Poetry

Old Testament Genesis

Gerard Sarnat

The earth breathed softly, dying or dead.
It is said our planet swayed silently,
restless in her stillness. Waters gathered,
one single singing sea, calm. Truly nothing
was that otherwise might’ve been –
except everlasting thunder and lightening.
Omniscient heavens were lonely above this void:
no human or beast, fowl or fish, crab or tree,
stone or bush, cast shadows yet.

Then the seventh angel from a seventh sun
trumpeted a single star falling to earth.
After which the primordial dance began,
gnawing acid, sucking leaches, everything
now about genitals and brains, tears and rage,
cunning and flying, as sister and brother woke.
Was it Eve who spoke first to Adam?
“Damn it, be a man, not a bloody lamb!
Winners don’t shiver, losers’re devoured.
Eat this apple, hon; no one can do it like you!”

Look in the distance to the end of the world.
Time tumbles; copper clouds race cirrusly.
Lava rises from blue streams; edges crumble,
boil over. Birches burn like matchsticks.
Snowcapped sierras molt tinsel towns into glass.
Pewter bells toll then collapse into liquid hell.
Golden calves split open: divisions of
fire ants file by, digesting bullioned flanks.
Black widow spiders claw entwined lovers’ entrails.
Oxygen is sparse as madhatter beggars’ soles.
Quicksilver freezes fleeing children in place.
Virgins are cast rock-solid in mercury forests;
cataracts of volcanic ash blind their millstoned eyes…

Day melts into night.
Dread seizes my heart into iron.
I sleepwalk oval hangovers that swallow your soul.
Trudging in overalls, hocking graveyard coughs,
flash-in-the-pan prophets on fools’ errands
whimper insanely to no sycophant in particular,
“The trick’s between the thighs, not the minds.
“Geld me, compel me to lay down in lime,
mail me to Dachau in a boxcar.”

Gerard Sarnat is a family-man, seeker, and Jewbu, physician to the homeless, past CEO and Stanford professor and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. He is published or forthcoming in fiftysome journals during the first half of 2008. California Institute of Arts and Letters’ Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry’s listed in Poets and Writers in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.

Enoch

Victor D. Infante

“Thomas Paine is too dangerous a figure to memorialize.”
- U.S. Congressman, overheard on NPR, 1994

When we gathered their remains we burned their boats.
This was in the first city, first crucible of plagues-

All cities are one city, golems carved from the nearness of flesh;
the proximity of breath and intermingled dreams.
In artificial night we catch each other
out of corners of our eyes, lingering like ghosts
with unkept promises.

This is the litany of madmen:
one gathers rubies, shatters them at midnight masses;
one is the wind, clearing dust from shop-front sidewalks.
one buys a gun, and is content.

There is no color for my sky, but I can taste its silt,
ashen on my tongue. This place was never mine to name-

All revolutions are one revolution,
same scattering of blood and feathers. We spoke in
the tongues of angels once. Our language was liquid.

If you take these things as Gospel, so to speak,
our history is the repetition of Creation and the Fall.
Enoch was a murderer’s creation, or so I’m told.
Little has changed.

I believe in a land to which I am anonymous,
I remember winter—

When the first boats arrived we pushed them back to sea;
Held my hands to the fire for warmth, recollected
abstract nouns that represent what’s lost:

“To put aside the condition of seeing one’s self
reflected in the eyes of huddled strangers; to act
in spite of fear of rotting limbs, association of
ourselves and famished skin.”

The scar on my forehead is a childhood injury,
and I have murdered no one.

Victor Infante is a poet, journalist, and editor of The November 3rd Club. The above poem appears in his book of poetry, “City of Insomnia” (2008, Write Bloody Publishing). To learn more about him, be sure to read our interview with him: Spotlight! The November 3rd Club.

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Qoph

David Harrity

Search me, O God, and know my heart… –139th Psalm

I always thought your message was about solidarity until this moment. You swing
your axe and slice me down my middle, clean through my spine, splitting me

like a fresh log. Reach across my chest and into my body—know the anatomy you made.
You begin by perusing the hairline of my skull, and then squeeze my sponge of brain,

the side responsible for this poem, but not my belief. You move down to my eye, tap
behind it like a fish clinking into his glass wall. Touch the wave of my tongue—half

an arrowhead—then run your knuckle along leather skin, the inside of my cheek. Down
again, sliding the tip of your thumb through the valley of my trachea, where my words

used to flow up and erupt. Even though you don’t want me to, I ignore your touch
to my heart—I can’t yet bear the darkness in the tiny chambers. Go to my lung, squeeze

an alveoli just so I can hear the pop, strum your fingers down all twelve shelves of ribs,
like playing the guitar—music, even to the untrained ear—then slide the arc of the last

to grip the shaft of my backbone, slick and cool as a fireman’s pole, which will lead
you to the thick snake of my intestine. Then I’ll know the true descent, between my shit

and my pelvis, where you put your fist to the ball and socket of my hip swathed in sinew.
Reach to yank the bar of my femur, spin the dial on the combination lock over my knee.

