Strang • Topal • Gonzalez • Kauffman • Kalamaras Waldrop • Gulin • Beaumont • Argüelles • Lotti • Smith Haupt
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STRANG • TOPAL • GONZALEZ • KAUFFMAN • KALAMARAS WALDROP • GULIN • BEAUMONT • ARGÜELLES • LOTTI • SMITH HAUPTMAN • BORDESE • TRETIN • PASSER • HERRICK KOMOR • ZVER • CHIRODEA • LEVINSON • STEWARD ABBOTT • VANDER MOLEN • ANDERSON • LIPSITZ • BEINING BRADLEY • RAPHAEL • CARDINAUX • BENNETT • GRABILL SILVIA CURBELO Ruby Every storm is Jesus chasing spirits, twister blowing through the clothesline of the dead making waves. There’s a sure thing in the high wind, old as some stick in the ground. Time makes an hourglass out of anything. Forget thunder, forget the reckless past. Keep your hymns short and your fuse shorter. Tell your children there’s no free ride to the reckoning, no blaze-of-glory color to paint this wicked world. Blue is some skinny dog lapping brown water on the side of the road. Green is his cup of sorrow. Red is for knowing who’s blind. What Hope Is Think of the weight of tenderness or faith. What is willed, what is opened. The way someone whispers someone’s name into a glass, then empties it, swallowing that small word. Cover: ADAN Y EVA (ADAM AND EVE) by Marcelo Bordese, 2006 acrylic on canvas (47” x 40”) Cover and title page design by Gary R. Smith, 1986 Typeset in Baskerville by Daniel Estrada Del Cid, HS Marketing Solutions, Santa Ana, California Lawrence R. Smith, Editor Deanne C. Smith, Associate Editor Daniel Estrada Del Cid, Production and Design Editor Calibanonline is published quarterly. Viewing online and pdf downloads are free. Unsolicited poetry, fction, art, music, and short art videos welcome. Please direct attached WORD documents to [email protected] Copyright © Calibanonline.com, 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS BRIAN STRANG the wasp CARINE TOPAL Sobriquet Passing Smaller Kingdoms St. Petersburg, Beliye Nochi RAY GONZALEZ barefoot father fate André Breton Cento Jose Luis Borges Cento Cortez y Malinche The Wind The Reenactment JANET KAUFFMAN Zooplankton and more Eco-dementia The knife in the fsh Abandoned He’s seen it crawl GEORGE KALAMARAS Letter to Reg from Cheyenne Letter to John Tritica from Ouray JASON WALDROP Disorient BRANKO GULIN Parallel Reality, Scene 227 Parallel Reality, Scene 232 Parallel Reality, Scene 245 JEANNE MARIE BEAUMONT A Brief Index “Mere” Hypotheses IVAN ARGÜELLES a brief history of SURREALISM An Account of the War Wasteland JEFREID LOTTI La Cola M4 Graffti LAWRENCE R. SMITH Stages of Night TERRY HAUPTMAN The Landfll Harmonic Hebrew Ballads II The Terrible Years MARCELO BORDESE Alegoria de la orfandad (Allegory of Orphanhood) Jardín Hormonal (Hormonal Garden) Caperusita y el lobo (Little Ridinghood and the Wolf) Madona con infantes (Madonna and Children) MARC TRETIN Maya, Sleeping on the Cairo to New York Flight, is Addressed by Her Muse JAY PASSER Letter to Myself III Letter to Myself IV LEIGH HERRICK Hawk Poem #4 ZOLTÁN KOMOR Pillow Pyre JIM ZVER Cambrian Collage #33 Cambrian Collage #34 DORU CHIRODEA Duck Duck Catering Toxic Honk HELLER LEVINSON tenebraed to a D. E. STEWARD Grass Valley ANDREW ABBOTT take my picture fake fowers ROBERT VANDER MOLEN The Watershed Matt’s Road Trip The Woman Who Owned the Cabin SUSAN ANDERSON The Dog Domestic Rustical Twin Memory LOU LIPSITZ My Job Letter to a Friend Dead One Year GUY R. BEINING updike gathers sheen caustic murmur JOHN BRADLEY That Which Transpires Behind That Which Appears That Which Appears Behind That Which Transpires Dreaming Imperfect DAN RAPHAEL Untitled If Wings ELIOT CARDINAUX Auxiliary Senility JOHN M. BENNETT the fair fell off Máscara de Atlan JAMES GRABILL Through the Door to Where They Were CONTRIBUTORS’ ADVICE BRIAN STRANG the wasp what kind of seventh son crumbles in the morning air makes a fre by his bedside feathers his skull with the sweet carcass of artifcial memory? touch the tip of the tongue to fulminating fevers the secret serpent of night of entwined skins tracing the seven marbled eyes stitched beneath the surface sizzling stones in the river of your veins a canine pack arches toward town claiming its rewritten history bushwhackers worshipping Baal crusaders on the wall of death with the detritus of their entitlement: the walking time bomb leopard seals cry “give me the world” run for ofce on foam and fsh bones yell “we are your overlords” like a Zeppelin banshee from the stoned wound of Wonder the society for unknowing writes hard like a moth on hate-hardened teeth these rubber-masked intruders 9 Strang/10 look for causation spread chancres of collapse stilled sparrows in a woolen hell beneath a chandelier bejeweled with beetles they are