshire, UK marching past one dead end street after another Steve Black— Born at the end of the summer of love now living within spitting distance of London. she stands naked in front of the window says someone could be watching and she would never know begs i go outside to make sure

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 83 So Soft, So Soft Mummy’s purple feet swayed in the wind, Tanja Trček so soft, so soft, inches above the ground. Nadžida was six. ~Golnik, Slovenia On the 17th July, 1995, we hugged for the last time, when i found her crouching in the corner of an empty room, among the shards of Notes broken windowpanes. Siege of Sarajevo, which was the longest siege With her torn cotton candy-pink t-shirt she of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. covered the puddle on the concrete ﬂoor beneath Lasting 1,425 days, it was more than a year her. Absorbing the moisture, the fabric turned longer than the Siege of Leningrad. I thought i dark pink, then purple. A bruise. A bruise knew it, as much as one who hasn’t lived through bleeding the heartbreaking stink of dread. it can know such things (which is very little), but the other day i watched a documentary on it and Nadžida was six. then decided to write a short tanka piece. What i found to have been the very worst part of that On the weathered bench under the apple whole horror was the fact, there was only one tree her grandfather had planted when he and source of drinking water in the entire city, a well, Baba married, she smiled, holding a stray kitten: where people would wait in line for long hours to “So soft, so soft, Mummy.” get some water, yet the Serbian snipers regularly shot at them. So if in summer you didn’t want to And so quiet after the shot. die of thirst, you risked being killed while waiting for water. And winters too were terrible, because Then the crickets began to sing again in the they are so harsh and long there, with temps long gentle grasses. usually lower than 4 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and feet and feet of snow, and they had no Mummy used to be a pianist. Landmine by means of heating their shelled homes, and very landmine, house by shelled house, the music fell little food. 45% of the entire pre-war population silent. The war chose new roles for us. of Bosnia still lives abroad.

Whenever she opened her ﬁeld nurse’s black bag and touched the white gauze dressings, she Once an all-around athlete, Tanja Trček is now mostly bedbound. She often ﬁnds the enormity of her illness overwhelming and seeks refuge would remember the exhilaration she had felt in small things, her very favorite among them being tanka. Seemingly each morning upon touching the piano keys. small poems, but with the power to give meaning to one’s life, maybe to even save lives. Black silhouettes of trees, white mists lifting.

Baščaršija shimmering in the rising sun.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 84 be written as prose. Try it. And ﬁnally no Looking Both Ways restrictions regarding language and subject matter allow for the emergence of truly unique Peter Fiore voices.

In the beginning there was tanka and tanka Peter Fiore lives and writes in Mahopac, New York, USA. His poems have been published in Atlas Poetica, Bright Stars, American sequences. Now we have kyoka, gogyohka, tanka Poetry Review, Rattle, Ribbons, Skylark, A Hundred Gourds and prose, tanka, pentaptych, sedoka, mondo, cherita, others. In 2009, Peter published text messages, a book of tanka poetry zuihitsu, ryuka, flash and micro-fiction among and in 2015, Peter’s book of tanka prose, flowers to the torch, was other variations. All with their own conventions published by Keibooks. In the spring of 2017, Peter’s first novella, when angels speak of love, was published by Loose MoosePress. and forms, and unreliable narrators. I’d suggest we are all writing miniatures and the only criteria for success is do you want to read it again, do you want to read more. A couple years back my friend Stu Dybek recommended Andreas Huyssen’s Miniature Review: These Purple Years by Metropolis, knowing I’d been writing miniatures all Amelia Fielden my life but never had a name for them. Huyssen traces the short prose form back to Charles Baudelaire, Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, who Reviewed by Patricia Prime published short sketches of Parisian life in the local newspapers, and to Walt Whitman who used the short prose form in Specimen Days, a These Purple Years journal of his time as a volunteer nurse during Amelia Fielden the Civil War. Am sure it goes back even farther. Ginninderra Press I want a book that’s never been written. On Port Adelaide, Australia. (2018) the first page a synopsis of the plot. Or maybe Pb 321 pp not. We all know how the plot ends. Thus we ISBN: 978-1-76041-559-4 dispense of a continuous narrative. What follows RRP: $37.50 would be freed from the burden of form. And we would be left to dream, remember and improvise. These Purple Years by Amelia Fielden is a What’s important is to maintain the feel of collection of previously published work from all tanka — the delicacy of the moment, a around the world and some previously heightened sense of simple language and the unpublished work including solo tanka strings, importance of five which links it, as Joy McCall responsive tanka strings, tanka tales and excerpts has pointed out, to our most primal ways of from tanka diaries. Amelia Fielden has been a knowing the world — five fingers on each hand, major presence in the writing of tanka for a very five toes, and the five senses. long time. This collection provides a handy I’d also put forth the proposition that the compendium of her poetic output of the last 20 only line break that makes sense today is the one or so years. Fielden is an internationally awarded that is determined by the breath. No one speaks translator and has been a researcher and a in iambic pentameter but we all breathe, pause, teacher. This is an ideal collection for someone now and then, between phrases, ideas, and coming to her work for the first time or a devoted images. Breath as form. Everyone in every follower who wants a portable selection of her language breathes. This makes for a truly work. international form. A corollary of this principle is The collection is arranged by country and that most contemporary poetry can just as well journal of publication. The previously