Then to the smooth stones of my heel, the foot bones arranged like cracking plates
of Pangea, the sharp dart metatarsals hold strong enough for me to keep my balance

so I don’t tip and fall to the ground, like the cleaved half of an apple, sweet symmetry facing upward. Father, I see you’ve already cleaned the axe even while you’ve been busy

touching me. I want repairs—you’ve found every last one of my weaknesses. You
want me to take this a bit more seriously? I’m half the man—fine, I’ll stop—maybe

I shouldn’t finish that thought. But humor won’t bind me back to whole. I get it—
make me new again. You want me to say I need you. I’ll ask for a needle and thread.

Terra Incognita or Drawn

David Harrity

What if you discovered
your body to be
a souvenir—that your bones
were borrowed
from the flesh
of another country.
That you aren’t
so much accident
as arrangement—
your cells placed
in precision
and exact folds of tissue.
What if you realized
that your difference
isn’t difference but connection
to the distance of another
waiting sea.

If you found an atlas,
would you be brave enough
to find an axis,
to see your country’s silhouette
sagging into water?
To trace the seaboard
onto paper?
Would you mark
each coast—to guide and find
the lines
that bind
your body
to your bones?

You are
more than simple flesh,
more than just a graphite sketch,
You are an adoption
of sound—
a roar
of water—
one ocean crashing
into another.

David Harrity is a writer from Kentucky. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from issues of New Southerner, The Minnetonka Review, and The Xavier Review. A chapbook of his poems, “Morning and What Has Come Since,” was published last year by Finishing Line Press and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Kentucky Literary Award.

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The Expanding Universe

John Hayes

Quark, the great sea monster,
rose from the waters into the darkness of the land
and plucked his golden strings.
Evelyn, a copper serpent, surfaced next to him.
Quark commanded, “Acclaim my strength and beauty.”
Evelyn stroked his vibrating strings
and whispered in his ear,
“I think dear Quark this space is much too dark.”

As Evelyn spoke the egg of wisdom
from her vibrant body burst.
And Quark said, “Nourish the egg of wisdom
upon this spinning rock which I shall call Earth.”

As he spoke God rose from a mountain top
and created man and woman.
Quark said to God and to the man and woman,
“Admire my golden strings for I am master of the Earth.”
God replied, “Your Earth, dear Quark,
is much too dark. You need to explore
throughout your expanding universe and find
eyes that can see your golden strings
in the darkest night.”
Quark frowned. He nodded.
He rushed into the dark cosmos.

God said to Evelyn, “Fry the egg of wisdom.
Sunny side up is good,
I want my wisdom bright.”
Then god created light
so humans could adore him.

Quark still seeks adoration
in his expanding universe
while humans wait for wisdom’s birth.

John Hayes appeared recently as Al Lewis in The Sunshine Boys and as a peanut vendor in Love and Peanuts, a one act play he wrote. He exhibits his sculpture wherever he can find an outlet and likes to read poetry at open mikes. He has been published in such magazines as Membra Disjecta, BareBone, Carleton Arts Review, Cemetery Moon, Lynx Eye, Psuedopod, Niteblade, and Hungur. Visit his web site to see his sculpture and more poetry.

Cristy Shauck has been writing and editing since 1991. Her poetry has appeared in High Grade, Whosever, The Platypus, and Elevated Living as well as a previous issue of Membra Disjecta. Her book (co-authored with Marie McClendon) The Healthy Lunchbox was published by The American Diabetes Association.

Overheard at a Cocktail Party

Cristy Shauck

No, Dahling, I’m the Associate Dirtier.
They pay me to muck up the waters.
I love biting into messy situations—
snatching skeletons from closets,
planting them amidst what’s left of Jimmy Hoffa—
cultivating gossip vines
by spreading manure
with glovéd hands.

Guess who shakes up your economic globe,
coating all that slime with glitter
so no one can tell what’s really going on?

Oh, sometimes I think about quitting.
The hours are unpredictable, but the pay is great.
Besides, it’s the family business,
passed on to each generation.

Think I’m scum?
You should meet my clients.
I can’t reveal their names
but go ahead,
speculate.

Minor Inconvenience

Aurelio Rico Lopez, III

On the platform,
Impatient grumbles course
Through the huddled crowd.
Trains wait, unmoving
Like giant millipedes
On iron paths.
From overhead speakers,
A female voice
Apologizes profusely
For the delay.
Entire railway at a standstill.
Gremlins on the tracks.
Please bear with us…

Aurelio Rico Lopez, III is a self-diagnosed scribble junkie from Iloilo City, Philippines. His poems have appeared in various venues such as Mythic Delirium, Star*Line, Sybil’s Garage, Black Petals, Steel Moon Publishing, Tales of the Talisman, Kaleidotrope, Electric Velocipede, Wanderings, and The Shantytown Anomaly. He is also the author of the chapbooks Jolts, Shocks, and Oddities from Sam’s Dot Publishing. You can reach him at thirdylopez2001 @ yahoo.com.

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