combustible and just next door the unkind dark somatic natural night used end of a bitter tongue in broad open eyes over a bed of coals you rise in the room view the small collection of detachable handshakes even the most generous critics of fickering trees gasp at this airborne city among the dried stars undercut by bailout deals lunch-time betrayals in private cars from your insides to their cargo bays a metronome counting backwards the god that returns knows what matters above all else the insect ethos sprouting new receptors that go hungry impel you to hit the sunshine switch every day all day until you hit the darkest light of summer wracked and bedridden what matters above all else is the cannibal code living with the obdurate push of a stinger Strang/11 something you never agreed to saturated indigo and safron the very garlands of your dream that flter through and perfume your unfortunate treehouse draped and doped in swelling compulsion the knife parade in absolute indiference what is this ephemeral fash? what is a dot on a dot on a dot? what does it matter to anyone concerned? you live among the fever swamps and tarantula hunger you have been left behind, beached and it’s true you say to nobody but an invertebrate sea gull leaving a chemical trail along the river’s reach you give up everything to live in a paper cocoon with a body segmented by warring desires lay me in the dirt and turn me to fowers lay me in my anonymous galaxy lay me infnitely androgynously the universe is a salty tear in an ocean where every seal has the same name the emptiest eyes are earthbound an existential entity of the nth degree lay me in the secret shape of the Milky Way CARINE TOPAL Sobriquet * It used to be grief which kept me whole, who knew my blood type, who stood at the foot of my bed. And I let it. Grief was a thing with shape and presence. I knew where I needed to be. It told me to feel safe so it could fnd me, as if it knew the future would be this way. And it told me so. * These days I sip from my own cup of kindness, ask myself if I’d like another, want veined by fts of joy. I’m built of nails, watch myself looking back at what I’ve done, carry the beautiful and the ugly like a signal of truth. Once released into pale sunlight, I do my chores. Forgive myself in secret. Fond lamb. * One foot’s in winter—the invisible bridge covered in fog—thank god no one is jumping today. On the safe side, children giggling, holding hands, their waists tethered by rope, one to the next, while a woman, who looks like their mother, talks them through vapor circling their heads—like moving halos—the beauty of that, of what goes on without me. 12 Topal/13 Passing My brother drove a country of rides, dark roads, of-road, squealing across the damp grass. He loved the reckless nights. He had a godawful pancreas he should have dropped of the turnpike at dusk. A thousand problems. His sweet blood made injuries hard to heal. With his one good eye, naturally, he crashed from time to time. But he loved the dark and traveled from twilight into moonlight. His hair was set back far enough giving the night a shine. And like the moon, he stood behind his mystery, simply turned a corner into a passing feld, unable to tell the delicate from the invisible, and disappeared. But that’s not how he died. He gave what he could and spun light from music. A ravishing light. What the moon gives. He lived mostly without touching, but was touched mostly by music. He composed in his head and wielded an air baton while driving. Driving in the dark. Shostakovich Symphony No. 8, Op.65, until he’d return home to undress for bed, discarding his shirt and pants, shoes and socks, as if he were changing a wound. Topal/14 Smaller Kingdoms This was April. April tundra, and who could keep warm, when Spring garlic still worked its way up, tipped its green through the ice? When we ate only what we could carry. This was when violets purpled between rock and sleeves of cold. Who could leave here. Who could? This was when the boy with a head like a lark sang like one, demented with elaborate calm. It was singing difcult to watch as his tiny winged shoulders failed, and this when he few hungry into song. And this when his sister saw Shakespeare in the moon or it was quill and ink by window light, a glowing beneath a lantern on a makeshift desk. When those tragedies were written. When our hungry fathers, who did the ancestors’ dismal jobs, craved smaller kingdoms, more easily managed. When my father believed in the steady work of the living. And this was when I walked around in my mother’s body like a long twilight of faith, because the small cleave to the lowest branches—and where’s the god in that? Topal/15 St.