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 85 unpublished work displays Fielden still working at zen garden the height of her powers in a series of lengthier crammed with solemn tourists pieces including strings, responsive tanka and photographing dairies. the first few crimson leaves In the first section there are tanka about on a small maple tree Japan, friendship, birds, flowers, grandchildren and a beautiful tanka about love: October leaves crunching under my feet all those years the bite while I waited for love of a first red apple . . . to return the day you died the magnolia tree reached higher, perfuming the stars (24). across the world spring flowers in bloom Throughout the book there is a sense of at Halloween taking stock; of reviewing the past and kids trick or treating contemplating the present together with an on a bright mild night (75). anxiety about the death of a pet and of what she has loved, as in the last verse of “A Narrow The tanka tales are lengthier pieces which Corridor”, Fielden writes: include prose, individual tanka and sometimes a sequence of tanka. In “Hanafubuki: A Flurry of gradually Flowers” is a tanka prose piece which begins with emptying of all I’ve loved a tanka and is followed by alternating tanka and the future prose passages. It is too long to quote in full, so I of unknowable length, reproduce the first tanka and following passage a narrow corridor (39). of prose:

This first section of the book contains several blossom petals powerful individual tanka, such as the following swirling in April breezes poem first published in Gusts: Contemporary Tanka: translucent white heavier than snow behind low cloud lighter than flowers the sun is a white moon ‘night and day When my plane lands at Narita it’s chilly and you are the one’, raining solidly. Four years since I’ve seen Nariko. an old song, can it be true (49). Not so long in the context of 53 years’ friendship. But now we are both over 75, it feels too long. Progressing from the individual tanka to the From my hotel I call to arrange our meeting. She responsive tanka strings written with other tanka frets that rain will have damaged the blossoms. poets creates a meeting of different minds. With (96). their characteristic short lines, syntax and enjambment, it’s as if these poems were written Among the tanka strings we find pungent by a different person; and in a significant sense, and wry poems about the decline in the health of of course, they were. In “Fluttering Gold”, the poet’s husband, homecoming, summer down written with Genie Nakano (USA), the two poets under, and the very beautiful “At Shell Harbour”, create a lively autumn-themed sequence: which ends with these two verses:

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 86 dusk misting as a southerly breeze stirs Review: under raintrees : cherita the ebb tide by ai li leaving sand damp and cool shells sharp under bare feet Reviewed by Patricia Prime stars sparkle into the sea’s mystery under raintrees: cherita by ai li a moon-path ai li ripples from horizon arvinder kaur, translator to deep-sleeping dunes (121) India: Logeet Parkashan (2018). RRP: 250 rands For me, many of the outstanding poems in ISBN: 978-93-83392-17-9. this collection are the tanka tales. Among them Pb 105 pp “Two Spoonfuls” (131), “Autumn Garden” (151), “Weather . . . or Not” (169) — poems that deal, in When I read a poem in a poetic form such as a highly evocative and honest way with society a sonnet, a villanelle or a sestina, I’m most and the world. The technical range is evident and interested in those moments when poems chafe impressive, but it’s the wide emotional scope, against the forms that constrain them. Poetic which — unsurprisingly, given the time span of forms are different, too. A sonnet, for example, the poems — affords the deepest pleasure. They has 14 lines. It has a volta, or turn, after the show the poet’s energy alongside her depth of octave, except when it’s in loose, unrhyming experience — sometimes in the same poem. On couplets. the evidence here, Fielden is one of the ablest In arvinder kaur’s trilingual translations of ai tanka poets: always readable, enjoyable, quotable li’s cherita, under raintrees, the cherita form and lovable. (originated by ai li in 1997), is integrated I’m conscious, when reading a collection of explicitly. The collection comprises several short someone’s work, that it may end up forming a essays about the cherita from a variety of poets kind of inadvertent autobiography of the poet. and editors, a selection of ai li’s cherita chosen And one gets a strong sense of the shape of and translated into Punjabi and Hindu by Fielden’s life and her preoccupation with the arvinder kaur and it is illustrated with beauty and expression of tanka throughout this photographs of ai li and arvinder kaur. excellent collection. One cannot sum up the ai li takes this little song and fashions it in poetic achievement of a long career in a short such a way to persuade us of something — of review and I won’t try; far better for you to read many things, but primarily of how to write the book yourself. “simply” and without artiﬁce. Her cherita are carefully worked out “stories”, presented without artiﬁce. The opening cherita, for example, is in the form of a question the poet asks herself:

ﬁnding you this late

the tint of my hair another black

do i have the years to give you love and grace? (2)

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 87 ai li’s range of emotions and mastery of this Read aloud, it sounds like a prose sentence, brief form are outstanding and many of these but the line-breaks demand that we read it as a moments will have been lived and felt by readers. poem. ai li is deploying, in the context of a poem, Each cherita must be savoured for its poignancy, prose’s strength for logical argument. its experience and its language. The collection is ai li’s cherita have a social, even convivial a good example of how well ai li handles aspect to them. There are poems of loss and its emotional material — moving, with palpable, but consolations, poems of ﬁtful sleep and dreams, of controlled, grief. It uses the conventional form of friends and lovers, of the living and the dead, of the cherita to do unconventional things, in a food, clothing, weather, ghost stories and this one distinctive way. ai li dislocates the cherita from about a family heirloom: the lyric tradition, wrings tears from it, brings joy to it, sets it apart from conventional forms, family heirloom without losing that directness of connection to the reader, that lightness of touch, which, it there’s dead skin seems to me, is the essence of cherita. in the drawers

if you look closely family dna that’s not in the graveyard (10) Review: Squall Line on the Horizon A cherita might begin with a well-worn, abstract indulgence — “love strays” — but the by Pris Campbell cherita opens out like a ﬂower to show that the shadow love casts has its effects long after its ﬁrst Reviewed by M. Kei blossoming:

love strays Squall Line on the Horizon, tanka Pris Campbell this year Nixes Mate Books the missing valentine Allston, Massachusetts, USA (2017) Pb 56 pp perfect bound i open the box ISBN: 978-0-692-85080-0 of cards $9.95 US i never received (30)

ai li reﬂects on loneliness, death and suicide Pris Campbell’s chapbook is printed on cream with the same resilience: colored paper and perfect bound, with a wraparound cover featuring a scene of fog and death poem sea. Inside, the font and layout is crisp, showing the evidence of professional design. Half page- using black ink width rules serve to bound the pages, which is a to make a point good touch, because with a 5” by 7.75” book, one poem per page can look lost. That’s a detail who will read my words frequently lost on self-published and self-taught if it isn’t found poets. Book design is a skill in its own right. The this piece of rice paper (42) professional treatment sets Pris’ tanka off to best advantage.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 88 ﬁre burning the sounds down to embers of two dogs mating settled you rouse me with my last solid love, to blue velvet kisses wilder days gone to time’s sand on that bed junked by time Pris Campbell is a poet that will be welcomed There are several tastefully erotic tanka that by lovers of tanka and lovers of love. Through it describe an on again, off again, love affair in her all is the scent of the sea and a longing for the youth. freedom of the dolphins.

mist isolates our old Boston brownstone at arm’s length after ﬁve long years, Review: Light on My Heart: Four beaten down I pack my bags Tanka Sequences by Richard St.

The poet continues to long for her lost love, Clair obsessively so, but the barrier cannot be overcome. Reviewed by M. Kei

cloaked by clouds that morphine moon Light on My Heart: Four Tanka Sequences your spirit Richard St. Clair slip-slides each night self-published (2017) back to that old war Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA Pb 34 pp saddle-stitched Another love affair follows the same pattern. Inquiries to: [email protected]

mother scissors him Richard St. Clair is a painter, musician, and from each wedding photo artist. Two of his paintings appear on the front timeless and back covers of his new chapbook, Light on My I stand next to the black hole Heart. The four sequences within address the that almost sucked my heart away themes of an older man, near to retirement, and his emotional and spiritual needs. Richard is a The lessons are learned. Buddhist, and that appears in his poetry.

cinderella diminishing piles pretty in her tiara of paperwork I’ve learned patiently waiting fairytale lovers vanish for the weekend when pumpkins appear and so

And she settles for a long-lasting marriage with what world a more suitable man. awaits the children of the children of the children of this world

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 89 Richard is a contemporary poet who deals are arranged in four parts, including the largest, with contemporary subject matter. His poetics which is devoted to abstract art, and Part IV are guided by his Buddhism, so aware comes which focuses on Tarlton’s studies of John naturally to him, freighted with anxiety and Constable’s paintings. The book is scheduled for concern over his ultimate end, but comforted by release in early January 2019. his belief in salvation by the Buddha. This is a strong chapbook, but the poor choice of font, a large cursive font, makes it difficult to read. The font is large enough that had it been more legible, it could have been recommended to readers who prefer a size 16 or Denis Garrison’s New Book: larger font. Nonetheless, the paper and print quality are good. She Walked Among the Blossoms She Walked Among the Blossoms, primarily tanka and haiku, was published in October as a trade paperback by Lulu Press, Inc. This is poet Denis M. Garrison’s new collection tribute to his wife, ANNOUNCEMENTS Deborah, who passed away this summer. Knowing how difficult buying print books online Atlas Poetica will publish short announcements in any can be, especially for readers outside the United language up to 300 words in length on a space available States, Garrison has posted the PDF file of this basis. Announcements may be edited for brevity, clarity, collection to his poetry blog where you can read grammar, or any other reason. Send announcements in the and download it for free. body of an email to: [email protected] — do not Links: Radical Brevity Blog https:// send attachments. radicalbrevity.wordpress.com/ Free online PDF of She Walked Among the Blossoms h t t p s : / / r a d i c a l b rev i t y. fi l e s. wordpress.com/2018/10/ shewalkedamongtheblossoms.pdf Touching Fire: New and Selected Ekphrastic Prosimetra by Charles D. Tarlton Cirrus 10 Published Published Hello friends in tanka, Touching Fire: New and Selected Ekphrastic Prosimetra, by Charles D. Tarlton, is 246 pages I realize that French is a challenge for many long, including 16 pages of material in the of you . . . however we do want to share our Preface and 18 pages of End Matter. It contains joy . . . 59 works, 56 of which are by Tarlton, with 52 of those being ekphrastic prosimetra, primarily http://www.cirrustanka.com/issues/ tanka prose. Twenty-one of the works are 10_Cirrus_automne_2018.pdf previously unpublished while 35 are reprints. The collection also includes 50 artworks (to be printed happy tomorrows, in color, with the exception of three B&W maxianne photographs) by 25 artists, covering a range of styles and time periods. Artworks and prosimetra

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 90 we cannot go back Haibun Today 12:4 Published

by ai li Our editors Patricia Prime, Janet Lynn Davis, Melissa Allen, Terri French, Rich Youmans and I the launch of ai li’s new third book of cherita welcome you to our new issue of Haibun Today which features 90 virgin Cherita with a one poem 12:4 December 2018. to a page format, and now available in paperback And we are welcoming our two new Tanka and on kindle on Amazon. Prose editors to our staff: Tish Davis & Tim To celebrate and coincide with the Gardiner. Tish will serve as editor for the Tanka announcement of my forthcoming lecture in Prose section for our next issue, and Tim, the Singapore in January 2019, I have decided to following one. launch my third book of cherita and continue Janet Lynn Davis will be retiring with this sharing stories that need to be told. issue. Kudos for her many contributions! We are now accepting submissions for our Please click on this link : next issue. Articles: Patricia Prime -> http://www.thecherita.com/ai-lis-bookshop/ [email protected] Tanka Prose: Tish Davis -> One example from my new book : [email protected] Haibun: Ray Rasmussen -> too late [email protected] For details on submissions visit our to turn back submissions page now -> http://haibuntoday.com/pages/ submissions.html i’m in We do hope you’ll help us spread the word my dreaming about haibun and tanka prose on these and your room other social media. And you can ask us to change your email to another address or unsubscribe ai li from this mailing list, but we hope you don’t. copyright ai li 2018 ~Ray Rasmussen, General Editor, Haibun Today

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 91 Educational Use Notice Editorial Biographies

Keibooks of Perryville, Maryland, USA, M. Kei is the editor of Atlas Poetica and was the publisher of the journal, Atlas Poetica: A Journal of editor-in-chief of Take Five: Best Contemporary World Tanka, is dedicated to tanka education in Tanka. His most recent project is Stacking Stones, An schools and colleges, at every level. It is our Anthology of Short Tanka Sequences. He is a tall ship intention and our policy to facilitate the use of sailor in real life and has published nautical Atlas Poetica and related materials to the novels featuring a gay protagonist, Pirates of the maximum extent feasible by educators at every Narrow Seas. His most recent poetry collection is level of school and university studies. January, A Tanka Diary. Educators, without individually seeking permission from the publisher, may use Atlas Grunge is an Indo-American member of the Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka’s online digital LGBT community, who specializes in urban editions and print editions as primary or ancillary tanka. He is currently the editorial assistant for teaching resources. Copyright law ‘Fair Use’ Keibooks, and lives in South Florida with a guidelines and doctrine should be interpreted collection of pet arthropods, an ancient cat, and very liberally with respect to Atlas Poetica precisely a pudgy leopard gecko. on the basis of our explicitly stated intention herein. This statement may be cited as an effective permission to use Atlas Poetica as a text or Kira Nash lives gratefully under the sun and stars resource for studies. Proper attribution of any on the southwest coast of France. She finds joy in excerpt to Atlas Poetica is required. This statement cups of tea with her husband and cuddles with applies equally to digital resources and print her cat, sometimes both at once. When the water copies of the journal. is warm enough, she surfs; the rest of the time Individual copyrights of poets, authors, she walks, and talks to trees. They usually reply. artists, etc., published in Atlas Poetica are their own Kira works as a writer, editor, artist, tech support property and are not meant to be compromised elf, and practitioner of alternative medicine. She in any way by the journal’s liberal policy on ‘Fair can be found at www.wellnessflowing.com Use.’ Any educator seeking clarification of our policy for a particular use may email the Editor of Atlas Poetica at [email protected]. We welcome innovative uses of our resources for tanka education.

Atlas Poetica Keibooks P O Box 346 Perryville, MD 21903 AtlasPoetica.org Our ‘butterﬂy’ is actually an Atlas moth (Attacus atlas), the largest butterﬂy / moth in the world. It comes from the tropical regions of Asia. Image from the 1921 Les insectes agricoles d’époque.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 36 • Page 92 Publications by Keibooks Journals

Anthologies Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka

Neon Grafﬁti: Tanka of Urban Life

Bright Stars, An Organic Tanka Anthology (Vols. 1 – 7) M. Kei’s Poetry Collections

Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka (Vol. 4) January, A Tanka Diary

Fire Pearls (Vols. 1 – 2): Short Masterpieces of the Heart Slow Motion: The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack tanka and short forms

Heron Sea: Short Poems of the Chesapeake Bay Tanka Collections tanka and short forms

Three-Part Harmony, by Debbie Strange

Warp and Weft, Tanka Threads, by Debbie Strange M. Kei’s Novels

Black Genji and Other Contemporary Tanka, Pirates of the Narrow Seas 1: The Sallee Rovers by Matsukaze Pirates of the Narrow Seas 2: Men of Honor Pirates of the Narrow Seas 3: Iron Men October Blues and Other Contemporary Tanka, Pirates of the Narrow Seas 4: Heart of Oak by Matsukaze Man in the Crescent Moon: A Pirates of the Narrow Seas flowers to the torch: American Tanka Prose, by peter Adventure fiore The Sea Leopard: A Pirates of the Narrow Seas Adventure on the cusp encore, a year of tanka, by Joy McCall fieldgates, tanka sequences, by Joy McCall Fire Dragon on the cusp, a year of tanka, by Joy McCall rising mist, fieldstones, by Joy McCall hedgerows, tanka pentaptychs, by Joy McCall circling smoke, scattered bones, by Joy McCall

Tanka Left Behind 1968: Tanka from the Notebooks of Sanford Goldstein, by Sanford Goldstein Tanka Left Behind: Tanka from the Notebooks of Sanford Goldstein, by Sanford Goldstein This Short Life, Minimalist Tanka, by Sanford Goldstein